Travis Jeppesen’s Bad Writing is a collection of interconnected essays and “fictocriticisms,” many appearing in print for the first time, that etches a pathway for a truly radical “bad” modernism in art and literature. Erudite, witty, and occasionally controversial, Bad Writing reinvigorates the too-often staid medium of art criticism as an iconoclastic and inventive literary art form.

While it’s super tempting to trot out that tired phraseology so bad it’s good, I’m not sure it covers how particularly bad Travis Jeppesen’s aims are: he wants to bankrupt what passes for most cultural critique, render it worthless, from the inside out, gastrointestinally, giving it food poisoning. (If you think that’s a mixed metaphor, bing Freud on excremental capital.) Which is to say, Jeppesen takes George Kuchar at his gloriously fetid word: ignoring all the societal encouragements to be a flash in the pan, dude’s set his slutty sights on becoming ‘a big soft plop-in-the-bowl … creat[ing] such a stink … that people cannot ignore it.’ Does this moment of ‘clusterfuck existentialism’ really deserve better? He’s the Weird Al Yankovic of art criticism, but gayer. — Bruce Hainley