Richard Milazzo is a critic, curator, publisher, independent scholar and poet. In the 1970s, he was the editor and co-publisher of Out of London Press. He is the co-founding publisher and editor of Edgewise Press. In the 1980s, under the rubric of Collins & Milazzo, he co-curated art exhibitions and co-wrote works on art and art theory.
Since 1982, he has worked internationally as a critic and curator in the art world. In the early 1980s, he co-published and co-edited Effects : Magazine for New Art Theory in the East Village, and from 1986 to 1988 he was the American co-editor of Kunstforum (Cologne). Among the many publications of those years were Radical Consumption and the New Poverty (New York: New Observations, 1987); Art at the End of the Social (Malmö, Sweden: The Rooseum, 1988); and Hyperframes: A Post-Appropriation Discourse in Art, the lectures they delivered as Senior Critics at Yale University in 1988 and 1989. They were recently reissued in an Italian edition by Campanotto Editore in Udine, in 2005.
Collins & Milazzo brought to prominence a new generation of artists in the 1980s. It was their exhibitions and writings that originally fashioned the theoretical context for a new kind of Post-conceptual art that argued simultaneously against Neo-Expressionism and Picture-Theory Art. It was through this context that the work of many of the artists associated with Neo-Conceptualism (or what the critics reductively called Simulationism and Neo Geo) was first brought together.