– a series of events and podcasts hosted by Simian, August-November, 2025. Original artwork by Tolia Astakhishvili.
Mood Curriculum is a new series of podcasts and events curated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen that takes as its starting point his essay Mood over Content published by Kunstkritikk last year. Mood implies both attunement and resonance; the possible dissolution of the boundary between object and subject. Mood is not information, but inherent to art's own ontology. Here, artwork and practice cannot be separated, but form a unit that necessitates that art's dissemination in itself must be practiced as an art form. What it posits is something at once so obvious and so completely alien as a turn towards aesthetic experience in contemporary art.
Podcast Episode 1: JF Martel Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
In the first episode of Mood Curriculum, JF Martel discusses the re-issue of his 2016 book Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice. I came across JF in the podcast Weird Studies which he hosts together with Phil Ford. Some of the heroes of the Weirdosphere, as they call it, are Carl Jung, David Lynch, figures from the history of esoteric thought like William James, James Hillman.
JF writes that "If the majority of aesthetic works fails to astonish us ... It may also have something to do with the fact that art ... is constantly being put to uses that are at odds with its essence." Instead, the kinds of objects that Martel is interested in are ones that come closer to the concept of mood: “The work shines from within,” he writes, emitting a “supreme quality that the medieval Scholastics defined as the quidditas or “whatness” of things.”
All podcasts feature music from Bitsy Knox and Roger 3000's album The Ears of Animals.
Podcast Episode 2: Ariana Reines Wave of Blood
In the second episode of Mood Curriculum, I speak with poet Ariana Reines about her book Wave of Blood (Divided, 2024), in which the native properties of poetry are harnessed to reckon with an acute real life crisis during the first months of the war in Gaza. In Wave of Blood there is real grief and anger; it is a challenging and very personal work. It opens with a quote from the poet and painter Etel Adnan that reads: "Science must not replace pain, because when that kind of catastrophe happens, it has no mercy."
Podcast Episode 3: Simon Critchley On Mysticism
In the third episode of Mood Curriculum, I speak with philosopher Simon Critchley about his book On Mysticism (NYRB, 2024). With On Mysticism Critchley offers a roadmap to mystical practice and thought within the Christian tradition. He understands mystical experience as experience in its most intense form – mysticism is mediated immediacy. It is an antidote to melancholy, as Julian of Norwich puts it, "to the heaviness with which the self is attached to itself, riveted to itself. " It is also a call to intensify the senses: "God is all mouth", he quotes from Madame Guyon, and a movement away from the self: to write, in the words of Annie Dillard, "without a face".
Event # 1: Negative Hands
Aug 14, 2025. 17:00 — 20:00
James Richards and Fatima Hellberg moderated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen
The first event in the series asks us to attune with art's negative potentials: the potency of refrain, the beauty inherent to certain types of loss. The artist James Richards will show a suite of recent films and the curator Fatima Hellberg will talk about her work with the collection at MUMOK in Vienna, where she has just begun her tenure as director.
Event #2: I'll just continue doing what I'm doing and you tell me when I'm living my dream: Art and deprofessionalisation
Aug 30, 2025. 15:00 — 18:00
With artwork by Annika Eriksson, performances by Jaakko Pallasvuo and Manuel Pelmus, and guests Emily Fahlén and Tom Engels, moderated by Kristian Vistrup Madsen.
The professionalisation of the art field necessitates the declaration of goods and the minimisation of risk. Consumers and institutions must know what they are buying as artists and curators must know what they are selling. "Mood rolls back art’s professionalisation because it demands something that it would require structural changes in order to buy: presence, sensitivity, and time ... For this reason, the artist of mood most likely needs another source of income, just as the curator cannot meaningfully churn out six shows a year. Mood, then, is for the most part too demanding to be commercially or institutionally viable ... With mood as benchmark, one does not make a career as an artist, curator, or writer – one makes a life." Is the art system fighting the art works? Can art's institutions accommodate mood?
Podcast Episode 4: Rosanna McGlaughlin Against Morality
In episode four of Mood Curriculum, I am in conversation with Rosanna McLaughlin about her essay Against Morality (Floating Opera Press, 2025). For McLaughlin, morality has become an unconstructive benchmark in art that strips it of its power along with its vitality.
Podcast Episode 5: Saskia Vogel on Peter Cornel's Ways of Paradise
In the fifth and final episode of Mood Curriculum, I meet Saskia Vogel to discuss her translation of Peter Cornell's Ways of Paradise (Fitzcarraldo, 2024). Cornell, who passed away earlier this year, first published the conceptual novel in Swedish in 1987. It presents as the footnotes to a lost manuscript, but what transpires from reading is that searching for ways to paradise will always mean circling the perimeter of a lost object.
#3: The autobiography of my attention
Nov 28, 2025. 17:00 — 19:00
Simon Lässig and Kristian Vistrup Madsen
The last live event in the Mood Curriculum series borrows its title from the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky in considering how the practice of paying attention - really a way of seeing - has the potential to dislodge distinctions between subject and object, self and other. The artist Simon Lässig will present a film program, and Kristian Vistrup Madsen will give a talk to sum up some of the lessons from the curriculum.