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Bonus Episode: Craft in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
45 Plays3 years ago
As you await the upcoming season of Curious Objects, please enjoy this special bonus episode, in which Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Abraham Thomas, ceramist Roxanne Jackson, and painter Andrew LaMar Hopkins join host Benjamin Miller onstage at the 2022 edition of the Winter Show to grapple with the legacy of Walter Benjamin’s famous 1935 essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” How have Benjamin’s contentions about “aura” fared in the ensuing eighty-odd years since its publication? And how might we apply his thoughts on art to works of craft being produced today?
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Transcript
New Season Announcement
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello and welcome to a special bonus episode of Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:15
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:16
Speaker
It's been a while since our last episode.
00:00:18
Speaker
We have been working on a new season of stories that we're so excited about.
00:00:23
Speaker
We're doing really deep dives into some incredible stories about remarkable objects and the people and events surrounding them.
00:00:31
Speaker
But to tell those stories right takes time.
00:00:35
Speaker
And I hope you'll believe me when I say they are definitely going to be worth the wait.
00:00:40
Speaker
You have never heard curious objects quite like this before.
00:00:44
Speaker
And while we've been keeping you waiting, some of you have sent really kind messages asking when the new season is coming, and the answer is soon, I think...
Bonus Episode Introduction
00:00:57
Speaker
We are aiming for a release this fall, but in the meantime, we have a bonus episode for you today.
00:01:05
Speaker
This is a live conversation that I led here in New York at the Winter Show, which was funnily enough rescheduled this year for spring.
00:01:15
Speaker
I spoke there with three really fascinating people, artists and scholars who have some really interesting ideas about how art and craftsmanship relate to history and to technology and what makes handmade objects so magically compelling.
00:01:32
Speaker
I really think you'll enjoy the conversation, so here we go.
Walter Benjamin's Essay Revisited
00:01:41
Speaker
It's been about 90 years since the German philosopher Walter Benjamin published his iconic essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
00:01:52
Speaker
For anyone who hasn't read this essay, maybe since you were an undergraduate,
00:01:57
Speaker
This was a transformative piece of writing which really changed the way that artists and art historians and critics were thinking about a wide variety of subjects.
00:02:11
Speaker
Benjamin observed that new technologies were making it easier and easier to produce and reproduce and even mass-produce works of art.
00:02:24
Speaker
He wondered what this change would mean for the way that we create and experience art.
The 'Aura' of Handmade Art
00:02:32
Speaker
And he spoke of what he called an aura that makes handmade works of art compelling and meaningful.
00:02:41
Speaker
So 90 years on, here we are at America's greatest antique fair, and the dealers and the collectors here are true believers.
00:02:50
Speaker
If there was ever such a thing as an aura associated with antiques, you will find it here.
00:02:57
Speaker
And that creates, I think, a great opportunity to talk about what is really going on.
00:03:04
Speaker
Where does that aura come from?
00:03:07
Speaker
What is that quality that makes your pulse race when you see or touch or hold a certain object or work of art?
00:03:17
Speaker
How does craft assert itself in the midst of technological change?
00:03:22
Speaker
And how do we connect to the countless generations before us that developed not just ways of making things, but also ways of looking at and experiencing and loving them?
00:03:36
Speaker
And in that endeavor, I am so pleased to be joined by three individuals whose work is intimately tied up in those questions and those concerns.
Roxanne Jackson's Creative Process
00:03:46
Speaker
So to my right is Roxanne Jackson.
00:03:49
Speaker
She is a New York-based ceramicist whose sculptures are wildly creative and novel and surprising, even while they draw deeply on historical forms and techniques.
00:04:01
Speaker
Andrew Lamar Hopkins is a New Orleans-based artist whose paintings give us provocative new ways of conceptualizing 19th century Creole society.
00:04:14
Speaker
And Abraham Thomas is the Metropolitan Museum's curator of Modern Architecture Design and Decorative Arts, whose work often takes chapters straight out of history books and smashes them right up against cutting-edge ideas and criticism around curation, presentation, and purpose.
00:04:38
Speaker
Now, we could spend a long time listing all of your various accolades, but I already have a feeling that we're going to find ourselves running out of time and wishing we had more at the end.
00:04:48
Speaker
So let's just get straight to it.
00:04:51
Speaker
For those who are listening via the podcast, we are going to be showing images throughout, which you can see if you go to themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
The Amphora Vase Explained
00:05:00
Speaker
So I encourage you to follow along with the pictures there.
00:05:05
Speaker
Okay.
00:05:07
Speaker
Roxanne.
00:05:10
Speaker
Some of your recent pieces, and I'm going to see if I can juggle all of these various devices here.
00:05:18
Speaker
Some of your recent pieces draw explicitly on forms from antiquity.
00:05:24
Speaker
So the amphora vase, for example, features prominently.
00:05:29
Speaker
That form, the amphora vase, must be one of the most recognizable decorative arts forms in the world.
00:05:37
Speaker
And I'm very grateful to you for recently pointing out to me that there is actually an emoji version of the amphora vase.
00:05:45
Speaker
How did you land on that subject?
00:05:48
Speaker
The first amphora, oh, thank you all for coming and thank you for inviting me to be here and nice to meet all of you.
00:05:55
Speaker
The first amphora I made was I was invited to be in an exhibition at a ceramic conference called Nsika.
00:06:01
Speaker
This is in 2014 and it was an interactive show.
00:06:05
Speaker
So to ask a ceramic artist to make an interactive piece that's kind of like nail biting because they're fragile objects.
00:06:13
Speaker
So I was thinking, but I like the parameters, like to
00:06:15
Speaker
solve this problem.
00:06:16
Speaker
So the first idea, I thought, was to make a bong.
00:06:20
Speaker
But again, this is 2014, so I thought it was definitely too racy, especially for the ceramic conference.
00:06:25
Speaker
But that's a different project currently in the works.
00:06:27
Speaker
Stay tuned.
00:06:28
Speaker
So the second idea was to make an amphora.
00:06:30
Speaker
And so I hand-built a large-scale amphora, and I glazed a section of it in blue and white.
00:06:37
Speaker
So blue and white, we think of the blue and white that comes from China, the cobalt painting on porcelain, or also the fake version that came out of Europe
00:06:45
Speaker
Europe, the Netherlands, and England specifically, and all around the world.
