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Arranging Tangerines Episode 16 - A Conversation with Kenny Schachter
54 Plays4 years ago
In this episode, we have a heartfelt conversation with Kenny Schachter in his art-filled home about the challenges of selling NFTs, how the NFT market compares to the traditional art world, stumbling into art after earning a law degree, how NFTs revitalized his art practice, the ethics of curating oneself into your own shows, teaching art as a learning tool, the lack of transparency in the traditional art market and the importance of art and humor in his life.
Kenny Schachter is a digital artist. He had a retrospective of his art at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in New York in the summer of 2018, curated an exhibit at Simon Lee Gallery in London, fall 2018 and a one person show at Kantor Gallery, LA, February 2019. He recently had a solo exhibition at Nagel-Draxler Gallery in Cologne and participated in a two-person show with Eva Beresin at Galerie Charim in Vienna.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Arranging Tangerines' and Hosts
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
00:00:05
Speaker
Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
00:00:10
Speaker
Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
00:00:13
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:15
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:00:17
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
00:00:19
Speaker
I know what to do.
00:00:20
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
00:00:22
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
Guest Introduction: Kenny Schecter
00:00:34
Speaker
This week's guest is Kenny Schecter.
00:00:36
Speaker
We're good.
00:00:37
Speaker
Cool.
00:00:39
Speaker
We'll get some room tone, huh?
00:00:40
Speaker
We can do it at the end.
00:00:41
Speaker
Okay.
00:00:42
Speaker
But you're pointing at it at home?
00:00:44
Speaker
I got it.
00:00:44
Speaker
I think.
00:00:45
Speaker
You want to have it in the center?
00:00:47
Speaker
This is our backup in case we get mugged on the way home.
00:00:52
Speaker
When do we get mugged?
00:00:53
Speaker
I mean, I guess they take my phone too, but I can put it on the cloud.
00:00:59
Speaker
All right, you want to start?
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah.
00:01:01
Speaker
Our guest this week is Kenny Schecter.
00:01:05
Speaker
Welcome to the show, Kenny.
00:01:06
Speaker
Thank you for having me.
00:01:07
Speaker
Thank you so much for inviting us into your space to do this episode.
00:01:14
Speaker
I asked Kenny if he had a bio that he wanted us to read.
00:01:16
Speaker
He told me to make it up.
00:01:17
Speaker
So Kenny Schechter is the number one NFT evangelist in the world and a contemporary thinker in the space.
00:01:27
Speaker
I would say one of the prominent forward thinkers in the space.
00:01:31
Speaker
And we're really excited to have him on the show.
00:01:33
Speaker
And I feel like if you're doing a show about NFTs, Kenny should probably be on it.
00:01:37
Speaker
I would say so.
00:01:38
Speaker
I think I've been on too many shows.
00:01:39
Speaker
I'm beginning to bore myself, so I hope I don't do the same for anyone who bothers to listen.
00:01:44
Speaker
Well, that's what I was like.
00:01:44
Speaker
We got to get him.
00:01:45
Speaker
We got to get him now while he's on his tour before he decides to hold up again and make work.
00:01:49
Speaker
I can't change because I have NFTism tattooed on my arm, so I can't change my mind, can I?
00:01:55
Speaker
I don't think you can at this point.
00:01:56
Speaker
You got to cover up, but it'll always be there.
00:01:59
Speaker
Um, so yeah, we usually do like, kind of like we, we spitball about NFTs and then we talk about the artist specific work.
00:02:07
Speaker
Um, but one thing I think I noticed about a lot of the talks that we did for research, when we were just like seeing what you were doing in the space, uh, a lot of them were kind of like you were introducing people to the NFT space and kind of giving them a rundown and overview, as well as like talking about your experience.
00:02:23
Speaker
And I think, uh, at this point it's been, uh,
00:02:26
Speaker
about a year since a lot of people have heard about NFTs.
00:02:30
Speaker
And we probably don't need to spend a ton of time on... I'm a veteran at a year and a half.
00:02:35
Speaker
Yeah, that is a veteran in crypto.
00:02:36
Speaker
Although I've been doing digital arts for 30 years.
00:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:02:41
Speaker
Which just means I'm old.
00:02:43
Speaker
Old and tired and cranky.
00:02:45
Speaker
You have me at a cranky point.
00:02:47
Speaker
That's fine.
00:02:48
Speaker
I think it'll make for good content.
00:02:49
Speaker
Good.
00:02:49
Speaker
I hope so.
Challenges of Selling Art & NFTs
00:02:51
Speaker
So I guess one question I have is like after a year and a half in the space, what's different now or like what surprises you about what the current state is of NFTs and contemporary art?
00:03:05
Speaker
Well, I mean, what's the same has been the same issue I've had since I started, since I put my toes into the art world.
00:03:15
Speaker
33 years ago, which is namely, you know, people have this notion that you dip into NFTs and you make a lot of money and it's all about the financialization and the fact that these NFTs have come to resemble securities or some form of a currency.
00:03:35
Speaker
But I find...
00:03:38
Speaker
sales to be the most painstaking aspect of, I mean, because I've done many different things in my career, the art world has always looked askance at me, period.
00:03:49
Speaker
So as an artist, I mean, I've been making art for 30 plus years.
00:03:53
Speaker
I mentioned I've done animations back in the early nineties, computer generated large scale prints in the nineties.
00:04:02
Speaker
But, you know, I guess I,
00:04:04
Speaker
Not just for me, but I just think selling art is one of the hardest things that you could do.
00:04:08
Speaker
And in a way, you know, probably akin to being an actor or a singer, it's only like the teeniest amount of people that consistently
00:04:18
Speaker
are able to flourish financially.
00:04:21
Speaker
So I think in that regard, it's pretty much the same for me as it's always been since the day I started.
00:04:27
Speaker
I mean, I always joke that I can't sell crack to a crackhead.
00:04:30
Speaker
And that's really like, I'm talking about like well-known art by other artists.
00:04:35
Speaker
Because to make a living, I've always had to rely on selling the work.
00:04:39
Speaker
Well, in the past year, I've done really well.
00:04:41
Speaker
So I
00:04:41
Speaker
I'll knock on wood and I can't really, I can't complain, although I surely will, especially now because I have like a saggy diaper and I'm in a bad fucking mood.
00:04:50
Speaker
But it just, you know, I have a show in Berlin.
00:04:52
Speaker
I've sold a few pieces.
00:04:53
Speaker
The show has been up for a month.
00:04:55
Speaker
It's at a conventional gallery that's been established for as long as I've been in the art world.
00:05:01
Speaker
It's a great gallery, Nagel Draxler.
00:05:02
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:05:03
Speaker
But I guess they... The show looks fantastic, by the way.
00:05:05
Speaker
Oh, thank you so much.
00:05:06
Speaker
I wish I could see it in person.
00:05:06
Speaker
Thank you so much.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:08
Speaker
I mean, I don't know.
00:05:09
Speaker
I guess, like, I looked at it yesterday when I posted some images and I was getting even more depressed.
00:05:15
Speaker
I just... I love this.
00:05:18
Speaker
But I mean, you know, a lot of the show is video, so I didn't really...
00:05:22
Speaker
post videos.
00:05:22
Speaker
I just think, you know, I'm in a, I've, I've, I've always put myself in difficult positions in my life.
00:05:29
Speaker
I've never done things the easy way.
00:05:31
Speaker
And I've always, I mean, I always do what I want, how I want to, when I want to.
00:05:35
Speaker
And as a result, you know, I, the obstacle, many of the obstacles in front of me, I've erected myself in terms of how I, my practice, but like, you know, in terms of the NFT world and all of that business, uh,
00:05:52
Speaker
On the micro side, it's easier to sell one of 10,000 than it is to sell one of one.
00:05:59
Speaker
I mean, really, NFTs, this podcast, digital art, all I care about is art.
00:06:06
Speaker
I love art.
00:06:07
Speaker
I'm crazy, stupidly passionate about art.
00:06:10
Speaker
So whatever works around that works.
Cultural Impact of NFTs on Art
00:06:12
Speaker
Right.
00:06:12
Speaker
So, I mean, if the whole crypto world imploded, which it kind of looked like it was about to a month ago, I really couldn't give a rat's ass if NFTs even dissolved.
00:06:22
Speaker
Again, except for the stupid tattoo on my arm, which I could always laser out.
00:06:27
Speaker
I'm sure you can change it to something.
00:06:29
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
00:06:30
Speaker
NFTism is a tough... I have bits and pieces of my wife's name, which I've... You could go down.
00:06:36
Speaker
N could be something like...
00:06:37
Speaker
Whatever.
00:06:38
Speaker
Anyway, national football team.
00:06:40
Speaker
I hate sports more than life right now.
00:06:45
Speaker
But I do like that you got a tattoo because I feel like crypto is like everybody's like all in when they get in.
00:06:50
Speaker
And so like I feel like getting a tattoo is all in, right?
00:06:53
Speaker
Well, I mean, well, first of all, I coined the word NFTism because, again, like, I was just in a ridiculous, speak about annoying podcasts and debates.
00:07:03
Speaker
I was in a stupid Twitter space last night for Artsy, which I don't even recognize them as a legitimate business.
00:07:09
Speaker
I was listening.
00:07:10
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:07:10
Speaker
I'm sorry.
00:07:11
Speaker
Apologies.
00:07:11
Speaker
Yeah.
00:07:12
Speaker
You were you were surrounded.
00:07:14
Speaker
It seems like everyone was taking potions.
00:07:15
Speaker
Well, the first like 20 minutes was so boring.
00:07:18
Speaker
I thought it was just it was so anemic in terms of the give and take.
00:07:21
Speaker
I thought it was going to be in a complete implosion.
00:07:23
Speaker
But the fact is, like, NFTs are nothing.
00:07:27
Speaker
This was a this was a conversation last night regarding Wikipedia's refusal to acknowledge NFTs as art.
00:07:35
Speaker
And I've always been, I mean, I contradict myself 20 times over the next 20 minutes.
00:07:40
Speaker
But like, you know, this was a conversation about whether NFTs are art.
00:07:46
Speaker
And I gave a quote for this article about this Wikipedia scandal saying like,
00:07:50
Speaker
Anyway, who cares about Wikipedia?
00:07:53
Speaker
And the fact is, you know, nothing's art except for art.
00:07:56
Speaker
So NFTs are nothing.
00:07:58
Speaker
They're just a digital certificate of authenticity and a system within which to buy and sell digital art.
00:08:05
Speaker
So in that sense, it's been a boon for me because I've made videos my whole life and I would previously put them on a USB and...
00:08:14
Speaker
I mean, I would number them in some kind of edition, but I would forget which videos are on.
00:08:19
Speaker
So, I mean, it was a disaster.
00:08:20
Speaker
And I'm sorry to the three people who I've sold USBs of five or six videos.
00:08:26
Speaker
And I called it an edition of three.
00:08:28
Speaker
But God knows, I don't even know what was on it.
00:08:30
Speaker
I have no records.
00:08:32
Speaker
Perfect.
00:08:32
Speaker
And the IRS will attest to how bad my record is.
00:08:35
Speaker
But anyway, so I think like, you know, if crypto imploded and if NFTs disappeared in a heap of ash tomorrow, I wouldn't care.
00:08:45
Speaker
Nothing would be different in my life.
00:08:47
Speaker
Yes, I've made a living for the first time in my artistic life over the past year for the first time in 30 odd years.
00:08:54
Speaker
But I think from the ashes, we've already seen a mechanism for selling digital art for the first time ever.
00:09:02
Speaker
So I think even if NFTs were to evaporate from the pieces, someone would create an alternative system for buying and selling digital art.
00:09:13
Speaker
So in that way, you know, that's been great, but it's just, it's all very difficult.
00:09:19
Speaker
And I mean, I can't complain because like I said, I make it difficult for myself, but yeah.
00:09:23
Speaker
You know, I just find it hard to maintain some continuity in my commercial side of my profession.
00:09:30
Speaker
I mean, I have like a great speaking engagements.
00:09:32
Speaker
I've been doing a documentary for over a year.
00:09:36
Speaker
I'm writing a lot.
00:09:37
Speaker
So, you know, yeah, I'll stop complaining.
00:09:39
Speaker
No, it was like I had a friend who was who was and is in a popular music group.
