The White Pube is the collaborative identity of London and Liverpool-based art critics Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. In 2015, Muhammad and De la Puente started an online platform for criticism straight out of art school, aiming at counteracting what they found to be “either boring, lifeless, overly academic, or too polite” exhibition reviews. Since then, they have published a broad variety of criticism, memes, and podcasts. Having run steadily for more than seven years, The White Pube today has between ten and thirty thousand monthly readers and an Instagram following of over eighty-seven thousand.
The White Pube – a name conceived as a pun on the London mega gallery the White Cube – is renowned for its interweaving of art criticism with social media, being an early adopter of Instagram as a platform for critical discussion. Continuously pointing to questions of gender and race, accessibility, aesthetic hegemony, and elitism, Muhammad and De la Puente have advocated for structural change in art institutions in the UK and abroad. They have done so both in their writing and through direct initiatives like the billboard campaign against inequality in the art world they launched in 2021.
In addition to publishing criticism in the form of texts and podcasts on – among other subjects – art, video games, and food, The White Pube awards a grant for working class creatives and offers various resources for artists and art professionals online. Currently, Muhammad and De la Puente are busy writing their first book and are slowly developing an aversion to Instagram – which they elaborate on in this interview.
Live Drønen: You’re currently working on your first book. Can you say anything about this?
Gabrielle de la Puente: No, sadly! We’re finishing the full copy this September, and then it could be another year until it comes out. But I’m happy to talk about the process. We’re so used to writing and publishing two days later, so the speed of this is completely different. Sometimes, when I write exhibition reviews, a month later I’ll disagree with what I wrote, so I worry how much we’ll change in the year between finishing the book and its publishing.
Zarina Muhammad: I have that fear too. My brain is split in half: one half has the same anxiety, and the other one knows that the longer I work on something, the happier I am with it in the long run.
LD: How does this process make you reflect on the way you usually work as writers and critics?
ZM: It’s a new way of writing and a new vocabulary. It’s made me realise that when I write reviews, I slip into a certain voice. As a critic, I want to be a good host. For the book, rather than being a good host, I want to be a good storyteller. And those are two different things. It feels like a different mental register.
GP: For the past seven years, we’ve almost exclusively written for ourselves, and have only a few times worked with external editors. For a period, we wrote an advice column for Elephant Magazine, and the very first time we sent them a text, we got it back with tons of edits, to the point where it didn’t sound like we were in it. At that moment we said that we didn’t want to go forward with the project unless we could write the way we wanted to, because that is what’s natural to us. We’re like a wild child that’s been on a bender and doesn’t have to write very professionally.
ZM: A child that has no bedtime, professionally.
GP: As we’ve built an audience on this style of writing, it wouldn’t make any sense to try to make it proper. I was worried about this when it came to the book, but the publishers are insistent that we write the way that we’re used to. The only thing they’ve warned us about, which is completely fair, is that if we make the typical rash comments that we tend to – for example, using “white men” as a fun joke – we need to be robust about justifying why we do so.
ZM: Yes, it’s a robustness. Being rigorous and saying the full sentence. Often, in our work, we slip into shorthand. We know our audience and they’re often of similar age and similar background to us, so there is this weird complicity and understanding between us. But our publishers come from a different perspective and push us not to be lazy and assume things. It’s a challenge, but one that I like – just so I can explain things fully to myself.
LD: Since the beginning of The White Pube, you’ve been using social media actively as a component in your criticism. Could you speak a bit about how you now reflect on this integration of criticism and social media?
GP: This could be an hour-long answer, but I’ll try to boil it down. Early on, the integration of art criticism with social media was quite a fraught relationship. I think that we were the ones who established Instagram as a place where it was OK to speak about art criticism. This was in early 2016, and, at the time, we could write about some art and add a comment like “by the way, this artist is a dickhead.” For the first few years, this really stressed people out, and I think that a lot of professionals wrote off the messaging as cyber bullying because it was taking place on social media. For some reason, we thought it was completely normal to use that platform because we didn’t have much experience of anything else. We didn’t buy art magazines or journals, read academia, have subscriptions to art newsletters, or any other slow writing. We were posting live and direct from exhibitions, which for some reason hadn’t happened before – especially not with such a memorable branding attached to it as The White Pube name.
We carried on, and over the years it became normal to do what we do on social media. Then it got to a point where we wanted to be more careful about what we were saying. We wanted to use social media as a way to direct people to our website, in order for them to actually read our work in full. In the process of doing this, we realised that some people are never going to click the link and leave the comfort of centralised social media to venture out onto some strange blog or website. So how do you share criticism with people who don’t want to leave social media? Memes! I have a love-hate relationship with them, but they are efficient. This made our following grow quickly, but it got to the point where a lot of people followed only for meme content and didn’t even know a website or podcast existed.