00:06:49
Speaker
So I kind of juxtaposed these two ubiquitous ceramic techniques, one in the form of the Greek pot, the amphora, and another one in this technique of the cobalt on porcelain.
00:07:00
Speaker
And I did that design on the front of the amphora vase.
00:07:04
Speaker
The rest of the vase I painted with black chalkboard paint
00:07:08
Speaker
which is rule number one, you're not supposed to do this if you go to graduate school for ceramics.
00:07:13
Speaker
You don't put paint on your pot.
00:07:15
Speaker
But I did that, and then I sent this piece to the exhibition with blue and white chalk.
00:07:20
Speaker
So most of the vase is painted with black chalkboard paint, and then there's a stripe of the blue and white done in a flower motif in the front.
00:07:27
Speaker
So I was inviting the artists...
00:07:29
Speaker
or sorry, the audience to participate and color in the rest of the vase, which is inherently a failure because chalk is chalky and it's not this beautiful, rich, cobalt color of the glaze, or the white is not gonna mimic porcelain in any way.
00:07:44
Speaker
So this showed me like, oh, this is a great example of what I'm trying to do with ceramics often, which is to express and show dichotomies and polarities in work.
00:07:53
Speaker
For instance, low brow and high brow.
00:07:56
Speaker
The reverent and the irreverent, like what I just described, was a great example of that.
00:08:01
Speaker
Like the profane and the sacred, the grotesque and the beautiful, utility and absurdity, list goes on and on.
00:08:09
Speaker
So I realized that this was a great...
00:08:11
Speaker
I should continue to work with this vase to express these ideas, sort of as a departure point for these ideas.
00:08:18
Speaker
One more thing, I also like working with this vase that's been made so many times because I feel like I'm connecting with all the artisans that have come before me and expressing this in a similar way but through my lens of the world.
00:08:34
Speaker
Yeah, well that's exactly what I wanted to get at because this form, I mean you mentioned the amphora is a Greek style of vase, but vases of sort of at least recognizably similar form go back six, eight thousand years.
00:08:49
Speaker
I mean this is one of the longest lived forms in the decorative arts.
00:08:52
Speaker
Why do you think it's so successful?
00:08:54
Speaker
What do people like about it?
00:08:56
Speaker
Well one thing is that ceramics remains on planet Earth for thousands of years.
00:09:01
Speaker
Even if those pieces are in shards, when we fire ceramics this is the reality.
00:09:06
Speaker
I think about this
Longevity and Responsibility in Ceramics
00:09:07
Speaker
a lot.
00:09:07
Speaker
I'm also a professor of ceramics so I talk about this to my students.
00:09:11
Speaker
There's a sense of responsibility when you work with this material because it will remain and I only hope that
00:09:17
Speaker
8,000 years from now, shards of this piece will end up in a museum, and people will be trying to figure out where it came from and who made it.
00:09:24
Speaker
So the fact that physically it remains, I think, really has an impact on us.
00:09:31
Speaker
especially so many of the amphorae vases were decorated.
00:09:34
Speaker
They were telling stories.
00:09:35
Speaker
They were in narrative pots.
00:09:37
Speaker
The red and the black figure depicting everyday scenes or special scenes of what was important to the culture.
00:09:44
Speaker
I mean, maybe I'm doing that too in a different kind of way.
00:09:47
Speaker
So I think storytelling through this visual object that is made by the hands of a human being, I think this idea resonates with us.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, well, so talk about that process.
00:09:59
Speaker
I mean, what are some of the sort of physical techniques and technologies that you use to produce these objects?
00:10:06
Speaker
And how do those compare with the ways that these pieces have been made over the millennia?
00:10:11
Speaker
Well, I think there's a lot of speculation about how pieces were made, but I think a lot of the Greek pots were made on the pottery wheel, and then other elements were hand-built on top.
00:10:20
Speaker
I don't use the pottery wheel because I'm just frankly not very good at it.
00:10:24
Speaker
I hand build techniques.
00:10:26
Speaker
One thing that I think is interesting about ceramics, obviously I think there's many interesting things about ceramics, if you can't tell, but it's like there's only a certain amount of techniques.
00:10:35
Speaker
Even as technology develops, there's still like five techniques, maybe six.
00:10:41
Speaker
And so I'm still using techniques that many people throughout time working with these objects have built forms with, such as coil building or working with slabs
00:10:50
Speaker
a piece like this, I build solid and then hollow out.
00:10:53
Speaker
So again, I'm working with this, one of the most basic materials all around planet Earth, maybe the first art form, arguably the first art form, right up there with cave painting.
00:11:04
Speaker
And I am still using basically like old technologies to build forms.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah, I love the lineage of that and the feeling that you participate in this ancient tradition.
00:11:17
Speaker
But tell me about
00:11:19
Speaker
the differences in the process that you go through when you're creating a piece like one of these vases versus
00:11:27
Speaker
when you're working on a piece that seems to be, shall we say, a bit unbridled, that's less directly grounded in works, in historical works, historical inspiration.
00:11:44
Speaker
What are the differences in how you conceptualize those pieces and then how you actually execute them?
00:11:51
Speaker
Yeah, and that's a good question.
00:11:52
Speaker
I've been thinking about this.
00:11:54
Speaker
Like when I am building a vase form, I might have a loose idea of like, put a bird on it.
00:12:00
Speaker
You know, like maybe I want to make a vase with a cockatoo.
00:12:03
Speaker
Oh, I already did one with a cockatoo, a toucan, whatever it is.
00:12:06
Speaker
I'll build the vase form, but then I have to actually like step back and look at what does the vase look like.
00:12:12
Speaker
I might be surrounded with some quick sketches, but ultimately for me in the studio, intuition dominates and spontaneity dominates.
00:12:21
Speaker
Even if I'm trying to follow a sketch, the process takes over and the piece might not look at the sketch at all in the end.
00:12:27
Speaker
So I have to like take that in.
00:12:29
Speaker
So I think of it like tabula rasa, this vase with nothing on it.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I have to see like, does it need handles that break above the horizon line of the piece?
00:12:39
Speaker
I was going to put a chameleon on it.
00:12:41
Speaker
Is the chameleon, could it be on top?
00:12:43
Speaker
Like what's the scale?
00:12:44
Speaker
How is it going to fit with the form?