00:09:45
Speaker
And it was like.
00:09:46
Speaker
They just hit it so hard when they got big because it was like, who knows how long this will last, right?
00:09:52
Speaker
So you do all the stuff you can while you can, right?
00:09:55
Speaker
And then it'll help.
00:09:56
Speaker
But also, like, the ridiculous, I mean, it just came out of the news today that NFTs are 1% of the crypto market.
00:10:04
Speaker
And also, like, you know, people complain that, oh, one of the, like, one thing that hasn't changed is, like,
00:10:12
Speaker
The ferocity, is that a word?
00:10:14
Speaker
The ferociousness.
00:10:15
Speaker
Ferocity and ferociousness, I think.
00:10:17
Speaker
Okay.
00:10:17
Speaker
Well, thank you.
00:10:18
Speaker
You look better than a thesaurus in front of you.
00:10:22
Speaker
Um,
00:10:23
Speaker
the vehemence of the hatred directed towards people in the NFT space, especially from the fine art world, the traditional art world, whatever you want to call it.
00:10:32
Speaker
I mean, in a way it fuels me because I love to piss people off and I love to stir up the shit.
00:10:37
Speaker
You do?
00:10:37
Speaker
Oh, I do indeed.
00:10:39
Speaker
I haven't even started and I'm just- But already, it's only been a year and all these- I mean, I've always had haters and people that want to kill me, literally.
00:10:48
Speaker
people have tried to beat me up in public threaten me threaten my life threatened to sue me get me suspended from heart and ed it's all i've had it all through my i mean i haven't written like next week is freeze and this is the first time in my life where i miss freeze new york because i was in vienna doing a show of my work another show where i didn't sell a single piece followed by one where i sold three pieces but um
00:11:13
Speaker
And Freeze is coming up and I don't even have, I'm not even feeling FOMO.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:18
Speaker
So that's a new life for me.
00:11:19
Speaker
So in the past, my journalistic beat was art fairs and auctions.
00:11:25
Speaker
And I never wanted to be this investigative reporter stealing information from the rich to give to the aspiring rich about who's screwing who and all the machinations of the art market.
00:11:38
Speaker
I never intended, I mean, I've been teaching art and economics at the University of Zurich, where I'm on the advisory board for the last 14 years.
00:11:47
Speaker
But again, like, that's just because I was looking to, I just wanted to be in the art world.
00:11:51
Speaker
I started curating and making art simultaneously after graduate school, which was law for some stupid reason, because I had a philosophy degree.
00:12:01
Speaker
Not too far from art.
00:12:02
Speaker
Well, I mean, I suck at both.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:05
Speaker
It also explains the argumentative nature?
00:12:09
Speaker
I was born that way.
00:12:10
Speaker
I mean, there's an image of me at... There's a picture of me at two days old and somehow my middle finger is raised.
00:12:17
Speaker
We can get that for the Instagram.
00:12:20
Speaker
I have it somewhere.
00:12:22
Speaker
It's kind of cute.
00:12:23
Speaker
That was a cute baby.
00:12:25
Speaker
Things have gone south since then.
00:12:27
Speaker
But anyway, so back to this other situation was like one of the assaults
00:12:34
Speaker
of people in the fine art world are that NFTs are, I mean, are just another form of currency.
00:12:41
Speaker
Meanwhile, the NFT, the Ethereum and Bitcoin went down 60% in no time at all.
00:12:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:49
Speaker
Just after the holidays.
00:12:52
Speaker
And that's per usual.
00:12:54
Speaker
Yeah, of course.
00:12:55
Speaker
I mean, the volatility is mad.
00:12:57
Speaker
That's part of it.
00:12:58
Speaker
But how could you say NFTs are money if, number one, I can hardly sell my own NFTs?
00:13:03
Speaker
And number two, like, that's only 1% of the whole crypto market.
00:13:06
Speaker
So that's not even, like, it's so little about, it's the same as the fine.
00:13:10
Speaker
I mean, I find a lot of the things that people complain about regarding NFTs are the same shit that the fine art world excels at.
00:13:18
Speaker
Money laundering, tax evasion, reducing this aesthetic,
00:13:23
Speaker
thing to money, to a commodity, financialization, monetization, blah, blah.
00:13:30
Speaker
Artificially inflating somebody's practice as opposed to somebody else's.
00:13:33
Speaker
It's just also boring.
00:13:35
Speaker
And in the end, it's like what I would like to see more of.
00:13:38
Speaker
And I mean, I've always been in my own way, like Johnny Appleseed.
00:13:42
Speaker
And I'm just spreading the word for the things that are important to me, for the things that I care about to the few people that bother to stay awake enough to listen to me.
00:13:50
Speaker
spew about them.
00:13:52
Speaker
So, I mean, uh,
00:13:55
Speaker
I've onboarded literally hundreds and hundreds of people that have had positive experiences in the space.
00:14:02
Speaker
Many of them have done better than me.
00:14:04
Speaker
I don't know how that makes me feel, but like, I love to teach.
00:14:07
Speaker
I love to help people.
00:14:08
Speaker
I love to facilitate opportunities for people.
00:14:10
Speaker
And in a way, like as much as I'm grumbling about various things now, things are a hell of a lot better.
00:14:15
Speaker
And my life is a hell of a lot more, you know, flourishing than it was five years ago.
00:14:20
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:20
Speaker
The other thing that I think is interesting about NFTs that you mentioned is like people say it's about money, which sometimes it is, right?
00:14:27
Speaker
There's more speculative projects, but it doesn't have to be about money at all.
00:14:32
Speaker
You could send NFT, like you have to pay the transaction fees, obviously for the blockchain, but like you could have a whole project that's NFTs that is either sold in fiat and then it's transferred on the blockchain without a sale.
00:14:45
Speaker
So it's not documented or you could give it away or do any kind of number of things where it's not a
00:14:50
Speaker
I mean, there's a million artworks that live on the blockchain that have nothing to do with money.
00:14:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:57
Speaker
I mean, there's a great artist who I've curated in a few shows, Sarah Friend.
00:15:01
Speaker
She's based in Berlin.
00:15:02
Speaker
She studied painting, taught herself coding, and her works sell for $20 to $35 oftentimes.
00:15:08
Speaker
Of course, I find like the most valuable one to blow my money on.
00:15:13
Speaker
But yeah, so I mean, again, like it's the same.
00:15:16
Speaker
It's all of these things.
00:15:19
Speaker
tropes of complaints and arguments and
00:15:22
Speaker
protestations, they all apply to the final world.
00:15:25
Speaker
Everyone thinks art is expensive.
00:15:27
Speaker
Everyone thinks good art.
00:15:29
Speaker
I mean, last night arguing with this one, I mean, just between us.
00:15:34
Speaker
And all of our listeners.
00:15:34
Speaker
This one idiot who like somehow teaches at Yale and calls himself a serial entrepreneur, but he's yet to succeed entrepreneurially other than selling these cockamamie books about things that he's never really done too exceptionally.
00:15:48
Speaker
But like to hear people talk about art that aren't art people,
00:15:53
Speaker
you know, about there's sculptures at the Whitney that are disgusting and only good art is expensive.
00:16:00
Speaker
And I mean, it's such shit about people that just don't know anything.
00:16:05
Speaker
They have no visceral sense of, I mean, art is, takes a lifetime to know and appreciate and understand.
00:16:13
Speaker
And it's a slow burning process.
00:16:14
Speaker
There's no immediate gratification.
00:16:16
Speaker
And, you know, what I love about art, asides from just
00:16:20
Speaker
the making process and the communication of it all.
00:16:23
Speaker
It's a means of communication.
00:16:24
Speaker
It's a reflection of our times.
00:16:26
Speaker
I'm not a technologist.
00:16:28
Speaker
I love, I love history and philosophy and, and culture and technology is culture.
00:16:35
Speaker
It's, it's part of it more than any, if there's one word to define our age, our time today, February, whatever it is, ninth or something.
Technology's Role in Art and AI Discussion
00:16:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:44
Speaker
10th.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:45
Speaker
Well, whatever.
00:16:46
Speaker
Not bad.
00:16:47
Speaker
It's technology.
00:16:48
Speaker
You're in there.
00:16:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm in the game.
00:16:50
Speaker
So like, I mean, yeah.
00:16:52
Speaker
I was going to say there's always someone that's going to make the argument that the technology is a bad thing for whatever reasons.
00:17:00
Speaker
People are so fucking stupid.
00:17:01
Speaker
I was going to say, I was listening to something recently and Plato actually wrote that the fact that someone can read is the death knell of society.
00:17:13
Speaker
Like they were the technology of actually having a page that you can actually read off of with printed material.
00:17:20
Speaker
It's like, it's over.
00:17:21
Speaker
He was like, you gotta, no longer you're going to be able to memorize things and you have to be able to like, interesting.
00:17:26
Speaker
So that was like for him, like, I guess a satin half wouldn't do it for him.
00:17:32
Speaker
Did you ever read his book about love?
00:17:33
Speaker
We won't talk about what he, what he, Oh yeah.
00:17:36
Speaker
Yeah.
00:17:36
Speaker
He thought like a cute boy in a little robe.
00:17:38
Speaker
What was his, uh, that's the thing.
00:17:41
Speaker
Whatever floats your boat.
00:17:42
Speaker
But anyway, so like, yeah, I mean, artificial intelligence is nothing artificial about it.
00:17:47
Speaker
It's some, it's people that are programming machines to emulate the thought process of humans.
00:17:53
Speaker
So, I mean, you know,
00:17:55
Speaker
Can I ask you a curator slash artist question?
00:17:59
Speaker
You can ask me whatever your heart designs.
00:18:01
Speaker
So in the NFTism show that you did, you curated a show called NFTism, correct?
00:18:08
Speaker
A few of them.
00:18:09
Speaker
And you had your work in it alongside other artists.
00:18:12
Speaker
We've been doing that since 1990.
00:18:14
Speaker
Okay.
00:18:14
Speaker
So that's just, it's something we've talked about because we are both artists and we're like, is it lame if we put on a show at our gallery?
00:18:21
Speaker
You're an idiot if you don't.
00:18:23
Speaker
And it's like, why wouldn't we?
00:18:23
Speaker
The best example is a museum in Germany called the ZKM Museum, which is a media based museum that's become one of the at the forefront of collecting NFTs.
00:18:35
Speaker
And the head of the entire museum is a man called Peter Weibel.
00:18:41
Speaker
I can't recall ever seeing a show in that museum that didn't feature his work in one capacity or another.
00:18:47
Speaker
Most recently, as of a few weeks ago, I went to see a show where he had some students put a work in the show, which was a robot.
00:18:59
Speaker
with his voice and his teachings on it.
00:19:01
Speaker
That was the closest he came to not being in a show.
00:19:04
Speaker
And bless him, he's brilliant video artist.
00:19:06
Speaker
And also he has a publishing relationship with MIT and he's published a book of his video works from like 61 to 62, volume two, 62 to 60.
00:19:14
Speaker
But there's gotta be hundreds of-
00:19:17
Speaker
Look, I've always faced this issue.
00:19:20
Speaker
And I've been, I mean, as a curator, I curated 95% group exhibitions.
00:19:26
Speaker
And I would say about 96% of them had my work in them.
00:19:30
Speaker
But the thought was, when you're a curator or a gallerist and you're showcasing your own work,
00:19:35
Speaker
It's like you're held to a higher standard.
00:19:37
Speaker
So if I'm going to, first of all, I think that if my work sucks and my work is awful and I'm going to make an ass of myself, which I do on a steady and most consistently regular basis, I mean, I'm going to pay a price.
00:19:50
Speaker
It's called reality testing.
00:19:51
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:19:52
Speaker
So number one, I would never be a pig and like hog the best wall.
00:19:56
Speaker
But I mean, I'm curating a show with 37 artists in this not so ginormous space, which opens March 1st in New York City.
00:20:03
Speaker
There's a soft opening.
00:20:04
Speaker
It'll open on 16 Morton Street in New York City in the West Village on the 15th of March.
00:20:11
Speaker
And I've chosen quite a substantially sized piece of my own.
00:20:16
Speaker
And in this case, there's 37 artists.
00:20:19
Speaker
And at this point in my life,
00:20:21
Speaker
I don't really care anymore about, I'm not, in the past, I would stick my stuff in like the least visible location.
