Pace Live

Against Interpretation

Naomi Fry & Oliver Shultz in Conversation on Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love

Thursday, Dec 11, 2025
6:30 – 8 PM
510 West 25th Street
New York

EVENT DETAILS

Thursday, Dec 11, 2025
6:30 – 8 PM
510 West 25th Street
New York

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(opens in a new window) @frynaomifry
(opens in a new window) @olivershultz
(opens in a new window) @friedrichkunath
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Join New Yorker writer Naomi Fry and Pace’s chief curator Oliver Shultz at our New York gallery for a wide-ranging conversation about everything other than art.

The talk is prompted by Susan Sontag’s famous 1966 provocation that interpretation amounts to “the revenge of the intellect upon art.” Sontag once wrote: “to interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world.

Rejecting the need to locate meaning in art, this discussion, taking place amid Friedrich Kunath’s current exhibition Aimless Love, will explore music, film, and popular culture, and how these subjects connect to experiences and feelings of selfhood, itinerance, longing, and the sublime. The conversation marks the publication of Friedrich Kunath: The Grand Tour, a new monographic publication from Phaidon/Monacelli on the artist’s work, which includes an essay by Fry. Friedrich Kunath: Aimless Love, which spotlights Kunath’s latest paintings, continues at Pace through December 20.

Naomi Fry

Naomi Fry is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes about popular culture, books, and art. She is also a cohost of the magazine’s culture podcast, Critics at Large.

Oliver Shultz

Oliver Shultz is Chief Curator at Pace Gallery and Director at 125 Newbury, Pace’s project space in New York. Before joining Pace, he was previously a curator at MoMA PS1, where he was part of the curatorial team on more than twenty exhibitions between 2015 and 2019. In 2014, he served as Fisher Curatorial Fellow in Painting and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He received his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 2018, where he was the Hume Graduate Fellow in the Arts, with a doctoral dissertation on the work of Paul Thek. He has lectured widely, including at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Courtauld Institute in London, the Institute of Fine Arts in New York, Hunter College, UC Berkeley, Stanford, and Yale, among others.