00:12:46
Speaker
So it kind of does provide like a foundation.
00:12:50
Speaker
and like a departure point for the sculpture, which I like a lot.
00:12:54
Speaker
It's quite different than just free floating and I'm gonna make a splayed animal head, which sometimes I make, and there's like, there's not a lot of grounding.
00:13:02
Speaker
I never know what those forms are gonna look like, where at least I know I'll end up with a vase, and who knows what's gonna happen.
00:13:09
Speaker
So there's a different kind, I'm just like grounded in something, which makes me feel good.
00:13:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:13:15
Speaker
Well, and so,
00:13:17
Speaker
I mean, these are all unique, one-of-a-kind handmade objects.
Reproducing Art in the Digital Age
00:13:21
Speaker
But do you think about the idea of reproduction?
00:13:24
Speaker
Getting back to Walter Benjamin's essay, I mean, if it were possible to reproduce these pieces using 3D printing, for example, how would you think about the possibility of something like that?
00:13:40
Speaker
Well,
00:13:43
Speaker
Sometimes I feel like I'm like a Luddite.
00:13:44
Speaker
I could be a Luddite when it comes to... I'm very into ceramics, so sometimes I'm resistant to new technologies, but change is inevitable, so we have to take it in.
00:13:53
Speaker
So when I first learned about 3D printing, I wasn't super excited about it.
00:13:57
Speaker
Also, NFTs was kind of like two thumbs down.
00:14:01
Speaker
But then I'm thinking about this more and I want to embrace all art forms, right?
00:14:05
Speaker
Because it's just an expression.
00:14:07
Speaker
So they all count.
00:14:09
Speaker
And the interesting thing about NFTs is maybe, I mean, I'm just going to say that's like the newest way of making art, this digital form that only exists in the virtual realm.
00:14:21
Speaker
If I'm gonna make an NFT of my work, I want it to be of a pot.
00:14:25
Speaker
I want it to be of like me referencing one of the most ancient art forms, which is the M4 vase.
00:14:32
Speaker
And funny, this is actually in process right now.
00:14:35
Speaker
I'm working with a gallery in New York called Room 57.
00:14:38
Speaker
Actually, Josh is here in the back.
00:14:40
Speaker
And we are in the process of making NFTs of the flamingo vase and 3D printed version of
00:14:46
Speaker
Because I think that's sort of full circle.
00:14:49
Speaker
If I'm going to make an NFT, again, the newest technology, I want it to harken, that to harken back to the oldest art form.
00:14:57
Speaker
I think there's a really interesting tension in that idea.
00:15:02
Speaker
Yeah, fantastic.
00:15:03
Speaker
I love that.
00:15:05
Speaker
The very oldest with the very newest.
00:15:08
Speaker
Andrew, I want to move on and talk about some of your work for a moment here.
00:15:13
Speaker
But when I introduced you, I threw around the word Creole a few times.
00:15:19
Speaker
And I wonder if you'd like to, because, you know, it's a word that different people use in different ways.
00:15:24
Speaker
Yes.
00:15:25
Speaker
How do you think about the word Creole, or what's your definition?
00:15:28
Speaker
So Creole is one of the most complicated words there is, because it's a word that evolved and changed over a period of time.
00:15:37
Speaker
A Creole could be people, a culture, a way of life.
00:15:40
Speaker
I was a tour guide back in the day in the French Quarter and gave kind of historically accurate tours of architecture and how people lived.
00:15:51
Speaker
And I like to tell people, Creoles lived on a people from Louisiana's colonial past.
00:16:00
Speaker
So New Orleans was founded in 1718.
00:16:03
Speaker
The colonial period was from 1718 to 1803.
00:16:07
Speaker
So everybody that lived in Louisiana, enslaved people, free blacks, Native Americans, and as well as the French and Spanish, all those people were considered to be Creoles.
00:16:22
Speaker
And Napoleon sold Louisiana in 1803.
00:16:26
Speaker
Americans started to flood in, and that word really meant something because it was like all of these people that were in Louisiana before the Americans came were Creoles.
00:16:35
Speaker
They were Catholic.
00:16:36
Speaker
They spoke French.
00:16:38
Speaker
The French culture, we were French first and then Spanish.
00:16:42
Speaker
Even during the Spanish period, people continued to speak French and live as if Louisiana was Paris.
00:16:50
Speaker
And so the Americans came in and things kind of changed.
00:16:53
Speaker
They were more interested in making money instead of having fun.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so it kind of began a separation of the Creoles, this group of people that were already in colonial Louisiana, and the Americans that began to come in.
00:17:09
Speaker
And the work that you do is beautifully plain and honest.
00:17:15
Speaker
Thank you.
Andrew Lamar Hopkins on Creole Society
00:17:17
Speaker
What we're looking at here is the cover that Andrew painted for the 100th anniversary issue of the magazine Antiques, except here there's a key to all of the objects that are included in the painting.
00:17:31
Speaker
So these aren't just haphazard slapdash objects.
00:17:34
Speaker
you know, pretty things thrown into a picture.
00:17:37
Speaker
They're all meticulously researched.
00:17:40
Speaker
You have a great historical understanding of the context around the objects that you include.
00:17:46
Speaker
And I'm wondering how much of that comes from your intuitive knowledge that you've developed over a lifetime of interest in this kind of material?
00:17:56
Speaker
How much of it is specific research that you'll do for a particular painting?
00:18:01
Speaker
What does that look like for you?
00:18:03
Speaker
It's almost 50-50 because in a former life, prior to becoming an artist, I've kind of always been an artist, I was an antique dealer.
00:18:14
Speaker
And I kind of fell into being an antique dealer.
00:18:16
Speaker
I was a nerdy child that would go to the library after school and research architecture and antiques.
00:18:24
Speaker
and would bother antique dealers in Mobile, Alabama, as well as Louisiana.
00:18:30
Speaker
And some of them wanted to teach me about antiques, which was a good thing.
00:18:35
Speaker
And so later in life, I didn't really kind of know what I wanted to do other than have beautiful things.
00:18:43
Speaker
And I realized, oh, I kind of know how to buy and sell antiques and make a profit and know a little bit about it.
00:18:50
Speaker
And so I became an antique dealer at the age of 20 in New Orleans.
00:18:57
Speaker
And you know, kind of had to know a little bit about everything.
