Andrew Berardini is a writer of quasi-essayistic prose poems about art and other sensual subjects.

An occasional editor and curator with past collaborations and exhibitions at MOCA in Los Angeles, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Castello Di Rivoli in Turin, and the Estonian Pavilion at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

The author of numerous catalogue essays including for the Whitney Biennial, the Hammer Museum, and SFMOMA, he published Danh Vo: Relics in 2015 and has a forthcoming book about color. A longtime contributor to Artforum and the former critic of the LA Weekly, he is currently contributing editor at Art-Agenda, Mousse, and Momus.

Berardini was described by Spike Magazine as “the most elegant of all art critic cowboys” and by the Los Angeles Times as “unusually unhelpful”. Since 2008, he has been faculty at the artist-run free school the Mountain School of Arts and has occasionally run a residency at the Banff Centre in Canada for art writers since 2014.

Berardini’s past experiences include being the Public Writer for Pierre Huyghe at his retrospective, an editorial assistant at Semiotexte, and Writer-in-Residence at the Institute for Art and Olfaction. Recipient of the Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Art Writing Grant and the Redbull Detroit Writers Residency, he is the author of Danh Vo: Relics (2016) and a book on color to be released in Fall 2021.

His research interests include art writing as a form of literature, color, radical subjectivity, ecstatic resistance, literary chimeras, corporeality, poetry as incantation, the permeability between fiction and reality, underground culture, the erotics of art, emerging mythologies, and most generally contemporary art.

In describing his work, curator Chris Sharp wrote, “I have always admired his unconventional attitude and obvious relish of art as a form of wrong-doing…. A large component of Berardini’s overall project seems to be one of revolt—revolt against the professionalization, sanitization and ultimately, the sterilization of the art world, as a space more concerned with offending sensibilities and damaging career opportunities than being recklessly committed to the production of the often messy and unwieldy stuff that is art.”

Born in California, Berardini lives most of the time with daughter Stella in Los Angeles.

A decently exhaustive list of all his dubious accomplisments is available here.