A salmagundi of tedium: The White Pube podcast reviewed

The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The name announced iconoclastic intent, playing on the White Cube gallery — which certainly deserves mockery (like a city law firm, it has outposts in Hong Kong and Manhattan). But The White Pube podcast is as inanely conventional as the gallery it makes fun of.

Each episode is an hour-long salvo by the hosts, or ‘art critic baby gods’, and as with their exhibition reviews — rated with emojis, not stars — conversation is appealingly informal and spontaneous. But they have little of interest to say, especially about their ostensible subject. Three episodes into this art criticism podcast, hardly an artwork has featured. Unsuspecting listeners must instead swallow a salmagundi of tedium, including a detailed account of the hosts’ driving lessons (Muhammad passed on the third attempt; de la Puente prefers manual to automatic; tune in for more revelations).

What they do discuss is pop culture, especially reality TV, stemming from their rejection of culture’s high/low divide (in their scheme: ‘pop or snobby’). This hardly makes them the art-world agitators they pose as. Pop culture has from the 1960s onwards thoroughly captured artists’ imaginations. Far from being an anti-establishment attitude, it gets you invited to Buckingham Palace, as the great pop artist Sir Peter Blake has found.

The White Pube’s bolshie style masks conformism. Expect modish nostrums (diversity good, capitalism bad), which aren’t necessarily wrong — I applaud them for endowing a working-class writers’ grant —but very safe. The art establishment has duly hailed them. Muhammad is on a residency at the ICA. De la Puente runs an Arts Council-funded gallery. Episode one relates endless invitations to teach and lecture at art schools and galleries, including being flown in to Norway’s Bergen Kunsthall.