00:20:29
Speaker
So everything in life or, you know, I meant is a zero sum game somehow.
00:20:35
Speaker
So if I'm putting my piece front and center, it's at the expense of somebody else who I'm curating into a show.
00:20:41
Speaker
Right.
00:20:42
Speaker
And,
00:20:43
Speaker
Even if I put it in the back of the space, it's still I'm in the show taking up space at the expense of another potential artist to be in the show.
00:20:51
Speaker
So I think it's a delicate balance and you don't want to be, you know, gross about it.
00:20:55
Speaker
And I have a piece that I'm quite happy with and it's not small, but I would never just like put it front and center when you walk in the space and then clear like six feet on either side of it to give it the...
00:21:07
Speaker
room to breathe, that would just be terrible.
00:21:10
Speaker
I mean, I have too much respect for other people that I would never want to usurp the opportunities that I'm helping others.
00:21:17
Speaker
Sure.
00:21:18
Speaker
So you're saying as long as contextually the work belongs
Curating Art and Personal Integrity
00:21:22
Speaker
within the grouping.
00:21:22
Speaker
Well, I just think if your work is terrible, you're going to look like a real moron, more so than usual.
00:21:28
Speaker
If you're the curator and you're putting your work in, look, this is an important point.
00:21:32
Speaker
I don't believe in conflict of interest.
00:21:36
Speaker
I believe that if you do things with integrity, honesty, and transparency,
00:21:41
Speaker
there's no such thing as a conflict of interest.
00:21:42
Speaker
If I'm curating a show, tough shit if I want to put my work in it.
00:21:46
Speaker
But number one, it should be decent, at least up to par with the lowest level of quality.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yeah, so let's just say that it should at least be equal to or better than the worst piece in the show.
00:21:59
Speaker
That's a nice little equation.
00:22:00
Speaker
So you start curating artists in who don't make very good work.
00:22:03
Speaker
You know, I just, it's my show, so tough.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:22:07
Speaker
No, I get it.
00:22:08
Speaker
But I just don't want to, you know, I want to be a fair person and a relatively honest person.
00:22:12
Speaker
And I, unlike most people in the art world, I'm generous with my time.
00:22:17
Speaker
I love creating.
00:22:19
Speaker
facilitating, like I mentioned, opportunities for other people.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:22
Speaker
And yeah, it's a, you know, I don't want to take advantage of my own.
00:22:28
Speaker
I grew up putting on punk shows when I was in high school and college.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so it was very much like if you put on a show, your band was on it for sure.
00:22:36
Speaker
But also like you didn't put yourself last or as the headliner, you always like put yourself somewhere in the middle and
00:22:42
Speaker
And everybody got paid the same.
00:22:44
Speaker
So there was like eight bands on the bill because you rented a VFW hall and everybody got paid the same, even if it was like, you know, more, more people came to see a different person.
00:22:54
Speaker
Uh, but the whole ethos of it was that like you're sharing, right.
00:22:58
Speaker
You're like creating those opportunities.
00:23:00
Speaker
Um,
00:23:00
Speaker
I'm kind of punk, like the Sex Pistols that couldn't play any instruments.
00:23:05
Speaker
I'm the artist that can't make art.
00:23:06
Speaker
I consider myself to be a fairly fake artist because I'm not... I'm a writer and a thinker, but I can't make shit.
00:23:12
Speaker
Well, this is why we got to talk about content, right?
00:23:13
Speaker
Because we haven't yet.
00:23:14
Speaker
So, yeah.
00:23:15
Speaker
So, I guess before I ask you about the... Stop pointing at me.
00:23:19
Speaker
Sorry, I don't want to point that to you.
00:23:23
Speaker
With the... So, your work, the videos, is there somebody who puts that together for you?
00:23:27
Speaker
Well, here's the story.
00:23:28
Speaker
Like, again...
00:23:30
Speaker
The minute I never knew art existed other than as a studio practice that went from the studio to a museum.
00:23:37
Speaker
So no one took me to museums.
00:23:39
Speaker
My mother passed away when I was young.
00:23:40
Speaker
Nothing.
00:23:41
Speaker
I never had a nurturing family.
00:23:43
Speaker
My father was absent and not terribly supportive of anything.
00:23:48
Speaker
In fact, tried to like dissuade me from, he always said, you should always do what you want.
00:23:52
Speaker
Always do what you want.
00:23:53
Speaker
I went to law school to hide from the marketplace with a philosophy degree while I decided, while I,
00:23:59
Speaker
I had to search, do a journey of what appealed to me because I had a speech impediment.
00:24:04
Speaker
I was overweight when I was younger.
00:24:05
Speaker
I had no friends.
00:24:06
Speaker
I had a shitty life.
00:24:07
Speaker
But I'm not complaining because it's made me stop laughing.
00:24:10
Speaker
Jesus.
00:24:11
Speaker
You're too funny.
00:24:11
Speaker
I was just like giving you this heartfelt moment of revelatory and you're laughing.
00:24:19
Speaker
Jesus, what an answer.
00:24:21
Speaker
We were laughing because we were sad inside.
00:24:23
Speaker
So your dad was saying you can do anything you want.
00:24:25
Speaker
Until I started to go in.
00:24:26
Speaker
And then finally after law school, I found art.
00:24:30
Speaker
I stumbled into the art world.
00:24:32
Speaker
And I'll never forget, he sat across from me and he was grinding his teeth and said that you promised if you weren't making a living after a year, you would stop.
00:24:42
Speaker
Because somehow I managed to pass the bar after cutting the entire...
00:24:46
Speaker
I never went to class in law school.
00:24:48
Speaker
I just took the exams and worked full time as I was casting around, trying to find something that relatively interested me enough to do for the rest of my life.
00:24:56
Speaker
So then I stumbled into the art world.
00:24:58
Speaker
And then like the reason I was organizing shows with other artists and covering fair writing about art fairs and auctions was because I just wanted to live in the art world.
00:25:08
Speaker
Once I found out about it, I started to make art.
00:25:10
Speaker
So I would start to,
00:25:13
Speaker
make constructions with my hands and make objects.
00:25:16
Speaker
Or I was always interested in like the, when I was younger, like in a sense, I think that your personality is cast in stone when you're five years old or thereabouts, like all of your quirks and, and, and, you know, characteristics are ingrained genetically and whatever nurturing you're going to get is, is, is cast.
00:25:36
Speaker
So anyway, while I was catatonic and, and isolated, I had a,
00:25:41
Speaker
part of the 70s decor in my house was that the wall in my bedroom was cork.
00:25:46
Speaker
And I was always fanatical about like, I never had the attention span much for reading lots of books, which is why I began teaching.
00:25:54
Speaker
So I would have an impetus to read.
00:25:56
Speaker
But I would just rip out pages from magazines and collage them onto this wall.
00:26:01
Speaker
And in a sense,
00:26:02
Speaker
I'm still doing the same thing with my manipulated photographic work and videos.
00:26:07
Speaker
So back in the 90s, I was doing, I would always hark back to some psychological experience as a child or adolescent.
00:26:15
Speaker
And then I was always playing with the manipulation of images, whether through cut and paste, early Photoshopping.
00:26:22
Speaker
And I was shooting videos where I would often act in them
00:26:28
Speaker
And so I would have like friends would film me acting in a short video.
00:26:34
Speaker
I would have another friend edited.
00:26:37
Speaker
John Kelsey is has a gallery called Rena Spalding and also an artist collective of the same name.
00:26:44
Speaker
And he was the one filming my videos and Jonathan Horowitz, who's a brilliant video artist.
00:26:49
Speaker
He was editing the work.
00:26:51
Speaker
So.
00:26:52
Speaker
That was what I did in my practice throughout all the years that, I mean, I couldn't even define myself as an artist because certainly nobody else did.
00:27:02
Speaker
And it took 10 plus to 15 years for people to even consider me a writer.
00:27:07
Speaker
And that's because in the beginning, no one read it, first of all, but like with the advent of smartphones and social media.
00:27:14
Speaker
You found your people.
00:27:14
Speaker
Yeah, I found my audience.
00:27:16
Speaker
Although I've alienated a large part of them because I've quit doing what they've come to love to read, which are these like revelatory tell-all articles about all the, you know... I want to read these now because I just know you as the NFT guy.
00:27:30
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:27:30
Speaker
So like I've broken many, many stories of...
00:27:35
Speaker
Who's buying, who's selling, who's zooming each other and taking advantage and being disingenuous.
00:27:42
Speaker
And I've broken stories like when the Leonardo da Vinci was on the yacht of the Prince of Saudi Arabia when he was hiding after he murdered.
00:27:50
Speaker
Khashoggi the journalist and broke stories of who bought the Jeff Koons bunny of all kinds of things there was a gigantic Louise Bourgeois that was sold to Christie's for 40 million dollars and I had found out that the spider had seven legs the preceding year and spiders have eight legs
00:28:11
Speaker
Wait, what?
00:28:12
Speaker
The spider had lost a leg in transit somewhere.
00:28:14
Speaker
Interesting.
00:28:15
Speaker
And it was being sold with seven legs at Kegosian before it made its way to Christie's back with eight legs.
00:28:22
Speaker
And I busted like over $100 million of deals probably by just talking about the backstories of these things.
00:28:29
Speaker
Even though like I used to drink a lot like you two knuckleheads are doing in front of me
Kenny's Career and Art Philosophy
00:28:34
Speaker
as I sit here.
00:28:34
Speaker
This is because we're nervous.
00:28:36
Speaker
First of all, we were nervous.
00:28:37
Speaker
How could you be nervous?
00:28:38
Speaker
I'm just an idiot.
00:28:39
Speaker
No.
00:28:40
Speaker
Anyway.
00:28:42
Speaker
So, nobody would take me seriously as an art dealer or in the financial sense because I was always, I just like, I love chaos and I courted chaos wherever I went.
00:28:56
Speaker
In my behavior, I was a bit of a drug addict, an alcoholic and...
00:29:00
Speaker
But you were shining light on these little corners.
00:29:03
Speaker
But I always had great social relationships with a lot of very prominent players within the art market.
00:29:10
Speaker
And I had one amalgam of different sources that I created a character called Deep Pockets as opposed to Deep Throat.
00:29:20
Speaker
And Deep Pockets would always give me the greatest, most crucial intel on the goings on in the art market.
00:29:29
Speaker
One of them, the predominant one ended up in jail, unfortunately.
00:29:34
Speaker
Indigo Philbrick, where he stole like $86 million when he was in his late 20s from various finance institutions and collectors.
00:29:42
Speaker
But he was a hell of a good art dealer before he went bad.
00:29:46
Speaker
So anyway, in that sense, because just by nature of the fact that I've been in the art world for over three decades, I was privy to a lot of great information.
00:29:56
Speaker
And because I'm not beholden to anyone, I was able to make a living
00:30:00
Speaker
by every time I was curating all these shows and over the, anytime I had five cents, I would buy art.
00:30:06
Speaker
So I would like, if I made a hundred dollars, I'd spend 120.
00:30:10
Speaker
If I made a thousand, I would spend more than that.
00:30:13
Speaker
And when I started to make good money during a brief period of time in my life, I just put it all into art.
00:30:18
Speaker
And the way that I've been able to make a living is by piecemeal selling the works that I've collected.
00:30:23
Speaker
And, you know, people can call me a flipper and a this and a that and any disparaging thing.
00:30:28
Speaker
comment you could fathom I've been called it publicly and but the fact is that you know I have a deep collection of stuff I couldn't get rid of if I wanted to because I'm drawn primarily to very non-commercial art artists like Vito Acconci conceptual artist who's most noted for masturbating under the floor of a gallery and I feel like Vito would like NFTs
00:30:48
Speaker
No, Vito hated everything, including himself.
00:30:51
Speaker
And he was just the, he was never terribly self-satisfied.
00:30:55
Speaker
And I mean, he suffered, he died destitute.
00:30:57
Speaker
He was a brilliant man.
00:30:59
Speaker
And I mean, when I first saw that you could masturbate under the floor of an art gallery and call it art, I was like, oh, perhaps I found my calling after all.
00:31:08
Speaker
But no, he was brilliant.
00:31:09
Speaker
There's many books.
