Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lydian Stater.
Speaker: Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
Speaker: Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: This week's guest is Mitchell F. Chan.
Speaker: Mitchell F. Chan has created innovative works about technology since 2006.
Speaker: He creates large-scale public works, gallery installations, and digital artworks.
Speaker: He is best known for creating one of the earliest non-fungible token artworks, which linked the immateriality of blockchain to the conceptual art practice of Yves Klein.
Speaker: In 2009, he was awarded the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Trustee Scholarship in Art and Technology Studies.
Speaker: His work has been covered and discussed in numerous media outlets including Art Forum, Art in America, Vice, Canadian Art, Slate, the Toronto Star, and Gizmodo.
Speaker: Welcome, Mitchell.
Speaker: Hi, can you hear me?
Speaker: Yes, we can.
Speaker: Can you hear us?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Hey, this is Joseph.
Speaker: He's my business gallery partner.
Speaker: How's it going?
Speaker: Good, good.
Speaker: Nice to meet you.
Speaker: Yeah, I can't remember.
Speaker: I was at the unconference as well.
Speaker: And I don't know if we actually
Speaker: chatted or crossed paths during that.
Speaker: It was busy.
Speaker: I saw you having a lively discussion from afar during the first session.
Speaker: Yeah, you know what?
Speaker: It's funny.
Speaker: I was just talking to Stevie P yesterday, actually, about the next one.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I've been on the Discord waiting for him to offer up people to offer up workshops because I'd like to or sessions.
Speaker: I'd like to do another one.
Speaker: Yeah, me too.
Speaker: I mean, it was a really, really good crowd.
Speaker: Super appreciative.
Speaker: Yeah, it was.
Speaker: It was awesome.
Speaker: I felt because we, you know, like we're fairly new to crypto.
Speaker: And so we dove in and crossed paths with lots of different kinds of people.
Speaker: And none of none of them yet at that point were those kinds of people in such a large number who were really interested in crypto.
Speaker: the more thoughtful artistic side of the artwork going into it.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Stevie P is a great kind of lightning rod for that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it was cool.
Speaker: Well, thanks.
Speaker: So how's it going?
Speaker: So what do you guys want to do today?
Speaker: Well, I mean, we keep it simple, very conversational.
Speaker: I mean, obviously, we like your work.
Speaker: We met at that conference.
Speaker: I had heard about your work on another podcast, Ipse Dixit.
Speaker: yeah with brian fry i love brian fry uh that's where i first saw your work and i was intrigued and then it was great to catch up and actually be in that panel or in the discussion room where you led uh last what was your what was y'all's group what was the discussion i honestly don't know i just remember it was really good
Speaker: I mean, I think that's what you want, right?
Speaker: You want people to go away remembering that it was really good and fruitful and rewarding.
Speaker: I need to talk to this guy at a future date.
Speaker: And here we are.
Speaker: Here we are.
Speaker: So happy to be here.
Speaker: I did contract COVID in that conference.
Speaker: Oh, congratulations.
Speaker: Everybody did.
Speaker: Everybody did.
Speaker: That was the big take away.
Speaker: Yeah, everybody at NFT NYC got it, except for me, actually.
Speaker: Yeah, I didn't get it either, but it's because I just had had it or something.
Speaker: I can't remember what the details were.
Speaker: I had it in May, so when that happened, it was like, I guess I was immune.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I did see that a lot of people got it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who would have thunk that...
Speaker: a bunch of libertarians coming across the country to New York City to have an event.
Speaker: Yeah, it's only the most obvious thing.
Speaker: They brought a decentralized virus with them and distributed it.
Speaker: Yeah, that was fun.
Speaker: So, yeah, I mean, we...
Speaker: We wanted to say, we wanted to talk about like your recent projects.
Speaker: We wanted to take your take on kind of like work where NFTs are now.
Speaker: That was a considerably different time.
Speaker: It seems like the crypto time runs in like decades versus six single years.
Speaker: Yeah, things go pretty fast, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I just read your 33 page Eves Klein paper.
Speaker: That was fascinating.
Speaker: Yeah, it's not that long of a read.
Speaker: No, it is.
Speaker: There's a lot of pictures.
Speaker: Double space.
Speaker: It's actually a fairly short read and there's a reasonable number of pictures.
Speaker: Yeah, he told me he just read it and I opened it up and I was like, oh, this isn't 33 real pages.
Speaker: It's like 33 pages.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it's totally consumable for anybody who wants to read it.
Speaker: It is accessible.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: And that was sort of, you know, my thesis that I was putting out there like five, five years ago, or just, you know, my observation about what crypto could be for art from a conceptual standpoint in terms of continuing, you know, explorations in the history of conceptual art and, you know, also as a potential medium for exchange.
Speaker: Yeah, I,
Speaker: Oh, sorry.
Speaker: Go ahead, Alex.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: Go.
Speaker: I was just going to say, I don't think that like formal training or education is necessarily that important for a lot of things.
Speaker: But I am curious.
Speaker: You don't have like an about me on your page.
Speaker: And I'm just curious how you came, how you kind of like came to how you came to art, how you came to attack if one came before the other or what your kind of like path was in like, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Briefly.
Speaker: I mean, I've been an artist for a long time and I've been making art with technology and art about technology for a long time.
Speaker: I'm a graduate of these art and technology studies program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Speaker: Oh, that's where I went.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so I graduated 2011.
Speaker: 2003 for me.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: Yeah, and so they're, you know, obviously as an artist, I think anybody who is really trying to make art that is about the world that they live in today is making art about technology, right, and a society and a culture that is shaped by technology.
Speaker: And, you know, I'd also been fortunate to learn some of the tools to use technology as my medium.
Speaker: And that is a symmetry that I really like to have in my practice where I like to employ the medium that I'm critiquing.
Speaker: That's not a really uncommon thing
Speaker: practice.
Speaker: And so I've done a lot of that.
Speaker: And in 2017,
Speaker: I was looking at blockchain technology and thinking this could be something that is important to society.