Since Instagram’s algorithm boosted the memes above our other content, it felt as if the actual platform began limiting what we could do and what we could offer to people. Over the past year, we’ve been thinking about what to do about this. The speed of Instagram is insane. You can open the app, see a picture of someone’s holiday, then some very distressing news, then someone’s kid, and then maybe a White Pube review in between it all. I don’t like to be thrown into that atmosphere. To regain more control over our content, we’ve been looking into the potential of RSS feeds, and we’ve spent a lot more time on [the instant messaging platform] Discord. The latter has been much more comfortable for us and allowed us to have the conversation we want to have through our work.
ZM: Just in terms of numbers, the memes are a helpful format to push things out quite rapidly. That’s been useful, but I do question the value of that kind of engagement. When we started writing, we did it so fast and loose. We were happy saying things that weren’t so concerned with nuance. I think there’s value in that kind of extremity. It can allow you to discover something new or a different angle, even if it’s just a political or critical position. It performs a function beyond just ripping through the algorithm.
A couple of years ago, the scale of that online contact had an actual, tangible effect on our writing in a negative way. We went from fast and loose to becoming more concerned with our writing always being waterproof, providing more nuance. It probably sounds like a good thing, but it was an anxious process. We ended up producing a lot of texts that would contradict or undermine what we were saying in the first place. We’d take what we actually wanted to say and then have to cover all these different angles, anticipating interruption. It meant I was writing and thinking in quite a clenched space that didn’t allow me to move very far. I think Discord has really balanced that, and allowed the writing to become a lot less clenched.
LD: What is the biggest difference between these platforms and the way your audience interacts with you there?
ZM: Discord is interesting because the platform inherently has a slower pace of discussion; it provides more thoughtful replies and new angles of thinking. Discussing a text, people can take their time and get back to you in, say, three days, after they’ve had time to really sit with something. On Instagram, a few hours after posting something, the attention around it dies down. The algorithms just blow past.
GP: The irony is that we still need Instagram, though. We need to keep the engagement up because we’re going to have to sell a book.
ZM: Yeah, we need to smash it. But the audience that’s only there for the shits and gigs aren’t interested in our long-form writing and wouldn’t buy the book anyway. But to be honest, Instagram is the place I spend the most time. It’s not a terrible place to be, it’s just a weird place to sit as a critic. It’s been interesting. It definitely shaped our careers.
LD: You’ve gotten attention for your approach to both the object of criticism – it being as much a video game or a book as an art exhibition – as well as its form, which is more diaristic and personal as opposed to analytic and ‘objective’. Were these conscious choices from the beginning?
ZM: It seemed natural to see it all as cultural output in a horizontal landscape. Because, right. Imagine you’re a very traditional critic who wears a suit and writes for a broadsheet newspaper: you’re on a payroll, you have a pension, job security, you speak in fully grammatically correct sentences, you’re a middle-aged man. When you go into a gallery, it’s a normal space for you to be in. And that is really unusual. It’s a niche position to come from, not just because you’re a middle-aged man with a salary and a pension – although most people can’t relate to any of those experiences – but because you walk into a gallery and that’s a normal part of your day. You’ll write about the gallery as if it’s normal and take certain quirks for granted. I think that amounts to a blind spot; it’s a gap in your understanding – you’re already missing things and not questioning certain parts of the way the system works.
Art is quite a weird thing, anyway. It’s already quite a niche concern. Exhibitions are strange places to be. Perhaps it was unconscious at first, but we wanted to write about art with this strangeness in mind. We don’t go into galleries and think, “oh yeah, this is incredibly normal.” It’s a specifically mediated experience, where special objects are placed in special rooms. The exhibition wants you to have a specific experience and it relies on certain things, takes things for granted, and asks for your complicity. That is a weird thing, and it doesn’t line up with the rest of our day – on the bus, or the tube, watching TV. That’s why we write about other kinds of culture, like video games and books, theme parks and restaurants. It makes sense to think about it all on a horizontal plane, not to bring them all down to the same level, but it’s just a more open and generous way to exist as a critic. During the lockdowns, I reviewed the park by my Mum’s house – it’s my favourite text I’ve ever written. When I think about it, art institutions are publicly funded spaces where you go to experience something with your body and your brain, and that’s what that park was too.
