The NewCrits Podcast

Screenwriter Ed Solomon discusses The Christophers and reflects on his career and creative process. Solomon discusses mentorship, writing intuitively, working with actors, navigating criticism, and finding a way through creative blocks.

Hosted by Ajay Kurian

00:00 — Welcome to The Forum
00:18 — Garry Shandling
02:34 — Writing The Christophers
04:05 — Trusting the writing process
06:37 — When success gets in the way
08:37 — Letting the project evolve
10:08 — The four stages of competence
12:24 — Letting characters surprise you
15:04 — Writing for great actors
17:35 — Rehearsing with Ian McKellen
18:47 — The power of silence
20:19 — How scenes change each other
23:10 — The terror of letting go
25:28 — Finding the flow state
26:17 — Inspiration is bullshit
28:51 — When Lori became his mirror
34:17 — Give your characters a history
35:48 — Cultural tension in storytelling
38:08 — The pain of criticism
40:16 — How to take notes
43:34 — Managing creative emotions
46:28 — His mother’s influence
49:55 — The importance of mentorship
52:41 — Audience Q&A
52:59 — Getting through the second act
54:17 — Getting unstuck
55:00 — Working backwards
56:00 — What would be the coolest thing to happen next?
58:38 — Closing


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Three artists reflect on their experiences working as assistants to established artists. Ian Cheng, Darren Bader, and Jamian Juliano-Villani discuss apprenticeship, authorship, studio culture, and the lessons—both practical and personal—they carried into their own practices.
00:00 — Introduction02:36 — Becoming Assistants04:10 — The Studio as Education07:37 — Learning the Craft09:13 — Building the Impossible10:54 — Authorship14:54 — Power & Studio Culture18:37 — Learning Through Failure22:50 — Good & Bad Habits30:23 — Assistants as Teachers34:30 — Knowing When to Leave40:12 — Assistants & Authorship42:03 — Learning the Business45:28 — Art & Precarity47:42 — Why Do It?