00:19:01
Speaker
So when I'm creating a painting like the magazine Antiques, I'm thinking, oh I want a Rembrandt Peale still life in this painting, or I want a Windsor chair.
00:19:12
Speaker
And you know, so I might go back and do a little bit more research and include that in the painting.
00:19:18
Speaker
So there are a lot of different ways of looking at the past, a lot of different lenses, different angles, and art historians and curators and researchers, they all work to bring that out in different ways.
00:19:34
Speaker
But what is it in your work, what is it about this period in Louisiana history in particular that your pictures can help people like us to understand differently or see in a different light?
Cultural Elements of Creole Fashion
00:19:49
Speaker
Well, this period of the late 18th century through about the 1830s, which is the period I like to paint, I love the fashion of that period.
00:20:00
Speaker
In Louisiana, even in the earliest days of Louisiana, we had mud streets.
00:20:06
Speaker
But when outsiders would come, they would always say, you know, everybody is fashionably dressed with the latest fashions from Paris.
00:20:14
Speaker
They have silks.
00:20:15
Speaker
satins walking around, you know, on these muddy streets of Louisiana.
00:20:21
Speaker
So I love the aesthetic of the clothing as well as the buildings.
00:20:27
Speaker
Louisiana is very different from the rest of America, primarily
00:20:33
Speaker
because during the colonial period we were never English.
00:20:36
Speaker
So the English influence had a huge influence on the rest of the South as well as the rest of America, but because Louisiana had a French and Spanish influence, it's almost like a different country.
00:20:51
Speaker
When you go to New Orleans, you see these beautiful arches, pastel bright colors, and people on the streets wearing the latest fashion from Paris
00:21:01
Speaker
This particular painting shows a free couple, free people of color, which were a group of blacks living in Louisiana during the time of slavery who were free.
00:21:13
Speaker
And this started very early on.
00:21:15
Speaker
Again, we were, New Orleans was settled in 1718, and the first free blacks are 1721, 1722.
00:21:20
Speaker
This painting is about 1820, so by that time,
00:21:28
Speaker
You had people that were generations of free people of color who owned, built real estate, owned buildings, and sold properties.
00:21:39
Speaker
So they had some money.
00:21:40
Speaker
Not everybody, but a group of them did.
00:21:47
Speaker
Your work has actually been widely reproduced.
00:21:49
Speaker
I had just mentioned the picture you did for the magazine Antiques.
00:21:53
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:53
Speaker
Thousands of copies.
00:21:55
Speaker
Yes.
00:21:55
Speaker
If you go upstairs to the third floor of the show.
00:21:58
Speaker
I've been stealing them every day.
00:21:59
Speaker
That's right.
00:22:02
Speaker
So there are actually posters of that painting available for sale.
00:22:06
Speaker
Yes.
00:22:09
Speaker
What does it mean for you?
00:22:11
Speaker
How do you feel psychologically, emotionally, when a picture like that that you've done is out in the world in thousands and thousands of iterations?
00:22:22
Speaker
Well, I'm greatly honored and flattered and actually humbled as well.
00:22:29
Speaker
to as a child growing up in Mobile, Alabama.
00:22:35
Speaker
Again, I was this nerdy kid not into sports or just doing what other children were doing.
00:22:41
Speaker
I was reading the magazine Antiques and learning about stuff that was old.
00:22:47
Speaker
So to me, I'm extremely honored and flattered to be on the 100-year issue cover and also humbled.
00:22:58
Speaker
You've done some pictures recently that
00:23:03
Speaker
take a bit of a different historical approach.
00:23:05
Speaker
I'm sorry, I don't have a reproduction of this one, but you've done a painting called The Birth of Creole Venus.
00:23:11
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:13
Speaker
Which is essentially a reimagining of Botticelli's Birth of Venus.
00:23:19
Speaker
Yes.
00:23:21
Speaker
I wonder, this is not a historical event, per se.
00:23:28
Speaker
Apologies to any Greek pantheists in the room.
00:23:32
Speaker
But how do you approach that sort of project, which is, again, based in historical art in this case, but depicting a mythological scene?
00:23:48
Speaker
So the way my mind works is, you know, that's, of course, the original is a beautiful painting, a very famous painting, but I like to creolize things when I see it.
00:23:57
Speaker
So when I see a wonderful...
00:24:00
Speaker
famous painting, I've even painted the Mona Lisa as Creole.
00:24:04
Speaker
So, of course, that's, The Birth of Venus is one of my favorite paintings, and I thought, I always kind of wanted to imagine her being born in the muddy waters of Louisiana.
00:24:17
Speaker
And unfortunately, we don't have a picture of it, but...
00:24:20
Speaker
That was one of the paintings I was quite proud of when I finished it because I just kind of reimagined it.
00:24:26
Speaker
And like I said, when I see art that I like, I reimagine those paintings as Creole.
00:24:33
Speaker
And they may be mythological and not that historic.
00:24:38
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:39
Speaker
Abraham, your turn on the hot seat.
Abraham Thomas on Architecture and Design
00:24:44
Speaker
Thank you.
00:24:46
Speaker
So your position at the Met is at the confluence of architecture, design, and decorative arts.
00:24:53
Speaker
Those are pretty broad areas.
00:24:57
Speaker
And I wonder what you're finding where those fields all intersect.
00:25:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's, hi everyone by the way, lovely to be here.
00:25:07
Speaker
I think one of the most fascinating things that I found in my role is just having the chance to delve into the collections through those three distinctive areas and, you know, I often think about concepts like, you know, ornament and abstraction or craftsmanship and sort of histories of making which I think apply at various scales and contexts in all three areas whether it's
00:25:30
Speaker
architecture at a larger scale design or decorative arts.
00:25:34
Speaker
And I think for me what's fascinating also being at the Met is that there's a chance to look at that through the lens of 5,000 years of history and various cultural contexts.
00:25:45
Speaker
And it's actually quite, it's really exciting to sort of see some of these common narratives emerge across these different areas of our collection.
00:25:55
Speaker
and there are certain objects in our collection which I think really speak well to this, and we haven't got any images of this, but I just thought of this as you were asking the question.
