Vince Aletti

Vince Aletti (born 1945) is a curator, writer, and photography critic.

Music industry
Aletti was a contributing writer for Rolling Stone from 1970 to 1989. He was the first person to write about disco in an article published by the magazine in 1973. He gave a negative review to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain in 1971, describing it as "a shattered, desolate landscape with few pleasures," competently performed but "limited." He was particularly critical of the record's second side, panning it as "dead-end stuff," and asked "who needs this shit?"

He also wrote a weekly column about disco for the music trade magazine Record World (1974–1979), and reported about early clubs like David Mancuso's The Loft for The Village Voice in the late 1970s and 1980s. Aletti was a senior editor at The Village Voice for nearly 20 years until leaving in early 2005.

Aletti worked with New York deejay Ritchie Rivera to curate a double-album disco compilation for Polydor Records, which released it in 1978 as Steppin' Out: Disco's Greatest Hits. Music critic Robert Christgau found it superior to Casablanca Records' Get Down and Boogie and Marlin's Disco Party, writing in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981): "Although local talent (Joe Simon, the Fatback Band) is represented, I find the spacey, lush-but-cool Euro-disco that predominates even more enticing, no doubt because the filler in which such music is usually swamped has been eliminated. New discoveries include the Chakachas' legendary 'Jungle Fever' and 'Running Away' by Roy Ayers, ordinarily the emptiest of 'jazz' pianists. This is disco the way it should be heard—as pure dance music, complete with risky changes."

In 1979 and 1980, Aletti also worked as the A&R Rep for Ray Caviano’s RFC Records.

Photography
Aletti is best known for his contributions to fine art photography. He reviewed photography exhibitions for ''The New Yorker until 2016.

Aletti has also curated numerous photography exhibitions, and has contributed writing for dozens of photography books. In 1998, Aletti was the curator of a highly praised 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 the book "Male/Female: 105 photographs" published by Aperture in 1999, 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. The following year Aletti organized Steven Klein American Beauty a retrospective exhibition 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 was the recipient of the Infinity Award for writing by The International Center for Photography.

Exhibitions curated by Aletti

 * 1998: Male. Wessel + O'Connor Gallery, New York.
 * 1999: Male/Female. Wessel + O'Connor Gallery, New York.
 * 2000: Settings & Players: Theatrical Ambiguity in American Photography. White Cube, London.
 * 2001: Steven Klein American Beauty. Musée de l’Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.
 * 2008: Male: work from the collection of Vince Aletti. White Columns, New York.
 * 2010: Dress Codes The Third ICP Triennial of Photography and Video. International Centre of Photography, New York. Curated with Kristen Lubben, Christopher Phillips, and Carol Squiers.