00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: Next to me here is Ian Chang. He’s an artist known for his live simulations, works that unfold over time using game engines and AI. His work has been shown at the Serpentine Galleries, MoMA PS1, Gladstone Gallery, and earlier in his career, he worked with Pierre Huyghe, which I think informs, uh, some of the ways that Ian had started to think about his work. But I’m curious to see what that relationship was. Pierre is an internationally renowned artist and has worked in massive ecosystems, taking over entire museum spaces and building things from bacteria to, you know, all sorts of crazy stuff. Um, going down the line. Next is Darren Bader. Darren is an artist whose work spans objects, language, and instructions, often questioning what an artwork even is or who it belongs to. He’s exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Dallas Museum of Art. Uh, sorry, the Museum of Modern Art in Dallas and his practice consistently unsettles ideas of authorship, making him especially interesting voice here. And he worked for the artist Urs Fischer. Um, you mentioned another artist you worked.
00:01:11 Darren Bader: For, Donald Bachelor, whom, um, the late Donald Bachelor whose estate I work for now, but he’s um. Well, yeah.
00:01:19 Ajay Kurian: We’ll get there.
00:01:19 Darren Bader: I did, yes, I did my time with two artists, um, very, very educational.
00:01:25 Ajay Kurian: And last but not least, Jamie and Juliano-villani is a painter whose work moves quickly between images, cartoons, art history, and the internet, held together by a sharp, instinctive sense of composition. She’s shown with Gagosian, Jeffrey Deitch, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. And earlier in her career she worked for Dana Schutz as well as the painter Eric Parker. So, uh, that’s actually how me and Jamie met Eric. Studio and Banks’ studio were right next to each other, and we were both assisting these artists. And yeah, Damien was just like, yeah, she, she was just in a little room and we were all just working away. So everybody give it up for all these, all the artists here. All right. Who wants to go first? No. Um, what I’m curious about is, uh, in the studios that I mentioned that you all worked for, were those studios that you sought out yourself or was it just a job? Yeah.
00:02:36 Ian Cheng: Um, yeah, I was in grad school at the time at Columbia, and I was, um, had a terrible time there. I didn’t know who I was or what I was doing. Um, I really just sat in my studio checking my email, getting no email and just, uh, just looking at the wall, waiting for the next crit to happen with nothing to say. And at the end of those two years of grad school, um, the one positive relationship I had was with, uh, Liam Gillick, who was like a kind of visiting professor. And I was like, what am I gonna do with my life? I’m gonna, I’m gonna apply as a UX designer to Google New York because I just need some totally no response rejection. And I thought, what else could I do? And I said, Liam, you know, can you hook me up with PR wigs, email? Like, I’d love to. I’ll be his dream printer. I literally pitched myself, I’ll be his dream. I can just like make anything. Um, and Liam was like, I’ll get back to you. And he gets back to me. He’s like, he used the words Pierre offers you his email, which was kind of interesting way to not like do the CC connection, but just to like, just take it from here, kid. Uh, email Pierre like pitched him like, you know, had a, had a quick meeting like, oh, I didn’t have no, had no credentials. Um, and simultaneously I thought, oh, fuck, like I need another job too. So I went to like Paul Chan’s website. Wow. Um, national philistine and just like emailed him like, hey, hi. I think like we have a lot in common. Like, can we meet? And so the next week, I met with both of them. And suddenly I had two artists kind of assistant jobs. Oh, wow. And yeah, it really kind of really began their shoot.
00:04:07 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really good taste too, you know?
00:04:09 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Those are great artists.
00:04:10 Ian Cheng: Well, how’s it go with people that you respect? I just thought like, oh, grad school is so bad. I didn’t respect anyone that came through. I should go to somewhere where I can speak a lot about this. Like, uh, it was the best school. Those two were like being effectively an apprentice and seeing how they lived life, like what they had for breakfast, what time they woke up, how they said no to people, how they protected their mornings was better school than school.
00:04:34 Ajay Kurian: Totally agree. Totally agree. Darren. Was it a job or was it a college?
00:04:39 Darren Bader: No no no no it was I mean, it was certainly a job insofar as you you lack the freedom that you, you um would prefer at many, many moment. But uh, no, it was a extraordinarily educational, especially with, with ers in particular. He is a real force of nature. Uh, and so, I mean, he’s just, he’s a presence. He, he’s. Always, he, he’s one of these people who, if you look at his work, you may say he’s phoning it in at times. There are also many, many, many times when he’s just creating very compelling work. But he’s he lives and breathes art every minute of the day. And, uh, it was just a very compelling environment to work in. Uh, it wasn’t always easy. I learned a ton. Um, much like what Ian said, you know, you learn about the routines, but it’s more about the relationships and how an artist can exercise power. I don’t mean that in any sort of, you know, um, manipulative or abusive way. Um, it’s just he, he was also very good at it. He if anyone I don’t Urs Fischer is physically also quite an imposing presence. He’s not Pierre um not or he’s he’s I mean he’s he’s he’s maybe five ten, but he’s very big. Uh, he’s very muscular. He’s covered in tattoos, deep voice, piercing gray eyes. Um, and so that’s a whole nother thing. And he makes these, this, this very fanciful at times and very tender art. So it’s a, but I learned so much just to just watching him operate. And then when he would let you in.
00:06:29 Ajay Kurian: Right.
00:06:30 Darren Bader: And he would say, hey, come over here. I want to talk about this work with you. What do you think of this? You’re like, okay, I’ll give my two cents. He’s like, oh, thank you. Fuck off. But he’s also but you know, he’s listening the entire time, right? He’s taking all this new account and he, he understands what it takes to make an artwork, which is not infrequently, uh, you know, no artwork in Ireland. It really does require a lot of hands on, you know, hands on deck and seeing what sticks and what doesn’t.
00:07:00 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, if anyone’s interested, there’s a good interview that Rick Rubin did with Urs Fischer.
00:07:06 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Really?
00:07:07 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It’s long and sprawling, and, um.
00:07:12 Darren Bader: There’s some moments.
00:07:13 Ajay Kurian: Tetragrammaton.
00:07:14 Darren Bader: This is.
00:07:15 Ajay Kurian: A weird plug for another podcast.
00:07:17 Darren Bader: With Urs is also very, very bright. But he does he he’s not he. You wouldn’t know it until you meet him. And he’s extremely versatile. He’s able to jump around from topic to topic and we’ll get to that at some point perhaps. Yeah.
00:07:34 Ajay Kurian: Tell us about tell us about your time.
00:07:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember.
00:07:37 Ajay Kurian: And Eric.
00:07:38 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I, it was funny, I as a painter at the time, I never painted anything that wasn’t on a desk, so I actually just lied. I did not know how to paint at all. And I showed up and I was such a nervous wreck and he knew I did not know what the hell I was doing. And, you know, I think I got fired like twice in like a week. And then, uh, I think he felt bad for me. And then I really learned really quickly. So, um, yeah. And working for Dana too, I mean, working for painters is such a weird thing because you can’t really interrupt them when they’re doing their thing. It’s like someone like breathing or fucking or, you know, you’re like, hi, you know, you just gotta like leave them alone. Then when they’re done, you’re like, okay, maybe I can assist, you know? Um, but yeah, it was really strange. Just like, um, it’s such an intimate thing to help someone with, you know, I don’t know if, if you guys have ever seen anyone make a drawing, but can you imagine like getting in the middle of the drawing and trying to help? So I did that for people exclusively for years. So I’m just very annoying. But yeah.
00:08:42 Ajay Kurian: It was, it is very different, like the, the experience of working for a multimedia artist versus someone who has like a craft of painting is really different. And like the skill sets are really different.
00:08:55 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I remember I would see Ajay at work and it looked like someone just got murdered. Like he was just like, he would look so drained and exhausted and like lunch break because I don’t know what you guys were making over there.
00:09:06 Ajay Kurian: We were making a lot of things.
00:09:08 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Um, I’ve never seen anyone so stressed out from a job, honestly. No offense.
00:09:13 Ajay Kurian: Well, I was more stressed before I worked at Gladstone right before that. And that was definitely more stressful than working for, for an artist. Um, but, you know, banks is the kind of artist who, uh, when you look at it, everything looks really shiny, super fabricated, and it looks like everything has been shipped out to some faraway place to get made and then sent somewhere. We made everything in the studio. And what that meant is like, um, you know, when he didn’t know how to do something like he wanted, he wanted a wall of mirrors that broke itself. Uh, so the mirrors would just shatter. And of course he didn’t know how to do that. And so it was like, okay, well, we need to learn about hydraulics. So he just buy a shit ton of hydraulics. And then it would just be like, the studio would just be filled with oil everywhere because he didn’t know what he was doing. And then we’d start welding things together, trying to see if we can break a mirror. If you’ve ever tried to, um, you know, like with a can, like if you have a soda can, it’s really easy to crumple this way. But if you took your hand and tried to crumple the can that way, it’s very, very hard. That’s the problem with trying to break a mirror from the sides. So all of these engineering problems, things like that, that’s what we’re here to sort of figure out with him and how that process like gets started. He wanted to make things out of aluminum. And so he built a foundry. And I mean, it was totally illegal, but like we had a foundry and we were pouring metal all day long. So yeah, you might have seen me after pouring a ton of metal and just feeling like I may not have eyebrows anymore.
00:10:51 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. No, totally. Yeah. Yeah.
00:10:54 Ajay Kurian: But what’s, um. I mean, let’s say like, there’s walking through the doors, there’s walking through the doors and like starting your job and then there’s leaving, like, what were the, how did you feel about authorship in the middle of it? How did you feel about you contributing? Like, did peer did ers? Did they make you feel like, um, that you were all in this together or did they make you feel like, all right, well, this is what I’m doing. This is what I need done.
00:11:24 Ian Cheng: Definitely. This is what I need need to get done. Um, but with Pierre, he was so interesting working for him because he was constantly. What I respect about him is he just kept reinventing of what he was doing as an amateur. So when I started working for him, he had this idea that he really wanted to make aquariums. And it’s like not an easy thing. And not only do you want to make aquariums, he wanted them to combine like, like animals that didn’t live in the same ecosystem. Same kind of water. He just wanted to make it work. And we hired an aquarium company. And they, like there were so many moments at the aquarium company where like, you just can’t do that. And it fell on me to research how you kind of do it. And so we figured it out, figured it out, figured it out. It kind of like all the clearest memory I have was like, freeze. I think it was twenty ten.
00:12:07 Ajay Kurian: He had an art fair. For those who don’t know.
00:12:10 Ian Cheng: He had a special project there where he was gonna do an aquarium of, um, a hermit crab inside of a shell. He’s like, his shell is a Brancusi like head reproduction. So super beautiful idea, this Brancusi sculpture kind of walking amongst the the rocks. And then you see it’s this crab that’s inhabiting it. And so I had to figure out, because the aquarium people couldn’t figure out how to get this crab to live in this sculpture. And it turns out like hermit crabs, their, their, their butts are very sensitive. And that’s why they like, hide it. They’re hermits for that. Um, and we tried all these different techniques and it fell on me like, I think ten days before we just ship out where I just went like, fuck, we, I gotta go to Chinatown. I gotta buy ten conch shells, you know, conch, like these giant snails boiled them in his rice cooker. I ate them and then cleaned it out and like stuck that the idea was to stick that into the enclosure, the the the, the shell of the interior of the sculpture. So secretly it’s a real shell inside. And the hermit crabs were like, so happy. I was like, oh, I finally slept in like two weeks. Um, and so like these little puzzles were, I mean, I have strong memories of them. Um, but yeah, I mean, those are the, that’s pretty brilliant. Like not authorship level, but like engineering like this was really fun. Yeah.
00:13:24 Ajay Kurian: That’s. Yeah. Oh, I always wondered how that sculpture came together.
00:13:29 Ian Cheng: It’s pretty cool. Chinatown conch.
00:13:30 Ajay Kurian: Shells. Do you feel I mean, you said you don’t have a sense of authorship to it, but, um.
00:13:40 Ian Cheng: And I wouldn’t want it either. I mean, I felt I learned so much by being able to not have the pressure of any authorship. I could just sort of absorb by osmosis, be, you know, sometimes I would write an email and try to write it in his style and like so enjoyable, so freeing to just mimic someone. I think that’s the best way to learn. And that was for me, the best way to learn just to be this mimetic thing. And then, you know, I, I would have to go to like another memory just briefly is going to reinstall that same work a year later in Miami Basel. And it’s like the air conditioners were broken. It was like one hundred twenty degrees inside this convention center. And he wasn’t there. I was there on remote installing.
00:14:18 Ajay Kurian: Oh boy.
00:14:19 Ian Cheng: Fucking Marian Goodman, like, God bless her. She comes up to me in the middle of like, trying to put the rock here and the crab here and get everything working. She’s like, you respect that animal you respect. I do not like how you’re handling this. And you all have Pierre on the phone saying like, no, the rock has to go this way. And then Marion yelling at me for the rock kind of endangering this crab.
00:14:38 Ajay Kurian: Marion is, uh, was Pierre’s gallerist. Uh, she passed away at a hundred in.
00:14:44 Darren Bader: Late nineties.
00:14:45 Ajay Kurian: Late nineties. Okay. Um, but one of the great gallerists of of the world. Really?
00:14:50 Darren Bader: Absolutely.
00:14:51 Ajay Kurian: Um, any, any similar memories? Darren.
00:14:54 Darren Bader: No, no, it was, it was a different relationship. I mean, with your lead question. Uh, it was more of this kind of communal effort. He was he, I, I assume he still is to some extent, although he has a smaller crew now. Um, he, he nurtured this environment. He was certainly, you know, at the top of the food chain as well as, you know, it was very patriarchal, let’s say, yet it was. So he has a very he has a generous streak and he, he knows how to get people to do things and make them feel included. Mhm. Without it being this, this, this very stark line between I am the author. You are, you know, the the worker. Yeah. The subordinate, the clear subordinate, you know, And yet, of course, he was clearly the author through and through. Yet I see he does have this unique, if not unique. You know, he does have this ability, this capacity, this, this, um, you know, uh, propensity to just manage. He’s a good emotional manager.
00:16:01 Ajay Kurian: Was it almost like a like lead singer of a band kind of thing?
00:16:05 Darren Bader: Well, I mean, which band? You know.
00:16:06 Ajay Kurian: Some.
00:16:08 Darren Bader: I don’t know. I don’t I wouldn’t say that, uh, more more like, you know, Don Henley on drums. Uh, but, uh, I, I, it, it was just this unique experience. I also started later, uh, I mean, I had already done a number of art jobs and, um, basically I was looking for work as when a job would come to a close. Not just, just, it just ended. There was no understood that it was, it was, uh, finite. And I hit him up because we’d worked together, I met him when he did a show at Gavin Brown twenty two thousand and five, where I worked for Gavin part time then, and he was just approachable. We were able to talk about arthouse films and I asked him, can you want to be in the group show? The first group show I curated a show I created, and he was like, sure. Like, I had seen a piece of his in a book and he was just like, he was open to things. And so I think he appreciated my openness and invited me to be part of things. And I was there kind of at this, this, um, you know, uh, inflection point where moment where it was right as he was rising to these great heights. So I kind of got to go. He was swimming in cash because the art market was very, um, healthy then. And all the galleries he had worked with from a very young age, um, we’re doing extraordinarily well. And he was extraordinarily good at, um, making art and exhibition. So it was just this wonderful journey from he just basically took me under his wing. And it’s a very it was more personal in a way less task based. He just kind of liked having me around. And I, I could not be more, um, you know, grateful for that opportunity three, three years. And he basically and he kicked me out. He’s like, you’re doing well. You’re not focused. Get the hell out of here. I’m like, all right, I’m done. But we’re still friends.
00:18:16 Ajay Kurian: That’s good, that’s good. I’m glad it’s on good terms.
00:18:18 Speaker 5: It’s on good terms.
00:18:19 Ajay Kurian: Jamie. And for you, it’s because there is more like craft and skill. I mean, even though you didn’t know what the fuck you were doing in the beginning, you clearly learned and like that relationship over time. Did it feel like. Did it feel different? Does it feel like you were, um.
00:18:37 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I felt like I was growing with the people I was working for. Yeah. Which is really nice, you know, because you can just come in and then there’s like, you know, obviously everyone that you work for, you always have to placate to the maestro complex. That’s what we always call it maestro complex. It’s like they’re the boss, you know? Um, so there’s always that, but, um, I was, I felt like I was growing with the people I was working with because they could see me learning stuff in real time and getting stressed out and fumbling and messing up. Like I’ve worked for many artists. And I remember this one artist wanted me to prep these canvases a certain way, and I’m used to just gessoed canvases. You know, you paint the thing white, it dries, you do it a couple more times, you sand it, you’re good to go. You have your surface. This guy was so OCD. He wanted me to get like, um, I was like, you know, gesso on like the palette knife. And then you got to like scrape it on and you have to do it for like hours and hours and hours until the thing looks like glass. And I did it for like four different canvases. And then I realized I did them all backwards and I was like, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. I’d do the whole thing again. I mean, I would never put my canvases like that. Why would you make anyone do that? I don’t know, it’s like, you know, um, but like, you know, there’s all these learning curves and like, I feel like when you are fucking up, they sympathize with you because they see that you’re really trying and they’re trying to, they’re trying to beat a new skill into you, you know, and you have that skill for the rest of your life. But does that make sense?
00:19:57 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, yeah. For sure.
00:19:59 Jamian Juliano-Villani : You know, and like, they, they kind of want to I mean, like I said, I’ve been fired from jobs like a million times. I’ve, you know, I’ve worked for other artists where I worked at, uh, Kremer pigments, which is closed, but I worked at the pigment store. So I learned how to make paint from scratch for people like I’ve done all the stuff. So like, you know, you learn all these skills as you go. And I think people really enjoy teaching you their way. You know, like my one, my one boss, Eric, um, he was a painter. He’s a painter. He, you know, like, see that table over there with all the glasses and stuff? Each one would have the most, like, esoteric name that you would never think of, like Rip Van Winkle and like neon cookie puss and like, you know, just like, you know, and each painting would have, like, I don’t know, like one hundred and twenty colors and all some stupid ass name and I have to memorize all of them. And, you know, just learning things like that. Like, you know, not everyone works like that, but that’s how he worked. So I would that became part of my habit, like working, working, you know. Um, does that make sense?
00:20:57 Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:20:58 Jamian Juliano-Villani : So everyone has a different method of working and they, I feel like, I mean, when, even when, you know, I’m a artist and when I hire people, I’d kind of put them through the ringer.
00:21:07 Speaker 5: Oh my God.
00:21:07 Ajay Kurian: Does she.
00:21:08 Speaker 5: Ever.
00:21:08 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. No. I’m surprised. Like I’ve not been cancelled yet. Straight up. But, um, I really do enjoy putting people through the ringer too, because I was put through the conceptual meat grinder as well. And I also feel like it’s good practice. Maybe I’m crazy, I don’t know.
00:21:24 Ajay Kurian: Jamian is crazy.
00:21:25 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. But yeah.
00:21:26 Ajay Kurian: I for context, um, the first time I ever took acid, I went Jamian took care of me for a portion of that, and I went to her studio and, um, initially I thought she was taking care of me. Um, she gave me a pillow, she gave me some gummy worms, and I was just chilling on the floor because I was like, there’s too many things happening. And then all of a sudden I start hearing like, jungle sounds, and then the jungle sounds have other music on top of that. And then I start hearing monologues from The King’s Speech and I’m losing my fucking mind. And I’m finally like, what is going on? And she’s cackling in laughter.
00:22:10 Speaker 5: And then.
00:22:11 Jamian Juliano-Villani : What he needed, you.
00:22:11 Speaker 5: Know.
00:22:13 Jamian Juliano-Villani : You don’t put on like a monologue from The King’s Speech when your friend’s like, tripping balls. I don’t know, eat some gummy worms, sit on the floor, let me put on the projector and put on a horrifying speech. Yeah.
00:22:24 Ajay Kurian: And then I asked her to turn that off. And finally she was like, she put on Frank ocean. She’s like, you like this shit, right? And that was. So just to say that Damien has a lot of idiosyncratic working methods that, um, not every artist has, but she works nonstop. Like there’s, there’s never, there’s never rest. Like you are an artist every day.
00:22:48 Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:22:50 Ajay Kurian: With habits though, that’s like another thing that I feel like is a really important thing that we learn from artists, good and bad.
00:22:57 Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:22:57 Ajay Kurian: So for instance, um, when I worked for banks, banks is very open about his past with drugs. Um, I had a conversation with him about it that you can watch. Um, when I got to the studio, I was the only one who didn’t do drugs and there were deliveries of drugs to the studio. And so just seeing the habits of that studio and how they work, like they would work till four or five in the morning. And if you’re not doing cocaine, that’s very difficult. Um, and so I would just go home at like two because that’s as much as I could do.
00:23:31 Jamian Juliano-Villani : That’s why you were so tired.
00:23:32 Speaker 5: Yeah. No shit.
00:23:35 Ajay Kurian: I was working on a reasonably normal schedule, but that was, um. You know, that was one of the bad habits. Whereas, uh, for, on the flip side, a good habit is banks was eternally curious. Like, if you didn’t know how to make something, he would figure it out. And we were all autodidacts in that way. Like you, you have to just keep learning what you don’t know. What are the habits good and bad that you guys learned?
00:24:00 Ian Cheng: Um, well, both Paul Chan and Pierre didn’t want me around until like eleven o’clock, eleven thirty. Oh, and it was because they wanted to protect their morning and they wanted they just couldn’t work when everyone was around. They were just reacting to people when like, can you answer this email? What do you think of this decision? And so they protected their mornings. And I mean, selfishly, that was the time where I really began and grew as an artist because I had my mornings, which were so precious. So that was a really good habit with Paul. Like he really knows how to say no to people on email, on phone calls, just I really learned that like, sometimes it’s n o send, it’s like you’re saying two, like you just say less, you know?
00:24:39 Speaker 5: Wow.
00:24:39 Ian Cheng: Just say no. Just say no.
00:24:41 Ajay Kurian: I gotta get better at it.
00:24:42 Ian Cheng: It was really cool.
00:24:44 Speaker 5: Um, yeah.