00:26:04
Speaker
We have, for example, these panels from the Normandy Ocean Liner, which on the one hand, they're extraordinary examples of full-scale architecture because they're architectural fragments from one of the
00:26:17
Speaker
first class dining saloons on the Normandy but they're these beautifully reverse painted glass panels so there's an extreme level of craftsmanship and detail in terms of decorative arts but then there are also these great examples of interior design as part of a holistic scheme and it defined a sort of lived, occupied, activated space so I think all these
00:26:41
Speaker
Even that one object as a case study, I think, speaks to how my role and the way in which we might develop these themes at the Met might grow in the future.
00:26:51
Speaker
Actually, the image we have up now is of three very distinctive examples of period rooms at the Met.
00:26:59
Speaker
And I think period rooms are, having worked at the Stone Museum for a number of years as well, before my time here in the States, I've always been fascinated with the idea of period rooms and the roles they play in museums.
00:27:10
Speaker
But we have here an example of our most recent period room project, the Afrofuturist period room project, our Renaissance studiolo and an 18th century Venetian bedroom in the bottom right.
00:27:24
Speaker
And I think they're all three very different
00:27:29
Speaker
notions of the period room, but I think period rooms themselves are such interesting examples of sort of tapping into the idea of architecture and the built environment, sort of lived spaces, but then also on a smaller level, object level, this idea of design
00:27:42
Speaker
holistically described as design and decorative arts and objects.
00:27:47
Speaker
So I think period rooms are also these great case studies of all three of those areas sort of coinciding, I think.
00:27:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:27:53
Speaker
Well, and so we've just heard from Rox and from Andrew, who are two artists who are very much conscious of the ways in which their work draws on historical heritage, while at the same time pushing those traditions forward in various ways.
00:28:12
Speaker
you know, to editorialize a little, it often seems to me that the best artists and the most influential artists are ones whose work manages to look backward and forward at the same time.
00:28:24
Speaker
As a curator, is that a quality that you're conscious of and looking for?
00:28:28
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:28:30
Speaker
I think, you know, when I think of contemporary artists and designers that we engage with or collect or, you know, collaborate with, it's what's most compelling for us is where these are
00:28:41
Speaker
artists and designers telling a new story, whether that's drawing upon the past or creating something entirely new and radical.
00:28:48
Speaker
And again, I think, you know, when I think about the Met's collections, there are so many opportunities for that type of sort of deep historical research and engaging with those various contexts.
00:29:00
Speaker
And, you know, as a design and architectural historian, when I think about the, you know, even the last 200 years of design history, it's been...
00:29:09
Speaker
utterly defined by this idea of looking forward and back, whether that's the design reform movement in the 19th century in Britain where architects and designers were looking to the Islamic world or Indian design to sort of find a new vision for 19th century design, or
00:29:27
Speaker
when we look in the 20th century, the sort of influence of medieval design on arts and crafts, for example, the idea of the guild and the collective, which became so influential on forms of making and material culture, or the postmodern movement, I've always been interested in as a sort of intrinsically political and radical movement, but it was all about engaging with the past in a sort of
00:29:53
Speaker
on its own terms in a way, sort of like re-embracing ornament and decoration and color.
00:29:57
Speaker
And so that way of engaging with the past, which isn't just simply a sense of sort of, you know, going back to the idea of the aura and Benjamin, it's not simply this idea of like ritual worship, but it's about adapting and sort of like the idea of sampling and remixing, I think has come up in both, you know, with Roxanne and Andrew's sort of,
00:30:15
Speaker
talks just now and that idea of the remix and the sample to sort of reconfigure and sort of recontextualize I think is such a valuable tool for curators, historians and artists and designers.
00:30:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:30:29
Speaker
Well, okay, so there's, you know, it strikes me that there can sometimes be a pretty fine line between work that's historically inflected and inspired and interesting versus pieces that are sort of derivative and old hat, and you've seen it all before, and it's kind of dull.
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:52
Speaker
What do you look for in a work?
00:30:53
Speaker
What are the characteristics that separate one from the other?
Engaging with History and Craftsmanship
00:30:57
Speaker
I'm not just saying this, but I think Roxanne and Andrew are great examples of this.
00:31:01
Speaker
What always stands out to me is when artists or designers have a real engagement with that history and that cultural context.
00:31:10
Speaker
and sort of understanding their place in that sort of continuum of design or art or architectural history.
00:31:16
Speaker
And I think also the idea of, you know, really having an interest in the sort of histories of making and technique.
00:31:24
Speaker
And I think, you know, Roxanne, you also talked a lot about technique and, you know, in the context of ceramics, the, you know, the idea of, you know, sort of continuing and being a
00:31:36
Speaker
cognizant of a tradition and series of techniques but adapting it to a sort of contemporary context and seeing how those various approaches to craft history or design history apply themselves through this sort of embodiment of skill and labor in an object or an architectural space.
00:31:54
Speaker
I think that's what's really interesting for me.
00:31:56
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:31:58
Speaker
Well, to go back to Benjamin's essay again for a moment,
00:32:03
Speaker
He made a great deal out of what I mentioned earlier, this sort of metaphysical aura that imbues a handcrafted work of art and distinguishes it from a mass-produced object.
00:32:17
Speaker
At the same time, at various points in the last century or more of art history, prints and multiples have sometimes taken center stage
00:32:27
Speaker
In the fine art world, of course, we're all familiar with the increasing, or at this point, maybe maxed out already, sort of mass production of household goods.
00:32:39
Speaker
How, I mean, would you say we've taken a wrong turn somewhere along the lines or would you say that, you know, maybe Benjamin made a mistake in the way that he fetishized this aura?
00:32:53
Speaker
How would you think about that tension?
00:32:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, like many of us here at the Winter Show and read magazine antiques, you know, I'm
00:33:04
Speaker
I care very much about the aura and the idea or the definition of the original, whatever that might mean.
00:33:11
Speaker
Because I think as a curator, historian, the idea of provenance, for example, is really important.
00:33:17
Speaker
The fact that these objects have lives and the fact that they bear the marks of the passage of time and they had a significance in a particular location in a particular moment of time.
00:33:32
Speaker
Those things, I think, are really important
00:33:35
Speaker
otherwise I wouldn't be working in a museum frankly but at the same time when I read Benjamin I think what's really kind of fascinating and kind of quite radical and political about his this idea of the aura is that he's almost embracing the idea of the impact of technology on this idea of reproduction and I think Andrew you mentioned the idea of
00:33:55
Speaker
the fact that you saw these images in the magazine Antiques, for example, and your work now is being reproduced.