00:31:10
Speaker
I mean, I wrote a book about him and he's in every major institution, but he died virtually penniless.
00:31:17
Speaker
Because the thing is like with Paul Tech, another one of the artists that are my heroes, I was just actually, I curated a show of Pace in 2013.
00:31:25
Speaker
They just called me this morning and asked me about if I knew of works for them to organize a show.
00:31:31
Speaker
Paul Tech and this incredible photographer, Peter Hujar.
00:31:34
Speaker
They both died of AIDS in 1988.
00:31:36
Speaker
They were lovers in the 60s, but then separated.
00:31:39
Speaker
Peter Hujar shows his estate as Matthew Marks, a brilliant, brilliant photographer.
00:31:45
Speaker
And then Pace was asking me about staging another show almost 10 years later.
00:31:49
Speaker
And I said, if you let me curate it, I'd be.
00:31:52
Speaker
But like, again, Paul Tech doesn't have a big market.
00:31:55
Speaker
Art is not expensive.
00:31:56
Speaker
Great art is not expensive.
00:31:58
Speaker
Like the idiot, like the other night, who talked about, you know,
00:32:02
Speaker
art is expensive and that's a validating not only you know that's a true representation of quality or it's not that's nothing what's it's it's a factor but like much art that's stupidly expensive today will be valueless in five years from now yeah um back to my work oh yeah let's talk about interview myself let's talk about the show uh the well i mean i think like my work normally like in the past so anyway while
00:32:31
Speaker
In the years that I've been writing for Artnet on and off since the early 90s, in a way, I taught myself art history by teaching.
00:32:40
Speaker
Of course, after grad school, I couldn't bear the thought of going back to school.
00:32:44
Speaker
So I conned my way into a teaching job at the new school.
00:32:46
Speaker
I used to drink like five beers before I would lecture because I was petrified.
00:32:50
Speaker
I would study three chapters of Jansen's book of art history, and then I would regurgitate them with my own spin on it.
00:32:56
Speaker
And then I'd start all over again the following week.
00:32:58
Speaker
That sounds stressful.
00:33:00
Speaker
No, because it was, I love pressure and I love to work.
00:33:03
Speaker
I mean, I like stress.
00:33:05
Speaker
I love chaos and stress.
00:33:06
Speaker
So like, that was the way I taught myself.
00:33:09
Speaker
I mean, I could teach anyone post-war history in 10 minutes off the street.
00:33:13
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:33:14
Speaker
it doesn't take much and most people in this field don't read terribly much, but like I, I had to go through the book and learn what happened when it went off the cave through the Renaissance.
00:33:23
Speaker
And I did that by teaching.
00:33:25
Speaker
And so through like, I taught to force myself to read and to learn.
00:33:31
Speaker
And I wrote mainly besides just, if I'm stuck, like having to make a living by like, like, um,
00:33:38
Speaker
what is it, death of a salesman, like carrying these suitcases around trying to buy and sell art from fair to fair, from city to city, country to country.
00:33:48
Speaker
to give more meaning to these mundane experiences, I was writing about it and then spinning it into the arc of a story with a middle, a beginning, middle and end.
00:33:57
Speaker
So like through the act of having to learn basic art history, I started to teach.
00:34:03
Speaker
And for someone who couldn't string a sentence together and couldn't pronounce the letter D in public, I mean, you know, teaching and learning to public speak and learning to communicate and have grown up alienated without very many friends.
00:34:16
Speaker
And, um,
00:34:18
Speaker
It was all just a way, like art has given meaning and direction to my life where there was just an existential hole, you know, with a bad family situation and not well socialized.
00:34:30
Speaker
And so since then, like I'm old right now.
00:34:33
Speaker
I shudder to think how old, but I have the spirit of like a child.
00:34:37
Speaker
You don't look old, by the way.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah, thank you.
00:34:38
Speaker
Because the thing is like, I became comfortable in my skin like at 57.
00:34:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:44
Speaker
But isn't that the irony of age?
00:34:46
Speaker
It's like you don't know it when you're younger to appreciate the time you have.
00:34:51
Speaker
Well, I also think it's funny because like when I couldn't sell a piece of art and I couldn't get a gallery, it's like when you're single and you just want to be next to another warm body and you can't, it won't happen.
00:35:03
Speaker
And then when you have a relationship, that's when like 15 opportunities will present themselves to you.
00:35:10
Speaker
So like when I finally found the way after literally
00:35:13
Speaker
You know, my whole career, I'm in the last chapter of this career.
00:35:17
Speaker
And then I finally find a way to effectuate the transactional success in selling my art.
00:35:24
Speaker
And then I get a gallery, two galleries.
00:35:28
Speaker
Which is kind of ironic.
00:35:30
Speaker
Totally.
00:35:30
Speaker
Typical.
00:35:31
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:31
Speaker
So anyway, so my art used back, I didn't forget the question.
00:35:36
Speaker
So while I was like squandering around, I had some showing opportunities like in maybe 1999 or 2000, but then I didn't have a show for like 20 years.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah.
00:35:46
Speaker
Till Joel Messler, who gave me a show in his gallery in East Hampton as like a joke.
00:35:53
Speaker
I think mainly he wanted me to write about him.
00:35:55
Speaker
So he gave me a little show in like the little attic space above his main gallery.
00:35:59
Speaker
And it was this tongue in cheek retrospective.
00:36:01
Speaker
I hadn't shown in 20 years and nobody gave a rat's ass about what I was doing.
00:36:05
Speaker
And then he gives me this, you know, retrospective, which was more comedic than that.
00:36:10
Speaker
And anyway, and then I actually sold pretty well.
00:36:13
Speaker
But in between when I didn't have any opportunities and I would go, you know, 10 years without a single exhibition of any sort, group or otherwise, I
00:36:22
Speaker
I figured out this way where I had been making the videos analog where, I mean, in one video, like I read about in Japan, the people are so pent up that they had these facilities where a business person could go after work and pay money.
00:36:38
Speaker
And they're coming in their suit, literally leaving their office and they pay money just to thrash a hotel room like Johnny Depp after a few bottles of vodka and a fight with whoever went on a ride or something.
00:36:52
Speaker
I thought like, before I got to the art world, I thought that everyone was drinking absinthe, hanging from a chandelier and having that sex orgy.
00:37:00
Speaker
I don't know what other kind of orgy they would be.
00:37:04
Speaker
And then I got into the art world and it was, at that point I had been a lawyer.
00:37:08
Speaker
I had been in the fashion business.
00:37:09
Speaker
You wouldn't know it.
00:37:12
Speaker
I think you're very fashionable.
00:37:13
Speaker
You're very kind.
00:37:14
Speaker
The gold chain is what does it.
00:37:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:37:16
Speaker
It pulls it all together.
00:37:18
Speaker
It's like the rug in the Big Lebowski.
00:37:21
Speaker
so you guys are great you're enjoying yourself i'm glad to see that i mean if we're not enjoying ourselves why are we here exactly to bug me to annoy me so to keep me from myself and wallowing i do think you're particularly less cranky now than you started as soon as i like no one in my family listens to me so when i have a captive audience i become a light with
00:37:45
Speaker
self-absorption.
00:37:46
Speaker
This is going to go out to our 12 or 13 listeners.
00:37:49
Speaker
I mean, it's actually... I could promote it myself, but I'm kind of embarrassed to tell people I've done yet another podcast.
00:37:56
Speaker
But, you know, fuck it.
00:37:58
Speaker
Anyone wants to hear, I have a hard time saying no.
00:38:01
Speaker
Yeah, as long as you're saying things that you haven't said on the other ones.
00:38:04
Speaker
No, I have only one story.
00:38:07
Speaker
It's been trodden to death.
00:38:08
Speaker
Don't think this is a special version.
00:38:10
Speaker
That's not true.
00:38:11
Speaker
I haven't heard all of these stories already.
00:38:13
Speaker
You would have to piece them together.
00:38:15
Speaker
I just got asked to teach a class at Brown today.
00:38:18
Speaker
Not like a full semester, but give a lecture at Brown.
00:38:21
Speaker
That's really cool.
00:38:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:22
Speaker
Considering I went to George Washington University and some
00:38:26
Speaker
You know, so that's really amazing that I'm self-wrought and self-actualized and created.
00:38:33
Speaker
So that's really exciting.
00:38:34
Speaker
And I really am very grateful for the opportunities that you want to come in here with all your fancy equipment and your 12 beers and your thermos full of bourbon.
00:38:42
Speaker
That's a good one.
00:38:43
Speaker
But let me get back.
00:38:44
Speaker
Don't worry.
00:38:45
Speaker
Wait, wait, wait.
00:38:45
Speaker
Before, before.
00:38:46
Speaker
No.
00:38:47
Speaker
Let me just say that.
00:38:48
Speaker
So I started, I embedded, I found a way to like,
00:38:53
Speaker
I mean, I
NFTs and Social Media Empowerment
00:38:54
Speaker
love the fact that NFTs are a do-it-yourself mechanism for artists to empower themselves to sell their own work.
00:39:02
Speaker
So I did this like in the same way that social media, for the first time in history, it used to be you'd have to send a photographic slide to communicate an image from one person to the other in something called the mail.
00:39:15
Speaker
And like a stamp and an envelope.
00:39:17
Speaker
And then with social media, artists from all over the world across, you know, geographical boundaries were able to communicate visual information, but there was no selling apparatus.
00:39:29
Speaker
With Instagram and Facebook.
00:39:31
Speaker
Except for your data, right?
00:39:32
Speaker
You were like selling your data.
00:39:33
Speaker
No, you weren't selling it.
00:39:34
Speaker
They were selling it.
00:39:36
Speaker
You were giving it.
00:39:37
Speaker
Right.
00:39:38
Speaker
Right.
00:39:38
Speaker
So anyway, like, so NFTs for the first time offer artists the potential.
00:39:43
Speaker
You still have to painstakingly claw your way into having an audience.
00:39:48
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:39:48
Speaker
It's such a stupid misconception to think like NFTs are, yes, they offer you the possibility to market your work if you have a market.
00:39:57
Speaker
And most of us don't, me included.
00:39:59
Speaker
I have an anemic one.
00:40:00
Speaker
And if you have a marketing mentality and you can live on Discord and just constantly be the one that's like one-on-one.
00:40:06
Speaker
Or Twitter.
00:40:07
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, I'm living on Discord and I get, it's just another battleground.
00:40:11
Speaker
Yeah, but you're trying to create arguments as well.
00:40:14
Speaker
I don't try to create arguments.
00:40:15
Speaker
You're picking fights.
00:40:16
Speaker
I know the fights come.
00:40:18
Speaker
Look at you two.
00:40:19
Speaker
You're just laughing at your own jokes.
00:40:23
Speaker
That's why there's two of us.
00:40:24
Speaker
It just makes sense.
00:40:24
Speaker
No.
00:40:26
Speaker
Anyway, so I put my own videos embedded in my art.
00:40:29
Speaker
I created my own platform to, I was having a one person show with the best audience in the world by embedding my writing with my videos.
00:40:41
Speaker
But I couldn't sell them, nor did I ever think in a million, I didn't think that my life would end.
00:40:46
Speaker
with any differently than me just posting my videos.
00:40:50
Speaker
I had a good audience through social media and my writing because I was revealing all this.
00:40:54
Speaker
I was, because I had art to sell to make a living, I was never beholden to any of the infrastructure of the art world.
00:41:02
Speaker
I didn't want anything from anyone.
00:41:04
Speaker
If I wanted to sell something, I would sell it to other dealers.
00:41:06
Speaker
You could be a serial killer, but if you have title to a blue Picasso, you could sell it.
00:41:11
Speaker
So I could sell stuff at auction or through other galleries.
00:41:15
Speaker
So it didn't make a difference if people thought I was generally people feel I'm an asshole or something.
00:41:19
Speaker
It didn't matter.
00:41:20
Speaker
I would say I'm an asshole, but not a C-U-N-T, which is a fine thing.
00:41:25
Speaker
difference in nomenclature.
00:41:27
Speaker
Don't get nervous.
00:41:29
Speaker
I heard recently that one of the big mistakes of Web2 was not monetizing likes.
00:41:36
Speaker
If likes were monetized, even at a fraction of... Well, they are monetized.
00:41:41
Speaker
Well, they were monetized in the direction of the corporation.