00:24:46 Ian Cheng: And sometimes, you know, you don’t, you know, like it’s, you know, have you guys seen like, J. Mail the Jeffrey Epstein interface with all the emails? What’s so cool is when you browse that you see his like crazy punctuation. And it was like a, you know, he will do like five commas in equal signs. And you’re like, he’s talking like a head of state or something. And you’re like, oh, it’s like he, he has like, it’s a, it’s a sign of status. Like he can just fire one off like that. Wow. Um, and.
00:25:11 Ajay Kurian: Now I don’t want to.
00:25:12 Ian Cheng: Do that. No, no. I mean, there’s this whole email world of like, yeah, how you play email?
00:25:17 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. No, I get that. I get that, that there is like a.
00:25:19 Ian Cheng: I don’t know if it’s good or bad habit, but it was definitely a habit.
00:25:22 Ajay Kurian: Right, right, right. Establishing almost like the relationships of power to.
00:25:26 Ian Cheng: Just like the punctuation or lack of it.
00:25:29 Speaker 5: Huh. Oh, there’s one for you.
00:25:32 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I was like, chain. We all were chain smoking, which is like I quit smoking a year ago. Thank you everyone. But it was like a cloud of smoke in that one studio. It was insane. Like, it was like the best and worst moments of my life, you know? But, um. Yeah, it was just like, you know, paint, smoke, paint, smoke for like hours on end. So I don’t know. Now it’s really hard for me to paint because I’m, I link it up with smoking so much, which is like really kind of lame, but it’s true. But, um.
00:26:11 Speaker 5: So do you.
00:26:11 Ajay Kurian: Have like.
00:26:12 Speaker 5: A.
00:26:12 Ajay Kurian: Do you just keep something in your hand now?
00:26:14 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. Another paintbrush. But at some point it was just like frankincense, you know? Um, uh, and then at one point I was like, maybe if I just hold incense and it didn’t do the same thing, but, um, yeah, no, it’s like we all were smoking and we all were listening to music so loud. Now I can’t hear anything, so I don’t know. I mean, like you were saying, like, there’s so many bad habits to that you can have. Like when you’re in a studio, it’s like, kind of like if you’re a runner, you know, you wake up every morning, you start running. You know, I’d wake up every morning, have a cup of coffee and buy a pack of cigarettes, chain smoke, and just paint all day long. So now, you know, doing that, like healthy, what am I supposed to do, hold an orange? Like I don’t really, but I may have to. Um, I smart.
00:27:02 Speaker 5: So.
00:27:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Smart.
00:27:04 Speaker 6: Yeah. Cigarette for instance.
00:27:05 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Totally. Have you guys seen that bubble cigarette? No. Oh, my God, it’s like a vape cigarette. That’s like a bubbles come out. Yeah, I may need that thing. If anyone knows, my address is three Stillery Road, Lebanon, new Jersey, zero eight eight eight three three seventy one. No, I’m just kidding, but, uh, that I may have to take it to the next level. So.
00:27:26 Ajay Kurian: Darren, any, any good habits? Bad habits?
00:27:28 Darren Bader: No.
00:27:29 Ajay Kurian: Oh. Sending the email? Yeah.
00:27:32 Darren Bader: Um, no. I mean, I just think, uh, you just you you learn where. I mean, I never had any full time assistants as an artist, but, uh, I learned that it’s what was, was very good at. Not always, but letting reminding his assistants that they were people, you know, they weren’t merely help. Sure, there are moments like, I’m paying you fucking get to fucking. We have a deadline. You’re working your ass off right now. Yes, I procrastinated, I will not admit to that for one second. We’re all burning the midnight oil and there will be no cocaine. But you know, you can. You can drink if you’d like. Um. And he would chain smoke to the guy. Can’t quit smoking. But, um, I it’s just just understanding boundaries, understanding, you know, I mean, it’s it’s just like any relationship. Sure. There’s certainly a power structure, um, uh, a power differential differential, but it’s just good and bad habits. I mean, art’s good and a bad habit. What are you going to do? It’s like this because once you get, you get you just can’t. Yeah. And you saw it consuming him. Um, even when he was a new you know, he had his, my first year, about a year in, he had his first child. And even seeing him wrestle with that, you know, because he had these, he had this major, major show at the new museum. He had three floors.
00:29:05 Speaker 6: Um, wow.
00:29:06 Darren Bader: Yeah. I mean, actually for, I suppose he, I think he had the lobby too, but, you know, it was just learning how to manage a career alongside life. And, you know, that’s just anyone’s good and bad. And I don’t think there was any, any, any kind of salient bad, uh, short of, you know, there are moments when we all go too far right and we can’t. We forget to press stop or pause and. And I don’t mean that that’s not you euphemizing anything. It’s just, you know. Yeah. It happens. There are deadlines and we must deal with them. And why was there waiting around for three weeks to work on the catalog that I was assigned to work on? Well, because he didn’t want to deal with it for three weeks. That’s on him. I’m still getting paid. But then I burn the midnight oil and it’s totally fine. It’s a great education. Um, and I think I find that’s all. I’m sure it’s the same for most any industry. It’s all any industry is. You just learn constantly. You’re reminded of things and then you, you, you’re taken aback because there’s some twist you could never have predicted. And there it is. So it’s just an education, always neither good nor bad. I mean, certainly plenty of good. But you know what I mean. There’s, there’s a.
00:30:20 Ajay Kurian: It’s, it’s sort of value neutral.
00:30:22 Darren Bader: Exactly. Yeah.
00:30:23 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the speaking to like feeling like you’re all included and that like you’re all valued in that way. That was something that banks did very well too. Like it was, uh, I remember a gallery that he was working with. I was liaising with them. And so, um, the gallery director was just being so rude to me, like horribly rude.
00:30:50 Speaker 6: Impossible.
00:30:51 Ajay Kurian: It was, it was impossible. Impossible. Exactly. Um, and it was, it was making my job harder. Like it was just harder to get things done. It was harder to liaise back and forth. And finally I had to bring it up to banks. I was like, I look, I’m not trying to make a stink about this, but like, this is making things very, very difficult. And he got on the phone in like two seconds and chewed them the fuck out where he was like, you will treat everybody as if they are me. Like anybody that works for me needs to be treated as if that’s like, we’re all the same. This is my studio and everyone’s going to be respected that way. And it really set a tone where it’s like, oh, we’re not subordinates. We’re not like people that are just getting this job done. Like we are the Banks Violette Studio. And when we like it felt like we felt like a band, kind of like when we’d go places, it was like we felt cool, you know, like it was, uh, it was a cool thing to feel like, oh yeah, this is our show. Like, of course it’s Banks’s vision. And of course, no one’s trying to take credit for that either. But yeah, we did that shit. It’s like it’s not easy to do. And, um, when an artist sets those grounds, it’s like you’re excited to do those things because like, you can, you can build this together and you can share ideas and, um, and it doesn’t feel like, I don’t know, I think sometimes people think that there’s this immediate exploitative thing about artists and assistants and that, oh, they’re getting all the credit while they’re doing all the hard work. It’s not that simple. It’s just never that simple. The worlds that we inhabit. Like, so this the movie, um, you know, Michaela, in the beginning, she’s she’s purportedly his assistant. Um, she’s actually there to forge his paintings. And, um, she’s employed by his two kids who are trying to get their nest egg because they burn through their money. So, um, she goes in and that’s, that’s the job that she’s meant to do. And then she fesses up to that’s what she’s doing. And then the relationship switches again, where in a sense, she’s almost telling him about himself. Like he starts learning from her. He, he, she becomes his mirror. So like, I think maybe my final question before we open it up is, did you ever feel like you were teaching them? Did you feel like there was a way that, uh, all of a sudden like, oh, okay. Uh, let me, let me tell you what I know now.
00:33:29 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. For sure. I mean, even just like bringing in some, you know, because every artist is kind of set in their habits. Like that’s how they make their work and blah, blah, blah. But, you know, I remember one time I brought in like a, like a digital projector and everyone’s mind was blown like, oh my God, you know, it’s like, we don’t have to use like this vis a vis marker over the fucking, you know, and, uh, that changed the game. And then another time I brought in an airbrush and everyone was like, I was like, you know, you ever see that Maxell ad where the guy’s in the chair like this? That’s what happened. You know, everyone was like, you know, so really like, you know, shook things up. So, um, but yeah, I think it’s really exciting when that happens too. But I remember those were two instances where, you know, like the whole trajectory of like how we’ve been working the whole time for like years was just like, completely like, like a giant bone in the spoke, you know? Um, and it was really exciting because everyone was looking like a fool together with these new tools. Yeah.
00:34:24 Ian Cheng: Yeah, I think I made Paul and Pierre install slack.
00:34:29 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Oh my.
00:34:30 Ian Cheng: God. I’m like, it’s so lame. But but it’s not because it’s like, oh, we don’t have to do every single thing as an email, right? Imagine how psychotic. I mean, it’s hard to imagine now, but it was just everything was in email. Yeah. Maybe the other thing was on the way out with Pierre. I started to not slack, but like my attention started to drift. I had to like, I took more and more time off. And at one point we just sat down together and he was like, what’s going on? Like, this is not working and this part’s not good. And like, you fucked up on that aquarium in Miami. Marion was mad about the the crab. And I just I said this thing, I read this thing recently about someone had like reorganized, I think a guy called Tim Urban had reorganized a person’s lifetime in terms of weeks.
00:35:13 Ajay Kurian: Oh, yeah.
00:35:14 Ian Cheng: It was like a, it was like a calendar with just the weeks that you’re alive, if you’re roughly like die at seventy or eighty. And then you can also get one with days and it was like twenty seven thousand days. You’re alive. Jesus. And when I saw that, I’m like, Pierre was having this intense conversation. And in that moment, I just, I guess I kind of fired myself. I said, like, uh, I have like, we have twenty seven thousand days. He was, he learned that he was like, holy shit. And, you know, he’s, you know, when he’s older, he’s like, and I already had like, I’m like, I don’t know, like, I don’t know, like, uh, I’m bad at math, but whatever. I’m like ten, twelve thousand days in or something and like, you’re like, way more like, I gotta just, I gotta just love my life. Yeah, yeah. And I think that he really understood when I phrased it that way and what was going wrong. Like he really understood and like, we’re good friends now. We’re good. Still good friends.
00:36:08 Ajay Kurian: That’s crazy. That’s crazy that it it’s just funny that a like a firing. One firing yourself would start with like, Everything is finite. I have to go. It’s a pretty serious conversation to have. Darren, do you have a.
00:36:28 Darren Bader: I forgot.
00:36:29 Speaker 6: The question.
00:36:29 Ajay Kurian: The question? The question was, um, did you did you start teaching us a thing or two?
00:36:35 Darren Bader: I, I may have, but it didn’t it, it was never of any interest to me. I, I just I, I as, as the oldest child in my family, I’m the oldest of three. I’ve, I think I’ve always sought, you know, kind of mentorship and big brothers, older siblings. And so if I taught him anything. Sure. Great. Uh, he, I don’t know if he would let on to it.
00:36:57 Ajay Kurian: Mhm.
00:36:58 Darren Bader: Um, and my other employer, Donald, was twenty two years my senior. So, um, it there was nothing of that. I, it just, I was there to learn, I suppose also to pay bills, but um, um I, I, I, you.
00:37:15 Ajay Kurian: Have like a very mature relationship to it. Like it’s the way you talk about it. It’s like it’s a very fluid relationship, but it’s also.
00:37:21 Darren Bader: one I wasn’t mature. Um, I, I may be mature now, but perhaps arguable, but I, I, it’s just, I think it’s just, just how I’ve, I, I, I, I take orders pretty decently. Doesn’t mean I don’t kind of, you know, uh, uh, yeah. What, what’s the word? Uh, not flinch. You know, there’s a word, uh uh.
00:37:42 Speaker 6: Uh uh.
00:37:42 Darren Bader: Uh, it’s b r it’s a b r word. Uh, in any case, um, Bristol. Bristol, Bristol, Bristol. I do bristle like, constantly. I do not like people telling me what to do, yet I know how to swallow my pride and get things done. Um, I just absorbed what I could, you know, whether it was memetic, as you said, or just, you know, osmosis. I just learned and I just knew I had to get out there and do it if I wanted an art career. And what was the best job I’ve ever had? Um, I didn’t have a great social life at that time because I always had to wake up and I was always. I was also the chauffeur because he. This big guy, is terrified of driving. He still can’t drive. Uh, so I got to drive a seven series. It was.
00:38:30 Ajay Kurian: I remember you coming.
00:38:31 Darren Bader: Around Manhattan like I learned how to drive. Uh, yeah. I got to learn how to drive in New York in a seven series. I’m like, well, it’s smooth. I’m still scared out of my mind. But, um.
00:38:45 Ajay Kurian: Now I remember you coming to my studio in that seven series.
00:38:48 Darren Bader: There we go. Uh, Ditmas Park, huh?
00:38:50 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:38:51 Darren Bader: Um, yeah, it was just. I think I’m just open to learning. I don’t want to be seen in various ways being seen and just, uh, being seen for as a human was enough for me. It still is. You know, I don’t need a pat on the back. I can get a thank you, and I’ll feel like a million bucks.
00:39:13 Ajay Kurian: I want to open it up to questions.
00:39:17 Speaker 7: Thank you. I worked for a famous writer one time, and, uh, I didn’t do any writing for her, but I. I did figure out things that she was hopeless with, like simple math and organizing her income taxes and things like that. But I recall, uh, on a tour through Venice, uh, guides talking about how in, in art schools, uh, for like Tintoretto, I think was mentioned where they would have, uh, assistants who would fill in the secondary figures and things like that. They would complete the master’s work. Was there any of that with, with, uh, your assistantships, did you ever do the corner of, uh, something that the artist was too busy to deal with or was on to the next thing?
00:40:12 Darren Bader: Let me jump in here because it’s, it’s a, it’s analogous, but it’s, it’s, it’s totally different. And so first I was just left at, for instance, at the new museum, it’s like, you know, I’m not going to show up or I don’t want to go to my own. He has some social anxiety. Like, you know, I’m going to arrive at my opening, you know, with ten minutes left, I ended up becoming just this kind of he just kind of like, let’s see what you do, you know, walk. I walked Jerry, Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith around a new museum show like it was. I wasn’t told, go do this. I just it was left to me. He’s like, I will upset myself and perhaps you can figure this out. And so in a way, it was I you know, I’m certainly I’m I’m no, I’m no, you know, studio assistant in that, but it is a it is an analog of sorts.
00:41:00 Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
00:41:01 Ajay Kurian: I mean, I mean, that seems like.
00:41:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : That’s all I did.
00:41:04 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:41:05 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Yeah. Cross the T’s and dot the I’s. I was there for that. So um, like literally for hours on per day, just go in and fill stuff in, you know, and like, just assume the role of the artist. Like what, what would blah, blah, blah. Like, and I would just do it for them. So it looked like they finished themselves, you know? So basically, you know, if you even look at my paintings, it’s almost like I don’t have a hand. I’m kind of working with everyone else’s hand. So.
00:41:33 Ajay Kurian: Is there any other questions right there?
00:41:36 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:41:38 Speaker 8: Yeah. Um, I appreciated your comment about, um, learning how to say no effectively. Um, from here, uh, Paul. Paul. Um, I’m wondering more concretely what you learned as an assistant or an apprentice in managing yourselves as artists, like within your business interests and financially.
00:42:03 Jamian Juliano-Villani : Don’t Google yourself at work and let them catch you. It’s the worst. Yeah.
00:42:10 Ian Cheng: Well, I think just in a basic way, like when I went to grad school, you don’t learn any of that, how to manage that side. And when you work for an artist, it’s literally the best. Could you get three? You get the whole thing, all the parts. And so I really am at pains to think of how I would have become an artist without working for artists I like, really respected and were like deep in the game. Um, you learn how they move, like not just in their work, but in the world and through people like you just can’t learn that without just being there and absorbing all the details. And so yeah, um, all the business stuff, you know, Paul’s a pretty savvy guy, pairs very ambitious, you know, huge budgets. You know, I, there’s only, uh, only one way to learn that and just doing it.
00:42:55 Speaker 6: Yeah, I, I concur there that’s, it’s just you’re just there.
00:42:59 Darren Bader: And you just absorb.
00:43:00 Speaker 6: It.
00:43:00 Ian Cheng: And it’s the best. It’s really.
00:43:01 Darren Bader: You’re not even conscious of it. You’re just, I mean, when, when I get, you know, thrown, you know. Kick kicked off the boat, You know, it’s just incredible. What I knew, I mean, I had a lot of hours to fill and I was like, cool, I got to make. What the hell am I doing? There are a lot of hours in a day. Um, but yeah, you just kind of. It’s incredible what you absorb. It really is. It’s it’s it’s it’s yeah.
00:43:28 Ajay Kurian: I mean, also the things that you don’t want to do, uh, banks had back taxes for the last ten years and I had to sort through that.
00:43:38 Speaker 8: Like how external to the art, but foundational to it, finding the resources to run a studio to stage a big exhibition.
00:43:46 Darren Bader: I mean, I had to oversee like this, this he basically hired a, a contractor, basically this, this warehouse got, you know, basically building up, building it up from scratch. He’s like, you, you liaise with the contractor. It’s my first job.
00:44:03 Speaker 6: I’m like.
00:44:04 Darren Bader: Like, okay, I get to drive the seven series down to Red hook and talk to the you know, it was it was crazy, you know. Oh, we need we need an expert. We didn’t he didn’t know what an expediter is either. Did I go find an expediter? Okay, here’s an expediter. We need these permits. Fast, fast, fast. Oh, we’re in violation of of, you know, um, whatever DOB is. Okay, we’ll figure it out.
00:44:29 Speaker 6: It’s who the.
00:44:30 Darren Bader: You just go. You just run with it back. Taxes too? Yep. Been there.
00:44:34 Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
00:44:35 Darren Bader: And, uh, you just go with it, you know, it’s all real. And then it’s incredible moments when it’s like, you know, uh, it’s like, Holy shit. You you understand what? Where the finances are not not that, not that it’s your job to be, you just kind of get it. You’re like, Holy shit, this is very real. And all of a sudden, you know, angel investor, you just don’t know. It’s just like, you know, that one work sells that keeps the entire operation afloat.
00:45:03 Speaker 6: Yeah.
00:45:03 Darren Bader: Because so much money was put into this or that project or these, This combination of work and it’s just. And all of a sudden it’s all just hanging by a thread. Truly, truly hanging by a thread. Truly. It’s crazy. It’s all so real because the money is so, so real in the business. And it’s so, you know.
00:45:28 Ajay Kurian: That’s another thing to distill. Like, I think a lot of people think that there are successful artists that are making money hand over foot and, um, they’re living this lavish life. But like, if you’re running a business with the ambition that these artists are running their business, it’s every project is taking you close to bankruptcy. And then like all these people’s jobs are on the line. And if, if one thing doesn’t pay off or if one thing doesn’t go right, or if there’s a delay on something, who knows what the next step is. It’s even at those levels, there’s precarity. Like there’s very few artists that are free of precarity. And I think like understanding how you build that in is not something that we’re taught and like not something that’s taught in school. And sometimes it’s hard to learn even when you’re on the job because you just keep growing. Like you just want to keep growing things. And like you’re not necessarily thinking about how to keep that sustainable. But, you know, I, I think we all.
00:46:27 Speaker 6: Learn.
00:46:27 Darren Bader: And also rarely, I mean, I’ve never encountered, even though there are so many of them are just extremely generous, kind people. A gallery will not tell you how to manage your career. They may say yes to this project or no to that, but they will not say, hey, you’ve got. We’re pretty confident you have a modest nest egg right now. Invest wisely. This won’t last forever. They will never tell you that. And that’s that’s really fucked. I’m sorry. It’s one of the great, uh. Yeah, there’s a word for this, too. I’m just not myself tonight. But blame it on the kids, okay? My fucking kids, they. No one will tell you that this is as precarious as temporary as it is.
00:47:15 Ajay Kurian: Yeah.
00:47:15 Darren Bader: They’ll just keep feeding you because you’re feeding them. Yeah. And they’re like, oh, we forgot to tell you this very critical thing, which is no guarantees. Never, never. Yeah.
00:47:30 Ajay Kurian: But you still do it.
00:47:31 Darren Bader: Of course you’re you’re addicted.
00:47:33 Ajay Kurian: We’ll take one last question and then we’re gonna wrap. Yeah.
00:47:42 Speaker 9: Um. Thank you. You guys said some really amazing things. Um, I’m thinking over here a lot about just from a philosophical standpoint, like this dissolution of ego and identity and self in a lot of ways. And how do you really reconcile with committing that deeply to that precarity and the, the precarity that is not yours to own? You know what I mean? And being committed to, you know, the vision of this artist or this thing that you’re building. Perhaps you feel some investment in that. But I think, you know, right now, in this current moment and many other moments, there has always been this collective energy that we’re working through of precarity as well as personal. So yeah, how do you really deal with determining where you draw the line or, or how much of a, I guess, value that commitment is for you? And I think that goes for like a technical perspective as well. Yeah. Like, as well as an artist that is participating in that making process.
00:48:40 Jamian Juliano-Villani : I feel like it’s kind of like someone rolls up on a monster truck and they’re like, do you want to ride? And then you just have to decide if you want to get on or not.
00:48:49 Darren Bader: Mhm. Uh, for me, the monster truck is just. Yeah, I’ve been just, just totally enamored of art since I knew what it was as an adult or a young, young adult, and I just signed up with these people, whether they were. I mean, I worked in a museum bookstore, I worked for galleries. I, I don’t care, I don’t care where it takes me. I just care so much about the end here, the end product, it’s, you know, it’s, I care so much about walking into an art space and chancing upon a work that will just make me feel like it’s all worth it. And it’s just, I cannot it’s been such an it’s like, it’s like sitting in the sun after the winter. It’s sixty, you know, whether it’s sixty five, seventy, you feel like a million. Again, I keep saying a million bucks, a million bucks, a million bucks, a million bucks. It’s the same thing. You’re you’re you’re just I’m just bathe in this this wonderful glow and I will do anything. It’s a madness, you know, it’s a pathology, potentially. But I will do anything to get that high again, and I will do it with people as long as they treat me okay. And I expect I that I would treat them okay as well, you know. You know, just just care ethics, um, common cause for the same dream really, which is that wonderful moment when you say, aha. Thank you for that artwork to whomever the creator is to whoever, whoever the creator is. Yeah.
00:50:30 Ian Cheng: Um, well, this might be a different time, but like when I was working for those two artists, it was around twenty ten. So in my mid twenties and I really did not want an identity. I didn’t have an identity. I didn’t want one. I didn’t know who I was. So I was happy to get on the monster truck because that’s like there’s an adventure right in front of me. Like I’m like, that’s better than anything. Um, I didn’t want to like, come to them with like this big ego of like, I’m going to be an artist. Like, it’s just that wasn’t even crossed my mind. I just, I was just clay, you know, like I wanted to just be around, have an adventure.