00:34:01
Speaker
And when Benjamin talks about sort of mass popular dissemination, he talks about, he presented radio shows in the 20s for children,
00:34:10
Speaker
talks about the advent of cinema and the idea of a communal experience.
00:34:14
Speaker
Those aspects, I think, are where he's sort of really embracing the idea of reproductions being for this kind of common social good.
00:34:22
Speaker
And, you know, having worked somewhere like the V&A, for example, you know, I always think about the idea of, you know, that museum's history of, like, the cast collection, for example, and the cast courts, which were these
00:34:37
Speaker
full-scale plaster reproductions of architectural spaces and also having thousands of electrotypes, which were copies of objects.
00:34:46
Speaker
And those were both, to some extent, examples of technological advance, but there was this educational remit, and it was about inspiring artists and designers and the general public.
00:34:57
Speaker
I think that's where the idea of the aura, it's kind of okay to debunk the idea of the aura and the original because what is the true value of that object if it's being, yes, there may be an original that had a specific context, but especially when we work in cultural institutions, the idea of the dissemination and the kind of reception of that I think is equally, if not more, important.
00:35:21
Speaker
And then I also mentioned period rooms because...
00:35:25
Speaker
this idea of the authentic, I think, comes up a lot with period rooms, because on the one hand, I mean, the Afrofuturist period room, which we opened at the Met last November, was in a way a kind of comment and a critique on the idea of, there's no such thing as an authentic period room, because number one, the idea of a period doesn't really exist, because it's not a single second and a minute in time, it's layers of history, and as curators, we often
00:35:48
Speaker
we're often speculating often like what objects existed and what permutations and were any of these objects actually original to that specific room in that specific moment in time.
00:35:56
Speaker
And so there's always this sort of slightly theatrical, as you can see with the studiolo and the Venetian bedroom, theatrical aspect of these rooms.
00:36:04
Speaker
They're sort of stage sets in a way.
00:36:06
Speaker
And so there's, I think, the idea of embracing a period room as not necessarily being like authentic in that sense is I think very productive and sort of interesting.
00:36:16
Speaker
And so that's where the idea of the aura, I think, can be questioned.
00:36:19
Speaker
And then also, of course, seeing how many examples there are of period rooms that have been taken out of their original context.
00:36:28
Speaker
We have so many examples that have met.
00:36:29
Speaker
And at the V&A, we had many examples of historic house collections that have been dismantled.
00:36:35
Speaker
And so you think to yourself, well, what...
00:36:40
Speaker
what is the authentic aspect of this room?
00:36:42
Speaker
Is it the fact that these are some original panels and sort of flooring and some objects?
00:36:47
Speaker
Or would it be more valuable to actually create a perfect facsimile in the original building or to reconstruct the building so people understood the full holistic context?
00:36:57
Speaker
Because when you take a period room out of context, that's completely dismantling the aura, as it were.
00:37:03
Speaker
And that's why one of the other examples I included in these images were the work of the Factum Foundation based in Madrid who create these extraordinary facsimiles of historic objects, whether it's the sarcophagus of Seti I or this example which, Ben, you have up now, which is the painting by Veronese of the wedding at Cana.
00:37:27
Speaker
And
00:37:28
Speaker
they created this extraordinary reproduction which wasn't just in terms of the image but the actual physical qualities of the surface of the paint.
00:37:35
Speaker
It was a laborious combination of high-level digital scanning and a combination of digital fabrication and hand-built additions.
00:37:48
Speaker
What's powerful about this is this idea of the aura because most people who see the painting in the Louvre, they
00:37:56
Speaker
most people actually are sort of focused on seeing the Mona Lisa, which is on the opposite side of the wall, so most people kind of walk past it.
00:38:01
Speaker
But Napoleon took this painting centuries ago from this refectory at San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, and so the idea was to create this facsimile and to bring it back to its original context.
00:38:14
Speaker
And Adam Lowe, the head of the Factum Foundation, often talks about these amazing facsimiles being not necessarily copies, but sort of almost like performances of an object.
00:38:22
Speaker
And so that's
00:38:23
Speaker
what I think is so interesting about this idea of the aura and the authentic, like which of these is actually more authentic?
00:38:27
Speaker
Is it the copy that you wouldn't actually to the naked eye could tell which was the real thing?
00:38:32
Speaker
Or is it the painting that's in the Louvre?
00:38:34
Speaker
Because it literally was Veronese's painting.
00:38:36
Speaker
And I think that opens up so many interesting and provocative philosophical questions for us.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:42
Speaker
Well, and of course, as soon as you start talking about authenticity in the context of the market,
00:38:46
Speaker
you create a whole new rabbit hole that we could dive down.
00:38:50
Speaker
But I wanted to put a couple of questions to any or all of you, just thinking a bit broadly about the place that we're in, in terms of art history, in terms of art creation.
00:39:05
Speaker
What are the technologies that are
00:39:09
Speaker
new to the world or that are just being developed right now that you already know or that you suspect are going to have the most significant influence on the way that you do your work, whether that's
00:39:25
Speaker
creating art or whether it's thinking about it.
00:39:28
Speaker
What are some of the changes that you think of?
00:39:32
Speaker
Because technology, of course, is always inherently bound up in the way that art is produced, and that's always been the case.
00:39:40
Speaker
But today, right now, what is happening in the world of technology that's having the strongest influence on what
NFTs and Originality in Digital Art
00:39:47
Speaker
you do?
00:39:47
Speaker
And I'll sort of let any or all of you who'd like to take that on
00:39:52
Speaker
Well, I already mentioned that I'm having an NFT made of one of my pieces and also a 3D printed image.
00:39:58
Speaker
And it's interesting to think about and talk about the aura because I'm like, is it going to be in these objects?
00:40:04
Speaker
Probably not, but does it really matter?
00:40:07
Speaker
So that's, I'm doing that more as a, I think it's an interesting exercise.
00:40:12
Speaker
I don't know how seriously I'm thinking about this NFT or the 3D printed, which will be smaller and it won't be ceramic and,
00:40:21
Speaker
It would be interesting to see what it looks like.
00:40:24
Speaker
But again, I just think it's kind of a fun exercise, but my expectation is that it won't be as significant.