00:41:44
Speaker
But they were monetized in the form of the person that actually was making the content.
00:41:49
Speaker
Let's say you're on...
00:41:50
Speaker
TikTok or YouTube and you're spinning around in your underpants and you have a large following, then you could sell advertising.
00:41:56
Speaker
Then you can sell, right.
00:41:57
Speaker
But that's Web3, isn't it?
00:41:59
Speaker
No, that's... There's still Web2?
00:42:01
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:01
Speaker
Oh, I mean, TikTok is a platform that's making money off of it.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yeah, and same with YouTube.
00:42:05
Speaker
But it's irrelevant.
00:42:07
Speaker
I mean, the point is that
00:42:09
Speaker
Like I'm, I always have believed in, so I was able to make a living, but I was never able to sell my art.
00:42:14
Speaker
And then, but the art that I was making as it was illustrating my articles about, I can only like, I'm a writer that can only write, I hate fiction.
00:42:25
Speaker
Cause I just think what people do to them, do to each other and themselves in, in life is far beyond the imagination of your mortal person.
00:42:34
Speaker
So like, you're not a fan of fiction.
00:42:36
Speaker
I mean, I like classic fiction.
00:42:40
Speaker
I mean, I did just read the novelization of the life of Thomas Mann.
00:42:45
Speaker
Oh, wow.
00:42:46
Speaker
By, what's his name?
00:42:49
Speaker
Toybin?
00:42:50
Speaker
I love Thomas Mann, by the way.
00:42:51
Speaker
Yeah, me too.
00:42:52
Speaker
So this was a book which was based on, I mean, it was weird because in a way it's like, it's not fiction, but it's fictionalized account of his life via his diaries and various biographies.
00:43:04
Speaker
But yeah, so I could only, as a writer, I only write about... Sorry, it's a shtick.
00:43:13
Speaker
It's like a thing we do on the show.
00:43:14
Speaker
It sounds like... Really?
00:43:15
Speaker
I'm so surprised.
00:43:17
Speaker
How old are you?
00:43:18
Speaker
12 and 13, respectively.
00:43:20
Speaker
He's 13 and I'm 11.
00:43:23
Speaker
So anyway, like I can't, like my wife can just sit in a room with no exterior design.
00:43:33
Speaker
exterior impetus or anything like she could just draw for the rest of her life and conjure up this fantastical world of characters and I can't.
00:43:42
Speaker
I need to live some, I'm very analytical and in my, like I like to just like I guess more like a philosophical framework for just, you know,
00:43:54
Speaker
reacting to my life and my experiences.
00:43:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:57
Speaker
Do you have a team that you go to?
00:43:58
Speaker
I am the team.
00:43:59
Speaker
Who does the digital file?
00:44:01
Speaker
I have one person that helps me do my animations.
00:44:03
Speaker
I have like a few piecemeal part-time helpers, but I'm a one man band.
00:44:09
Speaker
I wish I, I mean, at this point I could use a team and I would get beaten up less than discord.
00:44:13
Speaker
Cause I have my road.
00:44:15
Speaker
I always say like every day I get like blasted for like, what's your roadmap?
00:44:20
Speaker
Give us your white paper.
00:44:21
Speaker
I always say that I'm not Stalin.
00:44:22
Speaker
I don't have a five-year plan.
00:44:24
Speaker
My roadmap is whatever I'm going to do next Wednesday.
00:44:27
Speaker
And I don't know.
00:44:27
Speaker
I'm the type that makes a reservation for an international journey like the day before.
00:44:35
Speaker
And I don't know what I'll be doing six months from now.
00:44:37
Speaker
I don't know what I'll be doing
00:44:39
Speaker
a month from now for that matter.
00:44:40
Speaker
I just don't plan ahead.
00:44:42
Speaker
I mean, I'm very focused in terms of making art, writing and teaching.
00:44:46
Speaker
I did like that.
00:44:47
Speaker
When I hit you up on Instagram, I was like, you want to do this podcast?
00:44:50
Speaker
And you were like, sure.
00:44:51
Speaker
I was like, can we do it?
00:44:52
Speaker
You're like, no, I'm going to be in Europe.
00:44:53
Speaker
But as soon as I get home,
00:44:55
Speaker
Then I looked at your followers and I thought, what am I getting myself into?
00:44:57
Speaker
Exactly.
00:44:59
Speaker
And I was like, we were leaving the studio today and we were talking to the guy who runs the place.
00:45:03
Speaker
We're like, oh, we're going to talk to Kenny Schecter.
00:45:05
Speaker
We convinced him that we're important enough.
00:45:06
Speaker
That didn't take much.
00:45:07
Speaker
You didn't convince me at all.
00:45:10
Speaker
If you did, you would have hard.
00:45:11
Speaker
That would have been a tough task.
00:45:13
Speaker
It was a very easy task.
00:45:15
Speaker
No, I mean, because you know what?
00:45:16
Speaker
I'm grateful that you're here.
00:45:19
Speaker
You made the effort.
00:45:19
Speaker
You want to talk to me.
00:45:20
Speaker
And we appreciate that on the other end, too.
00:45:22
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:45:23
Speaker
I mean, look, I'm not going to I'm I'm grateful and I'm lucky.
00:45:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:27
Speaker
I mean, you know, most people don't have the luxury of wanting to be heard and being able to give their opinion about things.
00:45:34
Speaker
So with my art making in the past, it was very it was a reaction to my surroundings, which were kind of awful.
00:45:40
Speaker
They were going to art fairs and going to auction.
00:45:42
Speaker
So a lot of the content, I mean,
00:45:46
Speaker
I can't say that I'm a great fan of art about art.
00:45:48
Speaker
It's so insular and so kind of like, you know, self-congratulatory.
00:45:53
Speaker
I always say like the art world is like you pick up a rock and there's 300 worms intertwined.
00:45:58
Speaker
And that was pretty much, you know, a good chunk of the content of the art that I was making because they, they were, they were in the context of my writing and my writing was very, I mean, I wrote about Zaha Hadid.
00:46:11
Speaker
I wrote about Joe Bradley, who I gave his first exhibition to.
00:46:15
Speaker
I've written a lot about Paul Tech for MIT and various other publications because he was just such a great, he had such an impact on my sensibility and my life.
00:46:26
Speaker
He made these pieces of like a sculptural, like a
00:46:35
Speaker
an object that replicated flesh, like a cross section of human flesh or meat.
00:46:41
Speaker
And in a way, and then it was enclosed in a vitrine, which was speaking in the language of minimalism.
00:46:46
Speaker
And for me, it's like, it was, I've never seen something define this line of life and death and the fragility of life and the vulnerability.
00:46:56
Speaker
I mean, there's so much shit in the world with racism and,
00:47:00
Speaker
The political situation is dire in this country, and yet if you cut us all open, you're going to see the same crap, the same organs, the same.
00:47:08
Speaker
And Poltec, who died really tragically young,
00:47:13
Speaker
he really just, he, it was, I've never seen something that was such a, an incredible depiction of humanity, basically.
00:47:23
Speaker
And, and then yet again, he died destitute like Vito, but I forgot why he was even saying that.
00:47:29
Speaker
But anyway, so the art I was making was very specific to what I was, to my life.
00:47:34
Speaker
And my life was getting on a plane every two or three weeks and going to another crummy art fair or auction.
00:47:40
Speaker
So then, yeah,
00:47:41
Speaker
a year and a half ago when I got involved with NFTs and I transitioned into being more of a full-time artist and I've written 12 features on, on NFTs in the last year alone.
00:47:58
Speaker
And now my art is more becoming, well, in essence, part of it is about crypto.
00:48:05
Speaker
Part of it is about the whole ecosystem of NFTs.
00:48:09
Speaker
And it's about the art world, too.
00:48:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's still about the art world, but I'm trying to just get away from, I mean, the idea of just making art about the art market is, I mean, I went to Lucas Samaras' studio, and he's very eccentric, special artist.
00:48:26
Speaker
quote unquote person.
00:48:28
Speaker
And then I remember like I walked in the door and he lives oddly.
00:48:31
Speaker
He lives like in what looks like an office building in West 58th street, but it's a residential tower and he's high up above, uh, on like the 58th floor.
00:48:44
Speaker
And, uh, all of his windows are blacked out.
00:48:47
Speaker
And he was in an, in a little studio office room with these big five computer monitors.
00:48:53
Speaker
One of them playing like a, a,
00:48:56
Speaker
some kind of a TV game show where a talent game show where someone was singing.
00:49:02
Speaker
It was very disoriented.
00:49:04
Speaker
And then I explained to him what I do.
00:49:06
Speaker
And I said, I write about the goings on of the art world and,
00:49:10
Speaker
I go to auctions and fairs and teach about it.
00:49:13
Speaker
And he just looked at me and said, why?
00:49:16
Speaker
And I said, you're right.
00:49:18
Speaker
Because there's nothing else that I could do.
00:49:21
Speaker
And you're like, I gotta buy sandwiches.
00:49:23
Speaker
There's nothing else I could do while having a foot into the art world.
00:49:27
Speaker
That was the only thing I could do.
00:49:29
Speaker
Meanwhile, he claimed that Kusama stole a studio drawing off of his desk in the 60s, which was his rendering for a mirror room.
00:49:39
Speaker
And he claimed that she stole the entire... Hot gas.
00:49:42
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:42
Speaker
But then I just watched a documentary on Kusama last week and...
00:49:46
Speaker
She was ahead of the game when it came to mirror rooms than him.
00:49:49
Speaker
He's a great artist and completely nutcase.
00:49:52
Speaker
Then when I was in his house, he's like, do you want to see what's outside the window?
00:49:56
Speaker
And I'm like, yeah, you're on like this above the clouds.
00:49:59
Speaker
And then he like conspiratorially like pushes, pushes aside the black covering of his window.
00:50:05
Speaker
And then I saw like the skyline of New York city before me.
00:50:09
Speaker
I love crazy people.
00:50:11
Speaker
Maybe, maybe you do us an intro.
00:50:13
Speaker
You can get on the podcast.
00:50:14
Speaker
That would be fun.
00:50:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:50:15
Speaker
But anyway, so now my art is more... I like to think of it less... I mean, again, it has to do... I've made... There's still...
00:50:25
Speaker
Art about art, art referencing more historical periods.
00:50:29
Speaker
The show I have in Germany uses as a jumping off point, the data movement in the twenties.
00:50:36
Speaker
So yeah, I mean, I'm working on a bunch of video.
00:50:39
Speaker
Now I'm doing a video, which I'm really excited about, which is like, because I've been in nothing short of a battle for the last year with the art world.
00:50:47
Speaker
more so than usual.
00:50:48
Speaker
So when I was revealing all these stories about billionaires, I would get, I mean, there was one Russian like Sotheby's once stuck me in the back of the auction.
00:50:57
Speaker
If I would go to an auction with a billionaire, I would be sitting in the front row and they would begrudgingly have to give me a ticket if that person wanted to tag me along.
00:51:06
Speaker
Uh,
00:51:07
Speaker
And then when I would go alone, they would either not give me a ticket altogether, or at one point they begrudgingly accepted my role as a chronicler of the art market.
00:51:17
Speaker
So I remember I went to this auction and Sotheby's put me in the penultimate row in the auction house, second to last.
00:51:24
Speaker
And then I was- Wait, is second to last worse than last?
00:51:28
Speaker
I guess last you have a better bird's eye view of the proceedings in front of you.
00:51:32
Speaker
But anyway, so then like there was a lot being bid on and I kept hearing behind me that there was like someone who was clearly an art advisor who was speaking to someone, the client next to them.
00:51:47
Speaker
And it was coinciding with someone behind the phone banks placing bids for Jenny Savo painting in London.
00:51:54
Speaker
And then I clocked and it was the person behind me that was doing the bidding with an advisor on the telephone bidding for this painting that ultimately went for over $12 million.
00:52:04
Speaker
So what I did was I kind of snuck some cheeky glances behind me.
00:52:09
Speaker
I turned the volume off on my phone and then I just took some pictures.
00:52:12
Speaker
of this person to determine.
00:52:14
Speaker
I was always revealing.
00:52:16
Speaker
It's like pulling the curtain back.
00:52:17
Speaker
No one in the art world is like Omerta in the mafia.