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For nearly a decade, Marc Spiegler served as the Global Director of Art Basel, helping shape one of the world’s most influential institutions in contemporary art. Earlier this year, his New York Times opinion piece on the challenges facing commercial galleries sparked widespread conversation about the future of the art market and the pressures confronting artists, dealers, and collectors alike.
In this episode, Marc reflects on his path from journalism to Art Basel, the evolution of the global art world, and the lessons he took from leading an institution at the center of it all. We discuss his recent writing, the expansion of the international market, the role of technology and AI, the economics of art fairs, and why he believes galleries need to rethink how they build relationships with collectors.
Along the way, Marc shares his perspective on financialization, speculation, collecting, and what a healthier, more sustainable art ecosystem could look like.
This is a conversation about leadership, markets, and how the art world can continue to evolve without losing sight of the artists at its center.

Art Galleries Are Not OK, NYT Opinion: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/19/opinion/art-basel-fairs-gallery-market.html?eafs_enabled=false
Marc Spiegler Instagram:
https://www.instagram.com/marcspiegler/?hl=en

Hosted by Ajay Kurian Produced and Edited by Peter Groppe

00:00 Introduction
04:23 Growing up around artists and becoming a journalist
08:12 The unlikely path to leading Art Basel
12:20 Leadership lessons and managing a global institution
14:08 Expanding Art Basel: Asia, digital strategy, and the future
17:05 AI, technology, and why change is inevitable
23:00 His New York Times essay and why galleries need to think differently
28:14 Financialization, speculation, and the art market
34:30 Collectors, gatekeeping, and the changing role of galleries
39:40 Resale contracts and protecting artists from speculation
44:55 Why art fairs cost so much
51:35 How galleries actually benefit from participating in fairs
52:15 Auctions, speculation, and the evolution of the secondary market
58:55 Have collectors become today’s tastemakers?
1:08:00 Museums, collectors, and building the next generation of patrons
1:15:00 Why galleries are struggling today
1:23:00 Advice for young galleries navigating the current market
1:30:00 What a healthier art ecosystem could look like
1:36:00 Closing thoughts

00:00:00 Ajay Kurian: We’re living in an era of exhaustion, and artists and creators aren’t immune to this. We’re trying to figure it out, too. Welcome to spent from the new podcast. I’m your host, AJ Kurian, an artist, writer, and educator. I’ve been in the art world for nearly twenty years, shown all over the world, and taught at universities like Yale, Columbia, Parsons and Bard. The art world is a confusing and opaque place, but all of it tends to make a little more sense to me when I talk to one person at a time. Why do you think people blame you for this over financialization?

00:00:35 Marc Spiegler: I don’t know at all. I think it’s completely bogus. Like because. Because, I mean, first of all, like, like before I was running Art Basel and while I was running Art Basel, I was always against financialization. Like I’m literally was quoted in the New York Times talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach, the week of Art Basel, Miami Beach, and saying something like eighty percent of the art that’s sold next week will be worthless in twenty years. You know, and I wasn’t just talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach. I was talking about all of the twenty five fairs, but, you know, um, I was always very clear about the fact that people should buy art that they like, not buy art as an investment. You know, I mean, I had a funny thing, um, I wrote this article for the Business of Fashion column that I had last year. Um, and the title was something like we need to stop hyping art as an investment, you know, and, and, uh, Jamie Kenyon, your friend of mine wrote to me and said, I love this, this new mark unleashed. I’m like, dude, I’ve been saying this forever. You know, people are just noticing it now. But like, I was very clear about that.

00:01:39 Ajay Kurian: Mark Spiegler spent about a decade as the global director of Art Basel, which is to say for nearly ten years, he sat closer to the center of the art market’s money and power than most. He left that seat in twenty twenty two, and this past June did something he used to do in a prior life. He wrote an op ed for The New York Times, no less. Art galleries are not okay. The title alone got people talking. Many were infuriated that the man who’d spent the last ten years supposedly finalizing the art world was now saying it had gone too far. Around the same time, Pace Gallery let go of roughly fifty employees and fifty of their artists, and Marc Glimcher, the owner of pace, sat down with the times as well. Adam Lindemann, a collector and sometimes gallerist, responded with his own piece in Artnet, and journalist Barbara Pollock, among a handful of others, wrote a direct critique of Marc’s piece. We get into all of it. I first met Marc at a dinner in Basel in twenty sixteen, the year I did a solo booth with forty seven Canal. So I met him, in a sense as one of the artists inside the machine he was running. I’ll be honest about my expectations. I kind of assumed he’d be a bit of a douche. Instead, what I found was that Mark was quick and thoughtful and pretty fun to talk to, which is surprisingly rare at some of these fancy dinners. That wit can also function as a kind of armor. Mark has a beguiling matter of factness. He’ll answer you so plainly, so directly, that you can almost miss the moment he’s stepped neatly around the harder corners of a question. It’s disarming and it works. Going into this, I told myself I wouldn’t let him charm me away from pressing for an answer. I’ll let you be the judge, but I’d like to think I mostly held. We get into Mark’s past and where the art of it all started. Then we dip into the anxieties and inevitabilities of AI before getting to the meat of the conversation. Can you administer the market and still love the thing it sells for Mark? The answer is resoundingly yes. We cover his role in these machinations and how he sees things now, and what unquestioned truths need our critical scrutiny for the future, our worlds to thrive. This is spent. But Marc Spiegler isn’t. Marc, it’s great to have you.