00:40:33
Speaker
I mean, definitely it won't be as significant as the original and probably won't have that aura.
00:40:38
Speaker
And the white hand in here
00:40:40
Speaker
I think this is, maybe I'm getting off topic, but it goes back to the ore, and I kind of want to talk about this because I think this is really interesting.
00:40:47
Speaker
The White Hand, this was in a show, and this woman, Andrea Scott, wrote about it in The New Yorker.
00:40:53
Speaker
The show was called Fur Cup, you know, based on that piece of art, and one thing that she wrote about my work was this piece in particular was something to the effect of that this
00:41:04
Speaker
decorative object was a great example of, I sent you the quote, I'm paraphrasing, that art has to do with spirit, not with decoration.
00:41:13
Speaker
That's what she said about this piece.
00:41:15
Speaker
And I thought that that was like the greatest compliment because it is so highly decorated, literally bejeweled.
00:41:22
Speaker
and also a candle holder, so based on utility, also absurdity like I talked about earlier.
00:41:28
Speaker
So the fact that somebody picked up on the fact that this is really about spirit, not decoration, I just felt like, oh, I guess that's coming through because I do think about this thing, but it's hard to define.
00:41:41
Speaker
You know, it's like maybe it's in some pieces more than others.
00:41:45
Speaker
So I'm off topic, but packing on to previous
00:41:49
Speaker
things that were said.
00:41:51
Speaker
Yeah, so the new technologies will be part of kind of my work, side note, in the margins.
00:41:57
Speaker
And I'm just kind of curious to see what that will, what it will be like to have an NFT of a vase.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah, if I could, I'll just jump in as well.
00:42:06
Speaker
I'm so glad you mentioned NFTs actually, because I think it is such a provocative kind of fascinating topic.
00:42:10
Speaker
And I,
00:42:11
Speaker
I have a lot of healthy skepticism about NFTs as well.
00:42:14
Speaker
But one of the things I thought was most interesting about NFTs was the fact that because they're based on blockchain technology, there's this kind of encoded idea through the distributed ledger of the idea of the original because they literally cannot be another.
00:42:33
Speaker
You could create a kind of copy, as it were, and you could have
00:42:36
Speaker
Beeple's NFT hanging in your room, but you don't own the original because it hasn't got that sort of digital certificate, to paraphrase.
00:42:44
Speaker
And I think that is interesting.
00:42:45
Speaker
Even though it's a digital, non-tangible, non-physical object, they've literally gone all in on the idea of literally defining which is the original, which I think is kind of an interesting model in thinking about
00:42:58
Speaker
what is the original, the first?
00:43:01
Speaker
And there are a lot of these NFTs that sort of continue a tradition of digital generative art.
00:43:09
Speaker
And that kind of also makes me think of another technology, which I think, you know, especially in design and architecture is becoming more and more prevalent.
00:43:15
Speaker
And that's the idea of kind of artificial intelligence and the way in which that kind of
00:43:21
Speaker
guides design so it's and and so it makes me think about the aura in the sense that you know often we think about the aura it's the mark of the maker and so in a world where you know uh design is becoming much more collaborative between like you know a bunch of humans who are designing something and a series of algorithms which are sort of finding the most efficient engineering ratio or a kind of facade treatment um
00:43:45
Speaker
who is the maker and that idea of the aura and kind of authenticity comes up a lot, I think, when I think about AI's potential impact on design in the future.
00:43:54
Speaker
So that's something I think about.
00:43:56
Speaker
There's an intriguing idea that I've seen bandied about by certain auction houses
00:44:01
Speaker
around NFTs, which is to use an NFT actually to carry forward information about a particular physical object.
00:44:08
Speaker
So there's no pretense that you own the object by owning the NFT.
00:44:13
Speaker
It's not even really exciting to own the NFT.
00:44:16
Speaker
It's just that the NFT gives you a vehicle to add information as the object passes through the world and changes hands as you learn more about it, as other people own it and collect it and donate it to museums and whatnot.
00:44:31
Speaker
I haven't seen a very strong use case for that yet, but I hope people continue to explore that because it sounds like quite an interesting idea.
00:44:45
Speaker
On the flip side of that coin, I've been asking about technology.
00:44:50
Speaker
But we've also been talking about history.
00:44:52
Speaker
And I wonder if you'd like to speak about a historical idea or a historical technique or even an art historical philosophy or approach to thinking about art that you would like to see more of in today's world that has maybe been unfairly left
00:45:20
Speaker
on the wayside.
00:45:21
Speaker
I'll chime in.
00:45:24
Speaker
So speaking of the amphora, these were containers for food.
00:45:31
Speaker
These decorated beautiful objects that are still significant today held olive oil, wine, grain, etc.
00:45:40
Speaker
So I think wouldn't it be amazing to use less plastic and start using ceramics in this way?
00:45:47
Speaker
So I think bring that historical philosophy back.
00:45:50
Speaker
So not just for the art world, for the world at large.
00:45:54
Speaker
Fantastic.
00:45:56
Speaker
We always tell our clients to use the pieces they buy from us because after all that's what they were made for.
00:46:03
Speaker
And if you don't, well it's sort of like sucking the soul out of the thing.
00:46:08
Speaker
It's like the analogy I make sometimes is like closing Notre Dame to worshippers because it's too important as a historical work of architecture for people to enjoy it for its original purpose of worship.
00:46:21
Speaker
it would be a bit of a sad thing.
00:46:23
Speaker
Similarly, it's a bit of a sad thing to see people buy a tankard and never pour a glass of beer into it.
00:46:32
Speaker
Any other thoughts on the historical ideas that you'd like to see people pay a little more attention to these days?
00:46:41
Speaker
I mean, something I often think about, you know, in terms of the design of buildings, you know, when I think about, like, the 19th century, which sort of...
00:46:49
Speaker
was the start of the specialization of the architects.
00:46:53
Speaker
When we look back centuries, there was this idea of master builders or masons and the fact that architects weren't just designers of buildings, but they cared about all the details of every single aspect of their constructions.
00:47:10
Speaker
I think there's something about, and this kind of connects with another historical idea which might be a sort of useful idea for the future, the idea of the sort of the guild or the sort of collaborative, the collective of designers.
