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Arranging Tangerines Episode 26 - A Conversation with Peter Rostovsky
6 Plays3 years ago
Peter Rostovsky joins us this week to talk shop including discussions around his role in the NFT project The Inside World, the promising aspects of the blockchain for artists, his transition into working digitally, how the Occupy Wall Street movement affected his practice, the magic of books, the comparison of NFT technology to the advent of photography, his new graphic novel, and the way that painting is foundational to his work.
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Transcript
Introduction to Arranging Tangerines
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Speaker
Welcome to Arranging Tangerines, presented by Lady and Stater.
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Speaker
Conversations with contemporary artists, curators, and thinkers about the intersection of art, technology, and commerce.
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Speaker
Your hosts are me, Alessandro Silver and Joseph Wilcox.
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Speaker
I know what to do.
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Speaker
I know what to say.
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Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
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Speaker
I know what to do.
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Speaker
I don't know what to say.
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Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
Meet the Guest: Peter Rostovsky
00:00:38
Speaker
This week's guest is Peter Rostovsky.
00:00:41
Speaker
Sure.
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah.
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Speaker
Are you ready to go?
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Speaker
I'm rolling.
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Speaker
You're on bio duty this time.
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Speaker
Me?
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Speaker
Yeah.
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Speaker
I'll just read it at home.
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Speaker
No, do one live for the fans.
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Speaker
No, read it at home.
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Speaker
Do whatever you want.
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It's your nest.
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It's your hive.
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Do you want me to do it?
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Sure.
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I think it's a good tradition.
Rostovsky's Artistic Exploration
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Peter Rostovsky is a Russian-born artist who works in a variety of disciplines that include painting, sculpture, installation, and digital art.
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Rostovsky's many diverse projects attempt to bridge the gap between painting and conceptual art while remaining attentive to painting's material and discursive history and to its encounter with new technologies.
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Recently, Rostovsky has expanded his practice to explore e-books, graphic novels, and comics as hybrid forms that integrate writing and visual imagery.
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Speaker
Welcome to the show, Peter.
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Speaker
Thank you.
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Thanks for having me.
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Speaker
Did I pronounce everything right?
00:01:37
Speaker
You did.
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Speaker
Yeah, that's fantastic.
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Thank you.
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Speaker
I was going to note it.
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Speaker
That was a great job.
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So welcome to Peter for our audience.
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Alex and I know Peter through grad school.
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Peter was my MFA thesis defense.
00:01:56
Speaker
That's right.
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And we were just noting that that was 10 years ago.
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Speaker
10 years ago.
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Speaker
It's shocking.
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Give us a thumb step.
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Joseph just passed by a hair.
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No, I remember the thesis fondly.
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It was great.
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Great research, great work, great project.
00:02:16
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Yeah.
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Speaker
I'm trying to remember who else was on the panel.
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Speaker
I feel like- Did you say Sunanda?
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Sunanda was my advisor, so he was.
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Speaker
Okay.
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I feel like John Kramer, maybe.
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John Kramer.
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Is that a person who taught at Lesley?
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Speaker
Yeah.
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I don't remember this 10 years ago.
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It was a while ago.
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Speaker
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Parts of my memory.
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But yeah, I feel like I remember it going fairly well.
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Speaker
I think I was not, I think I was just a visiting person back then.
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Speaker
You were.
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So I was kind of a more itinerant figure.
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Speaker
Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I feel like maybe it was your first or second visiting artist thing.
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It must have been.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Yeah.
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Well, welcome.
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Thanks.
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Where do we start?
Discussion on NFTs and Crypto Art
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Speaker
Interrogate me.
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Speaker
Yeah.
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I guess we're going to get the NFT thing out of it.
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Yeah, let's do it.
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And before we got here, I was exchanging emails with Peter and he mentioned that, you know, there was there's been recent movement in the downward way in the crypto market.
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And we were.
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uh noting like whether it makes sense to kind of like revisit conversations about crypto art and nfts uh when like the market is more stable um which it's definitely not right now uh and i hadn't i had said you know we kind of i wouldn't say we enjoy when the market crashes obviously um it's like less there's less excitement there's less interest there's less money in the space um but it it uh it tends to kind of um
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bring people who are interested in the technology and the creative opportunities to the forefront because they're the ones who stick around.
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At least it seemed that way from the mini crash last year.
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And it shakes off a lot of those projects that were, you can tell, had nothing to do with anything besides speculation and trying to just garner more money.
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Yeah, because if there's not easy money, then those projects can't operate.
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But if there's something else going on besides just that, they can.
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So anyways, what has been your experience so far in the NFT space?
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When did you get into it, I guess?
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I'm curious.
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Well, you know, I think I should clarify that I'm...
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you know, I'm only partially in it.
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So I would describe myself as kind of like more crypto curious than a full participant.
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And I think that much of my, you know, interest in it, as it is in so many things, you know, it's primarily kind of academic and more philosophical.
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So in terms of, you know, my own participation, you know, I've really...
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participated in it as a collaborator, you know, and this is with Jennifer and Kevin McCoy and Annie Howell.
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And we did a project, an NFT based project called The Inside World, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this year.
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And so this is really and so I acted essentially as the art director and illustrator on this project.
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And that's really been my
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sort of like one and only kind of like full immersion in it.
Digital Transformation in Art
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I have like a dormant, vacant OpenSea page and then a bunch of things that could in principle be minted as NFTs.
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But I'm...
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I still define myself as a painter, even though I'm not really doing that much painting right now, and as a writer, increasingly, and as a comics artist who, and we can talk more about this in terms of what comics represents for me.
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So as a writer,
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And certainly as a practitioner, I've been obviously very interested in technology and how technology has, digital technology specifically, has really radically transformed our respective metiers, our pursuits, artistic pursuits.
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And so, you know, so...
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what it's presented to painting, you know, as a set of obstacles and as a set of enormous, you know, opportunities has been really fascinating to me.
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And so I feel like a lot of my interest, you know, kind of circulates around those questions.
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And, you know, the NFT world, I think, is, you know, this, the advent of, you know,
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blockchain technology in terms of what it could do in terms of establishing creative opportunities, certainly markets for artists and also, you know, what's the word sort of like, you know, completely rewiring the circuitry of, you know, art world hierarchies and opening up new
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pathways for discourse, all of that is really fascinating.
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If you ask me if I'm like an active participant in the NFT economy, not so much.
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Truth be told, I, you know, but, you know, it is absolutely the case that I am a digital artist right now, almost entirely.
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And so I have, you know, all of my work is on
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digital tablets at this point.
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I'm working on a graphic novel in two, technically.
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And so all of that work is digital.
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And so it's really migrated my practice from the easel and this kind of mucky, muddy stuff of oil paint and very toxic stuff of oil paint.
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And consumable too, right?
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It takes materials as opposed to digital, which...
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doesn't take, I mean, as many consumables.
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I know like an iPad or a tablet is eventually going to go out and you have to get a new one, but not like paint is, right?
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Well, paint, yeah.
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I mean, it's definitely a question of how those resources are redistributed, you know what I mean?
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And I definitely speculate on that in terms of how my studio has transformed, how my need for space has transformed.
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You know, it's, yeah, I mean, we can definitely like go down the rabbit hole and drill deeper into that type of comparison.
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We're all about going down rabbit holes.
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Sure, okay.
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So go as far as you want.
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Yeah, I may need some... That's what we're here for.
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That's what we're here for.
00:09:04
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Yeah, some like steering so I just don't ramble.
00:09:07
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Sure.
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But yeah, I mean, so I think in that regard, it's...
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you know, that's sort of where I am in terms of, in terms of my practice.
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And yeah.
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And, you know, I, you know, we talked about pedagogy earlier and I think it's also, you know, this is something to take note of is that, you know, I teach drawing and increasingly, and I'm sure, you know, if there are other educators listening to this podcast, they will note the difference too, is that, you know,
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kids or students, however you want to, artists would come into the classroom bearing analog tools for many, many, many, many years, the vast bulk of my educational practice.
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And I remember this very distinctly at Cooper Union.
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I was teaching a summer class and I'd always been interested in illustration, comics, the so-called popular arts,
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Speaker
And there was a student who clearly came kind of more from like the illustration wing and they had, you know, they had like digital art, you know, and it was this conversation like, well, what do we do with this?
00:10:21
Speaker
in this particular context, because it's still primarily painting, drawing, you know, these kind of like more artisanal tools.
00:10:28
Speaker
So what do we do with, you know, something that was rendered in Illustrator or an iPad?
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Speaker
And obviously there's quite a bit of flexibility, but at the time it was still kind of a question, you know, to even pose that in a more traditional art school context.
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And now I have to say, you know, so many of my crits, you know, this year happened on the screen, you know, because my students were producing Procreate drawings.
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They were just much more nimble within this kind of digital technology.
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ecosystem working with Photoshop or Procreate or Clip or, you know, what have you.
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Speaker
Yeah.
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And so I think that that's actually, you know, when you talk about NFT and speculation and the market, which seems very, very, very large in terms of any kind of conversation around this space.
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You know, what I...
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prefer to do is really think of it really in terms of digital art, you know, and how that digital art is going to circulate, how is it going to survive, what kind of markets would be available for this new generation of students.
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Speaker
Are those markets safe, you know, or are they as precarious and kind of predatory as the traditional art world?
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And that's something else we can talk about is maybe kind of holding these two things in parallel and trying to understand, you know, where they align, where they actually diverge quite dramatically.
00:12:04
Speaker
And so that's really my point of interest.
00:12:06
Speaker
So right now I'm sort of, you know, I'm definitely interested in the blockchain.
00:12:11
Speaker
Like it's a really, really amazing technological development.
00:12:15
Speaker
But my personal focus is actually like digital, you know, digital art and digital artists because this whole, you can say like cast of producers who on some level
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Speaker
I mean, we can definitely talk about this in comics, like didn't really have a marketplace.
Ownership: Traditional vs. Digital
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah.
00:12:37
Speaker
You know, the only way for them to really sell their work, even though so much of it is made on the tablet,
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Speaker
is to go back to paper.
00:12:47
Speaker
That's what I was going to ask you about your own practices.
00:12:49
Speaker
You mentioned that you're making on tablets, but yeah, do you typically show something printed?
00:12:55
Speaker
If it's if somebody's if somebody gets to view your artwork in an exhibition or in is it in book form or how does that like do you ever show work on screens?
00:13:05
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I have.
00:13:06
Speaker
And so, yeah, I mean, I can kind of take you through this thinking process.
00:13:11
Speaker
So, you know, I started I mean, I'm still even though my cartooning friends love to say things like you're a cartoonist now.
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Speaker
And even though I'm honored that, you know, they call me that.
00:13:26
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You know, I still am very identified as a painter because like my entire sort of compass is calibrated to that.