Speaker: And I just wanted to think about it as an artist.
Speaker: But it's a weird thing to wrap your head around.
Speaker: The technology side of it is fine.
Speaker: It's something that you can learn about.
Speaker: You can go and you can learn solidity or you can learn how to spin up a Bitcoin node or whatever.
Speaker: but it was the conceptual underpinnings of it.
Speaker: As an artist, you're not just interested in, oh, how does this technology work?
Speaker: Okay, cool, now I can use it and make doodles.
Speaker: That's what a creative technologist does.
Speaker: That's an experiment.
Speaker: As an artist, you look at that, you do all that, and then you think, what does this mean?
Speaker: What does it mean that we're a society that produced this?
Speaker: And so it turns out that, you know, there were some precedents in art history and in theory that kind of pointed the way about actually why we as a society would produce this, why we would produce Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Speaker: And so in 2017, right, I made a project that was...
Speaker: trying to draw a straight direct line between the conceptual work of Yves Klein beginning in 1958 and Ethereum and saying that both of these things took a very similar approach to ideas of ownership and to locating the source of value.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: That was super helpful.
Speaker: I like to get a little context on background because I think it helps me shape questions and it's super interesting.
Speaker: I had, and I think maybe connected to that Eve Klein piece, one of the things I noticed in a couple projects that was coming up was, or maybe it was just the most recent one, was the ability of the NFT to separate the expressive
Speaker: parts of art from the commodity part of art, right?
Speaker: Am I saying that kind of correct in the way that you've talked about it?
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I'm curious, like in relation to conceptual art,
Speaker: you know, I'm Alex is actually the art history guy, but in my general understanding of conceptualism, it was really an anti market, anti commodity kind of action for a lot of the artists.
Speaker: And, and there was there was obviously like the reasons for that.
Speaker: And it was part of that era.
Speaker: And it was part of the time that they were existing in.
Speaker: But so like NFTs allow
Speaker: art that was hard to be commodified become commodified, which can be great for like getting artists paid.
Speaker: I'm wondering if you have thoughts on kind of like whether that's a good thing for like the artwork in general, I guess.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Well, I'll say, so I'll lead with a straight up answer, which is yes.
Speaker: Yes, it's a very good thing.
Speaker: And now let's look at some, you know, precedents kind of that you're invoking and pick them apart a little bit, right?
Speaker: Like this whole idea that conceptualism was...
Speaker: a rebellion against the commodification of art.
Speaker: I think that's pretty disingenuous, right?
Speaker: And when you read about it, like if you read, you know, Lucy Lepard's Six Years, which is, you know, is close to a, like, living history document of somebody who is there in the conceptualism moment.
Speaker: It's like 10 pages into that book, she just admits, like, yeah, this whole anti-commercialism thing didn't last very long, you know?
Speaker: And this is actually because it can't to write it like can't last that long.
Speaker: That's yeah, sorry.
Speaker: It can't like one of the ways that the world of art and the world of finance are similar is that they've both done incredible jobs of turning who knows what completely intangible abstract ideas into commodities, right, that can be bought and sold.
Speaker: And so
Speaker: This is actually a big problem because, look, I'm not like a huge like profit maxi.
Speaker: I'm not like a Gordon Gekko like greed is good type of person.
Speaker: But I believe in like navigating...
Speaker: thoughtfully, right, and conducting oneself thoughtfully, like as we all try to navigate this ever tightening net of capitalism, right?
Speaker: And we can't do that when we're being disingenuous about it.
Speaker: And the art world is very, very disingenuous about its relationship to capital.
Speaker: And it's also really tries to be very disingenuous about the ways that it is creating commodities.
Speaker: So that's one of the problems, I think, with art that has tried to be about finance.
Speaker: And it's one of the things that I found extremely refreshing about Eve Klein.
Speaker: When Eve Klein, like, Eve Klein never foregrounded the relationship between money and his work.
Speaker: Because, I mean, he was already at the level where he could just take it for granted.
Speaker: Like it was almost, it was not a thing that needed to be foregrounded.
Speaker: It was just obvious.
Speaker: So for instance, when he first sold his blue monochrome paintings,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: These were paintings.
Speaker: They were all more or less the same thing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: All canvases painted in a signature international fine blue.
Speaker: But he priced them differently.
Speaker: They all had different prices.
Speaker: And when people paid different prices for them and didn't immediately go to the cheapest one, like he was thrilled.
Speaker: This was sort of a proof to him, like he was sort of like a validated experiment.
Speaker: where he said that, you know, people's ownership of something and how much they pay for something is a part of their emotional connection.
Speaker: For better or for worse, there's just no getting around it.
Speaker: That act of buying something changes your relationship to it.
Speaker: And for Klein, art is nothing but a relationship between himself, the artist, and the collector.
Speaker: So that's important, like ownership
Speaker: and the process of transaction is an important artist's material for him.
Speaker: So that's really, really interesting, and that's another thing that we can sort of explore on blockchain.
Speaker: Whenever, you know, when I saw Ethereum, I saw we could make smart contracts, we can design, you know, not just our own assets, but our own mechanisms for how they are transacted.
Speaker: That is an art material.
Speaker: It is, because it's important to how we experience the artwork.
Speaker: Now, the other reason why I think art has had a really difficult time making honest work about capitalism, financialization, and its role therein, is that any sort of artistic experiment, even one done in good faith, and many of them, I think, are not done in good faith, right?
Speaker: Many of them are like, ah, capitalism, look at how much I can sell this thing for.
Speaker: I am making a statement about how vulgar the world is.
Speaker: And it's like, but...
Speaker: Like the joke is never on the artist, that's for sure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But, but, but anyway, besides that, one of the reasons why it's difficult to make art that like meaningfully,
Speaker: disrupts or intersects or, you know, whatever, the world of finance is just that like, you can't really do anything at any impactful scale, right?
Speaker: Like sometimes you'll see artists and they might do some sort of like, you know, social aesthetics piece or performance piece where they create a little marketplace in the gallery.