00:04:22 Marc Spiegler: It’s great to be here.

00:04:23 Ajay Kurian: Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for sitting down with us. Um, there’s a big story to tell here, but I think I want to start out very local and very simple, which is starting with like, how did you even get into art? What I know you started as a journalist and I know that that’s like kind of maybe the.

00:04:43 Marc Spiegler: It goes further back. It does actually, it goes way back. In fact, it goes back to my birth because my mother was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the only, if not the only surrealist papercutting artist that I’ve ever heard of. Voila. See you. Look. That look was perfect. Okay, so she was trained by her grandmother in Alsace to do paper cuts, which was a very classic folkloric art form. Right? Using tiny scissors. Almost like sewing scissors. Um, so she learned those techniques. And then living in Paris in the sixties, she fell into surrealism. Um, and then she was part of a group of, of surrealists in Chicago where I grew up eventually. Um, and so she brought kind of the, the aesthetic and the thinking of surrealism into, in combination with the techniques that she had learned as a child. So. So my mother was an artist and then my best friend Ellen growing up went on to become an artist. And then my best friend in my teen years, Yoni, also went on to be an artist. So I was always surrounded by artists, you know, like I was I grew up in Chicago and then moved to upstate New York. My parents split up, and then I went to school in Philadelphia and then England, and then I ended up in New York, and I lived with Yoni, who was an artist. And so I was always surrounded by people who were going to SVA for the most part. So I was kind of in that group. And then I moved to Chicago to do graduate school, and I was hanging out with my friend Ellen, who was also an artist. And so I was always among artists. Um, but I trained as a journalist. Right.

00:06:16 Ajay Kurian: You went to graduate school for journalism?

00:06:17 Marc Spiegler: Exactly. At northwestern. And so I came out and then I was what’s called a general assignment reporter, which means you write about whatever seems interesting. Um, and, uh, I did a few kind of like art reviews, but I would never call myself an art critic. That’s a whole other thing, you know? Um, but, you know, I wrote, I wrote a big story in ninety four, um, about what was going on at the MCA Chicago. And that was noticed by people in New York, in the art press, because it was very in-depth. And I was an investigative journalist. And so I was, I wasn’t really afraid to write what I saw, which was that there were real issues between the board and the museum directorship at the time.

00:06:54 Ajay Kurian: Which I don’t think has changed very much.

00:06:56 Marc Spiegler: I’m not close enough to that situation.

00:06:58 Ajay Kurian: I’m not even saying in terms of that museum. I just oh.

00:07:00 Marc Spiegler: In general, yes, in general, that is a topic, you know, and what I wrote about was power. You know, I had a column called Power Lines, which was about media, business and politics. And I saw there was a lot of overlap with the art world, especially at the collector level, of course. Um, and then Bruce Wolmer, who at the time was the editor in chief of Art in action, which at the time was the single most important publication in terms of news in the art world, brought me in as his Chicago correspondent. And then when I moved to Switzerland for personal reasons, I continued to write for them and then started to write for lots and lots of other people. So it was basically like art was always part of my life. Like I was one of those kids that was dragged to museums by my parents. And then when I was old enough to choose, continued to go, you know. Um, but, you know, I came into the art world sort of in fits and spurts and was really like, there was this moment in the early two thousand where the other half of my business, which was writing about tech, collapsed completely in the first tech crash in two thousand and two. And so suddenly the magazines and the company I was writing for, I was writing about and writing for went out of business. And so I wrote more and more about the art world. And then in two thousand and seven, I was asked to apply for the job of director at Art Basel.

00:08:12 Ajay Kurian: Okay, wait. Hold on. How do you go from writing about journalism to being asked to apply for a position like that? It feels like there would be more steps.

00:08:24 Marc Spiegler: Uh, yes. Um, it was definitely, um, an unexpected series of events. And I definitely was not the archetypal candidate that you would have for that job. I mean, starting with the fact that I didn’t have much management experience beyond sort of, you know, editing sections and having writers working for me. Right. Um, and the fact that I didn’t really speak German properly, certainly not as well as I speak English and French and the fact that I’m not Swiss. So for all those reasons, I was an unlikely candidate, and I think I benefited from the fact that some of the likely candidates just did an interview. Well. Um, so I went through several rounds of interviews. Um, and I did have some things though, uh, I had a strong connection to America, which of course is a very important market. I think that was seen as an, as a, as a benefit. I came with a plan. I wasn’t asked, but I came with sort of a ten point plan of things that I thought Art Basel. I did an analysis of where Art Basel was at that time and things I thought it should do.

00:09:22 Ajay Kurian: Before this. You had done a business degree at Wharton.

00:09:25 Marc Spiegler: No no no no no no no no no no no, I had I that was like in twenty twenty and that was in like twenty eighteen. So I’m.

00:09:34 Ajay Kurian: Kidding.

00:09:35 Marc Spiegler: No no.

00:09:35 Ajay Kurian: No no. Okay.

00:09:37 Marc Spiegler: I have a political science degree. I have what’s called a social science degree from University of Kent, which is just like what you do if you concentrate your courses in one year. When you do a year abroad, then have a BA in Political Science from Haverford. And then I got a master’s in journalism from northwestern. Okay. I did a one week like finance for Non-finance people thing at Wharton, but I am not in any way a trained business person. I am someone who learned entirely on the job.

00:10:07 Ajay Kurian: How on earth do you learn all that on the job? Like, it just seems like such a big risk to take on somebody. I mean, you must have had a goddamn good plan.

00:10:16 Marc Spiegler: I had I had some good ideas, and also, like I was, I came into a triumvirate, you know, they they had candidates with different skills. And so they put us together into a triumvirate with a lot of complementary skills. It didn’t last long like the Roman triumvirate. It was within within nine months we were a co-directorship. But I benefited from the fact that I didn’t take over the whole job right away. You know, like I at first was responsible for the things I was closest to. Meaning uh, sponsorship, um, media and digital. And then later, when we became a co-directorship, I also took on the VIP and galleries sections, you know, but like I was, I was very much, I was still very much learning on the job, you know, like it’s, it’s weird when you go from, you know, when you’re a freelance journalist, like five hundred bucks is a lot of money to you, you know, um, when you are running a major international art fair, like you shouldn’t be thinking about any sum less than like fifty thousand bucks because that’s your, that’s your staff’s job and you’re micromanaging them. So you have to, you know, like it’s the scale at which you operate changes radically. And that was the thing I needed to learn. You know, there was a lot of learning on the job. I mean, one of the things that I learned was that when you’re in that kind of position, um, you people are constantly looking for clues as to what’s going on. So like, if you’re, you know, just a very concrete example, like my, uh, Uh, wife at the time, uh, became pregnant very, very early on in my, in, in my time at Art Basel. We hadn’t had kids, we lost a couple. And so I was nervous, excited, but also super nervous to see what was going on. And there’s like that fourteen week window. And I realized after a while that my staff was picking up on this and they thought something bad was happening because they could see me being nervous. And so I it really was a lesson in sort of what it means to be in that position where sort of all eyes are on you, especially internally, of course, externally as well.

00:12:14 Ajay Kurian: Yeah.

00:12:15 Marc Spiegler: You know.

00:12:15 Ajay Kurian: Was there again, is this a purely learning on the job? Did you have mentors? Did you have someone that I had?

00:12:21 Marc Spiegler: You know, I would say so. I had been friends with Sam Keller, who was our predecessor for many years, and had given me a lot of insight into the job because I was one of the many people he would ask for advice sometimes. Um, and he, he gave me a lot of, of lessons to live by and, you know, um, advice when I needed it. So I would say Sam was the one who really gave me the most tools. I had some other mentors, people who had been in business, you know. But I tried to learn from my own mistakes and also from other people’s mistakes, you know?

00:12:52 Ajay Kurian: So if there is a piece of advice that rings out in your head from Sam, can you recall anything that sticks out?

00:13:01 Marc Spiegler: God, there were so many. I mean, I think I think one of them was always remember that your your clients are your product. In other words, that when you run an art fair, you don’t actually own any art. You’re dependent upon your clients bringing the best art possible in essence. So it’s, you know, what you’re selling as a platform to them. You’re selling to them the access to the collectors that you can bring to the environment you can build, but you’re also dependent upon them for working, you know. So it’s a little bit different than a classical industrial process where you produce something over here and then you own that thing, and then you sell it to other people, you know. Right, right. So it’s a much more tight knit relationship, you know.

00:13:44 Ajay Kurian: And in a way, it’s like where most economies like kind of most media economies have gone, right?

00:13:50 Marc Spiegler: I mean, actually every social media company, the client is the product basically, because we, for the sake of convenience and, and affirmation, constantly feed social media companies with content, which they then sell to other people and then sell advertising off of. I mean, we’re all incredible dupes here.

00:14:08 Ajay Kurian: Um, when you got, when you started working, uh, for the fair with fair. Yeah. What did you see as like the, the path for growth? Like, what did you see were the shortcomings of the fair at that time? What did you see? The art world was at that time. And what did you dream that this could turn into?

00:14:30 Marc Spiegler: Well, I mean, it was very clear that we needed to embrace Asia. You know, at the time, you know, Art Basel had only Basel and Miami Beach. Within the ecosystem at the time, freeze had only. London. Um, yeah, that’s right, only London. Um and so the fair world was very, very Western and we felt like there was a whole group of collectors and institutions and artists that was sitting there waiting to be included, that galleries from the West wanted to go there. Um, and we just thought like, this was not the art world. It was kind of the art Western world, you know? So that was interesting to me, although I was nervous about it because I didn’t have a lot of experience with Asia. I also felt digital was really important. Um, you know, my, I always, I was very close with a lot of, a lot of my friends, my friends who are not in art tend to be in tech. You know, some of my closest friends are people who are like digital artists or, or Silicon Valley executives. You know, my, my ex-wife’s most recent job was running the digital strategy for the entire country of Switzerland. So I was always like very much crazy job. It’s a crazy job. Yeah, she’s the smart one, you know? Um, but but I mean, it’s it’s really, uh, sort of digital is something that I breathe. Like I, you know, I have all, I think that you do suspicions of surveillance capitalism and of the impact that digital has in our lives, you know, but, you know, I really believe that digital was going to happen, you know, and so I, and I inherited at Art Basel, uh, a website that no one could explain the structure of to me a, you know, a real fear of the digital, you know, and so sometimes through personal connections, sometimes because I was well advised, sometimes because people came to us, you know, we were the first fair to be on Facebook. We were the first fair to be on Twitter. We, um, we were approached by Instagram to do what are now called influencer tours, you know, where they brought a lot of people to Miami, you know, um, to post about it. Um, you know, when the pandemic came. You know, we launched the online viewing rooms, which was the result of a project we’d been working on for a long time. So I’m, I’m, you know, with all the caveats that an intelligent person has, you know, I am a technophile. And I think it’s I mean, with technology, it’s basically, you know, I guess the two surfer, the two surfer metaphors are you’re either in the lineup or you’re on the beach. And once you’re in the lineup, you’re either, you know, ahead of the wave or getting rolled by it. And so obviously you want to be ahead of the wave.

00:17:05 Ajay Kurian: Got it. I’m thinking of, uh, I remember reading this book like my, my relationship to, to tech or the tech world is one where, you know, I’m not a Luddite, but I’m not. Um, those aren’t necessarily my people. I don’t think I necessarily spend that much time there, but the book, what Technology wants, do you remember that book I’m trying to remember?

00:17:30 Marc Spiegler: I did, I haven’t read it.

00:17:32 Ajay Kurian: The founder of wired wrote it.

00:17:34 Marc Spiegler: Oh probably. Uh. Nicholas Rossetto. Something like that.

00:17:38 Ajay Kurian: Possibly. I have to look it up again. But I remember that book being a pretty, pretty game changing in my head where there were kind of these internal theologies of like, what is coming? Yeah. Like you can run this scenario a million times. The light bulbs always going to be invented, right? It just depends like where and how and what are the specifics of it. And similarly, it feels like, um, the way that the digital took over was just like, you could prophecy it every single time because it’s, it’s just, it’s going to happen.

00:18:08 Marc Spiegler: Yeah. It’s just not, it’s not a question of, of what? It’s a question of how. Right. And the specifics of how things arrive. But I think once you unleash digital and once you apply Moore’s Law, which makes technology twice as powerful every eighteen months, by definition, things are going to move very quickly in a certain direction.

00:18:26 Ajay Kurian: Right? This is I know I’m going to make some people upset with this, but the Uh, I feel like this is also how I’m starting. I mean, it’s how I think about AI as well. Yeah. Like it’s inevitable. Yeah. I don’t, I think the people who are kind of pushing back and saying that we really need to have, uh, you know, a deeper analysis of how this affects our lives and what this means for an economy. Sure. By all means. I think there’s like some safeguarding that we need to do. Right. But also, yeah, it feels we’re already so deep in.