GP: “Critic-at-large” is the phrase that I recently started using to explain what I do. It sounds like I’m the CEO of something.
ZM: Sounds like an outlaw.
GP: Oh, like I’m “at large.” [laughs]
LD: You also call yourselves “unprofessional part-time critics” in your Instagram bio. Are you still – and what does this unprofessionalism allow for?
ZM: Still unprofessional, but no longer part-time! Up until very recently. Now it’s both our full-time jobs.
GP: We put that in our bio in a moment of tension. At one point, the amount of followers we’d gained made me uncomfortable because it made us look more powerful than we felt and more powerful than we wanted to be. As Zarina explained, we just wanted to walk into an exhibition and talk about the weirdness of that encounter and write a text that is suggestive, not authoritative. We never wanted to dictate how anyone else should feel if they were to go through the same experience. But as we got a lot of followers, some developed a parasocial relationship to us, took everything we said as gospel, and felt like we were actually these CEO critics. That didn’t feel good. I didn’t want people to take us seriously, and I wanted them to understand that this wasn’t the centre of our world. I thought having the word “unprofessional” in the bio would lower people’s expectations. Now, things are different. We’re a little bit more professional because we understand that even though we don’t want power, we have it.
ZM: This reminds me of something I read, a tweet about Stuart Hall’s intervention in the field of cultural studies. I can’t remember what it said exactly, but it was about the idea that speaking from an autobiographical perspective used to be on the opposite side of the spectrum to speaking from an authoritative perspective – it was like the two were conflicting positions and couldn’t cross over. Partly because of how digital culture impacts writing, these two positions aren’t mutually exclusive anymore. They’ve moved closer together, and it’s possible to do both at the same time. I think that’s interesting. We started writing autobiographically to avoid being authoritative, but that only goes as far as the culture allows it to go. We can only avoid authority by being autobiographical if readers buy into that. They have to be complicit in our agenda for it to work.
LD: You’ve also mentioned that you want to offer art criticism that is honest. Do you think that traditional art criticism tends to be dishonest?
ZM: Not necessarily dishonest, but insincere and guarded. An academic, disembodied voice that claims to be objective denies the writer’s self. That’s not a new thing to say; that kind of objectivity is out of fashion. But art criticism emerged from and still exists within academic trajectories. Even broadsheet critics can get away with writing a whole exhibition review and never once say what they thought about it or how it made them feel. I think that’s insincere. I think criticism should involve some part of yourself being implicated. Without that, it’s a risk averse and kind of avoidant way to do criticism.
GP: I think that being honest is also about being honest with yourself. Sometimes, I will play a game and don’t know how I feel about it, but when I sit down to write, the truth comes out all of a sudden. This keeps amazing me – how I find honesty through writing.
ZM: At art school, my dissertation tutor gave me some advice that’s really stuck with me. I think it’s become really foundational in my understanding of what we do. He went: “You don’t need to know what you’re going to say when you sit down to write. You can have a thought and follow it and discover things through writing. Writing can just be a process of thinking – it can be an exploratory process.” I think he was trying to join the dots between practically making something as an artist and the thinking behind it all. That idea of writing as a vehicle for thought made so much sense, and a part of that is honesty.
LD: Regarding what you said about power earlier, I wonder if you’ve seen your way of writing about art have an impact in the bigger sphere of art criticism?
GP: I have no idea. I don’t read enough of it to know. I know that it’s so bad that I don’t do this, but it’s the truth.
ZM: We didn’t read enough criticism before we started writing ourselves to assess the state of it. Back then, our position was more adversarial. As a critic and writer, I’m now in a space where I’m more willing and able to engage with other people’s writing than I was in 2015. Maybe that’s because the landscape has shifted around us, but it’d be really crazy for us to say that we changed the landscape.
GP: One thing we know that we have done is make a lot of people feel more comfortable in galleries and art spaces. We get a lot of messages about this – that people feel like they have a right to be in them because of us, and also feel empowered to speak up if something doesn’t feel right. It’s a different kind of impact, but one that feels very good.
LD: Since the beginning, you’ve been promoting awareness on questions about representation and accessibility, and the lack of such in contemporary art and its institutions. In what way does your work advocate for structural change?
ZM: I find it hard to answer this question. Up until a couple of years ago, I truly believed that institutions could change, and that it was just, as a critic, about holding them to account. But saying the same things over and over again, you start doubting either the message or the medium in which it’s being said. Also, both words “representation” and “accessibility” have become so instrumentalised by institutions to pay lip service to the fundamental driving ideas behind them.