Speaker: But like, surely we understand that sort of social coordination experiments that happen
Speaker: In this extremely sanitized and elite space of a gallery or an artist-run center, we can't really infer anything about the real world from what happens in there, right?
Speaker: But something that you deploy to blockchain that is completely accessible, like forever, could be actually an interesting format, an interesting medium for making an art piece that's about the financialization of art.
Speaker: Sorry, I've ran off on a few different tangents from that question.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: I think that was a very thoughtful answer and kind of where my head was at.
Speaker: And I was, I think, playing devil's advocate a little bit.
Speaker: But you did mention, I mean, not because you brought up the accessibility of the blockchain, which in theory is accessible to everyone, but is not at all actually accessible to 90% of the world, probably 95% of the world.
Speaker: Yeah, you know what?
Speaker: That's a great point.
Speaker: That is a great point.
Speaker: And a great point where I should check myself because it's another thing that it's open and permissionless in theory, but you are right.
Speaker: There is definitely a cost to onboarding.
Speaker: The Ethereum blockchain right now is expensive to use.
Speaker: It costs a lot of money per transaction.
Speaker: It costs a lot of money to participate in.
Speaker: So I think that you are right.
Speaker: And, you know, I, I, I would also push against anybody who wants to put forward like a really simple utopian reading of this as like an open permission lists, you know, forum for, for, for art exactly for the reasons that you say.
Speaker: And it's like,
Speaker: And so if we want to go to the flip side, like sort of the ugly side of what we've seen about art on blockchain, right?
Speaker: It is that.
Speaker: It's that this world is populated by like a self-selecting group of people, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think probably when we both got interested, the utopian visions were part of our excitement about it that are not that are not gone, but are certainly like curbed a little bit from when from when we became interested, but but also like complicated in like a nice way too.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I like, you know, I share that perspective that you have, like, you know, every now and then I get really burned out on this, like on this culture because and to be explicit about some of the utopian claims of blockchain, right?
Speaker: You know, blockchain is a
Speaker: you know, advocates talk about blockchain leading to, you know, the world that provides easy access to capital for people who are unbanked or they talk about it, you know, being able to create new systems of self-governance that look a lot like direct democracies and things like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And the thing is, is I know that the people who believe in that are real, like, and I believe in that and that there are many people who are truly
Speaker: like working towards that in good faith including like i believe you know the the founder and creator of ethereum uh you know vitalik buterin like i genuinely believe that he wants to create something for the public good the problem is that we were just talking about barriers to access right the barrier to access the blockchain is not
Speaker: It's not the case that anybody with a utopian, with a dream of techno utopia can enter blockchain.
Speaker: That's not the case.
Speaker: It is the case that anybody with money can enter blockchain, right?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So like, unfortunately, the gatekeeping mechanism is a little bit different from like, you know, what you would want.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the gatekeeper is more just education and knowledge than it is like straight up money, but also like education and knowledge is connected to money.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: But that's like, you know, any time I have a conversation with people, it's a teaching slash learning thing a lot of the time because people just don't have the knowledge yet.
Speaker: I just wanted to first apologize that I look like a bad Rembrandt painting.
Speaker: I think that's cool.
Speaker: I started a new job at a museum and I'm actually in one of the corridors between a museum wall.
Speaker: So there's a hip hop exhibition on the other side of this wall.
Speaker: So I wanted to block it off and make sure that the sound wasn't pouring in.
Speaker: But I did want to mention or point out, it was interesting that you, obviously it was interesting that you went towards this technology to try to see what you could do with it and try to kind of like play around with the idea of finance and art.
Speaker: But the other thing in particular with Yves Klein was that he was very much into spirituality.
Speaker: And a lot of the talk in crypto, I've noticed, kind of like it almost has the feel of a spiritual talk because a lot of it is like in the future and it's like,
Speaker: um it's stuff that you can't prove and it's stuff that you can't really quantify it's like they they speak in these really grandiose kind of like forms and it's really good to excite people and for speculation and to kind of gather people around and make them uh open their pocketbooks and actually uh get some liquidity happening but it's it's interesting that it has a spirit it it's it's bordering on spirituality in my in my experience
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And so, um, like there are a couple of places we can take that.
Speaker: I mean, first of all is like this obvious, like a thing that you're pointing out about how like techno utopianism and especially like, you know,
Speaker: capitalist techno-utopianism is basically like the dominant form of spirituality, like at least certainly in the part of the world where I live and maybe where you live as well, right?
Speaker: And that was one of the things that I was interested in exploring, like
Speaker: particularly in that essay, in that 33-page essay that I wrote that accompanied that piece in 2017, that was directly drawing the parallels between Klein's mysticism, and particularly the mysticism that he assigned to his whole artistic practice, and the idea that he as an artist could conjure value from his force of personality.
Speaker: And this other type of mysticism that we see in blockchain culture and frankly in tech culture, right, which is that we can conjure value.
Speaker: I mean, interesting though, like it is that value is being conjured in a decentralized way, not from, well,
Speaker: I'll go back on this later, but the idea that the sentiment of a bunch of people can essentially put value into a Bitcoin, right?
Speaker: Like that value is created through however many decentralized nodes there are running the network and then other people
Speaker: investing in it.
Speaker: But there's other really interesting things that we can learn about society from this approach, right?
Speaker: One of the quotes that led my thinking when I was first doing art and blockchain was this quote by, I guess, the theorist or philosopher, Jean-Joseph Zhu.
Speaker: Is this the one about gold?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I read that on your site and it blew my mind for a second.
Speaker: But please, but please quote it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And he pointed, he points out this was he was noting that the rise of abstraction coincided with the same time that nation states were moving away from the gold standard towards fiat currency.
Speaker: And he says he's not trying to say there's a direct like, you know, causality or correlation between these things.
Speaker: It's more like the way that I read it is more like when there's something in the air, this same transition
Speaker: right, manifests itself in many different forms across different parts of our society.