00:19:01 Marc Spiegler: Oh, I mean, I love how this is becoming like an art world episode of Hard Fork, you know? Um, it’s just a question of who’s going to play Kevin? Who’s going to play Casey? Um, but I mean, I think since we’re there anyway, I mean, what’s interesting is to me, when I see how AI is, is coming into the art world, you know, because for me, it’s, it’s quite. Bifurcated in classical ways that actually apply to technology has definitely come into the art world, which is that the artists, with all due suspicions, are embracing it. You know, you have people like, you know, Jon Rafman or Holly Herndon or Ian Chang, you know, really using AI to make things that would have been impossible before. Um, and in the art market, people seem to have no idea what to do with it except maybe like generate, uh, artist statements or generate catalog copy for auction houses or use it. Um. To research potential collectors or something. Like I think, I think, and this is typical in the sense that I think the artists who are interested in technology have tended to embrace it quickly and play with it the same way that this is what artists do best. Like they see something new and they’re like, wow, what could I do with this? This is what I love about artists, right? Whereas the art world, um, and we’ll get to this later when we talk about the market, I think for a group of people who think of themselves as avant garde is actually remarkably reactionary, remarkably afraid of change. Remarkably stuck in old patterns. Um, and I think, uh, AI is one of those things, and I fully agree with you like, like by the time you do a proper colloquium on the impact of AI and what it’s going to mean, like AI will have become twice as powerful.

00:20:46 Ajay Kurian: Exactly.

00:20:47 Marc Spiegler: Yeah. Um, you know, for those of you who want to geek out, I would refer you to a study called or an analysis in the form of a narrative called AI twenty twenty seven, which was written by a bunch of ex OpenAI people. Um, and they talk about how basically, and this was written about a year and a half ago, it came out in April twenty twenty five. And it basically predicts step by step how, uh, you know, by sometime next year, basically AI will take over and imperil the human race. There’s also that’s the race version. There’s also a slowed down version and the slowed down version, which is dependent upon governments working together in the interest of humanity, um, is not quite as bad. But what’s super interesting about this is how accurate it is. And in fact, in that narrative, there’s this moment where an AI agent, like, escapes the bounds of its instructions and hacks into a company that happened last week. Wow. When open, when an open AI agent hacked into Hugging Face’s servers. Um, so basically we’re actually six months ahead of schedule on that. So yeah. I mean, I just, I, I’m terrified by this, you know, as, as I have teenage children, I have no idea what to tell them in terms of their careers. Certainly don’t become a programmer, you know, which would have been the instruction three years ago. I’m like, you know, I don’t know. Massage therapist, uh, DJ, DJ like like horse, horse riding instructor, uh, hiking like like mountain guide, you know, wellness guru.

00:22:12 Ajay Kurian: Yeah.

00:22:12 Marc Spiegler: Wellness guru. Yeah, whatever. Um, you know, but the point is, uh, I mean, I’m terrified by it. And I think it’s, it’s, you know, the, this is like San Francisco utopian at its worst, where like, everyone is rushing to build a thing that’s so powerful that it can kill us all. You know, to prove something like they want to be the first one to do this, which is so weird and tech bro ish, truly.

00:22:37 Ajay Kurian: I mean, it takes me back to what you were saying about Kennedy and how when something starts, it just starts to vibrate and people start to adopt it and follow it. Um, to go back to that and to go back to this moment when you start with the fairies. Yeah. What did you start to see that you wanted to like? Okay. So Asia and the digital. These are the two things that you sort of marked as the ways that you saw the fair moving forward. Of course, people understand, and I myself understand that so many collectors find artists through art fairs. Um, but, you know, with your, with the piece that you recently wrote for the New York Times, it was really saying like, let’s make it a little bit more regional. Let’s scale back a little bit. Let’s tighten up. And for someone who is so like really at the forefront of expansionism. Yeah. What changed?

00:23:35 Marc Spiegler: So. A couple of things. One is it’s not people are acting like I kind of changed my view completely. The reality is, and I said this in the piece that whenever I would talk to younger galleries who were kind of on the up, like the, the gallery, you know, takes off and suddenly, like every art fair in the world is like, oh, that’s the hot gallery. We need to have them in our young sector. I would always say like, guys don’t do ten fairs. You don’t have enough artists for this. But also like you need to have a solid home base, you know? So I would always say like, focus on the market around you, like build up relationships with collectors. And the international component is also important, you know? Um, I think one of the things that’s, that’s really troubling to me is that there are two Overall dynamics, which I think should have grown the market and the market hasn’t grown really in the last fifteen years. Right. In terms of the total volume of sales. You know, one is the fact that there are many, many, many more rich people, meaning multibillionaires or semi millionaires, you know, whatever, like people who have the means to buy art have gone up existentially, you know, um, all over the world. And so by all rights, there should have been a real surge in collecting and there wasn’t. And the art world got more global. Yeah. Right. Like, like there are more museums, there are more biennials, there are more fairs. And yet the pie hasn’t gotten better. Bigger. It’s just gotten spread, right? Sure. So it just makes me feel like something doesn’t work in the approach that people are taking. You know, and I think there are two aspects to this. You know, one is I think, um, that. You need to build a core of collectors. Like most galleries have a small number of artists and a small number of collectors that really drive their business. And those artists may change over time. Those collectors may change over time. But in the end, you have to be very close to a key group of people you know. An auction house is dependent on hundreds of people buying actively in order to to hit their numbers. A gallery with the right ten or fifteen collectors can really kind of make its business run, you know? Um, and I think it’s hard to stay close to people that you never see. Right. So of course, it doesn’t necessarily have to be people who live in the same place as you. They can be on the same circuit. But I think, you know, my one of my concerns I have is that people were running all over the world, not just affairs, but also to biennials and like to the openings of their artists in some far flung place. You know, when you talk to gallerists, they have insane travel schedules. Like whenever someone was like, your travel schedule is insane. I was like, you have no idea, you know, because I’m not a gallerist who has to go to the opening of this biennial in New York. And then there are there are most important artists is having an opening of a museum in Tokyo, and then they need to be back for the opening of the of the season, you know, in London or whatever it is, you know. And, you know, I think people are kind of chasing this kind of magical collector base that they always feel like the grass is greener somewhere. And if they just travel enough, they’ll meet, they’ll build those collectors. And my sense is that it’s important to do the fairs that make sense for you, you know, where you feel like there’s a market for your artists or where you’re starting to feel like there’s a collector base, or where you have some people already collecting who can connect you, you know, within a new network. But I think in a situation where just statistically, there are more and more wealthy people in every major urban area who are not collecting, wouldn’t it make sense to focus on the people who you can actually see once a week, once a month, you know, and build that up. I mean, that’s the classic what’s called the Castelli model, you know, the Castelli model, um, for those who are not familiar is basically, you know, Leo was, you know, downtown and his artists were downtown.

00:27:35 Ajay Kurian: And speaking of the Leo Castelli.

00:27:37 Marc Spiegler: Leo Castelli.

00:27:38 Ajay Kurian: Represented some of the major, most major artists of the last, like sixty years.

00:27:42 Marc Spiegler: Most major white male artists in the last sixty years, to be very specific. Because if you see like the gallery, the team photo, it’s that, you know, but still, but he represented great, great, great artists. And, you know, if he was an old school European gentleman, like you would go down and have lunch with him and buy from him. And, and, you know, I think, um, I think, you know, people he came to understand their taste very well and he was able to educate them, you know, bring them into the world, etc.. And I think it’s hard to do that with these kind of fleeting interactions, you know.

00:28:14 Ajay Kurian: Um, why do you think people blame you for this over financialization?

00:28:18 Marc Spiegler: I don’t know at all. I think it’s completely bogus. Like because. Because. No, I mean, first of all, like, like before I was running Art Basel and while I was running Art Basel, I was always against financialization. Like I’m literally was quoted in the New York Times talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach, the week of Art Basel, Miami Beach, and saying something like eighty percent of the art that’s sold next week will be worthless in twenty years. You know, and I wasn’t just talking about Art Basel, Miami Beach. I was talking about all of the twenty five fairs. But, you know, um, I’ve always said, you know, I was, um, you know, I was always very clear about the fact that people should buy art that they like, not buy art as an investment, you know? I mean, I had a funny thing, um, I wrote this article for the Business of Fashion column that I had last year. Um, and the title was something like, we need to stop hyping art as an investment, you know, and, and, uh, Jamie Kenyon, your friend of mine wrote to me and said, I love this, this new mark unleashed. I’m like, dude, I’ve been saying this forever. You know, people are just noticing it now. But like, I was very clear about that. But it’s interesting that you bring it up because I’m not sure that it’s just coincidence that like this twenty five year period in which the art market didn’t grow and by all rights, it should have been growing, is also the period during which this intense financialization took place. And by that, I mean you had the rise and fall of art funds, you know, where people buy our portfolio of works and then they sell it within a specific horizon, just like a hedge fund, right? You had this huge effort on the private banking side for people to set up art departments. You know, you had a lot of people promoting art as an investment, you know, whether it was to their clients, you know, as advisors or to their wealth management clients, as wealth managers at banks, um, or to their clients, you know, within, within art funds. And the reality is it didn’t really work. You know, a lot of people who went into invest, um, you know, who went in to invest, uh, in the market? Didn’t didn’t do well. You know, the reality is, I think to, to really be a very, a good investor, like a ruthless, cold hearted investor, like you have to not actually care that much about art, right? You have to have access to information and you have to buy the art that you know, that you think is going to go up regardless of whether you like it or not, you know, and that’s a different thing. That’s like day trading where the company doesn’t matter. It’s like, what’s the momentum on this stock? You know, um, you know, and I think the people who ironically perhaps are not ironically, the people whose collections tended to really go up in value were the ones who bought very early and very bravely. Dave Hickey once said, and I’m going to completely this is a paraphrase, you know, don’t don’t go crazy in the comments because I misquoted him. He once said something like, when you pay too much for an artwork, you’re paying the price of your cowardice because you didn’t. You weren’t brave enough to buy it early. You know, same thing like one of one of my great, uh, one of the things I loved is this. During the recession that hit very soon after we started running our Basel, we brought Herb and Dorothy Vogel down. For those who don’t know, they were these legendary collectors from New York. She was a librarian. He was a postman. They lived in Stuyvesant Town. You know, when the National Gallery came to accept their donation, uh, it took, like, panel truck upon panel truck or a truck upon truck to bring it down. Wow. But it was like, it was like, just like crazy. Like all the great artists of the sixties and 70s, like, just kind of piled underneath their beds and in their cupboards. But they were, you know, they had very little money, you know. Um, and they were just, but then they were buying the things that they loved from artists who loved to sell to them because they were because of who they were. You know, the artists felt good about selling to them, I think, and cut deals for them and gave them payment plans. And so, but to come back to the point about financialization, in the process of writing this article, which was repeating a theme that I’d written about repeatedly. You know, this issue of financialization and how actually it’s not a great way to invest money because art has very high carrying costs and because it’s a market which isn’t very transparent and which has, uh, there’s this non liquidity factor, which is, you know, basically that, that when an artist’s market turns, it becomes almost impossible to sell the work, right? You know, in a way that’s not true for real estate or even for stocks, you know, unless you have like an Enron event or something like that. Right.

00:32:40 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. You can unload most things.

00:32:42 Marc Spiegler: But but the thing that came to me and I’m, I’m not I have no proof of this, but it’s, it’s kind of a sentiment and it feels right. Is that I also think that it’s possible that because the dialogue around art had become so much about financialization, that a lot of really great potential patrons, people who were culturally oriented, people who were fascinated by art, people who thought they were fortunate enough to have money and they wanted to support art, they wanted to get involved in the art world. Um, came in and really were kind of, you know, to use twenty twenty six wording. Like they got the ick, like they really were like, wow, this is not what I thought it was. Like, you know, you walk into this and you’re like, everyone’s talking about, you know, I’m going to ten X this, or we’re going to run that, or we’re going to flip this or, or, you know, or they’re not allowed to buy because nobody knows who they are because even though they, you know, like they, um, you know, because there was this fear of speculation, it, it created a situation where I think a lot of potential patients were really put off by the art world because of this dynamic, right? Both of financialization. And that’s triggered by financialization, which brings this kind of mistrust of new players. Like it’s kind of crazy. Like the art world is one of the few markets, if not the only market I know of where when someone with a lot of money comes to buy the work, the first question is whether or not you want to sell it to them as opposed to like, wow, this is a great new client. We should immediately, it’s a little bit, um, Like, uh. When you go to Italy, right the first time you’re in a restaurant, often, like the owner will come over and be like, we’ll recommend something to you. And if they like you, you’ll get your free coffee and maybe like a limoncello afterwards. And they’re like, wow, let’s make this person come back. You know, let’s, let’s get this person on the team, you know.

00:34:30 Ajay Kurian: But there’s a, I mean, to my mind, what I’ve seen in the last, you know, I’ve been in the art world, uh, approaching twenty years, fifteen years. I’ve never seen collectors have this much power. I’ve never seen.

00:34:43 Marc Spiegler: Oh, yeah.

