Vince Aletti

Vince Aletti (born 1945) is an American music journalist, record company executive and photography critic.

Aletti was the first person to write about disco (in a piece published in Rolling Stone in 1973), writing a weekly column about disco for the music trade magazine Record World (1974–1979), and reporting about early clubs like David Mancuso's The Loft for The Village Voice in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In 1979 and 1980, Aletti also worked as the A&R man for Ray Caviano’s RFC Records. He was a senior editor at The Village Voice for nearly 20 years until leaving in early 2005.

In 1998, Aletti was the curator of a highly praised survey exhibition of art and photography called Male, which was followed up in 1999 by Female, both at Wessel + O'Connor Gallery in New York. In conjunction with those shows, he was the co-editor of the Fall 1999 "Male/Female" issue of Aperture, featuring his interview with Madonna, which was later anthologized in Da Capo's Best Music Writing (2000).

In 2000, he was the co-curator of an exhibition called Settings & Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography at London's White Cube 2 gallery, and the following year he organized a show of Steven Klein's fashion work for the Musée de l'Élysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Aletti was one of the two featured writers of The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century (2001).

In 2005, Aletti wrote moving tributes to Helen Gee and Richard Avedon for the Village Voice, in addition to his weekly reviews of New York museum and gallery exhibitions. Aletti is especially attuned to new developments in the New York City art world and his writing combines a journalistic sensibility and an understated critical grammar.

Vince Aletti currently reviews photography exhibitions for The New Yorker’s "Goings on About Town" section.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Articles

• Reviews the 'Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography' exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
• Discusses Mark Morrisroe.
• Reviews the 'Radical Camera' exhibition at the Jewish Museum.
• Vivian Maier.
• Reviews 'Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Retrospectives of Roman Vishniac and David Seymour at the International Center of Photography.
• Retrospective of Bill Brandt at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
• Photography and the American Civil War at the Met.