00:52:20
Speaker
No one tells you about the commissions, the typical going, you know, how deals are done and not done and the relations and who the players are.
00:52:28
Speaker
I mean, again, like it's such a misconception to think that in crypto, you know, there's transparency.
00:52:34
Speaker
There's no transparency in crypto.
00:52:36
Speaker
They're all just wallets with numbers and letters.
00:52:38
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:38
Speaker
People have, like you mentioned, you're buying the art of your friend and your friend's buying the art of yours.
00:52:43
Speaker
That never happened.
00:52:44
Speaker
No, that never happened.
00:52:45
Speaker
Oh yeah.
00:52:45
Speaker
Well, somebody, I can't remember.
00:52:47
Speaker
That was another.
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:49
Speaker
Totally.
00:52:49
Speaker
A little washing going on.
00:52:50
Speaker
You washed mine.
00:52:51
Speaker
So we just wrote.
00:52:52
Speaker
But anyway, wait, let me just tell you.
00:52:53
Speaker
So then I like, I clocked a picture of this guy.
00:52:55
Speaker
Then I showed it to five people I knew.
00:52:58
Speaker
Three people never saw him before.
00:52:59
Speaker
And the two people that knew who he was refused to tell me.
00:53:02
Speaker
And I knew I was onto something.
00:53:04
Speaker
And it turned out to be this Russian under the radar bidder whose identity I revealed.
00:53:09
Speaker
And his brother is called the Golden Pistol in Russia for like a private banker.
00:53:15
Speaker
Anyway, and I identified him and then he expressed a death threat against me.
00:53:24
Speaker
And I literally had to send someone I knew that knew him groveling to like, that was the time.
00:53:29
Speaker
I mean, there were a couple of times that I actually like had enough.
00:53:32
Speaker
Do you ever get paid off though?
00:53:33
Speaker
And like, you don't publish a thing.
00:53:34
Speaker
Cause somebody is like, don't do it.
00:53:35
Speaker
Are you kidding?
00:53:36
Speaker
That's, that's not, that's not journalistic integrity.
00:53:39
Speaker
I, I have journalistic.
00:53:42
Speaker
Or I've never had a good enough offer.
00:53:44
Speaker
Right, right, right.
00:53:45
Speaker
Exactly.
00:53:45
Speaker
Exactly.
00:53:46
Speaker
I always said I would sell my soul, but I never got an offer.
00:53:48
Speaker
But then I sold 9,000 crypto mutts for about $80 a piece.
00:53:53
Speaker
So I ended up selling my soul for $80.
00:53:55
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:53:56
Speaker
And I'm grateful to have this incredible dialogue.
00:53:59
Speaker
I mean, what's cool about Discord and the NFT?
00:54:03
Speaker
Discord's crazy.
00:54:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:04
Speaker
I love the relationship between the artist and the audience.
00:54:08
Speaker
Like David Bowie made a mention of it.
00:54:10
Speaker
I think he was quoting Marshall McLuhan.
00:54:12
Speaker
Like there's a conflation between the artist and the audience.
00:54:16
Speaker
So never before, like when I sell stuff through conventional galleries,
00:54:22
Speaker
Often, they don't even tell me who the buyer was.
00:54:24
Speaker
Right.
00:54:25
Speaker
More than often.
00:54:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:54:26
Speaker
And not only do you find out, again, it's not like CryptoPunks, Lava Labs, they've had some problems.
00:54:33
Speaker
They're like old school.
00:54:34
Speaker
I mean, they never claimed to be artists, but they sort of made their punks and they disappeared.
00:54:40
Speaker
They don't engage, and now they're getting some repercussions and backlash for some of their recent behavior.
00:54:45
Speaker
But like- I'm not familiar with that.
00:54:48
Speaker
I'm going to write about it now.
00:54:50
Speaker
But anyway, so like I go to Discord and I take the heat from the audience and I have a direct relationship with the owners of my NFTs or the ones that like, and I mean, it's my, I feel compelled.
00:55:03
Speaker
It's my obligation every day to go there and communicate and to tell them what's happening.
Creating Art Amid Criticism
00:55:08
Speaker
I mean,
00:55:08
Speaker
When you buy one of 9,000 NFTs, I mean, I meant this whole project to be a satire.
00:55:14
Speaker
And now it's taken on a lot of the characteristics of a typical PFP project.
00:55:18
Speaker
And they want to know, what are you doing?
00:55:20
Speaker
What are you doing for us?
00:55:21
Speaker
We paid $80 for your NFT.
00:55:23
Speaker
Why isn't it going up?
00:55:24
Speaker
Why is the floor?
00:55:25
Speaker
Anyway, so what I was saying before, and then I'll let you ask a question.
00:55:30
Speaker
Come on, I had like 12 cups of coffee.
00:55:32
Speaker
So...
00:55:34
Speaker
I'm making a video now, which is like a typical, when you think of video games, I remember my kid was like playing Grand Theft Auto when he was like 12 or 11.
00:55:44
Speaker
And he's like telling me how many hookers he killed and drug deals he made with great pride.
00:55:49
Speaker
And now I'm doing like a typical stereotypical video game where there's like a war between the NFT makers and audience against a traditional art world.
00:56:00
Speaker
Wait, wait, you're making this right now?
00:56:01
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:01
Speaker
A video game.
00:56:03
Speaker
Well, it's not a game game.
00:56:04
Speaker
I wish I could.
00:56:05
Speaker
I mean, I hate games.
00:56:06
Speaker
I hate sports and I was terrible at sports.
00:56:09
Speaker
And I never, only the video games I've ever played were two sticks with a dot across the screen.
00:56:15
Speaker
But this should be a real game.
00:56:16
Speaker
Pac-Man.
00:56:17
Speaker
It should be a real game.
00:56:18
Speaker
And actually, maybe that's a really good idea.
00:56:20
Speaker
But right now, I'm just making a video in the form of a, in the language of a video game of a, I mean, of a war.
00:56:26
Speaker
So in that sense, like, in that way, my art still reflects what my day to day life is.
00:56:32
Speaker
So is that you?
00:56:33
Speaker
It's because it's like you've never felt really at home in the quote unquote traditional art space.
00:56:39
Speaker
I haven't felt at home in the world.
00:56:41
Speaker
And then life.
00:56:42
Speaker
And even in the NFT space, it seems like you get backlash.
00:56:44
Speaker
Like people are questioning you for your motives.
00:56:46
Speaker
Well, I mean, I get a lot of support.
00:56:48
Speaker
I'm not going to.
00:56:49
Speaker
I mean, I have a lot of, I mean, even in the art world, I'm being facetious and a little bit self-deprecating just to get more empathy from you and your audience.
00:56:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:56:56
Speaker
13 listeners.
00:56:57
Speaker
That's my favorite number.
00:57:01
Speaker
Great.
00:57:01
Speaker
That's 13 more.
00:57:03
Speaker
So, um,
00:57:06
Speaker
No, I think I get it.
00:57:08
Speaker
I would probably say there's more haters in the traditional art world, especially now that they see that I've had some success outside of the confines of the art world.
00:57:20
Speaker
And it just gives people an easy, another way to write me off.
00:57:24
Speaker
I mean, I'm hated as a failure.
00:57:26
Speaker
So imagine you as a success.
00:57:29
Speaker
Right.
00:57:29
Speaker
And I've embellished my successes a little.
00:57:31
Speaker
I mean, I've had some good, I've had a good run.
00:57:33
Speaker
I don't know when my next sale will come from.
00:57:36
Speaker
I haven't had a sale in a long time, in months.
00:57:38
Speaker
I sold, I think, two or three pieces from my show up in Berlin right now.
00:57:43
Speaker
I don't care.
00:57:43
Speaker
You know, I've never done any of it for money.
00:57:45
Speaker
I didn't even do the PFP thing for money.
00:57:47
Speaker
It was meant to be a joke, a serious joke.
00:57:50
Speaker
I mean, for me, humor is a, is,
00:57:54
Speaker
I'm alive because of humor.
00:57:55
Speaker
I lost one of my kids three years ago.
00:57:58
Speaker
And art's given meaning to my life.
00:58:00
Speaker
Art has been like the sustenance for my soul.
00:58:04
Speaker
I have three other kids that I'm terribly close to.
00:58:07
Speaker
And so I'm compelled to go on.
00:58:10
Speaker
But, you know, art and humor, which I incorporate.
00:58:14
Speaker
I mean, I was best friends with Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi architect who died some few years ago.
00:58:21
Speaker
And I said to her, like,
00:58:23
Speaker
does humor ever figure into your architectural work?
00:58:25
Speaker
And she just looked at me like she was going to quash me.
00:58:28
Speaker
She's awesome.
00:58:31
Speaker
And then I asked her if there was any sex involved in any of, one of her works was equated to a gigantic vagina for a sports stadium in Tokyo.
00:58:40
Speaker
But anyway, so like humor is important to me in my work.
00:58:44
Speaker
And I get a lot of hate in the art world.
00:58:47
Speaker
I don't get hate in the NF, well, I guess there's one NFT artist, Max Osiris, but he's just nuts.
00:58:52
Speaker
He went, he's one of these, like he's part of the kind of trash movement a little bit, but anyway, yeah.
00:58:59
Speaker
I also, I just wanted to say, I, the, the reason I do art, like make it or do things like this or whatever is because of the way it gives meaning to existence.
00:59:09
Speaker
I think it's like a really nice, it's a nice like framework for interacting with people who are like interesting and thoughtful and like care about philosophy in the world.
00:59:20
Speaker
Um, I just, I just think it's like, uh, which world do you in?
00:59:22
Speaker
I mean, I'm, I'm trying to figure it out, I guess.
00:59:25
Speaker
No, it's true.
00:59:26
Speaker
I mean, although like,
00:59:29
Speaker
Most people in the world just care about money.
00:59:34
Speaker
And then the trend in the art world over the last 20 years has been one gravitating towards money, whether it's NFTs or contemporary art.
00:59:44
Speaker
I mean, all the artists I know wish they had money.
00:59:46
Speaker
Yeah, but they like to slag it off when they don't.
00:59:49
Speaker
But you look at cause...
00:59:51
Speaker
And like, I don't begrudge this guy.
00:59:52
Speaker
Obviously he's a genius, but I hate his work.
00:59:54
Speaker
It's utterly vacuous.
00:59:56
Speaker
He takes my favorite characters from my, you know, point in, in my cultural history of like Sesame street and all.
01:00:03
Speaker
And then he just puts X's to like Jim Henson did a damn good job creating big bird and all these other characters.
01:00:10
Speaker
And look, I, I'm an appropriator and I'm being sued for copyright infringement right now by some dickhead.
01:00:16
Speaker
But I mean, is that something you can talk about?
01:00:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:18
Speaker
I don't give a shit.
01:00:19
Speaker
I'll talk about anything.
01:00:20
Speaker
What is that?
01:00:21
Speaker
What's the work?
01:00:22
Speaker
Well, I made this sculpture like St.
01:00:25
Speaker
Sebastian with all these selfie sticks sticking in my body, which is a traditional motif for many artists.
01:00:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:31
Speaker
So, um, you're trying to say that my work is derivative.
01:00:34
Speaker
No, I'm saying it's a good thing to do.
01:00:35
Speaker
I'm saying it's intentionally derivative.
01:00:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:00:37
Speaker
Intentionally is the important.
01:00:39
Speaker
Okay.
01:00:39
Speaker
So anyway, um,
01:00:42
Speaker
I made a photo, I made a sculpture, which was like three quarters scaled version of myself with impaled by selfie sticks with little blood dripping down my knee.
01:00:54
Speaker
And I did a photo collage of that image.
01:00:57
Speaker
And I just asked my part time assistant to grab it.
01:01:03
Speaker
an image of a sunset off the internet.
01:01:07
Speaker
And then I put a silhouette of myself and there's this guy, Dr. McGluckin.
01:01:12
Speaker
You can't make this up.
01:01:14
Speaker
Dr. McGluckin.
01:01:15
Speaker
I love it.
01:01:15
Speaker
Dr. McFuckin.
01:01:16
Speaker
It sounds like McLovin from a super one of the biggest assholes in the entire universe.
01:01:21
Speaker
And I couldn't care less that I'm embroiled in litigation.
