It’s no great secret that the art world is, by and large, male, pale and stale. Read through the list of any broadsheet’s arts reviewers and you’ll be faced with a parade of white, middle-class men, almost all of them based in London. No wonder, then, that art criticism is often out of touch and impenetrable to anyone who doesn’t have an MA in art history. Enter: The White Pube.

Created by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente, The White Pube describe themselves as “art critic baby gods” – two 23-year-old women who want to write about contemporary art on their own terms. The name alone, a cheeky play on the White Cube gallery, embodies their fresh, tongue-in-cheek approach to art writing, which doesn’t so much aim to deconstruct the hierarchy of low and high art as shatter it completely.

“Keeping things to a minimum and masking the edges felt like the tone of the show, which is danggggerous when white curator is showing female black artist,” runs their review of Sonia Boyce at Manchester Art Gallery. Or as their emoji review puts it: 🌌🔦🎆

The White Pube publish weekly reviews and “baby essays” on their website, but unlike most publications, their Twitter and Instagram posts are as central to their output as long-form writing. The two also host a podcast and put up the occasional YouTube video.

Muhammad and De la Puente met in 2015 on the fine art BA course at Central St Martins and bonded over their growing frustration with the art world – which both were beginning to realise they wanted nothing to do with.

“So many critics presume that they have the authority to predict your response [to an artwork],” says Muhammad. “It’s all outdated. Art critics are either trying to canonise artworks for the market or actively make contemporary art history. The White Pube, by contrast, is about the immediate encounter we have with the art.”

While traditional criticism is a value judgment on art – it’s a one star or a five star; good or bad – The White Pube go with gut instinct.

“Feelings are so often seen as inadequate,” says Muhammad. And yet not liking a painting because a brushstroke makes you feel ill is a completely valid reaction, even if it’s one you might feel stupid for saying out loud. Writing in tandem has helped the pair figure out how to eloquently express those immediate visceral reactions in a way that others on the margins of the art world can relate to.

“Our reviews are a litmus test or a guide rope to anchor people to certain aspects of an artwork. I think it goes back to the reason we started The White Pube in the first place. We valued the reviews you would give a friend, by word of mouth or Facebook messenger, more than what the Evening Standard had written.”

You can tell in the writing where we’ve gotten in relationships, or what we’re going through in terms of mental health. It all seeps in and shapes the text

The White Pube’s subjective, personal, almost confessional approach to art criticism has been labelled “embodied criticism” and for Muhammad and De la Puente, it works. A White Pube review consciously takes in everything from the pair’s individual emotions before they enter the exhibition to current social and political concerns (white appropriation of black bodies, say) via private problems they’re facing in their own lives.

“I reviewed Marguerite Humeau’s show [last November] at Tate Britain,” says Muhammad. “I wasn’t having a good time of it and I took it out on the art.” In this way, she notes, The White Pube has become a tender, vulnerable journal of their lives over the past three years.

De la Puente concurs: “You can tell in the writing where we’ve gotten in relationships, or what we’re going through in terms of mental health. It all seeps in and shapes the text.”

This uber-personal approach goes some way to explaining their signature style – a hybrid of emoji-rich text-speech and first person stream-of-consciousness. “We didn’t really know what we were doing,” says Muhammad. “It was just about getting our feelings out – the way the words are positioned isn’t what matters.”

While Muhammad’s reviews are hurried and dotted with mistakes (“I commit to the typo” she tells me), De la Puente’s are more carefully crafted. “I’ll go to an exhibition as early as possible in the week and write that same day,” she says. “Then I spend the whole week going back to that text, until it feels representative of my exact experience.”

While this might raise the question of legibility, The White Pube’s readership numbers suggest that they’re onto something. Their website has hit 13,000 monthly visits, from predominantly 25 to 35-year-old women. On Instagram, they’ve just reached 10,000 followers and they’re featured among activists and models on Dazed and Confused’s 2018 Dazed 100 list – “your guide to the people whose moment is now”. The White Pube’s subjectivity and their frank political stance is clearly resonating with a younger audience in a way traditional art publications aren’t able to.

The pair make an effort to review women and BAME artists who aren’t London-based and to call out hypocrisies. “It’s important for us to be vocal because we don’t look or sound like critics,” says Muhammad.

At the opening of Zoë Paul’s La Perma-Perla Kraal Emporium in Bristol, Muhammad and De la Puente used their co-written review to highlight the “BASIC, VIOLENT issue” of a white artist using black bodies in their art. “[S]he’s got a solo show at a big institution ha ha ha ofc no one can say anything now,” they wrote, “except we can and will and did, even tho we are tired of being the only ones to do so.”

When I ask them over email about the Paul review, they don’t hold back. “[B]odies of colour should be given the agency to represent themselves,” they say. “N if u wana put a black body in a gallery so bad, commission a black artist instead of a white one.”

Likewise, they’re critical of Luke Willis Thompson’s Turner prize nomination for his solo exhibition, Autoportrait – because while the work looks at police brutality in America and black trauma, the artist himself is a New Zealander of mixed European and Fijian heritage. The pair say that they condemn Thompson’s nomination because he is a “white-passing” artist making work about, and therefore profiting from, the violence experienced by African Americans.

“[Thompson] hasn’t got the agency to speak on this as an issue in an authoritative way, and he certainly has no right whatsoever to turn black pain into a spectacle (as he has done),” the pair email. “We come from a very specific place where we don’t believe that white artists should ever attempt to represent bodies of colour within their work because of connotations and gaze those representations come with. Critics of LWT’s work are being silenced by liberal voices within the art world who are calling the work a “starter for an uncomfortable conversation” which is violent bollocks.

“We’re supported by people who agree that the art world is fucked – but also by people who feel powerless to change that,” they conclude. “I think that’s why it feels like we are a cult success. There are a lot of people in agreement with us about it being a white, cishet, male space for rich middle-class knobs.”