00:13:34
Speaker
And so, you know, I think what happened to me is that, you know, right around 2012, you know, I'm very much in the studio and I got completely euphorically swept up in the Occupy Wall Street sort of, you know, like,
00:13:52
Speaker
kind of awakening, you know, and then these occupied protests across the world.
00:13:56
Speaker
And, you know, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, which which, you know, was and now is again a totalitarian society, you know, that for me was very inspiring to kind of see this, you know, what I perceive to be kind of grassroots democratic, you know, a mass movement, you know, in action.
00:14:21
Speaker
And so I remember this very distinctly.
00:14:25
Speaker
And there's actually, if you kind of burrow through my site, there's a piece that I did for Cabinet Magazine called October 15, where I go to these protests with my friend Kamru Zaram, Kamru's taught at Leslie as well.
00:14:38
Speaker
And so we go, and I go back to the studio and I'm confronted by my paintings.
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And I sort of reflect on them and I reflect on the art world as it exists, you know?
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And I end that text by saying, it's like, well, I wonder if we're sort of on the wrong side of this historic movement, you know what I mean?
00:14:58
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And obviously, you know, this is a very complex question, so I don't wanna reduce it in any way.
00:15:05
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But I think that at the time, what I saw really was the fact that the artwork was singular and it felt cloistered, it felt economically cloistered.
00:15:14
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And what I really wanted to do is, and again, this is probably because I sort of, you know, left Russia, the Soviet Union, when I was too young to really understand just how terrible things truly were.
00:15:30
Speaker
I mean, I knew they were terrible, but, you know, I wasn't an adult, so I was 10 years old, you know.
00:15:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:15:35
Speaker
But I think what I had sort of retained from that point was this idea that a work can be massively distributed, you know, that it can have that in a sense, kind of like the singular can become the copy, you know.
00:15:52
Speaker
And so for me, this, you know, and obviously that's, you know, it's a great concern for like Walter Benjamin, you know, I'm not alone in this fascination.
00:16:06
Speaker
And I have to say this, this, this is widely shared by comics artists.
00:16:09
Speaker
You know, this is exactly why a lot of amazing, you know, uh, uh,
00:16:15
Speaker
creators, you know, move to comics because it's a public form.
00:16:18
Speaker
It's distributed through this sort of like what I call capillary actions, you know.
00:16:23
Speaker
So, and so I switched to digital art, you know, back then.
00:16:26
Speaker
And so I started making these paintings that, you know, developed, I remember this very distinctly.
00:16:32
Speaker
I went to TechServe
00:16:34
Speaker
I saw this Wacom tablet that was very expensive.
00:16:37
Speaker
It's still kind of with me, even though I had to be retired.
00:16:40
Speaker
Sure.
00:16:41
Speaker
It's sitting in the... Right, because when was the Occupy movement?
00:16:44
Speaker
It was like 2011, 2012.
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah.
00:16:47
Speaker
And I remember I went to TechServe.
00:16:48
Speaker
For those who don't know, this is a legendary Mac store, whose demise is very mourn in the New York community.
00:16:57
Speaker
And so and I didn't, you know, I didn't know how to use it, but I like I know I need that, you know.
00:17:03
Speaker
And so I started making these these digitally native paintings in the sense that they weren't like, you know, they originated in the computer and they ended on the computer.
Rostovsky's Digital Art Journey
00:17:11
Speaker
And then I started producing these large digital paintings.
00:17:15
Speaker
uh you know uh light boxes essentially okay these lambda and archival inkjet prints and you know the principle was that uh their price would actually go down with increased production you know so they become more affordable and uh and the files were distributed for free so again it's this kind of like open source you know mass uh met you know hopefully massively distributed thing where i give people the you know
00:17:43
Speaker
the option to print it out themselves.
00:17:45
Speaker
And there's this light box, which hopefully would be affordable.
00:17:49
Speaker
So, so this was the model and this was, uh, you know, the kind of first step of migrating into the screen.
00:17:57
Speaker
And then, um, and then later, you know, I learned how to build these, I mean, I learned how to build these light boxes.
00:18:04
Speaker
I became kind of a bit of an expert in terms of all of this photo stuff.
00:18:09
Speaker
And then, um,
00:18:10
Speaker
you know, these screens just became way more affordable.
00:18:15
Speaker
So in terms of, you know, digital tablets, in terms of the murals and the depict frames and the electric objects, like all of these technologies for actually, you know, showing the digital file.
00:18:31
Speaker
And at that point I was like, okay, well, I'm just not going to make a light box anymore.
00:18:35
Speaker
I'm just going to.
00:18:36
Speaker
Because it wasn't like you were making them because you wanted to have some special objects.
00:18:39
Speaker
You just wanted something nice to show the work on.
00:18:41
Speaker
Yes.
00:18:41
Speaker
I wanted a kind of luminous light.
00:18:47
Speaker
proxy to a painting.
00:18:48
Speaker
And this is something that I've spoken about, I think in many instances that again, I like to kind of invoke the great Walter Benjamin, that if painting has aura, the digital work has a kind of radiance, kind of called phosphorescence even.
00:19:05
Speaker
So I was sort of interested in that.
00:19:09
Speaker
And then, of course, the screen, I was just like, well, screw it.
00:19:13
Speaker
I'm just going to screen.
00:19:15
Speaker
And then eventually, all of those interests kind of turned into comics.
00:19:20
Speaker
And to answer...
00:19:23
Speaker
you know, to go back to this question is like, well, how is this displayed?
00:19:26
Speaker
I think, you know, comics are exactly within this space that I think is very analogous to art where it's a community of book fetishists in many ways, you know, so people who are really into books.
00:19:40
Speaker
Our little library has like ballooned, you know, swelled with all of these things.
00:19:45
Speaker
graphic novels and comics.
00:19:47
Speaker
And so, you know, so it's a very kind of collecting culture in terms of people who just want books.
00:19:55
Speaker
They love the smell of books.
00:19:56
Speaker
They love the bulk of them.
00:19:58
Speaker
That was something I was going to say compared to, you know, digital files or things like that.
00:20:02
Speaker
They don't have that physical thing that a lot of collectors do.
00:20:06
Speaker
at least how I know collectors, people who like to collect things, they love that stuff, right?
00:20:13
Speaker
That they can put on the shelf.
00:20:15
Speaker
And that's something we've talked about is are collectors changing as their existence becomes more digital?
00:20:22
Speaker
So folks who are younger, do they have a similar thing happen in their brain when they put a digital NFT in their wallet and they can show it on their shelf on a screen or something like that?
00:20:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:20:35
Speaker
And I don't think it's happened yet by any means in terms of like a mass adoption.
00:20:41
Speaker
But I think there's people out there who like think of their kind of like NFT showcase as their bookshelf.
00:20:47
Speaker
And I wonder if that'll happen more and more.
00:20:49
Speaker
When I just started like kind of like exploring...
00:20:53
Speaker
collecting NFTs on the, it was the Hick at Nunc platform.
00:20:58
Speaker
It was like Tezos, it was cheap.
00:21:00
Speaker
And people would give them away and stuff.
00:21:01
Speaker
And I started having like a collection.
00:21:05
Speaker
That was when I was first like, oh, this is cool.
00:21:07
Speaker
I like open it up and I see all of my things that like I own, even though they're like these like digital pictures.
00:21:13
Speaker
That was the first time I was able to like kind of make a connection between understanding the physical, the digital kind of like psychology.
00:21:21
Speaker
of collecting or something like that and having them be kind of similar.
00:21:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:21:25
Speaker
But yeah, book folks love books.
00:21:27
Speaker
Well, so here's the catch, because there's also, you know, there are digital editions of comics, you know, there is comiXology, which is, you know, the kind of Netflix of comics and there are other platforms and many, many people, you know,
00:21:44
Speaker
And, you know, I don't know what the percentage is, but, you know, they get their comics online, you know, and I remember having this a little bit of like an epiphany moment where, you know, I was, I think I went to B&H and I was at the Chipotle, you know, nearby.
00:21:59
Speaker
And there was a kid next to me.
00:22:00
Speaker
He was reading a comic book on his phone.
00:22:02
Speaker
Oh, my, some of my students?
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:22:05
Speaker
Right.
00:22:05
Speaker
Or I see, you know, kids on the subway.
00:22:07
Speaker
And I kind of realized like, well, you know, like,
00:22:10
Speaker
you know, on some level, like I'm sort of becoming obsolete in this regard.
00:22:13
Speaker
So like, yes, I'm into books and yes, I know many other people who are into books.
00:22:18
Speaker
Um, but, and I think this is the kind of wrinkle that'll be teased out in the next, um, you know, I imagine five years, um,
00:22:26
Speaker
That, you know, like right now, I feel like there are these two economies sort of they're co-existent, you know, I'm not sure they're necessarily tussling for for dominance.
00:22:38
Speaker
But I think there's there's certainly something happening in terms of like a pivot in terms of how is this material getting consumed, you know.
00:22:47
Speaker
And so, and I think maybe the right way to assess the situation is like, rather than being militant about it, which I think is people, what people tend to be, it's like, it's either painting or digital art.
00:23:00
Speaker
It's either NFTs or the traditional art market, you know?
00:23:04
Speaker
And my sense is that since all things tend towards a kind of granular hybridized effect, I think that the art lover, the art maker, the art critic, the art consumer of the future will navigate these things, you know, sort of in equal measure.
00:23:24
Speaker
So it'll be a much more, you know, and I think that once that militancy evolves,
00:23:29
Speaker
mellows.
00:23:30
Speaker
I think both in terms of the euphoria, in terms of the kind of allergies that we have, the people's positions are so entrenched and volatile.
00:23:40
Speaker
I think we'll see something that really resembles the market as it is right now.
00:23:47
Speaker
For instance, in your
00:23:49
Speaker
film content, you know what I mean?
00:23:51
Speaker
Or audio is a great example.
00:23:53
Speaker
Yeah, most of your stuff might come from streaming, but people who are into it, they'll have records.
00:24:00
Speaker
Some people will fetishize cassette tapes.
00:24:02
Speaker
And it does not involve...
00:24:04
Speaker
a major kind of aneurysm to move from one to the other.
00:24:11
Speaker
And so I think that that's really, I think that the comics world feels like that in terms of my own consumption.
00:24:18
Speaker
It's like, oh, this is a pain in the ass to get at the store.
00:24:22
Speaker
Maybe I'll just get it for Kindle, get it because I just want to read it.
00:24:26
Speaker
I want to see it.
00:24:27
Speaker
And at the same time, look at this amazing object that I want to hold on to this.
00:24:32
Speaker
I want to recollect it because this is something I had as a kid.
00:24:36
Speaker
Here it is reprinted, you know, something from 1985.
00:24:41
Speaker
So I feel like, you know, that's really, you know, sort of how I see it.