Speaker: And like what he was seeing is one that people essentially like were able to trust, you know, abstraction, right?
Speaker: He's talking about the abstraction of money and the abstraction of images that like we are now okay living in what he like, you know, would call like a world of free-flowing reference, right?
Speaker: There doesn't have to be a direct one-to-one correlation between one banknote and one bar of gold that's stored in Fort Knox or whatever.
Speaker: And now, so that was also why when I was thinking about digital currency, all right, there's another...
Speaker: signals, you know, is a manifestation of, I think, a major shift in the collective psyche, right, of all of us, which is moving away from sort of like safe abstraction of value that is guaranteed by a centralized nation state to like now it's like, now it's really out there.
Speaker: Like now there's really,
Speaker: Like it's post post structuralist value, right?
Speaker: But maybe, I don't know.
Speaker: And then, but then, okay, so if that's the shoe dropping on the finance side, right?
Speaker: If we follow this lineage where like, okay, every time there's a change in monetary policy, that also indicates a change in how society is thinking about value in art,
Speaker: changes accordingly.
Speaker: So if this is happening now, this is another big change in how we think about currency and value in our lives.
Speaker: Surely art has to change as well, right?
Speaker: So
Speaker: I don't know what I'm thinking about.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: What decentralized abstraction?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I don't have a cool term for it.
Speaker: I still don't have the answer.
Speaker: But, you know, that's what I'm looking for.
Speaker: That's a great point.
Speaker: So you're saying keep painting and making sculpture.
Speaker: Yeah, it's always... Yeah, or you can always just go back to basics.
Speaker: That will always work, actually.
Speaker: Well, also on the point of spirituality is that, you know, if we talk about...
Speaker: The process of belief and and also cult like tendencies.
Speaker: You know, I think there's a lot of overlap in the crypto space with with cultish behavior similar to a very accepted cultish behavior that's in the art market and art world as well, because.
Speaker: You know, most people that I know who are not within the art world, when you show them any kind of painting that sold for more than a million dollars, it still blows their minds.
Speaker: There's still no way to kind of like understand...
Speaker: how that how that happens or why it happens.
Speaker: And it just it doesn't make any sense because it is a really it's a very abstract, complicated concept of how that value is created.
Speaker: And so like, then you take it even one step further, right, we're like going deeper down the rabbit hole.
Speaker: And there's, you like have to have this transition of belief in order to kind of like buy into
Speaker: some of the things that cryptocurrency can offer.
Speaker: And I still feel a lot safer knowing that I can like swap it out for USD whenever I need to.
Speaker: Like, I don't live in the Ethereum world like some people do because, I mean, I know it's challenging, but also there are people that are all in all the time, maybe less so now than there was.
Speaker: But, you know, like we haven't totally let go of the stability of state governments and those kinds of things.
Speaker: No, absolutely.
Speaker: But we are leaning that way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean...
Speaker: I don't know how far it's going to go.
Speaker: This completely decentralized world that they use, the word that they use in blockchain a lot is trustlessness.
Speaker: We should all be able to go about our business without ever needing to trust another human being.
Speaker: That's a good thing.
Speaker: And it sounds like nightmare to me.
Speaker: So, yeah, I don't know if we'll ever get to that fully realized vision of the blockchain maximalist world.
Speaker: And I probably hope that we don't, frankly.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Because then we'll just kind of be robots, right?
Speaker: If we're not ever interacting with anyone or trusting anyone for anything.
Speaker: which I mean, maybe it'll be awesome when it happens, but it doesn't sound that awesome to me.
Speaker: Maybe that's a good segue.
Speaker: If you don't mind kind of talking about a little bit about the Sol LeWitt NFT that you had put out as well, which I think was a nice bookend to the Aves Klein.
Speaker: There's a recurring theme here because I know that I've just said, you know,
Speaker: a bunch of, you know, sort of like very skeptical things about blockchain technology and blockchain culture, like which, you know, I believe are warranted.
Speaker: Like, you know, I'm still, you know, largely an advocate for blockchain.
Speaker: It's just a thing that, you know, as an artist and frankly, as a human being,
Speaker: I have to approach critically.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And, you know, usually the way that I approach things critically is by just trying to check it against, you know, previous ideas.
Speaker: And like I said, I could understand I could understand blockchain a lot better when I understood it through the lens of conceptual art and on the very fundamental level.
Speaker: I understood like the value proposition of blockchain a little bit through Eve Klein's conceptual works and NFTs in particular.
Speaker: And so I made that piece.
Speaker: I made my first blockchain art piece.
Speaker: It was called Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility in 2017.
Speaker: And that was before the term NFT existed.
Speaker: It was before like the NFTs had been standardized as, you know, a data format, I guess you could call them.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And so it was, you know, one of the earliest NFTs by virtue of the fact that there weren't NFTs.
Speaker: But then sort of like three and a half, right, four years later, you know, NFTs were a thing and they were being widely used.
Speaker: And I got to think about these things as like not just a hypothetical like, oh, yeah, if ever, you know, artwork were just tokens traded on a distributed ledger.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, it would be kind of like this.
Speaker: You know, I could really like see them in action and I could see a lot of it going on and, you know, think about it again now that this was in practice.
Speaker: And, you know, Saul LeWitt was an artist who was really interesting to use like as a sort of template for thinking about what's really happening with an NFT.
Speaker: And so the way that I invoked him was thinking about, and I'm going to come back to a theme that you mentioned earlier in this conversation, the separation of the commodity form and the experienced form of an artwork.
Speaker: And I think this is a really, really big thing.
Speaker: Now, Sol LeWitt didn't do a full-on split like this, not the way Klein did.
Speaker: Klein legitimately did it.
Speaker: He said his artwork is something this over here, it is this cloud of matter or whatever, and, you know, what you buy, like, you get this receipt and that's all that you get.
Speaker: You know, and, but, you know, Sol LeWitt famously, right, his best-known works are these wall drawings.
