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We discuss Darling\\u2019s persona as portrayed in the article, his anti-capitalist leanings; what his future as an artist looks like, reading beyond what he says in the article towards his immediate future, having accepted an Oxford professorship; the public notoriety of the Turner Prize as compared with relative accolades in the U.S. (I claim that the Turner is much more public-facing than anything the U.S. offers, though Maiza claims that there are comparable points of recognition here in the States); and how Darling and his art are perceived by the public, both the NY Times public via the comments section, but also how contemporary art is taught, learned and thought about beyond the confines of the art world itself.
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This episode features the 1st half of the full episode. To get the full version, please visit: Patreon.com/theconversationpod\\xa0\\xa0 \\xa0The Conversation Art Podcast | creating a podcast that goes behind the scenes of the art worlds | Patreon
Recovering art worker and author of the novel Thieves, Valerie Werder talks about:
Her entrance into the art world via her demanding position at a fancy gallery in her attempt, as a newbie, to get access and proximity to the art world; \\xa0her ability to conform and comply under pressure (in the gallery environment), and the what the flip side of that looks like; what the coercion, that came thru various forms of care and the engendering of a \\u2018family\\u2019 dynamic at the gallery, looked like and how it played out, including through fancy paid meals and credit for fancy clothes so she could look and act the part; how working at a gallery gave her a completely different relationship to language, including the quick turnaround she had to produce, becoming a \\u2018language producing machine\\u2019 in the process; the craft of writing a gallery press release, and how she ultimately became, upon writing her novel, the \\u2018commodity\\u2019 herself that she in turn needed to sell.
In the 2nd half of the episode, Valerie talks about: her creative workarounds to promote her book, including using two very different kinds of publicists, and how throughout her professional career she\\u2019s been aware of and pushed against the given economic constraints, and how she believes it\\u2019s important to be explicit and unashamed about everything from her day jobs to the creation of her (writing) brand; the difference between the mythologizing/branding of artists back in the days of a much smaller (yet cut-throat) New York art world (of Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Walter De Maria et al.) and the more diffuse, digital world of today, and how in her book she wanted to explore the legacy and imprint of the peripheral art world figure \\u2018Valerie\\u2019 the character who herself was invisible but whose writing, through catalogues and press releases, was/is all over the art world, and in the process the real Valerie the writer becomes a visible figure, a brand herself; the strange relationship she had with her former gallerist boss, whom she became the voice for in press releases and personal emails and even interviews, and how she studied her and had the writings of her voice vetted by the gallerist herself, for which she was valued highly for absolutely being \\u2018her voice;\\u2019 how she wrote her book on an \\u2018unpaid sabbatical\\u2019 from her job at the gallery, in a friend\\u2019s cabin in Tennessee, and the complicated circumstances in which she quick her job upon returning from that \\u2018sabbatical,\\u2019 which she told the gallery was an artist residency; her doubts about whether her gallerist employer read her book (Thieves); the actual front desk worker (aka gallerina) protocol employed at the gallery where she worked, as far as how to treat different people who came into the gallery, whether they were VIPs who should be greeted by name (through the gallerina memorizing the faces of those collectors) or lowly artists/nobodies who could be ignored; her experience getting a once-over from a wealthy collector at the gallery, and giving that once-over right back to him; Frank Stella and his provocative artwork titling, and how it somehow wasn\\u2019t Valerie\\u2019s job to really do research about his work, despite the gallery selling it.
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Hungarian billionaire Gabriela and artist and architect Andi Schmied talk about:
Andi\\u2019s residencies, across Asia and Europe, as well as the Triangle Arts residency in DUMBO, Brooklyn, where she first connected with her fellow Hungarian, the billionaire Gabriela; some of the developments around the world that led her to the realization that there\\u2019s a glut of useless, ultra-wealthy housing that\\u2019s not actually being used, particularly a complex of villas about 100 miles outside of Beijing, where the groundskeepers wound up squatting in the empty units; doing a residency in New York in 2016, when she encountered Gabriela for the first time, who would become her key collaborator for what would her project \\u2018Private Views;\\u2019 the world of ultra-high end real estate, including the dynamics of a real estate agent showing a penthouse apartment of a very tall building to a client, and how Gabriela navigated these experiences; the questions the real estate agents showing these penthouses and other very expensive apartments asked, and what that revealed about the world of the ultra-wealthy; the various ways super-tall buildings in Manhattan are impacting everything from income inequality to changing the flora and fauna in Central Park from the long shadows they cast.