00:24:47
Speaker
But that digital sphere in comics, I mean, that's a major, major
00:24:52
Speaker
shift.
00:24:52
Speaker
And, you know, one of my studio, former studio mates, Dean Hasfield, you know, is quite, you know, in the forefront of that in terms of webtoons and webcomics.
00:25:02
Speaker
And of course, that's a major, major, major market.
00:25:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:05
Speaker
So I think that's quite convergent, you know, with the NFT market in many ways, you know, even though I feel like it's yet to really kind of shift into that.
00:25:14
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:15
Speaker
And I think it'll become easier to integrate the digital side of it into people's lives.
00:25:21
Speaker
when when things become um i don't know like when when it actually becomes more more mainstream and more lucrative for for kind of like regular folks to have that stuff in their on their walls or in their spaces where it's not weird to have an ipad dedicated to just your kind of like um visual digital visual content that you might collect or whatever because right now you have to be kind of a specific type of reader or consumer to have something like that in your home to have a frame
00:25:51
Speaker
that is digital that you put next to your other framed pieces that are paintings or something that's still kind of like, I think, an esoteric thing for people to have.
00:25:58
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:58
Speaker
And I think it'll become much less so as the technology kind of like pushes into people's homes because of like marketing from Samsung and things like that.
00:26:07
Speaker
Totally.
00:26:08
Speaker
Totally.
00:26:08
Speaker
That's also...
00:26:10
Speaker
That's kind of what we did as far as we started as a virtual gallery and then we were lucky enough to get a physical space and the physical space allowed us to contextualize the NFTs, not necessarily just show them on monitors, but
00:26:25
Speaker
use ancillary real objects that kind of lent a story or can add it to the actual nft and vice versa yeah so the dialogue between the two is something that's been very very exciting for the two of us uh it's very grounding um i think it's eye-opening for a lot of artists to kind of like get the sense of like
00:26:44
Speaker
I mean, a lot of our life is both material and immaterial.
00:26:47
Speaker
I mean, think of all the meetings that have moved virtually.
00:26:50
Speaker
Think of the acceptance of like even in galleries and museums where they actually have full on exhibitions online.
00:27:00
Speaker
But I think you're right in the sense that it's going to end up at some hybrid of the two.
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:27:09
Speaker
No, go on, please.
00:27:10
Speaker
No, I was going to say, I love you talking about these incoming students, just all experience being... Do they draw more because they have access to the thing?
00:27:21
Speaker
It's like... You know, it's... I mean, it's hard to say because I think that... I mean, don't get me wrong.
00:27:26
Speaker
I think, like, you know, the Zoom economy for educators has been really punishing, you know?
00:27:34
Speaker
So I think that you can also get...
00:27:38
Speaker
you know, you can get projects handed in like, oh, here's a picture.
00:27:41
Speaker
It's like, well, I want to see it.
00:27:44
Speaker
You know, like, I don't just want to like, you know, a photo of a painting that you could have, you know, gotten online or something like that.
00:27:52
Speaker
So, so I feel like it, it, it certainly opens up a lot of loopholes, but I do think that, you know, um,
00:28:01
Speaker
There's that category on Netflix, like casual viewing.
00:28:04
Speaker
And I feel like there's definitely something in terms of the digital platform in terms of whether they're tablets, Wicoms, whether they're iPad Pros, that I think allows for a new type of sketchbook that is just much more...
00:28:28
Speaker
I mean, in a way, it's just much more versatile, you know?
00:28:32
Speaker
And I think for me personally, it's just been very freeing to shift to a digital way of working.
00:28:39
Speaker
But so, yeah, I mean, do I think they'd probably draw more?
00:28:42
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that it just becomes a kind of like weird little like think tank in the way that a sketchbook had.
00:28:50
Speaker
But of course, the sketchbook,
00:28:52
Speaker
isn't, you know, it's not interconnected.
00:28:54
Speaker
They can't share stuff freely.
00:28:56
Speaker
You have to photograph or scan the image.
00:28:59
Speaker
It doesn't, you know, something like clip studio and has like, you know, animation capabilities, PD capabilities.
00:29:05
Speaker
So like all of this stuff, I think that kind of adds an enormous amount.
00:29:09
Speaker
And yeah, I mean, I think it's, you know, like, I think in terms of, um,
00:29:15
Speaker
you know, in terms of my sense of how this stuff will evolve, like, I think
NFTs: A Modern Art Form
00:29:19
Speaker
there's no question that this new digitally native generation, you know, will evolve.
00:29:28
Speaker
And perhaps, you know, in terms of like, you know, because right now, I mean, you know, just now we're talking about this at the gallery, it's like you're dealing with the NFT market and the crypto market.
00:29:38
Speaker
I really try to keep this in mind is that it is so much in its infancy right now.
00:29:43
Speaker
And so it's so difficult to predict.
00:29:45
Speaker
And so that's why, like, I don't want to, I want to, you know, this is my policy as a critic as well is that, you know, I, I,
00:29:54
Speaker
try to take on a dialectical position and so really, really weigh the pros and really, really weigh the cons of it as well.
00:30:00
Speaker
And so, you know, so I try to look at it from that very, very balanced or, you know, kind of aspirationally balanced approach, but at the same time really see that, you know, it is inevitable that it will become a kind of default market.
00:30:16
Speaker
So right now there's a utopian patina on it, you know, and at the same time there's an,
00:30:23
Speaker
all types of other associations, whether it's predatory and whether or not it's fraudulent, all of this stuff.
00:30:30
Speaker
Blake Gopnik said at some point that it'll simply be digital art at some point.
00:30:34
Speaker
It'll simply be digital art.
00:30:36
Speaker
Like the way you see digital art traffic will be via some kind of blockchain encryption.
00:30:41
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:30:42
Speaker
The smart contract, I think, is a great thing for traditional galleries to utilize because it makes those transactions transparent to the artist.
00:30:52
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:30:53
Speaker
Unless that's not what the gallery's goal is.
00:30:55
Speaker
Well, you know, but that's what I'm saying.
00:30:57
Speaker
So the smart contract really benefits everyone.
00:31:01
Speaker
You know, there's a great philanthropic use in terms of NFTs.
00:31:07
Speaker
But again, however,
00:31:09
Speaker
is so young, you know, what is it, like eight years, something like that?
00:31:13
Speaker
And so my analogy and this, you know, compliments of my friend, Jonathan T.D.
00:31:19
Speaker
Neal, who's amazing critic, but he really compared it to photography.
00:31:22
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:23
Speaker
And so and so I think when, you know, like that is the really the right context for assessing it.
00:31:28
Speaker
And it's really fascinating to revisit the kind of historical traces of it because Baudelaire railed against photography as the most vulgar assault on the arts.
00:31:42
Speaker
And it's an assault on dreaming.
00:31:45
Speaker
It's an assault on... It's this kind of incursion of science into the sphere of creativity.
00:31:52
Speaker
And, but look at photography, you know, it is really one of the most dominant, you know, ubiquitous forms.
00:31:58
Speaker
So, so I, and I, and I feel like, you know, in terms of the prejudices, the euphorias, everything that surrounds this particular new emerging ecosystem, if we frame it in terms of photography, I think that's actually a really healthy measure, you know, because you understand that, you know,
00:32:15
Speaker
It's like looking at photography in the 1870s or in the 1880s, could not possibly anticipate what photography has become in 2022.
00:32:25
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:26
Speaker
And it's like technical, but also like social and distribution and like all of the, all of those.
00:32:32
Speaker
systems that are set up around it absolutely yeah but even photography pre uh smartphone yeah absolutely because that that short amount of time i don't even know what the number of photographs are taken every day like it's it's unfathomable absolutely but that just because you take photographs does that make you a good photographer
00:32:55
Speaker
Exactly, exactly.
00:32:56
Speaker
And I think that this is the other thing that is, you know, this is where, you know, I try to sort of find my axioms.
00:33:04
Speaker
It's like, you know, my interest is in digital art, you know?
00:33:07
Speaker
And so, and I think that those figures, you know, will emerge, those avant-garde, I mean, they're emerging now, but, you know, we don't even, I don't think necessarily, I mean, we have some hindsight, but, you know, we don't have 40 years of history.
00:33:23
Speaker
Right.
00:33:25
Speaker
So to really assess this.
00:33:27
Speaker
So I feel like that's sort of what I'm, when I say like I'm crypto curious, I'm very curious about this trajectory because I see us as literally trying to kind of try to figure out what photography is at like second half of the 19th century.
00:33:47
Speaker
And somewhere there's a time travel from Star Trek seeing the smartphone and being like,
00:33:53
Speaker
dudes.
00:33:54
Speaker
Hey, hey kids, you know, Bill and Ted's dudes, you know, but they're saying like, you don't understand, like in the future, most photography won't be printed.
00:34:01
Speaker
Most photography will be shared.
00:34:04
Speaker
Photography will increasingly be transformed and modified.
00:34:07
Speaker
So it no longer have any kind of
00:34:09
Speaker
you know, evidentiary claims.
00:34:13
Speaker
And, you know, and, but, you know, one can, in principle, even within the sphere, even within the sphere that is so infantile and so emergent, try to visualize those futures and aim towards that.
00:34:26
Speaker
And that would be a very, very cool thing to see.
00:34:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:34:28
Speaker
You know, so...
00:34:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I've even started kind of like shifting how I think about art made on the blockchain into like at least like two categories, which one is like one that engages with either the code of it or the distribution models that are available by by coding in a specific way.
00:34:48
Speaker
And then another that is really just kind of like digital art minted to the blockchain so that it can exist as an NFT forever or whatever.
00:34:56
Speaker
And those are starting to feel very different to me in terms of the way
00:34:59
Speaker
the market is kind of like moving and the stuff that people are making.
00:35:03
Speaker
And I think they're both awesome.
00:35:06
Speaker
I think, I think one of them is just a really nice solution for digital artists for monetizing and auditioning their work and kind of like making it accessible while still
00:35:14
Speaker
allowing for ownership but the other one which which people have been doing for the last eight years is really kind of like uh tweaking and breaking and like seeing what happens when you like mess with the blockchain itself totally um and that's like you know this like generative art kind of push uh in the last i don't know six months that kind of felt like a trend at first but has really stuck around and people are still very interested in these kind of like
00:35:38
Speaker
um nfts that are made when you when you mint them based on a code that an artist kind of sets up has been really fun to watch totally well um you know we talked about this but you know kevin mccoy and you know very privileged to collaborate with uh kevin jen and
00:35:55
Speaker
any on this project but you know kevin is really the kind of the inventor of the of the form of the medium and you know his interest in it is uh is deeply philosophical you know and so it's it's um i mean i don't want to speak for him you should have him on the show um but you know it's it's very much inspired by wittgenstein like the kind of the
00:36:18
Speaker
original code of it.