01:01:24
Speaker
I mean, I haven't answered the lawsuit, but I have to, but he basically makes these saccharine,
01:01:31
Speaker
seascapes sunsets and blankets the internet with them and then he has a legal team that scours the internet to go find people to find people that have used them because they're purposefully screenshot-esque and they look so generic and fungible that anyone could have done it or they'd be in the public domain and then i had before and then like i've had people some lawyers have looked into it for me
01:01:56
Speaker
And he has a team that just scours the internet and then launches as many lawsuits as they possibly can.
01:02:01
Speaker
Such a wild business model.
01:02:02
Speaker
And then like we offered like $500 to settle and they refused it.
01:02:06
Speaker
And it's in California.
01:02:07
Speaker
And now like, you know, that's the kind of thing that I would use as fodder to make a body of work out.
01:02:12
Speaker
And like recently when I was in Germany, I lost two years of my archives, literally wiped out.
01:02:19
Speaker
Like on a hard drive or something?
01:02:20
Speaker
On a hard drive.
01:02:21
Speaker
And I made the tragic mistake of going to Apple.
01:02:25
Speaker
And whatever files that could have been salvaged were completely destroyed by the genius.
01:02:31
Speaker
The genius.
01:02:31
Speaker
At Apple.
01:02:32
Speaker
So then I took it to two more places and I ended up getting like a thousand files back, not in a folder that would just simply numbered files.
01:02:42
Speaker
Oh my gosh.
01:02:43
Speaker
So it's as good as, so I lost like literally my entire NFT career.
01:02:49
Speaker
I've given now like 25 plus lectures all over the world, Yale, Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian Museum, all over the world.
01:02:59
Speaker
And all of my presentations wiped out.
01:03:02
Speaker
Whoa.
01:03:03
Speaker
Gone.
01:03:04
Speaker
At least the work is on the IPFS, right?
01:03:07
Speaker
Yeah, IPFS is another system that's going to like crash out.
01:03:10
Speaker
No, no, no, no.
01:03:11
Speaker
Oh, please.
01:03:11
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:12
Speaker
In five years, if people don't, if there's going to be a lot of consolidation in the NFT space, there's going to be a lot of people that go out of business.
01:03:20
Speaker
There's going to be a lot of centralization with corporations taking over stuff.
01:03:23
Speaker
Yeah, but what I'm saying is there's going to be a hell of a lot of people that don't pay their pinata fees.
01:03:27
Speaker
Sure.
01:03:28
Speaker
And I can assure you that within two years, it's funny because I just, I looked, I Googled an image of blank rectangles.
01:03:36
Speaker
And then I posted on Twitter and Discord, I said,
01:03:42
Speaker
I opened my wallet and this is what I saw.
01:03:44
Speaker
Like all of the NFTs had been wiped out and I just saw a series of blank rectangles.
01:03:49
Speaker
And then people were panicking and it's like that it's inevitable.
01:03:52
Speaker
It's so much, so many NFTs in the next five years will be utterly lost where you'll have your little smart contract for perpetuity and you'll be left with an empty file.
01:04:01
Speaker
Which is why if you're a smart collector, you're pinning your own NFT works.
01:04:05
Speaker
Uh, cause then at least they exist, uh, on your, on your note or whatever you're running.
01:04:09
Speaker
That's how do you do that on?
01:04:11
Speaker
So you like sign up to be a pinner on, on pinata or whatever, but if, if you, and then Jason Bailey is trying to, I mean, if you, if you care about your collection, you, you pin your own works.
01:04:20
Speaker
Um, I mean, I don't think IPFS is going to go.
01:04:22
Speaker
I have a problem where I have, I, I, I've reserved a thousand of the crypto months that I did.
01:04:28
Speaker
And I, um,
01:04:31
Speaker
I stated that I would give 700 to the community, but I have to find the right structure.
01:04:35
Speaker
The right way to do it.
01:04:36
Speaker
Right.
01:04:37
Speaker
So they're all in my wallet.
01:04:38
Speaker
And right now my wallet's just on MetaMask.
01:04:40
Speaker
And I've collected probably 100 NFTs and been given some nice ones.
01:04:45
Speaker
And on my list, my to-do list is move them into cold storage.
01:04:50
Speaker
And it's a pain in the ass and you have to pay for it.
01:04:53
Speaker
So I'd have to transfer like 1,200 NFTs.
01:04:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:57
Speaker
But I mean, if I don't do it, it'll be too late by the time I do do it.
01:05:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
01:05:02
Speaker
And especially if you're talking about it on public forums and people are like, okay.
01:05:06
Speaker
Let's hack the motherfuckers up.
01:05:10
Speaker
I have more questions, but we're like getting kind of, I feel like it's been like an hour and a half.
01:05:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:14
Speaker
You've been very generous with your time.
01:05:16
Speaker
No, that's okay.
01:05:16
Speaker
Ask me a few more questions and then go away.
01:05:18
Speaker
I mean, I get out of my house.
01:05:21
Speaker
I have a question.
01:05:22
Speaker
Sorry.
01:05:23
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead.
01:05:24
Speaker
Because we're trying.
01:05:24
Speaker
I'm done talking now.
01:05:25
Speaker
So you can ask me whatever.
01:05:26
Speaker
We're trying to.
01:05:27
Speaker
We're trying to.
01:05:28
Speaker
I tried his fitness.
01:05:29
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead.
01:05:30
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:30
Speaker
We're trying to contextualize your work.
01:05:33
Speaker
And we came up with.
01:05:36
Speaker
Wait, wait, wait.
01:05:36
Speaker
Let's ask him first.
01:05:37
Speaker
Let's ask him.
01:05:38
Speaker
Right.
01:05:38
Speaker
What's like the lineage that you would see yourself in, in the in art history?
01:05:43
Speaker
Like, what would you like to be?
01:05:45
Speaker
That's so sweet.
01:05:45
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:05:47
Speaker
I mean, I don't think anyone's going to care.
01:05:51
Speaker
I don't really see myself.
01:05:53
Speaker
I mean, yeah, I mean, I have to say, like, as I've had some really great successes in the past year, so for, I mean, not that this is by far a gauge of anything, but I was in Basel, Switzerland, and then I was in Basel, Miami, doing big installations, and in the Cologne Art Fair, and I just remember, like, I had, like, a nervous breakdown in Miami, and
01:06:14
Speaker
I had just installed this major NFT installation with my work and the work of Kevin Abash and a few other artists like Sarah Friend and Rhea Myers.
01:06:26
Speaker
And I just remember walking around and looking at the other works of other artists in the fair.
01:06:34
Speaker
And I just, it was soul crushing because to put myself in relationship to my peers,
01:06:42
Speaker
alive and artists like Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polka and painters, Mary Heilman and all kinds of extraordinary works.
01:06:50
Speaker
And, and even like the way I was just, when I posted my works for my show in Berlin yesterday, I mean, I guess I'm pretty hard on myself.
01:07:00
Speaker
It's weird because my work is quite unusual and it would be very hard.
01:07:03
Speaker
Like I, I can't think of a ready, uh,
01:07:08
Speaker
like someone to analogize my work to because it's very unique.
01:07:15
Speaker
Not unique in a good way.
01:07:19
Speaker
It's just fucking weird.
01:07:20
Speaker
I don't know.
01:07:21
Speaker
It's just really, it's a manifestation and a concretization of my experience in my life.
Art's Enrichment of Life and Influences
01:07:27
Speaker
And, you know, I've carved out a role for myself that didn't really exist before.
01:07:31
Speaker
And also lineages are kind of bullshit anyways, right?
01:07:33
Speaker
It's like how people... Well, I mean, it's a construct.
01:07:36
Speaker
Yeah, but we all sort of... I mean, look, art builds on the art of our forebears.
01:07:40
Speaker
It's like what came before it.
01:07:42
Speaker
So I don't know.
01:07:42
Speaker
That's a tough question.
01:07:44
Speaker
I can't answer that.
01:07:45
Speaker
Well, we came up with Mauricio Catalan as being somebody... Yeah, someone has called me the Mauricio Catalan of the digital space.
01:07:54
Speaker
And then I said, if Bill Murray and Mauricio Catalan had a baby... I like that.
01:07:59
Speaker
I'll go with that.
01:08:01
Speaker
Because you're just so forthcoming with... It doesn't seem like...
01:08:05
Speaker
It seems no filterless, right?
01:08:07
Speaker
Well, I mean, I just think like so much about the alt world is, I mean, if there's one word that will come to mind, it's caution.
01:08:14
Speaker
Hmm.
01:08:15
Speaker
And people are so, like, again, there's this writer who's like 120, Anthony Hayden Guest, and he's a drinker and a hard charging.
01:08:24
Speaker
When they had this magazine called Spy Magazine, which came from the UK, came over to the shores here.
01:08:29
Speaker
And they facetiously had this like yearly competition.
01:08:35
Speaker
And he was known as like the Iron Man who went to a million parties.
01:08:38
Speaker
And then he wrote an allegedly tell-all book,
01:08:41
Speaker
called True Colors about the art world.
01:08:44
Speaker
And this is a man who had seen a lot.
01:08:46
Speaker
And yet he was so cautious to maybe lose an invitation to a free drinks gathering or a dinner invitation that he just didn't tell anything.
01:08:55
Speaker
And, you know, I just don't care.
01:08:59
Speaker
I care very much in my attitude of not caring.
01:09:03
Speaker
So, I mean, I'm very, like, I don't take myself seriously.
01:09:10
Speaker
But of course, I'm dead serious about what I do and how I do it.
01:09:13
Speaker
You're very serious about not taking yourself seriously.
01:09:15
Speaker
Well, I mean, I just love, love, love, love art.
01:09:20
Speaker
And I love the practitioners of art whose work
01:09:23
Speaker
has impacted my life and made my life more livable.
01:09:26
Speaker
Bruce Naumann and Eva Hesse, younger artists like Rachel Harrison.
01:09:31
Speaker
And there's just a whole host of different artists that have enriched my existence.
01:09:36
Speaker
So, I mean, Mauricio Catalan, I mean, I was thinking more historically, so that didn't occur to me, but I think that he's brilliant, obviously.
01:09:44
Speaker
And like, just the, like, whereas Duchamp took a ready-made and stuck it into an exhibition and that, you know, was a revolution.
01:09:53
Speaker
In the same way that Maurizio Catalan just put a price on something.
01:09:58
Speaker
And that was his equivalent, you know, disruption in the art world.
01:10:03
Speaker
Like, you know, pricey the banana at $150,000.
01:10:06
Speaker
And you could dismiss it all day long, but it's quite a brilliant provocation.
01:10:11
Speaker
It's a mirror.
01:10:13
Speaker
You often bring up mirrors to the art world itself.
01:10:17
Speaker
It's like, look at yourself.
01:10:18
Speaker
Yes.
01:10:19
Speaker
You're very silly.
01:10:20
Speaker
You're doing this thing that's very... It's very silly.
01:10:22
Speaker
It doesn't make sense.
01:10:23
Speaker
Yeah, in a way you're like hyper focusing on things and putting them in a different format in which for people to look at themselves.
01:10:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:32
Speaker
So I, yeah, that's important to me.
01:10:36
Speaker
I think that's a good, I think that's a good spot.
01:10:39
Speaker
I mean, we have tons of other questions, but you give me your best one.
01:10:42
Speaker
Give me your best shot.
01:10:43
Speaker
I'll let him go.
01:10:45
Speaker
Have a shot of bourbon.
01:10:46
Speaker
Shot of bourbon.
01:10:47
Speaker
You want to crack it open?
01:10:48
Speaker
Ask me something.
01:10:48
Speaker
Crack it open.
01:10:49
Speaker
Ask me something.
01:10:50
Speaker
Before he asks you the gotcha question.
01:10:53
Speaker
Have you ever read Camus' The Fall?
01:10:55
Speaker
Yes.
01:10:55
Speaker
Awesome.
01:10:58
Speaker
No, it's great.
01:10:58
Speaker
Stop pointing at me.
01:11:00
Speaker
Because of the whole... He is a fairly transparent individual.
01:11:03
Speaker
No, but the character, the main character being a lawyer.
01:11:08
Speaker
Yes.
01:11:08
Speaker
Who has a stolen Van Eyck in his cupboard.
01:11:12
Speaker
Right.