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If you would like to access Episode 340A, which features four great stories from Art Can Kill, you can support The Conversation on Patreon here:
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Arts writer and former professional surfer Jamie Brisick talks about: w hat it was like being on the pro surfing tour back in his late teens and early 20s, and how he developed his Plan B career initially as a surfing writer before moving into arts & culture writing; how he comes to art/the art world with a relatively fresh perspective, and has experienced some unsavoriness in the upper spheres in its being too much like high school in terms of popularity, etc.; what it means when, to quote the artist Paul Chan in this case, \\u2018Success is its own form of failure;\\u2019 the varied and fascinating work of Francis Al\\xffs, whom Brisick tried to get an interview with but was essentially blown off, but whom he still highly respects and reveres as an artist; the artworks, storytelling, and other idiosyncrasies of quintessential surfing-art artist, Raymond Pettibon, whom Brisick has profiled extensively and become friends with; the surf-skate pioneer Craig Stecyk (also a mentor of Brisick\\u2019s) and his crazy performance art stunts; and his relationship with the journalist and writer William Finnegan, whose struggle with his memoir may be a source of inspiration for listeners.
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n the 14th installment of the podcast\\u2019s Virtual Caf\\xe9, we take as our prompt a Dec. review by NYTimes art critic Holland Cotter about politics in art:
About 10 artists in the Virtual Caf\\xe9 (including past guests Ianna Frisby of Art Advice and William Powhida) talk about art and politics, including successful examples of political art; the nimbleness of capitalism to absorb all things protest; the challenges and failures of artists to organize, particularly artist unions; the question of whether artwork being in a gallery is neutered, in terms of its political/social power; virtue signaling in art, particularly political art; Theaster Gates as a strong example of an artist changing a community, and of socially engaged art; the importance of the rhetoric around so-called political art (including the good side of the word \\u2018didactic\');\\xa0the lack of transparency in galleries reporting where their donations to (political) causes are allocated; and how to take political art to the people, as opposed to through the gallery system.
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Bay Area co-director of Art+Action, head of AK Art Advisory and former Sotheby\\u2019s gatekeeper Amy Kisch talks about :
Her organizing work to bring awareness to the Census in the San Francisco Bay Area, through various partnerships with organizations and artists, as her favorite hybrid of art and social justice coming together; her time working at Sotheby\\u2019s auction house in New York, first in the proposals division, followed by running Sotheby\\u2019s Preferred, their VIP program for top clients, which put her in a sort of \\u2018bouncer\\u2019 role; why she thinks her friends who have stayed at Sotheby\\u2019s have chosen to do so, whereas for Amy, having come from a social work background, it just wasn\\u2019t going to be a long-term fit; differences she\\u2019s encountering living in the Bay Area compared with the much more market-centric New York, where there\\u2019s much more \\u201cdrafting FOMO\\u201d guiding how people collect; her love for the Bay Area, and yet her significant awareness of both the housing crisis and the homeless crisis, which she calls \\u2018post-apocalyptic.\'
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L.A.-based painter Davyd Whaley Foundation director Nick Brown talks about :
Quitting all his teaching jobs in favor of bartending while in New York because he needed to be making significantly for the high cost of living; how he got his current day job as director of the Davyd Whaley Foundation, which gives artist\\u2019s grants in the Southern California region, and what the job entails; how his being involved in the jury process has made him more sympathetic to artists who apply, advocating for prospective grantees; how he\\u2019s found artists in L.A. to be more generous in sharing opportunities than he experienced while in New York, and how he really likes to making art world introductions; his career successes and struggles, and how he sees the Whaley grant for emerging artists as a way for them to get a boost of recognition and advances their career; how he\\u2019s maintaining his UCLA extension teaching job in addition to being the Foundation director because he loves teaching so much, despite its challenges; how he sells his work, both to collectors he\\u2019s been able to cultivate without a gallery, as well as small watercolors on Instagram; the story of when a collector rang him up out of the blue and bought $10k of his work at a moment when he was really hurting financially; and how he applied to New American Paintings two years in a row with the exact same work, getting in the 2nd time (because it was all about the viewer, he said--not the work).
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\\u1427Canadian but now Berlin-based artist and software engineer Sarah Friend talks about:
Living in Berlin as an ex-pat among an ex-pat community so large that it tends to keep her and others from properly integrating into a big German city, and yet the Ven diagram of her kind of people - artists and people in tech - is in full force there; her day-job projects vs. her own art projects, which sometimes have a little overlap (she\\u2019s working on a Universal Basic Income-based cryptocurrency called Circles as a recent paid gig, for example); how she got started in software engineering (on her own, self-taught, early-20s), born out of her disillusionment with the class realities of the art world vis-\\xe0-vis her fellow graduating art students, as well as needing paid work coming into the great recession job market, and becoming an Occupy-er; her Remembering Network, an interactive digital memorial to all the species that are reaching extinction; and the existential questions, in light of that piece but other works she makes as well: when does something become art, and when does it not? And the way she sometimes she\\u2019s her art-making as having an extra limb: it would be a phantom limb if it were somehow taken away.
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