00:36:20
Speaker
And he sees that generative dimension is really, really pivotal to the work and how he thinks about it.
00:36:30
Speaker
And I think that there's a lot of incredibly fascinating experimentation with the technology and the blockchain as a kind of mechanism.
00:36:41
Speaker
And, you know, that that's really the stuff I feel like that, you know, that I think will be very, very, very interesting to artists aside from, you know, these other kind of uses, which.
00:36:56
Speaker
which feel like increasingly like dominate the space, you know, there's this kind of like libertarian dimension.
00:37:01
Speaker
There's obviously a very, you know, speculative kind of, you know, entrepreneurial attitude.
00:37:10
Speaker
But, you know, but as you said, it's like, you know, I think that these, these contractions of the market, I think they shake those things out and, and,
00:37:18
Speaker
What I perceive is that it'll just become a market like any other.
00:37:24
Speaker
The art world is a market.
00:37:26
Speaker
It goes through its various contractions and absurd sort of things.
00:37:32
Speaker
Baroque phases.
00:37:35
Speaker
But, you know, and there's some horrible work in there that gets inappropriately praised.
00:37:44
Speaker
And some work that miraculously, you know, gets attention and, you know, edifies.
00:37:51
Speaker
us all in a way.
00:37:53
Speaker
So I feel like that's, you know, to me, like, I think that's what I find, like, I think within the next five years, we'll see some kind of normalization period.
00:38:04
Speaker
That's my, that's a guess, you know?
00:38:05
Speaker
I mean, I don't know.
00:38:06
Speaker
I'm not a futurist.
00:38:09
Speaker
I was right on other things though.
00:38:11
Speaker
I have been right.
00:38:12
Speaker
It's got a good track record.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:17
Speaker
Well, you know, not entirely.
00:38:19
Speaker
Anyway.
00:38:21
Speaker
So one of the things that, so like we started this gallery and now we're curating artworks that are made into NFTs.
00:38:31
Speaker
um, in, in kind of like this space where I think a lot of the impetus started from like removing the middleman, uh, because like anybody can mint and collectors could buy straight from the artist on, on wherever they buy it from.
00:38:43
Speaker
Um, and so we've kind of like reinserted ourselves as middlemen into this, into this market that exists
Curation in Comics and NFTs
00:38:50
Speaker
or are trying to, and there's lots of people doing that, whether it's like platforms or curators, um,
00:38:57
Speaker
And I guess I'm curious and we I'm actually more curious about like curation in the in the comic scene.
00:39:05
Speaker
Sure.
00:39:05
Speaker
Because I like I know what it looks like in the NFT scene.
00:39:08
Speaker
And I think there's an interesting conversation there.
00:39:10
Speaker
But, you know, the comic world, I don't really know that well.
00:39:14
Speaker
And I remember.
00:39:16
Speaker
When I lived in Portland, Oregon, like 12 years ago, I got, I, I volunteered at a zine shop that had like a, like a really wonderful selection of comics that I didn't know existed.
00:39:29
Speaker
I didn't know that was like a thing that was out there and they were, you know, they were curating this like selection of comics that they liked that were from like a wide variety of makers, but it had like, you know, it had like a personal touch from the owner who like,
00:39:43
Speaker
was making sure that this stuff was, was what she thought was interesting and thought her people would.
00:39:49
Speaker
So, yeah, I'm interested like, uh, curation in the comic world.
00:39:51
Speaker
And then like, also if you have any thoughts about, you know, what it means to kind of like curate in a space that is meant to be non curatorial or like open access or something.
00:40:02
Speaker
Oh, I see what you're saying.
00:40:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:40:04
Speaker
Well, you know, I mean, my experience and, you know, in full disclosure, it's, um,
00:40:10
Speaker
You know, I was a comics nerd when I was a kid.
00:40:11
Speaker
Oh, yeah.
00:40:12
Speaker
I was going to ask you, like, what were your, like, comics when you were growing up?
00:40:15
Speaker
Oh, my.
00:40:16
Speaker
Well, okay.
00:40:18
Speaker
So, a little side note.
00:40:19
Speaker
So, you know, we came here in 1980.
00:40:22
Speaker
Okay.
00:40:23
Speaker
So, we came here as refugees, you know, through the HIOS program.
00:40:29
Speaker
And we settled in the Bronx.
00:40:31
Speaker
And much to my surprise โ oh, I don't know.
00:40:34
Speaker
Actually, I don't know how โ
00:40:36
Speaker
I did this, but I somehow found a comic book store.
00:40:40
Speaker
Now I barely spoke any English.
00:40:42
Speaker
So, so what I said and how I navigated this was, uh, it was kind of a miracle, but, um, it was Jimmy's comics and it had like this, this, you know, gaggle of, of, uh, kids, uh, it's very like standby me.
00:40:56
Speaker
And, uh, and so this was 1982, like probably 1985, um,
00:41:00
Speaker
So what were my comics?
00:41:01
Speaker
So it just so happened that, you know, this was an amazing time for comics, because there were a lot of people back then who were, you know, really kind of working at their prime.
00:41:15
Speaker
So, you know, George Perez, Teen Titans, Klaus Janssen, Frank Miller, Daredevil, you know, and
00:41:23
Speaker
There was, I mean, like Micronauts, you know, Michael Golden, you know, all kinds of Marvel fanfares and what ifs, you know, I mean, it's and, you know, I continued collecting, I think, through like the 1989.
00:41:41
Speaker
But... So, you know, I just ate all of this stuff up.
00:41:47
Speaker
You know, it's Elric, you know, Pete Craig Russell.
00:41:51
Speaker
I mean, this stuff really blew my mind.
00:41:54
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:41:55
Speaker
And it was also, you know, just so... You know, it was mainstream comics for the most part.
00:42:00
Speaker
But it was mainstream comics that was really incredible, you know, and very, very mature.
00:42:07
Speaker
And so I had, you know, started...
00:42:10
Speaker
rebuying some of this stuff.
00:42:11
Speaker
For example, Frank Miller, you know, really kind of mind-blowing, you know, electro-assassin, Miller and Sienkiewicz, you know, it was really kind of an avant-garde book in many ways.
00:42:22
Speaker
I mean, this was later, but
00:42:26
Speaker
But anyway, so, you know, to me, it was just this incredible awakening in terms of what this stuff, you know, what this stuff can do.
00:42:35
Speaker
But yeah, I mean, those were sort of my people.
00:42:39
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:42:41
Speaker
That's cool.
00:42:41
Speaker
I was kind of a comics nerd in the 90s.
00:42:43
Speaker
Okay, so that's a bit later.
00:42:45
Speaker
It was like when Image Comics had started getting very popular.
00:42:48
Speaker
So the Max was like my, I mean, I feel like part of my identity is wrapped up in the Max comics.
00:42:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:55
Speaker
Which is Sam Keith.
00:42:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah.
00:42:57
Speaker
I mean, I had already stopped collecting then and, you know, I had returned to it.
00:43:02
Speaker
I'm saying the last seven years, you know, I did go back and buy.
00:43:09
Speaker
There was like maybe four or five issues from the series that I like never got because I just like it was wherever that ended was when I stopped collecting.
00:43:19
Speaker
And so I like finally got to finish the series, which was kind of fun.
00:43:23
Speaker
And they had reprinted them in like a new company that somebody had started.
00:43:27
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:29
Speaker
Which was fun.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah.
00:43:30
Speaker
Well, it's amazing revisiting this stuff because I think what it showed me is that I was actually exposed to incredibly...
00:43:37
Speaker
Adult themes at a young age.
00:43:39
Speaker
I mean, same with me.
00:43:39
Speaker
The max is like, the max is heavy.
00:43:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
00:43:42
Speaker
You know, and it's, you know, the language is very sophisticated.
00:43:47
Speaker
The art is incredibly, I don't know how to describe it.
00:43:51
Speaker
It's like, it's, it's,
00:43:53
Speaker
polyphonic.
00:43:54
Speaker
I think of Pete Craig Russell.
00:43:56
Speaker
He was just absorbing Japanese art, Art Nouveau.
00:44:01
Speaker
You look at Janssen's expressionism, German expressionism.
00:44:08
Speaker
To me, I rediscovered this.
00:44:09
Speaker
I was like, wow, I was actually really nourished, well-nourished when I was a kid by these mainstream brands.
00:44:18
Speaker
And of course, you know, there's a lot of, you know, wonderful politics in there.
00:44:22
Speaker
You know, so if you're reading like early X-Men, you know, it's all political allegory.
00:44:29
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:44:30
Speaker
I didn't get comics.
00:44:33
Speaker
I also grew up in New York in the 80s.
00:44:35
Speaker
My friends would go to comic book stores and I would just look around.
00:44:38
Speaker
I never...
00:44:39
Speaker
I got like some G.I.
00:44:39
Speaker
Joe comic books and whatever, but I didn't get into comics until the aughts.
00:44:43
Speaker
Oh, interesting.
00:44:44
Speaker
Like with Chris Ware and Joe Sacco and Jason, like that's when it hit me.
00:44:49
Speaker
Okay.
00:44:49
Speaker
And I was like, holy crap, this is an amazing art form.
00:44:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:44:53
Speaker
Storytelling.
00:44:54
Speaker
I mean, talk about hybrid.
00:44:56
Speaker
where to text and image blend together to tell a story.
00:45:01
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
00:45:02
Speaker
Way better than either or, in my opinion.
00:45:06
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:45:07
Speaker
But that's kind of, I'm sure you're well aware of those people.
00:45:11
Speaker
Yeah, of course, yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
00:45:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that this is the, you know, and again, just to kind of, sorry, I'll sit closer to the microphone, to sort of speak of, you know, euphoria, it's that I feel like everyone, you know,
00:45:26
Speaker
You know, the people who are in specific disciplines, you know, are very, very deeply passionate about it.
00:45:30
Speaker
And I'm sorry, I neglected your question.
00:45:32
Speaker
That's right, we'll get back to it.
00:45:33
Speaker
Keep going.
00:45:33
Speaker
Curatorial space.
00:45:34
Speaker
No, but I just remembered it.
00:45:36
Speaker
I want to get back to it.
00:45:37
Speaker
So you can cut a lot of that metal stuff out when I drift off.
Passion for Comics
00:45:44
Speaker
So they're very, very passionate about it, you know.
00:45:47
Speaker
And I think that, you know, comics, you know, is what people are very...
00:45:54
Speaker
They're quite, you know, they're almost like religious about it, is that kind of synthesis of word and image, the kind of immersion of the comic book.
00:46:05
Speaker
So I feel like, you know, in terms of that hybrid model, that's really what they're fixated on.