Speaker: And, you know, these wall drawings are a set of instructions that he, the artist Solowit writes, and then he signs the instructions, right?
Speaker: They're printed on a certificate.
Speaker: He sells it to the collector or the museum or whatever.
Speaker: And then, you know, the museum hires someone, I don't know, right?
Speaker: I mean, well, really, I do.
Speaker: Like, there are, like, professional Solowit installers now.
Speaker: It's a little cottage industry.
Speaker: But let's pretend before that was a thing.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: you don't know they hire like some some college kids or whatever to go and execute these instructions and draw the drawing on the wall right and in this way like there's a clear distinction made right and then me as the viewer I go in and I see that and there's this really clear distinction between what I'm seeing and experiencing and saying oh that's a solid width that's a really that's a really pretty artwork I really like those
Speaker: lines on the wall.
Speaker: That makes me feel happy, right?
Speaker: And then what is the actual thing that the museum paid a million dollars for or whatever, right?
Speaker: now I know that I'm subverting is thinking a little bit because he wanted to talk about his whole thing was that the idea is the artwork the idea is the artwork that's why it's conceptualism the concept is the artwork and the paper was the receptacle right the repository of that concept but again it's important to be
Speaker: honest about what the fact that art also is an asset and so there's another thing going on there so it is just like okay what did you need to do in order to make that work for you so you could you know pay for your Lower East Side studio or whatever which is that you know those ideas also became
Speaker: the asset, the thing that we're sold, which necessarily had to take on a different form.
Speaker: And so, boom, there you have it again, like that separation of what the viewer sees and what is bought and transacted.
Speaker: And Lewitt just happened to locate the value, like,
Speaker: He just happened to put the artistic value and the money value of the piece in the exact same repository.
Speaker: The certificate had both of them.
Speaker: For him, it had the artistic value of the piece.
Speaker: The drawing that was executed was just meh, whatever, right?
Speaker: I mean, I know he cared about it, but, you know, he would certainly prioritize that idea on paper.
Speaker: And that also is where the money value of the piece was.
Speaker: So that was really interesting.
Speaker: And it was really interesting for me to think about NFTs, right?
Speaker: Because NFTs are famously like the NFT is not the artwork, right?
Speaker: The NFT is a digital...
Speaker: it's three bits of data, really, that are stored on the blockchain.
Speaker: It's a token ID and a wallet address of who owns it and a field that tells you what this artwork looks like.
Speaker: But the artwork itself is elsewhere.
Speaker: It's a JPEG that's stored on a different server, probably not even on the blockchain.
Speaker: And this is an equivalent
Speaker: severance of the artistic form because that jpeg is over on another server somewhere and the commodity form which is the which is the token right which is the non-fungible token which stays on the blockchain is in a perfect form to be a liquid commodity right as a highly like tradable and resaleable asset
Speaker: And so anyway, I made, so I made an artwork that was about, you know, where I sort of like reinterpreted, you know, some Saul LeWitt instructions, essentially just as a way to put a pin in this idea.
Speaker: Yeah, I you mentioned the solo at Mass Mocha, which I feel like that was like the first time I really like saw I've seen his work before, but that was like the first time I really saw it.
Speaker: And in relation to NFT, something we talk about all the time is like being able to like so.
Speaker: So those works are in a museum that anybody can go to.
Speaker: depending on if they can pay the admission or whatever.
Speaker: But but NFTs kind of like turned the Internet into a public museum for everyone.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So like anybody, whether they own the thing or not, can go see the work, which has kind of been the function of museums.
Speaker: for a long time, which is to create repositories for this artwork that normally would sit in collectors houses and would never be seen by people if there wasn't a public facing institution that was supporting it.
Speaker: And now like the museum isn't really I mean, isn't necessary if the work that's going forward is going to be NFTs, at least not the way and not the public facing way to give people access to the work because everybody has access.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: And I think that is such an important point, right?
Speaker: Like we talked about, you know, the barrier to access to participate in the blockchain economy, right?
Speaker: Like to participate in blockchain technology.
Speaker: even but the barrier of access to access like the art that is being you know sold and transacted as nfts is ridiculously low right it's just like if you can go to a library and go online like you can participate and experience this art and that's i think really
Speaker: really important.
Speaker: So, you know, my most recent piece, you know, was commissioned by the Buffalo AKG Museum, the Albert Knox Gallery.
Speaker: And, you know, it was quite exciting for me because I wanted to make a piece that was, you know, you know, it was an NFT piece.
Speaker: And, but I wanted it to be like extremely accessible, which meant like platform agnostic.
Speaker: So it's a full piece of software, again, linked to a token so that, you know, the, whatever small number, relatively small number of people who wanted to buy it and own essentially the financial, you know, interest in this thing, like we're able to, while the work exists online, like,
Speaker: well, I don't want to say forever, like nothing's forever, but like for all to access, right?
Speaker: And that's whether or not the museum puts it on their website, right?
Speaker: And I think that that's really, really important.
Speaker: And for me, so for me now, like I'm even trying to make platform agnostic work.
Speaker: Like I want the work to present itself, whether you're on your phone or on your computer, right?
Speaker: for as many different people as possible.
Speaker: And, you know, this actually takes me back to another really important thing about my background, because as much as it was important for me that I, you know, had a background in art and technology studies, like learning technology, just as important is that I spent most of my career making public art.
Speaker: um and doing you know commissions for public parks plazas like you know spaces like that um where i was always thinking about how this would connect to like a a general audience and like what it would mean for like a really nice like heterogeneous group of people to interact with that work and so i hope that that spirit of kind of like
Speaker: you know pluralism comes back to to art because we're presenting in this very very public way and i think it's a really important point um about about nfts is that access and of course like i don't mean to suggest that like museums are going away like they're not museums are lovely spaces i love going to museums i love museums and they do important services and you know they conserve art and elevate art and everything and there's a lot of art that i really enjoy that doesn't translate very well to screens
Speaker: So that's all fine, but this is a really exciting kind of new way of distributing art, like both as an experience and as a commodity.
