Bad at Sports Episode 912: Ben Davis
Bad at Sports
This week Bad at Sports goes full meta, talking about talking about art. We sit down with Ben Davis, National Art Critic for Artnet News and author of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, to unpack the state of art criticism in 2025. Davis has been one of the sharpest voices charting the relationship between culture, economics, and media—at once insider, outsider, and always keeping his mom in mind. From the collapse of traditional publishing to the weird vacuum left by social media, Davis doesn’t just describe the cracks in the system—he names them, theorizes them, and points to where...
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Bad at Sports Episode 911: Edra Soto and Dan Sullivan
Bad at Sports
Recorded live from the Chicago Architectural Biennial’s booth at EXPO Chicago, Bad at Sports tailgates with artist Edra Soto and designer Dan Sullivan—Chicago’s unofficial art-world power couple. Soto unpacks her first solo art fair booth at Engage Projects, where monoblock plastic chairs, airbrushed T-shirts, and Puerto Rican vernacular architecture collide with memory, loss, and celebration. Sullivan, founder of Navillus Woodworks, riffs on craft, Ikea hacks, and the business of making high-end furniture while moonlighting as Soto’s collaborator and fabricator. "Dan helps." What...
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Bad at Sports Episode 910: CAB 6 – Dirk Denison, David Salkin, and Jennifer Armetta
Bad at Sports
In this lively and insightful episode, Bad at Sports hosts a roundtable conversation with Dirk Denison (Founding Board Member of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB)), David Salkin (Designer, Curator, and Board Husband), and Jennifer Armetta (Executive Director of the CAB). Together, they reflect on the impact and legacy of the Chicago Architecture Biennial and its shifting forms of experimentation, urbanism, and civic engagement. The episode explores the curatorial frameworks of CAB, the roles of education and public space, and how architecture becomes a lens through which cities reimagine...
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Bad at Sports Episode 909: Paul Pfeiffer
Bad at Sports
We meet Paul Pfeiffer inside his retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to talk about ghosts, spectacle, and the metaphysics of sports. Known for erasing athletes from footage and turning stadiums into stages of worship, Pfeiffer opens up about boxing as performance, the haunted loop of fandom, and building media rituals in the Philippines. Also: parrots, Deion Sanders, lip sync monks, and the death of the moment. Names dropped: Deion Sanders - Manny Pacquiao - The Bible (yes, the text) - Tom Gunning - Joshua Oppenheimer - DJ Spooky (Paul...
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Bad at Sports Episode 908: Rachel Adams and the Bemis Art Center
Bad at Sports
We sit down with curator Rachel Adams to talk about institutional evolution, artists as infrastructure, and how curatorial practice shifts between museums and biennials. Rachel reflects on working with artists like Cauleen Smith, Liz Magic Laser, and Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, the power of slow curation, and why she’s drawn to hybrid spaces that defy the market. Along the way: phantom titles, artist contracts, Minneapolis moments, and a manifesto in a box of ice cream bars. Cauleen Smith Liz Magic Laser Beatriz Santiago Muñoz lima.art Candice...
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Bad at Sports Episode 907: A Hubris of Irish Curators
Bad at Sports
We sit down with a delegation of Irish curators—Michele Horrigan (Askeaton Contemporary Arts), Michael Hill (Temple Bar Gallery + Studios), and Mark O’Gorman (The Complex)—to unpack what it means to build artist-centered institutions on an island without a commercial art market. From weather-worn banana warehouses to smoke-machine-filled nightclubs, these curators share space-making tactics, post-colonial entanglements, and the challenges of caring for artists without selling to collectors. They’re in Chicago for EXPO and bringing the heat—with nothing but friendship, found neon, and...
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Bad at Sports Episode 906: Jaqueline Cedar & Josh Dihle
Bad at Sports
Live from Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago In this intimate, laughter-filled episode recorded live at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Duncan and Ryan sit down with artists Jaqueline Cedar and Josh Dihle on the occasion of their concurrent solo exhibitions. The conversation traverses everything from Duchampian bathroom jokes to model train nostalgia, parenthood, masculinity, and why drawing still matters. We dig deep into Cedar's intimate, narrative-rich figure paintings and Dihle’s large, toy-like sculptural paintings, both brimming with color, play, and strange tenderness. Along the way, we...
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Bad at Sports Episode 905: The REAL Joey Orr!
Bad at Sports
Live from the tailgate lounge at Chicago Architectural Biennial 6's booth at Expo Chicago, Duncan and Ryan welcome Joey Orr, the newly appointed Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the MCA Chicago. In this densely brilliant and surprisingly hilarious conversation, Orr discusses what it means to steer a contemporary art institution in an era of deep social complexity, political polarization, and shifting museum ethics. We cover everything from the social life of objects to the lore of performance documentation, and even pitch a game show based on the varied memories of Chris...
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Bad at Sports Episode 904: Caitlin McGurk and Brian Baynes
Bad at Sports
Broadcast live from Rice University (yes, in Houston), this episode of Bad at Sports brings together the curator of comics and cartoon art at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, Caitlin McGurk, and the Richmond-based zine publisher and comics obsessive behind Bubbles Fanzine, Brian Baynes. We dive deep into McGurk’s new book a biography and art book reclaiming one of the first women to work for The New Yorker. McGurk details her decade-long research process, Shermund’s punk rock lifestyle in the 1920s, and the bittersweet reclamation of her uncredited legacy. In the...
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Bad at Sports Episode 903: Jake Nickell & Lance Curran of Threadless
Bad at Sports
This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller cruise their way into a murder mansion fever dream with Jake Nickell and Lance Curran, two of the minds behind Threadless—the Chicago-based t-shirt empire that helped invent crowdsourced artwear before we’d marketed terms like “creator economy” or “drop ship.” What begins as a nostalgia trip (setting the stage for how the business developed through DIY screenprinting and forum culture) quickly becomes a deep dive into ethics, art careers, AI disruption, licensing chaos, and why having your work sold in Hot Topic...
info_outlineThis week. Dana’s back?
She and Duncan sit down with artist Wafaa Bilal and curator Bana Kattan to discuss Bilal’s powerful and deeply personal mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Known for his provocative, often participatory works that grapple with war, trauma, displacement, and surveillance, Bilal has long made the body both a site of resistance and a vessel of memory.
We talk through key moments in Bilal’s practice—from early performance pieces like Domestic Tension to newer, installation-based works—and reflect on how his work has shifted, expanded, and endured over the past two decades. Kattan, who curated the exhibition, shares insights into the retrospective’s structure and the challenges of contextualizing work that refuses easy categorization.
While reminiscing, Duncan and Wafaa also talk through what it means to make art as a form of witnessing, how museums hold space for pain and politics, and why Bilal still believes in the power of beauty…
(Spoiler: Duncan isn’t sure, but Bana and Dana side with Wafaa.)
Links & References:
- Wafaa Bilal's website: http://wafaabilal.com
- MCA Chicago Exhibition Info: https://mcachicago.org/Exhibitions/2024/Wafaa-Bilal
- Bana Kattan bio & curatorial work: https://mcachicago.org/About/Who-We-Are/Staff/Bana-Kattan
- Domestic Tension (aka “Shoot an Iraqi” project): https://wafaabilal.com/domestic-tension
- Book: Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life, and Resistance Under the Gun (co-authored with Kari Lydersen) – https://www.amazon.com/Shoot-Iraqi-Life-Resistance-Under/dp/087286491X
- @wafaabilal on Instagram
- @mcachicago on Instagram