GP: I thought I understood what accessibility meant, and that I had read and said the right things. Then I got chronically sick myself [Long Covid/POTS] and realised I hadn’t done anything right. Now, I feel like I have so much to make up for, and that I’m coming up against a lot of the same issues that I’ve seen Zarina face in terms of writing about representation where I feel like no matter what I do, nothing is going to change. But then there is this instinct to say something and complain anyways, because, as I said before, if we have the power, we also have the responsibility to use it when and where we can. Even if the fact that it doesn’t change anything makes me feel bad, going through the process of speaking up feels less bad than doing nothing.
ZM: I think that’s a good way of saying it. Within a complaint there is a knowledge of its own futility. By vocalising a problem, you’re kind of acknowledging the futility of expecting it to change. But it is good to do anyway – it does something, it exercises something. And I’m not sure what that is.
GP: I think what it does is empower the audience, as we spoke about earlier. That’s the by-product of it.
ZM: Yeah. I spent years writing at a wall, expecting structural change. No structural change happened, but our audience was listening. Not the institutions, but our readers. I think I was paying attention to the wrong thing – maybe that’s the shift that happened.
LD: Is this why you’ve also been emphasising being an action-oriented agent on the art scene – from running grants, to your billboard campaign, and actively supporting the Tate strikes? Do you think that art criticism has a responsibility in terms of being an active agent in the politics of representation and identity?
GP: I think that it does. I think a lot about not having done enough of it myself, and now that I’m sick its twice as hard to do anything. But it also feels twice as important. I’m currently organising a protest against some public artworks in Liverpool that are made by a person who is very hateful online.
ZM: Direct action is hard. A complaint is easier to identify: you can draw a circle around the problem pretty easily. Criticism within its academic trajectory, that disembodied approach where it’s just thought, just discourse, just theory – that’s easy. That’s not to say it doesn’t have value, but it does deny or ignore the critic’s role in the actual arts ecology and community between curators, institutions, artists, etc. I think art critics do have a responsibility to be active agents in that sense. It feels silly to think of criticism as something that only takes place in a vacuum. Exhibitions don’t happen in a vacuum, and neither does criticism. Criticism without any kind of consequence or outcome denies the fact that critics have skin in the game too. It allows you to write from a position where you can kind of say, “this doesn’t have any implication in the real world.” As if art takes place in a cerebral chamber.
It reminds me of something Jerry Saltz said a couple of years ago: a critic produces work in the same way or to the same extent that an artist does. I don’t know if I agree with that completely. I don’t think that writing criticism is the same feeling as producing art. But criticism is a productive field, and maybe that’s why direct action feels more important to us now, because it feels like a more productive thing than the writing itself.
LD: Is this a part of why you’ve been running The White Pube Creatives Grant since 2020?
GDLP: Yes, this is very important to us. A company called Creative Debuts reached out to us and asked if there was anything we wanted to do or needed money to do, which started it all. We initially said we wanted to do a grant for working-class writers, which became the first iteration. That later opened up to all working-class creatives. The grant is a one-off sum of GBP 500 that Creative Debuts provides, and for which we don’t expect anything back. No reporting.
ZM: I think it’s the most important thing we do. Maybe because it’s direct action, a tangible thing. We’re putting five hundred quid in someone’s pocket and having an immediate impact.
GP: It also gives the receivers a stamp of approval. It feels uncomfortable to say, but it is a part of it as well. They’re all early-career – or sometimes not even in a career yet – so the presence of a grant can be important validation.
LD: Lastly, having visited Norway and Scandinavia several times, what do you see as the biggest differences between the Nordic and the UK contexts when it comes to being an art world professional – whether it be as a critic or an artist?
GP: When we went to Norway, what struck me were the unions and societies for the arts and how they’re centred around disciplines: one for sculpture, one for photography, and so on. This was something I hadn’t seen before, and something I’ve been thinking a lot about. I like the setup, the way these spaces allow for specialised conversation and community, the way they archive the discipline’s legacies, and the care and thought that is being put into this.
ZM: It enables camaraderie too, which I quite like.
GP: I was at a talk that Mark Fisher did years ago, just before he died, where he was talking about how individualisation is being forced upon us and how suspicious that is. If we’re not together, we can’t organise or discuss how bad things are. This is also what I think that Discord can start to undo for us. It is not a stream of people where no one really interacts, but a platform where there is actually a better chance of community being made because the technology has a different shape. I think we should all find ways to spend more time together – not just in a cynically productive way, but an artistic way which can be interesting and generative.