Speaker: That's interesting because the way that the Albright displayed that piece was very interesting because it was very, there's a bunch of components and they were very meticulous about the way they kind of displayed it.
Speaker: And methods of display is something that obviously,
Speaker: on your phone is going to be inhibited as far as the, you know, the size of your screen, where you have access, the resolution.
Speaker: So it's not necessarily exactly what the artist particularly intended.
Speaker: But it depends.
Speaker: It depends on what the artist intends.
Speaker: So I'll say this, like my philosophy as an artist, and again, especially as somebody who made public art, right, where it's just like,
Speaker: It's on you.
Speaker: Like, I make public art, it goes in public parks, right?
Speaker: It's on you to think about what happens if, you know, someone smashes your sculpture with a baseball bat.
Speaker: Like, it really is.
Speaker: Like, you know what you're getting into, right?
Speaker: And so, like, I also believe that, you know, when I make digital art,
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's on me to be like accountable for the different types of experiences that people can have.
Speaker: Cause it's not like you're always getting a perfect experience in a museum either.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's not like it's great to go and like see the Mona Lisa behind three inches of glass surrounded by 300 other like heavy breathing tourists.
Speaker: That also sucks.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And digital art really, and all time-based art really, really sucks in a museum.
Speaker: It sucks.
Speaker: If you're trying to go see like, you know,
Speaker: the cremaster cycle and you like walk into it a halfway full like you walk into like a dark black box that's in the middle of a white box and you walk in halfway through like you know when the thing started and so you don't see the beginning and you don't see the end and then you never see it again because it goes back in the vault like that sucks too and with these different avenues like these different outlets for presenting art
Speaker: artists can and probably should be held more accountable for that.
Speaker: So no, like is seeing my art on your phone a perfect experience?
Speaker: Absolutely not.
Speaker: I'd really prefer that you did it on a nice big 4k screen when you have like plenty of time, maybe you dim the lights in your living room.
Speaker: Pour a glass of wine.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But you know what?
Speaker: Like, I can't tell you to do that.
Speaker: How like ungenerous of me, right?
Speaker: Like, I think it's a lot better to just meet you where you're at.
Speaker: You know, if you want to have a little like taste of this thing while you're on your morning commute on the bus, that's pretty cool.
Speaker: I think that's really nice.
Speaker: I think it's really amazing to be able to do that.
Speaker: And it is the way that people are interacting with things more and more, right?
Speaker: And so this like sustained...
Speaker: sustained presence of a viewer, you know, that doesn't happen anywhere, right?
Speaker: People, it's like the average time somebody looks at a painting is like four seconds or five seconds or something like that, right?
Speaker: So if they get it at all, that's great, I think.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: That's an amazing metric that you bring up, right?
Speaker: To provide a little bit more context, like my most recent piece was a video game, right?
Speaker: It's a web app video game.
Speaker: Like I said, this is the piece I was just saying that anybody can play on their phone, on the website.
Speaker: And it's on feralfile.com right now, right?
Speaker: You can access it there if people are listening and they want to go.
Speaker: Yeah, you can see the full exhibition organized by the Albright Knox Gallery there.
Speaker: or on my website, chan.gallery, or in a lot of different places, or by browsing basically any NFT market, right?
Speaker: And so, but like, so yeah, most people spend four or five seconds in between a work, right?
Speaker: But, you know, I tried to create this work to, you know, meet people where they're at, both in terms of how it displays and in terms of the types of, like, the mechanisms that it uses to attract the user's attention, right?
Speaker: Because it's a video game.
Speaker: It's a little croquet game.
Speaker: It's called Winslow Homer's Croquet Challenge.
Speaker: And you hit your croquet balls around.
Speaker: And then this sort of, like, I think, sort of, you know, subtle narrative unfolds about social structures and reconstruction America.
Speaker: Now, if I told, you know...
Speaker: a thousand people who are sort of, you know, my audience in NFT world is like, come and see, like, I would really like you to see this, you know, provocative rumination on reconstruction era America and, you know, the social politics of that time, you know, it's not a great sell to be honest.
Speaker: Like you would feel bad.
Speaker: probably bad about not going to the opening, you know, so maybe you would go, but like, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: But presenting it this way, it's on everybody's phone.
Speaker: I have people messaging me all the time saying like, I've played this game every day, like since I got it.
Speaker: Or people who are like saying like, I played this for hours straight.
Speaker: And I just thought like, can you imagine making an artwork that people were standing, like multiple people were standing in front of for hours?
Speaker: Like, it's awesome to make art that meets people where they're at.
Speaker: You actually get more attention.
Speaker: And I'm grateful for it because it's honestly, like, it's a thoughtful, subtle political piece.
Speaker: But that is, and that kind of stuff is usually a pretty hard pill to swallow for people.
Speaker: But I met people where they were at, like, through technology, through digital art.
Speaker: And I was able to do that from a financial perspective, like, because of NFTs.
Speaker: Yeah, I also like that you mentioned in history that games like I think it was croquet, chess and video games have been used as a sublimation for for political and social unrest or something like that.
Speaker: In relation, you know, in the description for your game in this time that we live in, which is not ideal.
Speaker: Yeah, of course.
Speaker: We just finished the World Cup in Qatar.
Speaker: I'm just like, I'm watching the Saudi Southern Wealth, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund, right?
Speaker: Just buy up sports teams.
Speaker: And it's cool.
Speaker: And I don't know, they must be really good countries because the teams are just really good, you know?
Speaker: Yeah, that's usually how it works.
Speaker: People with the most money are usually the best people, you know.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: I had a question about, I just learned about, and this is just kind of like a nerdy kind of tech question about generative art.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: which is like, so, you know, like the generative art in NFT form that like art blocks has been doing or has done the ones that I've seen you, you know, you mint the piece on the algorithm.
Speaker: You don't know what it's going to look like until you get it.