00:34:44 Ajay Kurian: Dictate the culture more than a gallerist or more than a discourse around it. Anything. It’s like if they say that this artist is important, then other people start buying the work and it becomes sort of foundational to a museum’s collection. And these things kind of trickle upwards.

00:35:02 Marc Spiegler: Or they curate shows.

00:35:03 Ajay Kurian: Or they curate shows.

00:35:04 Marc Spiegler: Or they have a private museum.

00:35:05 Ajay Kurian: And I’m like, I’m not even opposed to those things. It’s just that the, the tastemaking and like the, the kind of blatant vapidity of much of it is new and it feels like something that’s like, I don’t, I don’t really understand like how they’ve taken so much power. Besides, besides the fact they have the money.

00:35:29 Marc Spiegler: I have some theories there. Well, they always have the money.

00:35:31 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, exactly. They always have the money.

00:35:33 Marc Spiegler: So, um, as you can imagine, as someone who’s, who’s, I assume, probably digested a lot of my previous writings. And, you know, in the recent past, the New York Times piece had much more complex complexity to it. And of course, because it’s a mainstream publication and they’re not going to give me, you know, four thousand words. Um, some, some of that got got.

00:35:54 Ajay Kurian: Condensed.

00:35:55 Marc Spiegler: Got condensed. Um, one of the themes that I wanted to explore and there just wasn’t room to do it in the right way is precisely the shift you’re talking about, you know, and, and so There was a great essay a long time ago. Do you remember Edward Winkleman, the gallerist from. Okay, so Ed Winkleman was a great gallerist, um, in Chelsea. Super smart guy. He wrote this essay. I’m going to say it’s about ten years ago. It was called The Garden of Forking Paths. And he talked about, um, sort of how the relationship between galleries and artists, but also collectors and galleries had changed. And so, um, the point he made in that was that everyone assumed that what digital would do would be to, to disintermediate the galleries that would take them out of the sales process, right? That basically everybody, you know, artists would put stuff on platforms, they would sell it and that kind of thing. And that’s actually not been the effect. You know, gallerists are still there. Artists still want to work with galleries. They still want to show with galleries. They still are dependent upon galleries to do things like bring them to fairs and fund their biennial appearances and fund their museum shows and that kind of thing. But what did definitely happen is that the gallerists lost control of both access to information about the artist and access to the artists themselves. Right. What digital does is it allows collectors to rapidly inform themselves, well informed or not, but to feel informed about an artist without having to do what you used to have to do, which was to go to the gallery and say, hey, can I look at your your archive on this artist? Do you remember the old days when you would go to fairs and, and like, literally there would be a brochure like this thick about every artist on the stand. You know, like that was the control they had because they had all the information, they had all the catalogues. Right. And likewise, you know, nowadays you can just DM an artist like the Instagram functions as like the world’s phonebook, right? You can do an artist sometimes you see stuff that’s being that’s in the studio that’s not even released yet, you know? Um, and so basically what the digital has done is it has allowed collectors to go around the galleries in a lot of ways. You know, so on the one hand, they have a lot of money and money is important, you know, but the last real power that a gallery has in relationship to collectors is to decide whether or not to sell to them.

00:38:24 Ajay Kurian: Right. Which by I suppose most people would just call that gatekeeping.

00:38:30 Marc Spiegler: Yeah. I mean, certainly for collectors to hold. No, it feels like gatekeeping.

00:38:34 Ajay Kurian: Right?

00:38:34 Marc Spiegler: Others would say actually they’re protecting their artists from speculation.

00:38:38 Ajay Kurian: And I think both are valid.

00:38:40 Marc Spiegler: I think both are valid. I think I think both are totally valid. I think I think when I, you know, I have artist friends who suddenly have their work being flipped, they feel like it’s the gallerists fault for not doing it. And, you know, there’s this famous quote, uh, from James Brolin, you know, on the Felix podcast talking about how he’s, again, I don’t have the perfect quote, but it’s something like, like he’s never he’s he’s it’s he says something like, I’ve never subjugated myself as much as when I’m trying to get a work from a gallerist, you know, this is like an Academy Award nominee or even winner, you know, but the point is, um, again, like where you stand depends on where you sit. If you’re in the collector’s chair and you’re not getting access to the work, you feel like it’s wrong, you know, and if you’re in the, you know, if you’re the artist and the work is getting flipped, you feel like the gallerist made a mistake, you know, and it’s, it’s tough because usually, you know, the work that’s most Flippable is also by one of the few artists who are really making a lot of money for the gallery. So that that relationship is, you know, has to be defended at all costs because otherwise people will go to another gallery, you know.

00:39:41 Ajay Kurian: And why I mean, you’ve already you’ve said this before in other pieces, but, um, stipulating sort of resale mechanisms within a contract. Like why hasn’t that ever, I can tell.

00:39:53 Marc Spiegler: You.

00:39:54 Ajay Kurian: There’s.

00:39:54 Marc Spiegler: Been a, I got a lot of feedback about my piece, you know, um, negative and positive public, not so public, you know. And I think this comes with the territory. I think when you when you come forward with a piece like that and you, you know, um, and which was driven from my side by the sense that people were not taking seriously how much trouble galleries are having right now in terms of finding workable business models and surviving in this environment and how important that is to the art world beyond just the galleries, individual survival as business entities or not, you know? Um, so the one thing everybody agreed on is resale contracts are not happening. Really, really.

00:40:36 Ajay Kurian: That’s disappointing.

00:40:38 Marc Spiegler: Everyone seems to feel like it’s wrongheaded, you know, to, to do this, although it’s actually law in some states and countries.

00:40:49 Ajay Kurian: We just need to start doing it. I think like to me, I feel like everybody believes that there’s a code where, okay, well, if somebody does that, they’re just going to go to another gallery. This is how billionaires treated Mamdani’s wealth tax that they’re all going to up and leave. They’re not going to fucking leave. They’re gonna stay. Some of them might leave, some of them might go to Miami or do whatever they need to do. But I would say seventy percent are going to stay. And I think the same holds true when you’re you’re developing something that nobody does. And that’s not like the general practice, right? I think a lot of people are going to say that this doesn’t make any sense until it does.

00:41:29 Marc Spiegler: Right. Well, I think part of it has to do with the fact that. Because no one needs to own art. It’s not a human need like lodging or food, you know, um, there’s this sense that like every deal is very fragile and that anything, anything that could in any way shift the collectors momentum or their thinking, or make them feel nervous. Puts the deal at risk, you know?

00:42:05 Ajay Kurian: But you’ve seen so many things that I think would provide an alternative perspective on that, because you can cultivate desire in ways that make something so deeply attractive that it has like gravitational pull.

00:42:21 Marc Spiegler: Yeah.

00:42:22 Ajay Kurian: And I don’t think it necessarily ends with the fragility of that relationship. It’s like, okay, well, maybe this isn’t it, but there are other ways in which.

00:42:29 Marc Spiegler: In a weird way, it’s kind of it’s, it’s kind of like the discussion about prenups. Like there are people who feel like a prenup is not romantic, but there are other people who feel like a prenup is just a natural way to create a sense of security within the relationship. Totally. You know, so in a way, like resale rights, it’s resale rights are kind of like prenups. It’s like, it’s a recognition of the fact that things can go wrong and relationships can change, and that there’s a certain set of rules that you’re agreeing to in that eventuality. Right.

00:42:53 Ajay Kurian: I think that’s great.

00:42:54 Marc Spiegler: And like.

00:42:54 Ajay Kurian: A lot.

00:42:55 Marc Spiegler: Of, I like. I also think, and again, this is never going to happen because again, it would require more contractual relationships, you know? Um, I also think that there should be something like the resale rights system that you have in, in football or soccer, depending on which side of the Atlantic you’re on. Um, you know, where like when you develop a great player and they go to another team, you get something for that. Right.

00:43:18 Ajay Kurian: Right, right.

00:43:19 Marc Spiegler: Um, I just think it’s in the same way that I think technology has been scary to people. Um, anything which sort of changes the relationship between collectors and galleries and, and to your point, you know, because people feel like collectors are more powerful than ever, they’re even more afraid to try something which would, which would drive them. And in a weird way, like, I think it’s the kind of thing where it only works if everybody does it. Yeah. You know, and that’s going to be super hard to do. Um, But, you know, just because we don’t have a solution, because nobody thinks resale contracts are a viable option, doesn’t mean we don’t have a problem. And the problem is the following. The problem is that because people are afraid of collectors, they don’t know flipping work. They meet these collectors with mistrust, and those collectors either end up going to another gallery or to the auction houses, where as long as their check clears, everything is cool, right? And so, you know, I’m very happy to engage in any sort of discussion about other innovations that will allow galleries to feel more at home with rapidly embracing new collectors that will somehow mitigate this risk, this fear of speculation. Um, because I think it’s, I think it’s one of the reasons why the art market hasn’t grown in the way that it should have in this period where again, it both globalized internally, but also, you know, didn’t leverage this enormous growth and very high end wealth.

00:44:55 Ajay Kurian: Okay. So before we go down that path, I want to return to. I think there’s also a sense that art fairs for galleries have gotten inordinately expensive, and that’s something that you were in charge of. So I’d like to know kind of transparently, like how have the costs increased and how have they kept tied with sort of everything else that’s going on? Because I think from the outside looking in, people see that and they’re like, oh, you’re gutting galleries. This is why they’re closing, because it’s like one hundred thousand dollars for a booth, right? If I think if people had a little bit better understanding of like, what, how, why are these prices so high? Mhm.

00:45:39 Marc Spiegler: I mean, there is a huge degree of inflation involved with everything that that an art fair does, you know, whether it’s shipping walls, you know, whether it’s employing people, whether it’s building up the kind of robust digital infrastructure that people expect an art fair to have, and also the programs and that kind of thing. Um, I think it’s important for people to understand that. When it comes to the galleries, art fairs are not a margin business. They’re a volume business. Art fairs do not make double digit profits on their on stands, you know, at least not in my experience. Um, they, they do that with sponsorships, for example, where there are fewer in the contracts are bigger and the but, but the way that art fairs make money and I think this applies for almost every fair, um, is they have, they make a small amount of, or a relatively small amount of money on a lot of booths. Right. So it’s not that like the art fairs are like, oh, we’re suddenly going to make forty percent profit on every booth. That never happens. It’s more like our costs are going up. We need to account for that. You know, as we know, there’s been enormous inflation in many in many things. Everything involving international travel has gotten more expensive. Sure. Um, and art fairs. But the other thing that I would say is. A lot of the costs for a gallery to do art fairs have nothing to do with the art fairs themselves, in the sense that they’re not set by the fair. I’ll give you an example. Actually, it ties back to this issue. Mhm. At a certain point, we introduced a sliding scale for the booths at Art Basel, the effect of which was that the bigger your booth was. The more you paid per square meter. So it’s actually the opposite of a volume discount.

00:47:32 Ajay Kurian: I was I was like.

00:47:34 Marc Spiegler: It’s backwards. It’s, it’s it’s it’s progressive taxation. Yeah. Right. The more income you make, the higher tax you pay, the bigger your booth is, which by definition means that you’re a bigger gallery. You have, you know, you’re, you’re more established, right? Um, the more you pay per square meter. Interesting. And so when we did that, um, I took the preemptive move because I knew I was going to get asked of reaching out to a lot of the major galleries and saying, like, we’re going to come through with this. I want to explain it to you and I’d appreciate your support. When the press comes and says, but what about those galleries suddenly have to pay more? So I remember, uh. I think I can share the name. I called Gordon Veneklasen, you know, from Michael Werner Front Row Gallery at Art Basel. I said, hey, Gordon, you know, like, I want to explain this to you. Um, and I’d appreciate your support. He said, you know, Marc, you know, it’s going to cost us ten thousand bucks more, you know, and we’re paying, you know, two hundred and fifty to three thousand bucks in all to do Basel. And that’s not the square meters, right? That’s shipping and handling and a dinner for galleries and, you know, six nights of hotels for the team. And so a lot of the costs that are tied to the fair are actually beyond the fair’s control. So it’s part of a broader economy where hotel prices have gone up, as we all know, where airfare has gone up, where shipping has gone up enormously even before the war and the price of oil spiking. So but yes, of course, art fair expenses, especially if you do a lot of fairs, are an enormous part of the gallery’s expense. And that’s why I would advocate that people, um, think about their strategy and think about like, are you doing more fairs than you actually have time to prepare for and follow up on, you know?

00:49:16 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. I mean, I will say like, so I, I’m represented by forty seven Canal and Oliver, who, uh, is the owner of forty seven. He’s always been pretty fiscally conservative in that regard. Like they’ve never done that many fairs. And like when they started doing more, it was very specific. It was Basel, Miami, Basel, Basel, and now they do Basel, Hong Kong. Yeah. And I don’t think they do frieze anymore. I think they just do.

00:49:45 Marc Spiegler: And they occasionally do Chicago and things like that. Like when it makes sense.

00:49:49 Ajay Kurian: I think like they don’t have a real like they’re moving to Chelsea right now. They don’t have a space. So they decided to do more fairs this year.

