Presentation of the book How to Write About Contemporary Art by Gilda Williams at Garage during The Second Garage Art Book Fair and Museum Night.

Gilda Williams talked about how to translate visual experiences into words, explain the difference between evaluative and explanatory writing, and showed how to avoid common pitfalls in art criticism.

Encouraging aspiring critics to write in clear, confident, and vivid language, How to Write About Contemporary Art by Gilda Williams is itself an example of such engaging writing. Despite the great variety of genres in contemporary art criticism, ranging from sketchy notes for a blog to academic studies, a good critical piece, Williams argues, will always answer three key questions: What is it? What might this mean? Why does this matter to the world at large? The main trend of today, she points out, is the emergence of literary hybrids, with poetic texts appearing in serious publications and detailed reviews of exhibitions published in blogs.

Gilda Williams is an art critic, editor, and lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. From 1994 to 2005 she was Editor and then Commissioning Editor at Phaidon Press. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, Art Monthly, The Guardian and other periodicals.

Valentin Diaconov is a curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. He is the author of many articles on art in both general interest and specialized publications (newspapers: Kommersant, Vremya Novostei, magazines: ArtChronika, Iskusstvo, Frieze, online press: Artinfo.com, ArtGuide, Raznoglasia).