00:47:21
Speaker
Because, you know, often we, you know, with the nature of sort of architectural procurement now, you know, a designer is involved at a certain stage, but then
00:47:31
Speaker
things like the handrail and the doorknobs, they all get specialised off into other areas and it becomes, you know, it's such a distributed kind of form of design.
00:47:42
Speaker
One could argue that we've kind of lost that idea of every single detail being thought of by like a single group of people in a sort of collective or a guild type way, as was more common, you know, centuries ago.
00:47:53
Speaker
So, and that's sort of like the idea of the tactility and the quality of those materials and that sort of, again, it goes back to that question you asked about
00:48:01
Speaker
architecture design and decorative arts being this unified thing.
00:48:04
Speaker
The idea of every level of detail being thought of with the same care, whether it's the building or the things you touch, the tactility, that I think would be an interesting thing to sort of revive maybe.
00:48:18
Speaker
Incidentally, what are we looking at here?
00:48:20
Speaker
Sorry?
00:48:21
Speaker
I said incidentally, what are we looking at here?
00:48:23
Speaker
Oh, yes.
00:48:24
Speaker
So this was...
00:48:27
Speaker
my sort of provocative final slide, which was, this is a sort of placeholder image for this idea of the metaverse, which I think is, perhaps relates to your earlier question, Ben, about new technologies and...
The Metaverse and Future of Art
00:48:40
Speaker
Again, like NFTs, I have a lot of healthy skepticism about the metaverse and what it even means, and no one seems to be clear about what the definition is.
00:48:47
Speaker
But the idea of having this sort of digital world where we might occupy for part of our lives, what does that mean for architects and designers and objects?
00:49:01
Speaker
And I often think about, even in the early days of the internet, people thought, well,
00:49:08
Speaker
what is going to be the final culmination of this?
00:49:10
Speaker
What's the purpose?
00:49:12
Speaker
How does design have a part in this?
00:49:14
Speaker
When the internet was, or the World Wide Web rather, was much more text-based, no one could have imagined a world of sort of
00:49:21
Speaker
like mobile technology and sort of having the internet on the move or having streaming or video.
00:49:27
Speaker
And so I think the metaverse sort of offers a similar kind of interesting proposition in terms of what does it really mean?
00:49:32
Speaker
Is it something that really derives from gaming culture?
00:49:34
Speaker
Is it somewhere where we can actually, you know, find other ways of collaborating and community building, for example?
00:49:42
Speaker
And, you know, what...
00:49:45
Speaker
what does this mean for us in terms of the physical object or the original object or the aura, for example?
00:49:50
Speaker
And I think these new possibilities, I think, are something interesting in the design and architecture context.
00:49:59
Speaker
But, yeah, I don't know if either of you have thoughts about the metaverse or about these sort of worlds of
00:50:05
Speaker
online living.
00:50:06
Speaker
I have no thoughts about the metaverse, but I just remembered, I just want to share this story.
00:50:12
Speaker
I've been to India and thinking of like the containers, the ceramic, I bought a cup of tea more than once from a street vendor and the cups were thrown on a makeshift wheel and the clay wasn't fired.
00:50:25
Speaker
So it was just air dry clay and hot tea was put in it.
00:50:29
Speaker
So you, people were drinking tea out of this cup that was just basically just
00:50:34
Speaker
dried mud, dried clay.
00:50:37
Speaker
If you held onto the cup of tea for too long because it wasn't fired, the cup would literally disintegrate in your hand.
00:50:44
Speaker
And then when you were done, people just tossed it on the street.
00:50:47
Speaker
So we should also bring that back.
00:50:49
Speaker
I like that idea.
00:50:51
Speaker
And the metaverse.
00:50:53
Speaker
It makes me think of what you said earlier, Roxanne, about fragments.
00:50:57
Speaker
It makes me think of clay pipes.
00:51:02
Speaker
Clay pipes that often get broken and crushed.
00:51:05
Speaker
They're such an interesting, slightly ephemeral example of clay and ceramics being used, especially in an archaeological context.
00:51:14
Speaker
you know like trawling the side of the River Thames and finding these kind of 18th century examples of clay pipes and yeah, it reminds me of your India story.
00:51:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:51:23
Speaker
I also recently did a piece, I'm sorry if I'm dominating this real quick, made out of 850 pounds of wet clay.
00:51:31
Speaker
I did a, it was not fired.
00:51:33
Speaker
Like an ephemeral piece, speaking of ephemera, I invited some friends to make an object.
00:51:38
Speaker
It was based on like Vanita, still life painting, so traditional.
00:51:41
Speaker
So there was lots of vessels, but it was just all brown clay on a two-tiered platform with kind of stalactite forms and candles, but all done with clay.
00:51:50
Speaker
Skulls, and then I invited people to come and make objects.
00:51:54
Speaker
So it was this kind of ongoing, very collaborative project.
00:51:58
Speaker
but also ephemeral peace that at the end I literally smashed things with a hammer and dust to dust.
00:52:04
Speaker
Let it go.
00:52:07
Speaker
Yeah, that piece must have had a hell of an aura by the end.
00:52:11
Speaker
Thank you all so much.
00:52:13
Speaker
Again, Abraham Thomas, Andrew Lamar Hopkins, Roxanne Jackson, I appreciate your time and your thoughts.
00:52:22
Speaker
Thank you again to Helen and to the Winter Show team, also to the magazine Antiques.
00:52:26
Speaker
Thank you all for coming.
00:52:28
Speaker
The show is open, so go find something with an aura and bring it home with you.
Closing Remarks and Audience Engagement
00:52:39
Speaker
That's today's episode.
00:52:40
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:52:41
Speaker
Again, we will be back in a few months with the new season of Curious Objects, so I really appreciate your patience.
00:52:48
Speaker
For now, if you'd like to support Curious Objects and the work we're doing, the easiest way to do that is to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening right now.
00:52:59
Speaker
This helps others learn about the podcast, which is ultimately what makes it possible for us to do what we're doing.
00:53:05
Speaker
So thank you so much.
00:53:06
Speaker
I really appreciate it.
00:53:08
Speaker
And we'll be back with you soon.
00:53:11
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Delata.
00:53:17
Speaker
Marketing by Jennifer Norton.
00:53:18
Speaker
Mateo Solis Prada is our digital media assistant.
00:53:22
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:53:24
Speaker
And I'm Ben Miller.