00:46:11
Speaker
And so if you're in a good comic book, there's something about it that is so fundamentally quasi, it's quasi cinematic, it's obviously literary, sort of activates all your senses.
00:46:22
Speaker
I mean, this is what Scott McCloud talked about.
00:46:24
Speaker
But I wanna go back to this question.
00:46:26
Speaker
Forgive me for neglecting it.
00:46:27
Speaker
So the curatorial platform.
00:46:31
Speaker
So the comic book industry, to my knowledge, again, and so, you know, and I haven't been swimming in it for as long as, you know, many of my comrades.
00:46:42
Speaker
So, you know, it's still, I think, like the art world, kind of a...
00:46:48
Speaker
a small field, you know what I mean?
00:46:52
Speaker
In perspective.
00:46:55
Speaker
So it's people who are in it for a very, very long time, oftentimes, and they're editors, obviously they're makers, there are many people that I know in that world who just, they only dreamed of making comics.
00:47:13
Speaker
That was their sole passion.
00:47:17
Speaker
And so the curatorial dimension works in the sense that people really know what their vision is.
00:47:25
Speaker
They know what their preference is in terms of whether it's indie comics that's specific to that tradition or if it's mainstream and kind of more superhero fare but maybe has a much more kind of melodramatic or epic background.
00:47:42
Speaker
dimension.
00:47:44
Speaker
And, you know, the editors who work in these various presses, they, you know, they really know their stuff and they really try to
00:47:55
Speaker
nurture you know that specific vision um i mean like every industry there's you know there's obviously like a lot of um you know moving parts and people moving from one press to another but you know my experience is that because you have these like um like lifers you know in the in the in that sphere um they're very connoissorial you know um
00:48:19
Speaker
And so that I feel like is where that kind of curatorial dimension plays out, both, you know, in terms of the artists, in terms of, you know, these specific genealogies of artists whom they follow or champion, support or in conversation with, certainly in terms of editors and in terms of presses and like galleries.
00:48:41
Speaker
I was going to say not dissimilar from galleries.
00:48:43
Speaker
Very similar.
00:48:44
Speaker
Very, very similar.
00:48:45
Speaker
And so, and I think that it's a very analogous thing that, you know, you come to a particular, you know, press and you'll understand like what they're about in the same way that a gallery program would be like, oh yeah, you know, this person shows kind of like all over abstraction with some psychedelic sculpture, do not expect.
00:49:06
Speaker
smart video work in this program.
00:49:09
Speaker
This person shows figurative painting with a classical bent.
00:49:13
Speaker
That's where you go for that.
00:49:14
Speaker
And I think it's very, very similar.
00:49:16
Speaker
That's why for me, it felt like, oh, it's just kind of like a parallel universe.
00:49:22
Speaker
Like it's very similar in so many ways.
00:49:24
Speaker
Yeah.
00:49:24
Speaker
And record labels are the same way all the time.
00:49:27
Speaker
Totally.
00:49:27
Speaker
Totally.
00:49:28
Speaker
I always look forward to drawn and quarterly.
00:49:30
Speaker
Yeah, for instance, exactly, exactly.
00:49:33
Speaker
Drone and Quarterly, Fantagraphics.
00:49:37
Speaker
So, Image has a very, I think a very, even though I think they're quite open, but there's still a certain kind of identifiable look.
00:49:50
Speaker
So the other part of the question is, what does it mean to curate in a place that's supposed to be non-cultural?
00:49:57
Speaker
Yeah, like let's say that the libertarian bend of the cryptosphere is the right one, right?
00:50:04
Speaker
And it's supposed to be this thing where people are able to kind of like put out their things and connect and there's not gatekeepers and nobody's kind of like owning that space and keeping people from kind of like showing their stuff.
00:50:18
Speaker
But it's not just libertarian, it's also anarchist.
00:50:20
Speaker
Yes.
00:50:21
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:50:21
Speaker
I mean, I think there's a lot of crossover there.
00:50:23
Speaker
Well, but just, you know, like I've had these conversations and I think like I think it's really important.
00:50:29
Speaker
I'm not sure that I'm the person to make it because I'm not knowledgeable enough, you know, enough about the ecosystem.
00:50:36
Speaker
But I think that, you know, you have to make a left case for crypto, a left case.
00:50:41
Speaker
I mean, maybe, except a lot of libertarians tend to lean right on a lot of things when it comes down to it.
00:50:49
Speaker
Okay, but I think that this is... No, but this is where I would...
00:50:56
Speaker
contextualize it as a kind of an anarchist principle as opposed to a libertarian one.
00:51:00
Speaker
Sure.
00:51:00
Speaker
Okay.
00:51:01
Speaker
I mean, I'll buy that because that's the way that I see it.
00:51:04
Speaker
Exactly.
00:51:04
Speaker
Is it non-hierarchical?
00:51:06
Speaker
Exactly.
00:51:06
Speaker
So something decentralized, something that's peer-to-peer, something that's open access, something that chooses to kind of level hierarchies as opposed to reassert them.
00:51:16
Speaker
Which is what the crypto space is supposedly...
00:51:21
Speaker
built on right well exactly so so you know to me again this from my distanced perspective um it seems like the great war in heaven right is over the anarchist and libertarian definition of this space i just i just see two nerds running
00:51:42
Speaker
I think optically that's what the camera may record.
00:51:46
Speaker
However... But so I am for the anarchist version of it, but I also have reinserted myself into it as a gatekeeper on purpose, as running kind of like a gallery that like... Sure.
00:52:00
Speaker
And so I guess I wonder, you know, what you think about curators acting in spaces and trying to be...
00:52:09
Speaker
not necessarily non-hierarchical, but, but trying to kind of like, um, champion the artist, right.
00:52:15
Speaker
Yeah.
00:52:15
Speaker
In a way that, that elevates the artist in a way that they couldn't do themselves.
00:52:19
Speaker
Sure.
00:52:20
Speaker
Sure.
00:52:21
Speaker
Um, so I don't know, I don't actually know really what the question is, but it just, yeah, I'm curious.
00:52:25
Speaker
Well, I think, you know, it's one of those things where, um,
00:52:30
Speaker
I mean, I can tell you my perspective from the standpoint of a maker, you know, and I've come to really revere the role of the editor.
00:52:40
Speaker
And so in part, you know, as a writer, I've been very, very fortunate to work with wonderful editors, great editors, you know, they just add volumes.
00:52:50
Speaker
And my analogy is they add new rooms to my text.
00:52:54
Speaker
I didn't know this was possible, but here's...
00:52:57
Speaker
Jonathan or Monica or Evan or Christina or whoever, you know?
00:53:03
Speaker
And all of a sudden it was like, have you considered this?
00:53:05
Speaker
And I'd be like, oh,
00:53:07
Speaker
You know, all of a sudden it just adds like, boom, there's another room to your house, you know?
00:53:13
Speaker
And so, you know, same thing with, you know, my partner, Mary, who's a poet, you know, she's my primary editor.
00:53:21
Speaker
It's my first sort of, the first line of defense, you know, between the text and the world.
00:53:29
Speaker
And she'll be like,
00:53:31
Speaker
I have no idea what you're saying, or this is great, or this is beautiful, or I don't understand.
00:53:38
Speaker
I would need an example.
00:53:40
Speaker
She's an amazing reader because she doesn't really come from the art world.
00:53:43
Speaker
She's interested, she's cultivated, but she's not an art expert.
00:53:48
Speaker
And she's not a theory head.
00:53:50
Speaker
So if I can articulate in the language that pulls Marion as a reader, I know I've done my job.
00:53:56
Speaker
And the same thing with comics.
00:54:00
Speaker
Like an editor, a good editor will develop the book.
00:54:05
Speaker
They will give you opportunities to be like, hmm, you don't need this panel, or have you considered this, or move these captions around to ease the flow of reading and stuff like that.
00:54:15
Speaker
And so in many ways, I see the role of the curator and that intermediary as the role of an editor.
00:54:22
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:54:22
Speaker
They're not, I think it would be a mistake
00:54:26
Speaker
to say that they occupy the most privileged position in the art world.
00:54:33
Speaker
But it's a really vital one because I know from my experience that the proper contextualization
00:54:42
Speaker
And the proper editing will, you know, benefit me as an artist or writer.
00:54:46
Speaker
So in this regard, you know, I'm of like, you know, I'm of two minds, you know, like when I when I go through some of the the the platforms, whether it's like, you know, super rare or foundation or whatever.
00:54:59
Speaker
And it's just like the kind of Zappos of.
00:55:03
Speaker
stuff, you know?
00:55:04
Speaker
And I mean, I'm like a very patient consumer of, of content, you know, digital content, but even I'm just like completely like instantly broken by it.
00:55:15
Speaker
And it was like, I can't, I can't deal, you know, like don't even get me started and open to you.
00:55:19
Speaker
Like I can't navigate it.
00:55:21
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:55:22
Speaker
And so, so I feel like this is where, you know, that kind of curatorial focus, you know, would be of, of enormous benefit.
00:55:30
Speaker
Um,
00:55:31
Speaker
So, so yes, in principle, it is this, this kind of, you know, free for all space.
00:55:36
Speaker
It's this like horizontal terrain.
00:55:38
Speaker
You should be able to navigate freely and so on.
00:55:40
Speaker
But this is, you know, one of the great problems with our digital ecosystem.
00:55:44
Speaker
There is, um, such an overwhelming surplus of content, you know, like I took a friend of mine, um, who, you know, publishes, you know, like a kind of, you know, art magazine took him to forbidden planet.
00:56:00
Speaker
see the look on his face.
00:56:02
Speaker
He was like, there is just so much content.
00:56:06
Speaker
You know, it's like, what do I do?
00:56:08
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:56:10
Speaker
And so I feel like this is where, you know, that kind of curatorial eye
00:56:16
Speaker
Someone to aggregate focus and reposition information.
00:56:22
Speaker
I think that's increasingly needed.
00:56:28
Speaker
I use the word curator, but I think you could replace it with a lot of different nouns.
00:56:34
Speaker
Even a really well-done Instagram page or a Twitter or something like that that's kind of promoting...
00:56:39
Speaker
artists can be like these kind of collections that help people help people find things that they're interested in in this sea of kind of like whateverness absolutely absolutely well I mean you know my um you know speaking of Instagram I mean we are sort of on some level describing uh influencers but of course I'm thinking of of more um
00:57:01
Speaker
kind of boutique-y, you know, as feets in a way.
00:57:05
Speaker
Librarians, you know, this is what I'm thinking of.
00:57:07
Speaker
So it's like 50watts.com, you know, Desert Island Comics, Public Domain Review, you know, like those are...
00:57:14
Speaker
curatorial visions, you know.
00:57:17
Speaker
But those people are navigators within this sort of sea of data.
00:57:23
Speaker
And, you know, Oliver is one of these people as well.