Speaker: Um, and then I just, I read about one artist who's doing some experiments where he's, he's minting the algorithm, but you get to keep the infinite iterations.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: There was one that was specific that I found that was referenced on a Discord channel named Holonic, and he just has like three examples and they're really simple.
Speaker: But instead of minting the generative art piece and getting your kind of like still or moving image that's based on the algorithm based on the code, you get to own the whole thing.
Speaker: And I was wondering if that if you've seen any of those and what your thoughts are on this idea of like owning right that's like owning the instructions rather than owning the expression expression that comes out of it.
Speaker: So it's like, so I haven't seen that piece that you're referring to or pieces of that genre, but I can just tell you off the cuff what it sounds like to me.
Speaker: It sounds like a very old idea.
Speaker: That honestly sounds exactly like how generative art used to work.
Speaker: It sounds exactly like how digital art used to work, right?
Speaker: If you were exhibiting, you know, a piece by, you know, Marius Watts or Casey Reuss or whatever, handed you over a computer program and that computer program just sort of ran on the monitor in the museum, right?
Speaker: people could sit there and be awed by the infinite iterations or whatever like or or not right so that's like it's it's sort of funny like now in in the quest because you know generative art is such a big marketplace right in like the nft economy
Speaker: And it's so funny as people keep trying to find new angles to like, and that they just end up retrieving the old thing.
Speaker: That sounds to me like, yeah, exactly how code-based art used to work.
Speaker: Well, they had, they had, they had me.
Speaker: I thought, I thought it was good.
Speaker: So they got me.
Speaker: So it's good.
Speaker: They'll get some more people too.
Speaker: But doesn't that coincide with the, I think I saw on your Twitter recent, like a pet peeve of yours about people calling certain NFT art conceptual when it has nothing to do with, say, the original underpinnings or...
Speaker: Yeah, well, this is a big challenge.
Speaker: So look, we're into talking about, I think, the dark side of the NFT marketplace and NFT art culture.
Speaker: And like I said, like I've said, a lot of positive things about it.
Speaker: I do think that it democratizes experiences of digital artworks and that it incentivizes artists like me to make more open artworks because they can be financialized as NFTs.
Speaker: That's all great.
Speaker: So tons of great stuff.
Speaker: Now, marketplace in general, yeah, has this same sort of, like, problem.
Speaker: It's maybe a barrier to entry problem because, you know, like, not everybody who loves making art can kind of get into this ecosystem, but everybody who has money can.
Speaker: But also just the fact that, like, look, and we have to be real about this, like, we're building this culture.
Speaker: There's a lot of culture there, but, like, there's some really, like, I truly think that many of the best artists
Speaker: working today like artists not digital artists not nft artists like the best artists full stop like working today are working in this field and i'm really excited about them
Speaker: But, like, it's also, you know, we can't ignore the fact that we're building all this on top of a financial technology, right?
Speaker: The thing that, like, it's amazing that we turned this financial technology into something that we could use, you know, for art.
Speaker: But, like, we'll never forget that this thing exists, was built purpose, purpose built for, you know, exchanging financial assets.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So that happens, right?
Speaker: And then, of course, like what art is great at is constructing narratives, belief, as we've, you know, that is a word that we've been bandying about a little bit in this conversation, that inflate the value of things, right?
Speaker: And it's like the art world is really good at it, but it's not hard to notice the pattern of that game.
Speaker: Like it's, you know,
Speaker: And so people figure it out.
Speaker: And so when people want to make their JPEGs, and it's kind of easy to pick up on the terminology and stuff that the art world uses to try to ascribe value to things.
Speaker: And so, yeah, you know, and also a lot of people in this space
Speaker: So, yeah, disingenuously, I think people assign art world narratives now to stuff where they just really haven't put the effort in.
Speaker: That's fine.
Speaker: Like, that's going to happen.
Speaker: I mean, whatever.
Speaker: That's also a thing that I would do in art school when I was a bad artist.
Speaker: So, you know, I don't like, I don't want to complain about that too, too loudly.
Speaker: And then also the optimistic take away that I truly do take is that, you know, this is a great moment for art.
Speaker: And a lot of people are kind of just learning about art, like through this moment.
Speaker: And I know that certainly like a lot of my audience and a lot of my collectors and the people that I interact with online every day,
Speaker: people who didn't come from an art background, right?
Speaker: They came from a computer science background or the finance background or a background of like just being a curious person who spent a lot of time on the internet, right?
Speaker: And then they were all sort of like through this moment became very interested in art.
Speaker: And you know what?
Speaker: Like, you know, so that's the people are, you know, start trying out assigning these, you know, narratives and like templates to their work.
Speaker: And some of that stuff happens in good faith as well.
Speaker: I got to say, that's one of the more satisfying components of our endeavor.
Speaker: Joe and I, our gallery is especially when meeting somebody in the crypto space and then introducing them to a traditional artist who's done something in the NFT world and then them going through that lens and then actually seeing the paintings or the originating work that actually
Speaker: was the thing that kind of like the genesis for the actual NFT and vice versa.
Speaker: So when it goes both ways and it goes and it opens up this doorway to like this world that maybe was intimidating or maybe was something that was outside of their purview or they didn't think they were interested in, but then they do become interested in.
Speaker: Yeah, it's amazing.
Speaker: Yeah, we, I mean, our whole thing when we started and still is, was that we were taking artists who make really great work, who have never made NFTs before, and then teaching them how to do it and teaching the technology and everything.
Speaker: kind of like workshopping and doing studio visits about how that could look in a way that like serves their practice genuinely.
Speaker: And so that's been really fun.
Speaker: But like anytime we try and sell stuff to people from the traditional art market, we have a much harder time than when we talk to people who are in the crypto space.
Speaker: I would say that most of our collectors come from the crypto space.
Speaker: And so they are they're looking they're all they're looking for this like thoughtful, good work from artists and and they're willing to kind of like put put their money where their mouth is because both they're like less risk averse, I think.
Speaker: And also they're like they're curious.
