This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Art writing is an increasingly niche interest, this magazine’s success notwithstanding. Critique is so marginal that contemporary artists and curators hardly bother reading reviews, let alone indulge critics and their arcane ideas of taste. After Brian Sewell’s passing, it has been difficult to imagine that art criticism would birth a celebrity again.

Enter The White Pube (yes, that’s a juvenile pun), the pseudonymous practice of Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad who met at art school. Disillusioned with the institution, they have devoted the past decade to critiquing the art world instead. The Pube produces weekly independent reviews of exhibitions, video games and “cultural” experiences that recently included a visit to the dentist. 

Their texts often read like social media rants, devoting more space to the writer’s bus journey to the gallery than the art. What the reviews lack in punctuation they make up with emojis.

Irreverence and a “we’re in this together” vibe resonated with the duo’s peers, who fund the writing through subscriptions. The Pube has earned praise from Vogue, the Guardian, and even the establishment art magazine e-flux. With more than 100,000 social media followers, a book deal was inevitable.

Poor Artists is the Pube’s oath of allegiance to their audience. In what reads like a series of blog posts, the fictional memoir follows a wannabe artist. The opening describes the then toddler Quest Talukdar’s transcendental encounter with art in a museum. Experiencing art is akin to a baby tasting lemon for the very first time. “My senses get pulled in opposite directions; my sense of self becomes a work in progress.” Profound stuff.

Page ten and age one are, sadly, the last time Quest says anything remotely interesting about art. Her subsequent journey — which includes school museum visits, art school in London, a successful but brief commercial career and retreat to her childhood home in Liverpool — has precious little to do with understanding art. The ideas and circumstances which propel and challenge Quest are entirely the epiphenomena of the social and economic system known as “the art world”. 

And the art world is brutal. The working-class Quest drowns in student debt, can’t make rent and feels out of place at gallery openings. She blames racism and classism for her low self-esteem without understanding that she failed another test altogether. Even as she finds Instagram art gold, she feels only shame when she encounters her former school sweetheart, who is now a respected art theorist.

The further Quest falls, the harder it is to empathise with her ambitions. For Poor Artists, making art is akin to taking part in a reality TV show. Each wants to be famous, only their talents are dubious. The winners might get to meet the “pale, male and stale” Big Brother “art king”. Dejected, Quest fantasises about murdering him.

Are The White Pube a symptom or cause of art criticism’s downfall? Aspects of the book credibly suggest that their generation was let down brutally by directionless art school instruction that failed to equip them with art history, aesthetic judgement or commercial nous. The intended readership of poor artists will thus easily recognise themselves as the book’s pitiful heroes. 

But the Pube inexcusably palm their readers off with clichés like “capitalism” and “white supremacy” in lieu of analysis. Because these critics only know life from the reality TV set, they have no idea where art and artists lost their way.

And this gets clicks. In this art world, nobody wants to look at art because they’re too absorbed in their fragile subjectivities. Not bothering to make any art is the obvious next step. Poor Artists offers 300 pages of excuses for artists who never explain what they stand for, including to themselves.

This would be remarkable if it weren’t for The White Pube’s materially corrosive power in the real art world. It was their social media assault that got Rex Whistler cancelled at Tate Britain. In 2018, they led a campaign to get the ceramicist Nina Edge fired from a teaching job on account of her alleged transphobia. Their website hosts slanderous denunciations of art world figures whom De la Puente and Muhammad wish to banish. 

Absent artistry or principle, such criticism swaps judgement and even ethics for “feels” and hysteria. The White Pube’s writing offers no cultural insight. It can’t even be dismissed as bad Marxism or French theory. It is a depressing, inarticulate complaint of a generation too paralysed even to make art. It lazily disguises The Pube’s self-serving impulse. Poor artists of the real world will not notice that these critics are, in fact, the “art king’s” keenest courtiers.