00:57:27
Speaker
You know, it's an enormous, you know, like...
00:57:31
Speaker
what's the word?
00:57:32
Speaker
Like, plethora is too timid.
00:57:35
Speaker
Like, it's just, you know, just overabundance is like explosion of found anonymous imagery.
00:57:41
Speaker
Explosion, overexplosion, overexplosion.
00:57:43
Speaker
Yeah, the supernova of popular, you know, flotsam.
00:57:48
Speaker
And, but, you know, but Oliver Wasso focuses these, you know, selects these photos, vintage photos from eBay and positions them in this really, you know, makes us notice them.
00:57:59
Speaker
So I feel like that's a really vital role and increasingly so given the fact that there's just too much stuff.
00:58:07
Speaker
There's just way too much stuff to navigate.
00:58:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:10
Speaker
And I think, I mean, even, I don't know if it's a direct analogy, but we were talking about, we like saw an open call that would have been great for one of our artists that
Navigating Digital Abundance
00:58:18
Speaker
we missed.
00:58:18
Speaker
And he was like, Alex was like, how do you see, there should be like an aggregate of all the things that we want to see.
00:58:25
Speaker
And I was like,
00:58:26
Speaker
There's too many, like, there's no way you can actually see everything that you, that is relevant to you because you, you don't have enough bandwidth in time.
00:58:34
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:35
Speaker
And so as long as you're like, okay with the fact that there's stuff out there that you would love that you're never going to get to consume or view, then like, you can just kind of focus on the avenues you do have that, um, that are, are showing you the things that make you, uh, you know, think or are joyful or whatever.
00:58:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:51
Speaker
Yeah.
00:58:52
Speaker
Um, which I don't know, for me, that's helpful in the digital space to kind of like take a step back and just recognize that there's so much good stuff that I should just like enjoy what's in front of me and not have to worry about what else is out there.
00:59:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:59:06
Speaker
Well, I feel like that sense of FOMO is.
00:59:09
Speaker
it's sort of implicit within the digital economy on every level.
00:59:14
Speaker
But, you know, this is something that, that, you know, in my writing, I've, I've used like the restaurant analogy in terms of describing the gallery system, um, in the sense that it's a very, um, you know, it's, you know, when you go into a gallery, or at least when I go into a gallery, you know, what I'm doing is I'm, I'm actually like executing a kind of social script, um,
00:59:38
Speaker
And because in reality, as an artist, this is something that the Russian artist, Komar and Melamed, I think at one point said, or this is actually, early on, it was like Tony Smith, this example, he takes a student to the New Jersey Turnpike.
00:59:54
Speaker
And he's like, this is it.
00:59:56
Speaker
You don't need art because this is it.
00:59:57
Speaker
This is like the sublime, this kind of expansive, unframed aesthetic experience.
01:00:03
Speaker
And so I think if you're an artist, it's like,
01:00:08
Speaker
just get your aesthetic fix from a lot of things.
01:00:10
Speaker
You know, you don't need to get it from things that are, you know, like already kind of pre-cooked, you know, pre-framed as art.
01:00:18
Speaker
And so I feel like that's, you know, the curator, the role of the curator, the role of the influencer or the aggregator or whoever it is.
01:00:27
Speaker
You know, like I think that that's, again, just to speak of these hybrid experiences, like that is a choice.
01:00:31
Speaker
Like that is in the same way that, you know, the restaurant does not define food
01:00:37
Speaker
or nourishment is just one particular ritual of consuming it, maybe sharing it with friends, maybe going there for prestige to be seen, for whatever, all the things that are kind of attendant to that space.
01:00:54
Speaker
So, you know, I feel like that's how I see this thing.
01:00:58
Speaker
It's like I think what I would want to do is I want to preserve it, but really see it as one distinct opportunity for, you know, an aesthetic experience among many and not not necessarily the privileged one.
01:01:12
Speaker
Sure.
01:01:12
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:01:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:01:14
Speaker
And I feel like that's kind of, for me, that solves this paradox of like, well, you know, how can you have a intermediary, you know, intermediary in a space that's unmediated?
01:01:26
Speaker
It's like, well, you actually, you know, you come, here's a specific choice that I choose to execute the same way that like, you know, many collectors might go to a gallery actually to be educated.
01:01:37
Speaker
Or they, you know, this actually, the student,
01:01:42
Speaker
I'm working with, you know, it's like a work of buying a work of art is a way of fostering a relationship with the artist and the gallerist.
01:01:52
Speaker
So it's not just buying stuff.
01:01:54
Speaker
It's actually trying to cultivate some kind of, you know, a social network where you're, you know, you're really patronizing someone, you're supporting practice.
01:02:06
Speaker
Yeah.
01:02:06
Speaker
as opposed to you're just buying an object and you're like, okay, well, let's see how this thing performs.
01:02:12
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:02:13
Speaker
And so that type of patronage, you know, in the same way that we would go to a restaurant where we get to know the people who work there, we have our, you know, expectations, it becomes our place, you know?
01:02:25
Speaker
I feel like that's a very, very healthy approach to, you know, to art commerce.
01:02:33
Speaker
And at the same, well, I wouldn't even want to describe it as commerce.
01:02:36
Speaker
I'd really describe it in terms of patronage.
01:02:38
Speaker
And what artists wouldn't want someone like in their corner being like...
01:02:43
Speaker
Hey, what are you up to?
01:02:43
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:02:46
Speaker
And I want to know more about your life.
01:02:49
Speaker
Not just the stuff that you make.
01:02:53
Speaker
That kind of goes back to what Joe said.
01:02:56
Speaker
Not that we were looking forward to a crash.
01:02:59
Speaker
We knew a crash is inevitable.
01:03:00
Speaker
We know that the crypto market is very volatile.
01:03:04
Speaker
And there's times where it does kind of just sink below a certain threshold and stays there for a while.
01:03:09
Speaker
I think the reason we've been looking for something like that is because up until recently, like our first show, we put on the pricing guide.
01:03:17
Speaker
Every other day we had to change the pricing guide because the price of Tezos was going either up or down.
01:03:22
Speaker
And it was like chasing this never-ending thing.
01:03:28
Speaker
I was thinking about it recently.
01:03:29
Speaker
It's like, imagine making art and then putting it on gold and then trying to sell it, but then the gold outprices the artwork.
01:03:38
Speaker
So it's like,
01:03:39
Speaker
it almost overshadows the actual work itself.
01:03:43
Speaker
Sure, yeah.
01:03:44
Speaker
So it almost would be better to, say, mint NFT on, say, a stable coin like USDC where it's pegged to a certain dollar amount and it doesn't change.
01:03:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:03:56
Speaker
Just like fiat.
01:03:57
Speaker
It's like your dollar.
01:03:58
Speaker
I mean, inflation, whatever.
01:03:59
Speaker
But it's like to have this system where you mint on top of a certain dollar
01:04:06
Speaker
blockchain and the blockchain keeps changing and if I pay a certain amount like one eth for a work of art and then next month that eth is worth twice or four times what I paid for it now the value has changed because not because of the artwork but because the actual
01:04:22
Speaker
coin that's under the... So yeah, it's been interesting.
01:04:29
Speaker
And again, this is an infancy, so a lot of these problems will probably be worked out at some point.
01:04:35
Speaker
But it's really strange to kind of
01:04:39
Speaker
Navigate.
01:04:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:04:40
Speaker
Well, maybe then the analogy is actually like, who's the Renaissance sculptor Cellini?
01:04:47
Speaker
You know, he made jewelry and it's very, very fine work.
01:04:51
Speaker
So it's so maybe it's it's kind of more analogous to that.
01:04:54
Speaker
And I think it's actually kind of an interesting paradox that it's like.
01:04:59
Speaker
you know, that the art of the future, the most technologically advanced, seemingly immaterial art of the future actually goes back to artisanal craft in terms of precious materials, you know, that give rather than the design or, you know, the kind of formal values that give this give this work their value.
01:05:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that that's, you know, the kind of fintech dimension of it is not, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correct, fintech?
01:05:31
Speaker
I say fintech, I think that's right.
01:05:33
Speaker
Yeah, so, I mean, like, that stuff for me is, you know, like, you know, Mary and I talk about this, it's like, we live in a world of gambling, you know, and investment is gambling, the art market is gambling, like everyone is gambling, you know.
01:05:49
Speaker
And so to me, there's a part of it that's not particularly shocking.
01:05:54
Speaker
It doesn't seem so heretical because I know that's what the art world is.
01:05:57
Speaker
And I've been navigating the art world for a very long time.
01:06:02
Speaker
And at the same time, now our 401ks are devalued.
01:06:06
Speaker
And so you realize that it's part of the same kind of school of thought in many ways.
01:06:14
Speaker
But so, you know, I take your point, like it's it feels like you're kind of following this this wave.
01:06:21
Speaker
And I think the art market, you know, is seeing its various contractions.
01:06:24
Speaker
I mean, I remember, you know, I was here in 2008 during
01:06:29
Speaker
you know, like the first notes of the financial crisis.
01:06:32
Speaker
And it just felt like galleries were like, they were just ships adrift, you know, like it was, it was, it was shocking to just see all of this prestige and power, like all of a sudden it was evaporated, you know?
01:06:46
Speaker
or at least stilled in a very, very memorable way.
01:06:54
Speaker
And then I remember Hurricane Sandy where all of a sudden everything got flooded.
01:07:00
Speaker
And this was actually, this is something I would like to talk about because I was making digital art at the time, making my light boxes.
01:07:09
Speaker
And so when Sandy happened and all of a sudden, like, I think we retained power, but all of a sudden when I realized like they were going to shut down, like, like there was no, you know, there was no light.
01:07:19
Speaker
I was like, I was like, oh shit.
01:07:23
Speaker
So it's like, this is why painting, you know, and sculpture exists.
01:07:27
Speaker
This is so they can like,
01:07:29
Speaker
You know, they can like outflank, you know, the elements.
01:07:33
Speaker
But at the same time, then, you know, you see Sandy, you see all of these spaces getting flooded and you see people losing work.
01:07:38
Speaker
And I think that that's, you know, what I've come to.
01:07:42
Speaker
I think part of like my more.
01:07:45
Speaker
kind of philosophical perch, you know, from that I try to hold is like, I see all of this stuff as profoundly fugitive, as totally erratic.
01:07:56
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:07:57
Speaker
Because I think that this is one of the things that, you know, again, I've written on is that like, if you're, you know, there is this human impulse to somehow preserve and stultify something that is, you know, transitory, ephemeral, fugitive, however you want to describe it.
The Impermanence of Art
01:08:16
Speaker
And so I think this attempt to fix value is part of that human drive.
01:08:21
Speaker
It's, you know, the drive to archive something, to preserve it, to steal it, you know.