01:11:13
Speaker
I think it's perfect.
01:11:13
Speaker
I haven't stolen anything.
01:11:15
Speaker
Well, he didn't steal it.
01:11:16
Speaker
He just has it.
01:11:16
Speaker
He didn't steal it.
01:11:17
Speaker
He's just holding it.
01:11:18
Speaker
But this feels very apropos.
01:11:21
Speaker
You haven't gone through law school.
01:11:23
Speaker
Yes.
01:11:23
Speaker
That's a nice connection.
01:11:25
Speaker
Right?
01:11:25
Speaker
Our last exhibition was about, it was called The Fall.
01:11:28
Speaker
It was using that as kind of like a conceptual lens.
01:11:30
Speaker
Nice.
01:11:31
Speaker
Yeah.
01:11:32
Speaker
I guess, I mean, well, I would say to you and your readers, stay in touch.
01:11:37
Speaker
You can contact me.
01:11:39
Speaker
I mean, I'm the, I respond to every DM within 24 hours.
01:11:43
Speaker
I will attest to the fact that Kenny will respond to your DMs.
01:11:46
Speaker
I mean, I get this.
01:11:47
Speaker
He really does.
01:11:48
Speaker
If you, if you have no manners, you're going to see a dark side of me that you don't want to see.
01:11:53
Speaker
And I'll probably post it in my story because like, you know, I get these DMs.
01:11:58
Speaker
I want to be on, get me on Nifty Gateway.
01:12:00
Speaker
Like,
01:12:02
Speaker
That's annoying.
Helping Others in the NFT Space
01:12:03
Speaker
Sure.
01:12:03
Speaker
Help me sell my NFTs.
01:12:05
Speaker
And you're like, help me sell my NFTs.
01:12:07
Speaker
That's my response.
01:12:08
Speaker
That would be my response.
01:12:09
Speaker
You can help me write these.
01:12:11
Speaker
But like if you're kind and considerate and you ask for advice within the purview of my breadth of knowledge, which is small, that I can help, it gives me great, great, great, great pleasure and joy to help people.
01:12:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:12:24
Speaker
So, you know.
01:12:25
Speaker
I feel like you pretend to be quite a curmudgeon and you're really not so much.
01:12:30
Speaker
You're a nice guy.
01:12:31
Speaker
Thank you very much.
01:12:32
Speaker
Can we, so sometimes we, so we have music, obviously, intro, outro.
01:12:37
Speaker
Can we outro with your money song?
01:12:39
Speaker
Oh, gosh, please.
01:12:42
Speaker
It's so catchy.
01:12:42
Speaker
Perfect.
01:12:43
Speaker
Did you see the one I wrote about crypto months?
01:12:45
Speaker
No, I haven't seen that one.
01:12:46
Speaker
Months for life.
01:12:47
Speaker
Oh, maybe we should do months for life.
01:12:48
Speaker
Although the money, money, money is like, anyways, we'll walk out with one of those.
01:12:53
Speaker
No, what happened was I wrote that because...
01:12:56
Speaker
people are always saying it's all about money.
01:12:58
Speaker
So then I was on a podcast for our net and I said, money, money, money, money.
01:13:03
Speaker
All you hear about is money.
01:13:04
Speaker
I'm like, if you want to make money, buy fucking crypto, don't buy an NFT.
01:13:07
Speaker
You're going to lose your money.
01:13:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:09
Speaker
So then a friend of mine as a joke, just like took an excerpt of me saying that and sent it back to me as a loop.
01:13:14
Speaker
I thought, Oh my God, that sounds like a song.
01:13:17
Speaker
So then I quickly wrote up some lyrics.
01:13:19
Speaker
Then I put myself under the comforter for better sound, uh,
01:13:23
Speaker
Nice.
01:13:23
Speaker
Acoustics.
01:13:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:25
Speaker
I can attest to that.
01:13:26
Speaker
And then I, I, I sang a little song and I've done it in the nineties.
01:13:30
Speaker
I made songs.
01:13:31
Speaker
One of my kids was always wearing dresses.
01:13:33
Speaker
I made a song about him.
01:13:34
Speaker
Then I made a song about a midlife crisis and all kinds of stupid things.
01:13:38
Speaker
Cause I just think, yeah.
01:13:39
Speaker
Were you making memes before memes?
01:13:42
Speaker
I am a meme.
01:13:43
Speaker
I just think you have like one life, you know, and you make Mark said, why can't you be an economist in the morning and a fisherman in the afternoon?
01:13:50
Speaker
And if I want to make a fucking song, I'll make a song.
01:13:52
Speaker
Someone asked me to play Gagosian in a short film.
01:13:55
Speaker
I mean, I did it on Sunday.
01:13:56
Speaker
I saw that suit you were wearing.
01:13:57
Speaker
Yeah.
01:13:57
Speaker
I put a suit on.
01:13:58
Speaker
That's a nice
Creative Ventures and Experiences
01:14:00
Speaker
suit.
01:14:00
Speaker
Oh, thank you.
01:14:01
Speaker
It had a few motholes in it, which you couldn't see in the, but then I like memorized my lines and I was in the role of an actor and it was awful.
01:14:07
Speaker
I mean, like there was 25 takes of this one and the film isn't terribly good.
01:14:14
Speaker
Sorry to the filmmaker.
01:14:15
Speaker
But I'd love to like, I got the experience.
01:14:18
Speaker
Like I worked with one of my songs in the past.
01:14:20
Speaker
I worked with someone who won a Grammy as an engineer and I was in a recording studio making a song.
01:14:24
Speaker
So then it's like, it's like existentially or whatever you want to call it experientially.
01:14:30
Speaker
I'm in, I'm in that role.
01:14:32
Speaker
And I mean, we're often playing roles in life and like to be playing the role of an act of, of an actor, like,
01:14:39
Speaker
That was really cool.
01:14:40
Speaker
And it was really interesting.
01:14:42
Speaker
Who doesn't want to try that out?
01:14:44
Speaker
Yeah, it was really fun.
01:14:45
Speaker
I mean, it was tedious to say the least.
01:14:48
Speaker
But, you know, yeah, it was really fun.
01:14:50
Speaker
That's cool.
01:14:51
Speaker
I liked it.
01:14:51
Speaker
So anyway, like, I just think if I want to do... Anyway, so then I made the Money, Money, Money song, made a music video.
01:14:57
Speaker
And then I was asked to be in a...
01:15:00
Speaker
I was called by an auction house in Tokyo called SBI.
01:15:04
Speaker
And they kept asking me to put a piece in an auction like eight months in advance.
01:15:07
Speaker
And I never heard of this auction company.
01:15:09
Speaker
Then they kept asking me for my bank account information.
01:15:11
Speaker
I thought it was just another generic scam.
01:15:13
Speaker
So I thought they were stealing money from me.
01:15:15
Speaker
So I'm like joking.
01:15:17
Speaker
Then I like did some research and found out that they were...
01:15:21
Speaker
They were a credible company.
01:15:22
Speaker
And I put my money.
01:15:23
Speaker
So then I put this image.
01:15:25
Speaker
Again, I thought it was some marginal stupid thing.
01:15:27
Speaker
So I gave them an animation of a dick sucking elephant, which is a sculpture I made in the past when I was a lonely.
01:15:33
Speaker
That one?
01:15:34
Speaker
That one.
01:15:35
Speaker
When I was a lonely teen in Long Island, you know, I was a little overweight.
01:15:40
Speaker
So it was a bit of a stretch, so to speak, to try to do something like that.
01:15:44
Speaker
And it's a great analogy.
01:15:45
Speaker
How many of those exist?
01:15:46
Speaker
Oh, like 25.
01:15:47
Speaker
Wow.
01:15:48
Speaker
And I made an animation and I sent it to Japan and they recoiled.
01:15:53
Speaker
I can only imagine.
01:15:54
Speaker
They were not terribly interested in myself sucking, filleting elephant animation.
01:16:00
Speaker
So then I sent them the money, money, money video and lo and behold, it sold for like 20 grand.
01:16:04
Speaker
Awesome.
01:16:06
Speaker
And the minute I got off the phone with the auction house and they told me it sold.
01:16:09
Speaker
And again, like I've learned in life not to have low expectations, but to have no expectations.
01:16:14
Speaker
No.
01:16:14
Speaker
Because that's typically the way things pan out in my life.
01:16:17
Speaker
Then I literally got off the phone, ran upstairs and wrote a song about crypto butts, which hasn't sold yet.
01:16:24
Speaker
And made quite an epic music video.
01:16:25
Speaker
As it goes.
01:16:26
Speaker
And that's it.
01:16:27
Speaker
Awesome.
01:16:27
Speaker
We'll play the song out to... Please.
01:16:30
Speaker
Yeah, here it comes.
01:16:30
Speaker
If you want to alienate those 13.
01:16:32
Speaker
And then the episode after me, you'll have 11 listeners.
01:16:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:36
Speaker
I'll whittle it down to a mere skeletal audience.
01:16:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:16:40
Speaker
Thanks.
01:16:41
Speaker
But anyway, thank you very much for your time.
01:16:43
Speaker
Thank you.
01:16:43
Speaker
Thank you.
01:16:44
Speaker
My pleasure.
01:16:44
Speaker
This was wonderful.
01:16:45
Speaker
Awesome.
01:16:46
Speaker
All right.
01:16:47
Speaker
Ouch.
01:16:48
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:16:51
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:16:54
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:16:58
Speaker
Money, money, money.
Podcast Production and Outro Song
01:16:59
Speaker
Arranging Tangerines is recorded, edited, and produced by Lydian Stater, an evolving curatorial platform based in New York City with a focus on the intersection of contemporary and crypto art.
01:17:09
Speaker
You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at lydianstaternyc on Instagram, and follow us at lydianstater on Twitter.
01:17:16
Speaker
Thanks to Kenny Schachter for taking the time to speak to us this week.
01:17:19
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about his work, check out his website at Kenny Schachter dot art.
01:17:23
Speaker
Big thanks to Tal Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
01:17:27
Speaker
His albums are available at talwan.bandcamp.com.
01:17:31
Speaker
And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
01:17:34
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:17:37
Speaker
I'm so sick and tired of the NFT divide Just you wait, just you wait for the shifting tide I've never seen anything so polarizing, stigmatizing All the despising, analyzing, galvanizing, merchandising, moralizing, patronizing It's mesmerizing, nothing short of a social uprising Money, money, money Money, money, money
01:18:03
Speaker
All the pushback about crypto crime, laundering, tax evasion, and then there came grimes.
01:18:09
Speaker
The currency whipsaws with a whole lot of volatility.
01:18:13
Speaker
Sit back, enjoy the ride, and drop the hostility.
01:18:16
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:18:19
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:18:22
Speaker
But what about the history of digital art?
01:18:26
Speaker
Let's not forget what gave nifties their start.
01:18:29
Speaker
Forget the grip.
01:18:30
Speaker
It's no more, no less.
01:18:32
Speaker
What you find in the art world.
01:18:33
Speaker
No cause for distress.
01:18:35
Speaker
Yes, Bitcoin mining sucks lots of juice.
01:18:38
Speaker
Just wait for E2 to end the abuse.
01:18:42
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:18:45
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:18:48
Speaker
Energy consumption's on everyone's mind.
01:18:51
Speaker
Airplane, oil paint, shipping crate.
01:18:53
Speaker
Are you all blind?
01:18:54
Speaker
The NFT market has shrunk from the past.
01:18:57
Speaker
So make some, buy some.
01:18:59
Speaker
It's still a blast.
01:19:01
Speaker
This is no more about money than any old painting.
01:19:04
Speaker
Relax, stop fighting.
01:19:06
Speaker
No need for fainting.
01:19:07
Speaker
Admit it's not all well and good.
01:19:09
Speaker
The state of the metaverse isn't as fun as it should.
01:19:14
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:19:17
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:19:20
Speaker
Don't judge the market by the likes of people.
01:19:23
Speaker
Lord knows, Lord knows, there's so many better people.
01:19:26
Speaker
Genie's out of the bottle.
01:19:28
Speaker
The eth is in the ether.
01:19:30
Speaker
Get out in front.
01:19:31
Speaker
Don't end up beneath her.
01:19:33
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:19:36
Speaker
Money, money, money.
01:19:39
Speaker
Money, money, money.