Doreen St. Félix on Using Pop Culture to Consider Society

The Critic and Her Publics is a live interview series that asks the best and most prominent critics working today to perform criticism on the spot, on an object they’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse into brilliant minds at work, performing their thinking, taking risks, and making spontaneous judgments, which are sometimes right and sometimes wrong.

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From the episode:

Merve Emre: When I was preparing for this conversation, there was some sort of glitch on the New Yorker’s website. When I typed in Doreen St. Félix to pull up her reviews and essays, it retrieved every single article ever written in the history of the magazine. This struck me as appropriate because Doreen is the most prolific critic I know, with wide-ranging interests and surprising subjects. Here are some of the artists I’ve learned about through her work:

There’s the violinist Sudan Archives, who, Doreen writes, “does not stand still when she performs. She’s used choreography inspired by video games, twirling her bow as if it were a sword or a snake, as if she were a charmer or a warrior. Lately, she has equipped herself with a studded quiver, drawing her bow like an archer.”

There’s the cult stargazer, Susan Miller, who gives readings perched on top of a trunk, which is, I quote again, “space blue on the exterior, with a circular aperture that reveals the inside where orbs representing Saturn and Pluto hang.”

There’s the photographer Alicia Rodriguez Alvisa, who’s doubled images of women Doreen compares to taking a selfie: “I think of how I sometimes turn my phone on myself and am then confronted by dozens of antagonizing copies of me that curdle into an image nothing like the idea of what I want to look like.”

Doreen writes about everything: public art and the history of Confederate monuments, the Republican primary debates, the new Kesha album, anti-Black police violence, the photographs of Clifford Prince King, Jerry Springer, Alex Trebek, and of course, television. If you’ve watched it, Doreen has written about it in her gorgeously sinewy style with her sharp political acumen and her wicked sense of humor. Her television column from 2020 to 2022 will be regarded as one of the founding archives of television criticism. I think of her as our John Berger, a Berger for the Screen Era.

For a full transcript and details of the piece Doreen responded to, head over to the New York Review of Books.

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Doreen St. Félix has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2017. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. St. Félix was named on the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category.

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