01:08:27
Speaker
And I think that, you know, I'm definitely not a Buddhist or like a really, really failed one, but, you know, I think that
01:08:37
Speaker
trying to come to terms with the fact that as artists, like we're all kind of making sand mandalas, you know what I mean?
01:08:42
Speaker
Like we're all just, you're either making paintings with the horizon of catastrophic climate change, you know?
01:08:50
Speaker
You know, you're making NFTs following this market that is going any which way, you know?
01:08:59
Speaker
So I think that that's ultimately it's like, you know, what is it that we have to offer, you know, as artists is like, well, we actually offer meaningful statements, you know, like our technologies are always going to be very, very flawed.
01:09:11
Speaker
You know, the paintings are going to rot.
01:09:14
Speaker
The markets are going to go, you know, just wacko in whatever way.
01:09:18
Speaker
But, you know, in that brief moment, you know, you might be able to kind of smuggle something in that's actually really like moving for a person.
01:09:28
Speaker
And I think that's, you know, that's a very different thing that's totally divorced from speculation, from fintech, from any of these things.
01:09:36
Speaker
these issues because I think like your, your model is interesting.
01:09:39
Speaker
Like you're trying to kind of ride something that is, you know, very, very unpredictable, but the thing you're kind of trying to paste onto it, I mean, that's where the focus really should be.
01:09:51
Speaker
Exactly.
01:09:52
Speaker
I would be remiss to not bring up,
01:09:57
Speaker
your paintings, like your facility with paint.
01:10:03
Speaker
I mean, we'll put examples on with the show notes, but you're one of the better painters that I know personally.
01:10:11
Speaker
You paint really well.
01:10:12
Speaker
Thank you.
01:10:15
Speaker
Do you miss that?
01:10:18
Speaker
Well, I think this is where, you know, if you find me sort of like
01:10:26
Speaker
you know, being a little bit on a, you know, I'm sort of, how should I say it?
01:10:31
Speaker
It's like, I have many, um,
01:10:35
Speaker
You know, I have many lives in my hand and many disciplines, you know.
01:10:41
Speaker
And so it's been very challenging for me to try to organize all of them and try to.
01:10:47
Speaker
So I feel like comics, it's an attempt to sort of bring these together, to bring the writer together with the visual artist.
01:10:54
Speaker
But absolutely, as I've grown more digitally immersed, painting has somehow fallen to the wayside.
01:11:03
Speaker
And I absolutely feel like that is inappropriate.
01:11:12
Speaker
And so it is unsustainable for me, just psychologically, frankly.
01:11:18
Speaker
And so for me, you know, it becomes kind of the great task and I'm still...
01:11:25
Speaker
you know, like on the one hand, I think when I try to theorize these things, I really see them as in terms of multiplicity, like ever granular multiplicity, like
01:11:36
Speaker
It shouldn't be a choice.
01:11:37
Speaker
It shouldn't be like it, or I should say it should be a choice.
01:11:39
Speaker
Like you either go for a curated experience or you go for a completely decentralized experience where you navigate the sphere and you just do it, you know, open sandbox.
01:11:48
Speaker
You just spread that redemption.
01:11:50
Speaker
You have six hours to kill.
01:11:52
Speaker
Explore.
01:11:53
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:11:54
Speaker
Go on open seat, see what you find.
01:11:56
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:11:57
Speaker
Um, if you feel like something that's more focused,
01:12:00
Speaker
Here's this person who seems to have, you know, a real sensibility that they demonstrate, you know, and follow what they, and they can open up doors.
01:12:09
Speaker
So it's not an either or, I just feel like it's, it should again, just be a bit of, you know, a kind of, you know, a kind of casual pivot from, from one thing to another.
01:12:19
Speaker
And so I think with, you know, with painting, um,
01:12:24
Speaker
all of this stuff I still have kind of like a theory of everything you know like some grand unified model which I know may be impossible but the goal uh would be to unify the writing side of me and the painting side of me and and maybe even the digital side of me there's a one kind of hybrid thing now is this going to be a monstrous Frankenstein
01:12:48
Speaker
I don't know.
01:12:50
Speaker
Or I can just be like, well, what's wrong with just the multiplicity model?
01:12:54
Speaker
It's like some, you know, this is like Marx, you know, this is Marx's notion of utopia.
01:12:58
Speaker
It's like, you're a fisherman, a philosopher, you know, like you can do all of these things, you know, so it's like a painter, you know, then you can do some writing, then you can do some digital art.
01:13:10
Speaker
And that's, that's cool.
01:13:11
Speaker
I can think of a simple way to do that.
01:13:13
Speaker
How?
01:13:13
Speaker
A Lydian Stater show.
01:13:15
Speaker
That's very kind of you.
01:13:17
Speaker
Okay.
01:13:18
Speaker
Well, we can talk.
01:13:19
Speaker
Wow, we put the pitch right in the podcast.
01:13:21
Speaker
That's how it works, folks.
01:13:24
Speaker
But in looking at your, because I was searching through your past paintings, and one of the things, obviously, besides dexterity,
01:13:33
Speaker
It seems like you would come up with ways to impede or put obstacles.
01:13:41
Speaker
There's these paintings where you actually have these reflective tubes.
01:13:46
Speaker
Yeah, the anamorphic.
01:13:47
Speaker
Anamorphic paintings.
01:13:49
Speaker
And then there's other paintings where you actually put little figures to observe.
01:13:52
Speaker
Yeah, the epiphany models.
01:13:56
Speaker
Has dexterity ever gotten in the way?
01:13:59
Speaker
You know, it's very kind of you to say that.
01:14:04
Speaker
I mean, I still see myself as a perpetual student in almost everything.
01:14:09
Speaker
You know what I mean?
01:14:10
Speaker
So I could paint, but I'm always sort of looking at some unreachable virtuoso that's...
01:14:25
Speaker
You know, I guess I just see myself as not, I only see the problems in my work.
01:14:32
Speaker
Maybe that's a really healthy thing to do, but you know, it's like everyone is,
01:14:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:14:40
Speaker
And especially, you know, it's like I give these artist talks and I look at my old work and it's like, oh, yeah, it's just like, what was I thinking?
01:14:49
Speaker
You know, so so it's very kind of you.
01:14:51
Speaker
But but I feel like that's it doesn't get in the way because I'm always looking for like sort of the next project.
01:14:58
Speaker
You know, like when I was when I started doing comics, I mean, I.
01:15:06
Speaker
you know, I had potential, but like, but I like, I don't know if I, if I was really, I didn't have like a real workflow.
01:15:13
Speaker
I'll put it this way.
01:15:14
Speaker
I was just really just, you know, all over the place.
01:15:18
Speaker
I feel like sometimes that's when the good stuff comes out though, is when somebody comes at something from the side without really knowing all the rules that you're supposed to know.
01:15:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:26
Speaker
And then you start making mistakes based on what model you're supposed to be following.
01:15:30
Speaker
And then it actually is good because it's different.
01:15:33
Speaker
Right.
01:15:33
Speaker
Yeah, totally.
01:15:34
Speaker
Totally.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:35
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:35
Speaker
I don't.
01:15:36
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:37
Speaker
You are publishing your first comic.
01:15:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:40
Speaker
Soon.
01:15:41
Speaker
First graphic novel.
01:15:42
Speaker
Well, technically, I think it's slated for like next spring.
01:15:46
Speaker
OK.
01:15:47
Speaker
Yeah.
01:15:47
Speaker
That feels soonish.
01:15:48
Speaker
It's soonish, yeah.
01:15:51
Speaker
I just sent it to my agent and publisher in terms of basically wrapping up the last chapter.
01:15:59
Speaker
Okay.
01:15:59
Speaker
Then today I put it into InDesign, which I should not admit that I put it into InDesign this late in the game.
01:16:07
Speaker
Is that like a faux pas?
01:16:10
Speaker
Oh.
01:16:10
Speaker
Well, it's to see the whole thing and I was just like, ooh.
01:16:13
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of should put in a couple more pages.
01:16:16
Speaker
Stuff like that.
01:16:20
Speaker
What can you tell us about the project?
01:16:23
Speaker
I mean, it's on the agency, you know, the blurb is on agency...
01:16:30
Speaker
So it's Aisha Pand Literary.
01:16:33
Speaker
And it's basically, it's called Damnation Diaries.
01:16:35
Speaker
It's about, it's a political satire and it's about a sinner in hell who after 300 years decides to get therapy from hell's only therapist, Fred Greenberg.
01:16:46
Speaker
And, you know, he's, yeah, it's, it's, it feels like it's on some level ripped from the headlines.
01:16:55
Speaker
It's, it's a dark comedy.
01:16:57
Speaker
You know, I think that, you know, for people who live in New York, it might,
01:17:04
Speaker
sting true in many ways.
01:17:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:09
Speaker
And it's, you know, it's very indebted to, so you mentioned like, Who Are My People?
01:17:13
Speaker
Yeah.
01:17:13
Speaker
You know, it's really indebted to some of these sort of classics of the Bronze Age comics.
01:17:19
Speaker
So like Bernie Wrightson, there's a Belgian artist by the name of Francois Squitin, Jim Starlin.
01:17:29
Speaker
So it has a really kind of like classic, well, classic, what does that mean?
01:17:33
Speaker
It has a very particular look in terms of a kind of 80s vibe.
01:17:40
Speaker
It looks, it's very like crosshatched.
01:17:42
Speaker
It's on my website.
01:17:43
Speaker
You can see it.
01:17:44
Speaker
So it has this, a bit evocative of Gustave Dorรฉ in terms of those engravings.
01:17:51
Speaker
But the content is very satirical.
01:17:54
Speaker
So it's, you know, it's...
01:17:59
Speaker
a dramedy.
01:18:01
Speaker
Okay.
01:18:02
Speaker
But it's, but it's, people tell me it's funny, so.
01:18:05
Speaker
I can't wait to read it.
01:18:06
Speaker
Yes.
01:18:06
Speaker
I mean, this is the one thing I have to say that it's really, you know, like there's something about the art world, not, not, I don't want to reduce it, but I feel like it took me a long time to really
01:18:21
Speaker
be open with the kind of humorous side of me because it's like criticism doesn't give you a space for that.
01:18:27
Speaker
And I really appreciate what you say about my paintings, but this is the one thing that I feel like is, as much as I really am invested in that kind of more atmospheric
01:18:40
Speaker
ambient qualities, there's something in that writerly dimension of like, you know, something that's very like fleet footed and, you know, that the comedy that's, it's a great, great interest for me.
01:18:55
Speaker
And so I've yet to find, you know, an artistic way of expressing that, even though I did collaborate with my friend Ola, we did some funny stuff together.
01:19:02
Speaker
And like sometimes, you know, at certain points in existence, people need comedy to like.
01:19:09
Speaker
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
01:19:10
Speaker
I mean, all the time.