Speaker: They're like they're they're willing to like take a risk on that, which I really, really appreciate.
Speaker: That has absolutely been my experience as well, which is that I found a lot more crypto people who are really excited to hear about art than there were art people who are excited to hear about crypto.
Speaker: Until, of course, crypto had this big boom cycle, and then everybody wants to hear about it.
Speaker: But yeah, weirdly, again, even people in the art world didn't really want to hear about it.
Speaker: you know, when there were legitimately interesting art ideas like that were happening there, you know, like, right.
Speaker: Like once again, it took like this big financial boom cycle for even the, you know, the art world people to, to be interested in it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I know you have to go soon.
Speaker: I'm just wondering what's in the works in the future for you.
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for asking.
Speaker: I'm continuing to make games, right?
Speaker: And continuing to work in that ethos of being able to create works that are really open.
Speaker: Also works that where I can, you know, exert a lot of like, you know, control over the experience.
Speaker: I really, really believe in games as an artistic medium.
Speaker: I think that like now that we are fully entering the age of digital art, right?
Speaker: Okay, we got to move past the idea that, you know, art is just that, you know, digital art is just going to be JPEG images, or, you know, even algorithms that, you know, generate a whole bunch of JPEG images or moving images, right?
Speaker: When I move into a technology, I try to look at all the affordances of that technology.
Speaker: And so if I'm going to ask you to look at a screen, I'm at least going to let you put a controller in your hand, right?
Speaker: I mean, that's something you can do.
Speaker: And I've just learned that there are incredible...
Speaker: one storytelling opportunities you can do oh this could be we've gone such a long rant about this but you ever notice that like the art world hates narrative you know like you can't like if you're making video art like do not that's rule number one yeah and um like so but but but also like i've just learned the act of
Speaker: and this isn't just like a straight interactive art kind of like statement, but there is something about being able to run somebody through like a curated series of experiences that I just feel like I can really...
Speaker: bring ideas home in these unique ways, you know?
Speaker: Like, again, like the last piece, which was a piece that was about a very boring idea, like it was about gender politics in Reconstruction America, okay?
Speaker: Like, come on, that's a grant application, that's not an artwork, right?
Speaker: But,
Speaker: But like, but like through the medium of games, like, you know, I couldn't make it come to life and it didn't make the work dumb.
Speaker: Like it didn't make it like I didn't, I don't think it made the ideas any less valid.
Speaker: So that's just the format that I'm really excited about.
Speaker: And, you know, continue to sell them as NFTs.
Speaker: And that's what I'm really looking forward to.
Speaker: Sounds great.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Thank you so much for taking the time out.
Speaker: Oh, it's truly a pleasure.
Speaker: And good luck to you guys.
Speaker: I'm a big fan of what you're doing and making these connections is so important.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: And we'll see you soon, hopefully, at the next conference thing.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Thanks, guys.
Speaker: We'll all get COVID together.
Speaker: I just want to give you a break point for editing.
Speaker: I got a couple minutes, but I did want to just genuinely say, like, thank you for letting me on.
Speaker: No, thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, this is great.
Speaker: Yeah, that was perfect.
Speaker: That was nice.
Speaker: You mentioned the video game thing, and I'm excited to see film
Speaker: move more interactive because it hasn't I haven't seen a lot of like like movies and film being interactive and I remember they did that do you remember that Black Mirror episode that was it was about a video game and then you got to play the episode and like I I feel like it kind of flopped in terms of like their critical reception but I thought it was fucking awesome
Speaker: Okay, I have a recommendation for you.
Speaker: Okay, and this is like a legit, super strong recommendation.
Speaker: Okay, which is because you can get this on iPad and it's free because Netflix wanted to distribute it for free because they're trying to move into the gaming space.
Speaker: It's a game called Immortality.
Speaker: And you'll be able to find it on the app store.
Speaker: It'll have a little Netflix logo on it.
Speaker: And it's a game like, and the guy who made it, Sam Barlow, he's made other games before.
Speaker: Um, but like, it is in my opinion, like a full on like experimental video piece.
Speaker: And, um, I'll just say when you, when you open up the game, right.
Speaker: Or the app, it presents itself as like, you know, it's a archive project where they've, you know, they've there, they, they just show, they're showing you all the, um,
Speaker: clips from the career of this actress from the 60s and 70s.
Speaker: And you kind of just scrub through the clips, right?
Speaker: And as you scrub through, they will link you to, you know, another clip, another clip.
Speaker: You can kind of choose it branches off.
Speaker: And so there are three different movies that unfold in this nonlinear way.
Speaker: And then the sort of fourth narrative that, like, you discover through...
Speaker: you know, the act of scrubbing through them.
Speaker: Look, it's just, I think it's great experimental film.
Speaker: And if you, if you liked that, like you will love it.
Speaker: Like it's, it's well-performed.
Speaker: It's a super like smart, smartly executed.
Speaker: Great piece.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: That sounds awesome.
Speaker: I I'm going to check it out.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: Thanks for the rec.
Speaker: Awesome guys.
Speaker: If you have a preferred bio, cause I usually read a bio in the, in the beginning of the podcast.
Speaker: If you don't mind sending that to me or if you want me to just take something on the web.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: No, probably whatever's on the website is good.
Speaker: So you just send the same thing.
Speaker: But I will, after I'm done dinner with my family, I can send you something.
Speaker: Sounds great.
Speaker: Thanks again.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: Have a great day.
Speaker: Good to see you.
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.
Speaker: You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at lydianstaternyc on Instagram, and follow us at lydianstater on Twitter.
Speaker: Thanks to Mitchell F. Chan for taking the time to speak to us this week.
Speaker: You can learn more about his work at mitchellfchan.com.
Speaker: Big thanks to Tall Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
Speaker: His albums are available at tallwan.bandcamp.com.
Speaker: And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I don't know what to say.
Speaker: I just know I don't want to be like you.
Speaker: I know what to do, I know what to say, I know what to do.
