Critics Page
For the Critics Page in each issue of the Rail, a guest critic is charged with suggesting a topic or theme that can be explored and debated for this special section.
Guest Critic: Erica Hunt
This month’s Critics Page features eighteen poets and visual artists responding to a call for hybrid poems that place poetry and image in generative encounters. Together, they blur the boundary between the read and the seen, joining each—text and image—into a sum greater than their individual parts.
Guest Critics: Ginevra de Blasio and Vittoria de Franchis
This seemingly straightforward question opens into a larger project—not to pin the term down with a definition, but to let it unfold. What fascinated us was its ambivalence: its uses, misuses, histories, politicization, trends, and the ways it has been claimed to hold power—or to hold on to a dream, often defining positions that came to capture the zeitgeist of their era.
Guest Critic: Patricia L Lewy
Michael Fried has been at the forefront of art-critical and art-historical discourse for sixty years and counting; this Critics Page reflects on the wide swath he has plowed through artistic and literary studies from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first.
Guest Critic: Pamela Kort
In an age increasingly defined by the automation of imagination and the erosion of life’s sustaining rituals, subversive art may be one of the last defenses of the human spirit. The idea is not new.
Guest Critic: Lisa E. Farrington
Penned by an international group of scholars, artists, and activists, the following essays have been written in response to two decades of research culminating in the book The World Before Racism: An Art Story (The Artist Book Foundation, 2025).