01:19:11
Speaker
But, you know, it's I don't know.
01:19:12
Speaker
I feel like I'm excited about any project that is a dramedy that comes out anytime soon.
01:19:19
Speaker
Yes.
01:19:20
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:21
Speaker
Well, I'll definitely keep you posted.
01:19:24
Speaker
It's off to the publisher who is an expert editor.
01:19:28
Speaker
Okay.
01:19:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:30
Speaker
So what does a project launch look like for that, for somebody who also identifies as a painter and is connected to the traditional art world a little bit?
01:19:39
Speaker
Are you going to do- Art world stuff?
01:19:42
Speaker
Yeah.
01:19:43
Speaker
Are you going to do a launch or an exhibition of some of the works?
01:19:48
Speaker
It's a great question.
01:19:49
Speaker
You know, I, I mean, you know, this is something that is important for me personally, that, you know, when I choose to, and again, I think this goes back to this idea, like, you know, that I always see myself as a student.
01:20:04
Speaker
that if I enter into a particular field, I try to really be as thorough about it as possible.
01:20:12
Speaker
And so, you know, you know, writing criticism was just like, well, you know, this is, this is what you do, you know?
01:20:19
Speaker
So it's like, you try to, um, do this, not, uh, in a sense as an artist would do it, you know, but really try to kind of just situate yourself as, as, as, um,
01:20:35
Speaker
as emphatically as possible within, you know, within that position, you know.
01:20:41
Speaker
And so the same thing with comics.
01:20:45
Speaker
So, you know, what it would look like is it would be, I imagine, you know, book launches and book readings.
01:20:53
Speaker
And it would primarily go through the art process
01:20:56
Speaker
I'm sorry, it would primarily go through the comic circuit.
01:20:59
Speaker
Sure.
01:20:59
Speaker
But I've yet to speak to the publisher in terms of how it would be marketed further down the line.
01:21:08
Speaker
But it's but yeah, I mean, it's definitely, you know, a thought to to somehow, you know, try to entwine the two spheres in some way.
01:21:19
Speaker
But, you know, it's so it's still far in advance.
01:21:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:22
Speaker
So I haven't really.
01:21:23
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:23
Speaker
I mean, maybe it's a good idea.
01:21:25
Speaker
Maybe it's not.
01:21:25
Speaker
I just was curious.
01:21:26
Speaker
No, no, no.
01:21:27
Speaker
It's definitely it's definitely on my mind to try to figure out how to do it.
01:21:32
Speaker
But I think, you know, it's like I definitely want to honor all the traditional circuitry.
01:21:38
Speaker
of the book world.
01:21:39
Speaker
But then, of course, because I do come from the art world and I have painting experience and that's part of my whatever, part of my resources.
01:21:52
Speaker
I don't want to call them that, but part of my experience.
01:21:55
Speaker
It would make sense.
01:21:57
Speaker
And, you know, I tried
01:21:59
Speaker
wants to do this.
01:22:01
Speaker
And it was a very, very interesting experience where I read, I organized with Dean Haspel a comics reading at PS122.
01:22:10
Speaker
Okay.
01:22:12
Speaker
And it was an attempt to really hybridize these two audiences.
01:22:18
Speaker
And I have to say, apart from a sea captain falling unconscious during my reading because of hypoglycemia,
01:22:31
Speaker
It sounds like the start of a joke, right?
01:22:33
Speaker
It went smashingly well.
01:22:34
Speaker
It was, I have to say, it was my first comic reading.
01:22:38
Speaker
And afterwards, Dean was like, this is what they're going to say about you, Peter.
01:22:42
Speaker
He made a sea captain faint in his first meeting.
01:22:46
Speaker
But he fell on a friend of mine as a curator.
01:22:49
Speaker
Fortunately, he was sitting down.
01:22:50
Speaker
Everyone's okay, folks.
01:22:52
Speaker
It was fine.
01:22:53
Speaker
It was just low blood sugar.
01:22:54
Speaker
But it was, yeah, it was a lot of commercial.
01:22:57
Speaker
But, you know, it was a great experiment because this was my great ambition.
01:23:01
Speaker
Because, you know, what I find, and this is a great example, is that people in the art world have an experience with comics.
01:23:08
Speaker
And people in comics have an experience in the art world.
01:23:12
Speaker
But they don't quite, like, interlace as often as you think.
01:23:18
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
01:23:19
Speaker
And so I definitely would love to be, you know,
01:23:26
Speaker
like some kind of an ambassador, you know, some kind of like a pivot between these two spheres because they're filled with incredibly, obviously both filled with incredibly brilliant people, but they're very distinct economies, very distinct economies.
01:23:40
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:41
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:41
Speaker
I would run into Chris Ware's work a lot in Chicago.
01:23:44
Speaker
They would put him up at the MCA and stuff like the, I don't know what you call them, the layouts.
01:23:48
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:48
Speaker
Cause he works, he hand draws.
01:23:51
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:52
Speaker
Yeah.
01:23:52
Speaker
Big voluminous sheets that he kind of corrects in the blue marks and all that.
01:23:56
Speaker
But yeah, it can't just be like Chris Ware that you're going to run across or whatnot.
01:24:01
Speaker
And I do want to go on the record and say that even though I love your paintings, I do love your comics as well.
01:24:06
Speaker
Oh, thank you.
01:24:06
Speaker
Thank you.
01:24:07
Speaker
I find them wonderfully, especially the ones that you post on Instagram.
01:24:11
Speaker
There's an ambiguity that is always intriguing.
01:24:15
Speaker
Oh, thank you.
Influential Figures in Comics
01:24:17
Speaker
Yeah, I see hints of Mobius and
01:24:20
Speaker
Oh my God.
01:24:20
Speaker
I love Mobius.
01:24:22
Speaker
I am.
01:24:23
Speaker
But you know, saying you like Mobius, it's like, I made this analogy to one of my, um, uh, students.
01:24:30
Speaker
It's a little bit like saying you love Led Zeppelin in the comments.
01:24:35
Speaker
You know, what are people going to say?
01:24:36
Speaker
Like, you don't like him.
01:24:38
Speaker
Like, of course.
01:24:39
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:39
Speaker
And it's like, no, Led Zeppelin sucks.
01:24:43
Speaker
Um, yeah.
01:24:44
Speaker
I mean, I, I, yeah, I, I adore that, you know, and again, this is something that I, I, um,
01:24:49
Speaker
I think I absorbed when I was a kid.
01:24:52
Speaker
It's something that I absorbed as a kid, rediscovered in my adulthood.
01:24:57
Speaker
But yeah, that stuff is really amazing.
01:24:58
Speaker
I've never even seen this Mobius.
01:25:00
Speaker
Oh, it's amazing.
01:25:02
Speaker
I mean, it's really like, I think is one of the most influential.
01:25:09
Speaker
He is one of the most influential figures in comics, for sure.
01:25:14
Speaker
Cool.
01:25:15
Speaker
Him and Gary Penter.
01:25:17
Speaker
Gary Panter in the indie world.
01:25:18
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:18
Speaker
You know, Gary Panter is a painter, very accomplished painter.
01:25:21
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:21
Speaker
It shows at Frederick's Freiser.
01:25:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:25:25
Speaker
I mean, see, like, I think that this is what's so fascinating is like there are,
01:25:29
Speaker
you know, there are these links, you know, and I remember like hearing Klaus Janssen and Bill Sienkiewicz speak at Mokun, you know, they were talking about Max Beckman and clearly Sienkiewicz, you know, kind of looks at Klimt quite a bit, other painters.
Digital Platforms Transform Art Distribution
01:25:48
Speaker
But I think that this is something that is really,
01:25:53
Speaker
You know, like this is maybe where as things become more digitally distributed, you know, that this is where some of these things can align.
01:26:02
Speaker
And I think that this is one of the more interesting things about the shift to visual material.
01:26:09
Speaker
moving to Instagram as opposed to, you know, like, again, speaking to my students, like, how do you know this artist?
01:26:14
Speaker
Instagram.
01:26:17
Speaker
But because, you know, the digital horizon tends to kind of equalize things or not equalize it, but it puts them in proximity to one another, you know, in some version of adjacency.
01:26:27
Speaker
I think this is where some of these walls between these different spheres, whether they're economic, aesthetic, ideological,
01:26:36
Speaker
I think this is where they can start eroding because I think they're already eroded in practice, you know?
Comics and Contemporary Art Crossover
01:26:42
Speaker
And so I've come to, you know, I've gone to gallery shows and they'll be talking to some painter and he said, oh, you're into comics.
01:26:47
Speaker
You know what comic blew me away?
01:26:49
Speaker
I was like, what?
01:26:49
Speaker
He's like, electro assassin, you know?
01:26:51
Speaker
But they say it like, almost like they're saying something like vaguely heretical, you know?
01:26:56
Speaker
Or it's something that's very much like in their private sphere, you know what I mean?
01:26:59
Speaker
They never just come out and press release, boom.
01:27:01
Speaker
You know, this is, and likewise, you know, there are many,
01:27:06
Speaker
Comics friends, you know, who are very invested in contemporary art, but, you know, but then they're in a very, very or, you know, are actually expats.
01:27:15
Speaker
So they have MFAs and painting from various, you know, prestigious establishments, but they go into comics, you know, for a variety of reasons, you know.
01:27:25
Speaker
But those social spheres, I think, are quite distinct.
01:27:30
Speaker
Those economies are quite distinct.
01:27:31
Speaker
And I often, often think, wow, wouldn't it be amazing if these things somehow really interpenetrated?
01:27:39
Speaker
There was actually a really open dialogue.
01:27:43
Speaker
And granted, there are a few people who do that, but fewer than I would suspect because all of our interests and passions are, you know,
01:27:55
Speaker
very similar if not the same yeah so that's great maybe that's a good place to uh call it yeah all right well thank you thanks so much this has been joyous and uh yeah for us as well yeah i appreciate it absolutely thank you all right
01:28:18
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
Podcast Production and Closing Remarks
01:28:28
Speaker
art.
01:28:28
Speaker
You can learn more at lydianstater.co, find images at Lydian Stater NYC on Instagram, and follow us at Lydian Stater on Twitter.
01:28:35
Speaker
Thanks to Peter Rostowski for taking the time to speak to us this week.
01:28:38
Speaker
If you'd like to learn more about his work, visit his website at peterrostowski.com.
01:28:42
Speaker
Big thanks to Tall Juan, who graciously provides our intro music.
01:28:46
Speaker
His albums are available at tallwan.bandcamp.com.
01:28:50
Speaker
And thank you to you, listener, for spending your valuable time with us.
01:28:54
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
01:28:58
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.
01:29:00
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
01:29:01
Speaker
I don't know what to say.
01:29:03
Speaker
I just know I don't want to be like you.