00:49:54 Marc Spiegler: It makes sense, you know, because you need to put things out there. Exactly. Um, you know, I think that’s what’s interesting is, is in the last, even just before the pandemic already when the market was still pretty strong, I had more and more gallerists come up and say, hey, you know, I sat down with my accountant and we started running the numbers and trying to figure out which fair makes sense. And we realized, and I think the one thing I would say about fairs is that it’s very hard to measure the impact of a fair, you know, if you say, we spent this much money and we sold this much work during the fair, and that’s like, that’s, you know, is it, is it, you know, a plus or a minus? That’s very reductive. The reality is that that when collectors know that a certain artist’s work is coming to a fair, they want to buy if they’re interested, they’re going to try to buy it before it gets there, right? Because they have their relationship. And in the same way, a gallery owner at the end of the fair will have sold a certain number of works. But there’s things which are on reserve, which I think you have to attribute to the fair existence. And then even there are collectors, they meet for the first time there who then become interested, who ideally then come to see the gallery in person, who then follow, you know, they’re like, oh, you know, he has a show. I want to go see it. Right, right, right. So, you know, I think it’s very hard to measure or let’s say you have to have. A pretty broad way of thinking about what the impact of fairs are on your program. And I think if you stop doing fairs at all, which is never something I would advocate, you know, um, I don’t know where your pipeline is going to come from.

00:51:36 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. You said thirty percent of new collectors are found through art fairs.

00:51:41 Marc Spiegler: I didn’t say that, but that’s a number.

00:51:42 Ajay Kurian: That was that was a statistic.

00:51:43 Marc Spiegler: That’s a statistic that was floating around. Yeah. I mean, I think that’s that’s probably accurate. I’m surprised. And I think probably for some people it’s much higher. And given the fact that, you know, there’s as far as I know, no gallery neighborhood in the world where the footfall has increased since the pandemic, it’s probably going to be more and more true. It’s basically like if people are not coming into the gallery as much, you’re going to find new collectors either through your own social networks, through fairs, or through them coming to you over media, over social media.

00:52:12 Ajay Kurian: Right. Mhm. Philippe.

00:52:16 Marc Spiegler: Uh.

00:52:17 Ajay Kurian: You had, uh, I sort of knew of Philippe, but I was watching an interview with you, and you were addressing Philippe’s impact on auctions today. Yeah. Um, because he was sort of integral in bringing young artists to auction.

00:52:35 Marc Spiegler: Right? Um, I mean, this is second hand stuff because I wasn’t even in the art world at the time that started. But in the mid nineties, the. And I’ve checked this with people who were were very much at the center of the auction world at the time in the nineties. I think what Phillips innovation was, was this idea that a work didn’t have to be ten years old before it came to auction, that you could bring something relatively new into auction. And of course, um, you know, he was correct. And he did his job, which just to understand where the market is and what’s possible within it.

00:53:06 Ajay Kurian: It’s funny that you say innovation. Like I, I imagine that there’s some people that would say what Phillips corruption was.

00:53:14 Marc Spiegler: I mean, if you want to use him, I mean, innovation, I mean, the innovation, the creation of weapons is also an innovation. And that’s where my mom was an innovation. You know.

00:53:22 Ajay Kurian: That’s an.

00:53:23 Marc Spiegler: Amoral word I’m using. Yeah. It literally just means new. Exactly. And this was a new way of thinking, you know, if you want to use a more modern term, you could say his disruption was this. But the point is that to the best of my secondhand knowledge. You know, Philippe was someone who really said, you know, why? Why do we need to wait so long if there’s a market for this now, you know. And then the kind of end point of this was this moment, I would say in the mid aughts, you know, where where you had artists, especially Chinese artists coming into auction straight out of the studio, you know, um, you know, or you could say Damien Hirst, you know, with his sale where like everything was coming out of his studio. Right. So that’s kind of.

00:54:03 Ajay Kurian: That was, I mean, that was kind of a brilliant marketing initiative on his end, which.

00:54:08 Marc Spiegler: Immediately preceded the crash of the downfall of Lehman Brothers. Like, like, literally, like all happened within the same week or something, you know, but, but these, these two events are not tied to each other. But the point is, um, yeah, I mean, I think this, this created this notion that relatively new work that, you know, fresh paint work or wet paint work can come into auction. And eventually that leads to these kind of speculative cycles and all these kinds of things, you know, um, so, you know, I think that’s and again, you know, I think that’s that led to this notion of financialization of the art world, which has had all the effects that we’ve talked about, none of which I think are particularly great, because I think there are I remember talking to I think it was Louis Gouzer for a piece I did for Business of Fashion, you know, and, and, um, he was saying that there were, you know, we were talking about where the market was. And he was saying on the one hand, there’s this at the high end, there’s like almost infinite possibility, you know, and we see that, we see that like the auctions just came out with these incredible results for, for the first half, you know, and most of that is concentrated in a very small number of brand name super blue chip artworks being sold to a very small number of people, because that’s all. But, you know, um, you know, and other people told me that they felt like a lot of people were pausing because they realized that a lot of the work that they bought as investments actually wasn’t a good investment. And they were kind of like, maybe this isn’t a game that I want to play. Yeah. You know.

00:55:40 Ajay Kurian: And I’ve talked to a handful of galleries that have said the same thing.

00:55:43 Marc Spiegler: I mean, I think it’s I mean, I remember, um, on the eve of, of Frieze Seoul a couple of years ago, I had dinner with a great gallerist who told me they were concerned because they felt like in the Korean market, a lot of people, young people with money had come in and started to invest. And like they all. Were realizing that they hadn’t worked out. You know, the impact is a little bit like, you know, if you go to a party where people are taking a lot of cocaine and they all take it at the same time, suddenly, like an hour and a half later, the room gets really bitchy. You know, for the record, not my drug, but like, but, you know, we’ve all been there or many of us have been there. And it’s kind of this thing where like, the market gets really high on its own supply. And then there’s this kind of crash. And I think, I think the, the, the counterpoint to that is, um. To go more locavore, you know, like I think people need to build markets collector by collector hand to hand, eating with people, understanding them, becoming part of their lives. And you see some galleries that do this well, you know, you see these galleries who, who really are the gallerists are really part of the lives, you know, personal lives, professional lives, intellectual lives of their collectors, you know, and I think that’s a model that works. Again, it doesn’t take that many collectors and the money is out there, right?

00:57:06 Ajay Kurian: Money is.

00:57:06 Marc Spiegler: I think I think the the, the thing about this locavore approach is, is that you focus on the people with whom you can have a running relationship, you know, because you live in the same city or you’re, you’re seeing them all the time, you know, and you really try to pull them close to you, pull them close to your artists, get them excited about your program. And I think that’s, that’s an approach that can work. So I want to be super clear, I am not against a global art market. I’m not against expansionism. I think I desperately want the art market to expand, because that means more artists can produce more work and actually pay rent and have vacations and, you know, not retire broke and own property and all these things that I think artists who are some of the most important parts of our members of our society should be able to live from what they’re doing. I mean, we, you know, for everyone who read Josh Klein’s essay, it’s basically, you know, the, the Tldr version is even a super successful artist in New York is going to struggle because of the realities of New York, you know? Right. Um, and so I think we should have a more globalized art market, but I think it gets built locally and then gets activated globally. And so the role of the art fairs, I think, is not to create new collectors. That is the job of galleries and curators and museums. They are in the trenches. They represent a small group of artists, you know. I mean, an art fair doesn’t represent the four thousand artists who come to the show, you know? So I think and I think galleries are positioned to they have the information, they know the artists, they can give access, they can build the narratives around the artists work. And so the job of an art fair is to convene collectors. It is not to create collectors.

00:58:59 Ajay Kurian: Absolutely, I get that. I think right now there was a in one of in a Q&A at one of your talks, there was a person who asked a question. I think you might have known him. Um, but he said that collectors used to want money, power and knowledge. And now they just wanted money and power. And I feel like there’s something here where, you know, I think in that talk you were marking how, uh, luxury goods had skyrocketed? Yeah. And there was a huge, uh, a huge fork where, uh, contemporary art was keeping pace and then all of a sudden completely, you know, declined in relation to the luxury goods market. Yeah. And it does feel like it’s around the same time where collectors took more power and where they were not doing the work of it. They were just sort of like apprehending certain things and moving accordingly. So even if they’re not necessarily thinking of them as investments, they’re investments in the sense that I don’t know, to my mind, and this is I’m painting with very broad strokes here. Yeah. It’s like art feels more tchotchke ified. Like it feels like it’s it’s these, it’s the playthings of the rich. And it’s not changing culture. It’s not, it’s not like, uh, all of a sudden, this has blown apart the perspective of the person who bought it. It’s really just like, this is cute in my home.

01:00:37 Marc Spiegler: Right? So I think that’s a little reductive. Like, I’m not, I’m not in love with this meme of like, the stupid, powerful collector who just wants to, to put the red thing behind their red couch, you know?

01:00:50 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. And I’m not.

01:00:50 Marc Spiegler: Saying that that’s what it is. Also, it’s also because I know so many counterexamples. I know so many people.

01:00:56 Ajay Kurian: Absolutely.

01:00:57 Marc Spiegler: There’s so.

01:00:57 Ajay Kurian: Many intelligent.

01:00:58 Marc Spiegler: People, so many great collectors who are so interested in what artists are doing and who like, support all the shows and support their museum shows. And, and, you know, I think, um, I don’t think it’s fair to blame collectors for the fact that we live in a culture which generally values knowledge less. I mean, I teach you teach, right? I mean, every year, I have to say like, is my syllabus from last year too long? Is it too like.

01:01:26 Ajay Kurian: I don’t I yeah, I don’t think it’s just purely a collective problem.

01:01:29 Marc Spiegler: We live in a culture where people where people read less. Yes. Where like podcasts are driven by the clips that are extracted from them. Right? You know, where, you know, people like.

01:01:43 Ajay Kurian: My producer is nodding over there.

01:01:44 Marc Spiegler: We’re like, we’re like, like known. We’re like, I remember one of my favorite writers whose name I can’t remember putting on their Instagram that they were looking for short books to read, you know, and it’s this notion that like, you don’t want to make a book too long, you don’t want to make a thought too complex. You don’t want to ask people to watch a movie that’s too long, you know? And, you know, I think collectors and this is something that’s really important to understand. People talk about the connoisseur, collector, the collector who really saw every show, read all the catalogs, did all these things, you know, and I think what they forget is a, the connoisseur collector was living in a much smaller world. Sure. You know, all you needed to do was go back and forth across the Atlantic a couple times a year and keep up on the reviews in Artforum and maybe a couple of other magazines and art review. Let’s say maybe to know what was going on, you know. Um, the art world now has become you can’t wrap your arms around, you can’t wrap your head around it, you know? So it’s impossible to have the level of knowledge about all the important artists that people had before, because there’s so many more of them. And there was so much more information coming out from them. Right. Um, you know, so I think that’s, that’s important. And the other thing too, which is really important is to understand who has money now. Mhm. You know, there’s this classic, um, Veblen thing of the leisure class, you know, which is this kind of leisure class that has money and they have they don’t know what to do with their time. And so they become connoisseurs. The people who have money now, the people who have the money now to move markets are so busy. They’re much busier than you and me. They’re much busier than, than they have. They have very intense professional lives. They have very intense social lives. The people who have a lot of money now are often still actively making it. They’re still actively running companies. And so for them, this is part of why art fairs became so important, because it allowed the people who felt an interest in knowing more about the art world to rapidly scan it, to do what the French would call a tourism, which is like looking along the horizon to see what’s out there and then to decide where to dive in. But the point is that I think, yeah, uh, but this is something that galleries complain about that they feel like it’s just harder to get people to engage at any level of depth with what their artists are trying to do. But I think it’s harder to get people to engage with almost anything across the board. You know, I agree.

01:04:10 Ajay Kurian: I think that’s true. I think, um, you know, a part of that was a provocation. I don’t think collectors are all just like across the board dumb. Um, do you feel like there was more of a belief in art. Do you think the belief has diminished? Because I think sometimes people equate realism, a realism about the world, with a level of cynicism, and that to believe that art can push beyond what we see sometimes feels, at a certain point, naive.

01:04:47 Marc Spiegler: I don’t I don’t think so. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think so. The fact that the market hasn’t been able to translate what’s going on around it into, into growth doesn’t mean people are not excited about artists. I mean, you look, you know, like, like, you know, um, look at Hollywood, right? Everyone’s saying Hollywood is over and then boom, like these two movies that come out of YouTube basically, which is like backrooms and obsession, right? Just like blow up and people are going into movie theaters to see it. So it’s, it’s, I think part of it is it’s not the content that’s fucked up, it’s the distribution channels that have not adapted to the realities of what they’re dealing with. Right? So, so I think people actually are really into art. I think more people are more conscious of more artists than ever before. That’s the one thing social media does super well, right? One hundred percent. My kids are super excited to go see Doug Aitken’s show at The shed right now. Obviously, I’m choosing these are my kids. Of course, they’ve grown up adjacent to the art world. You know, I also don’t force feed them more than one show per day. But like, I’m like, this is a show. Check out the video. You know, you can listen to my podcast with him, etc., etc.. But the point is like, like, you know, my, my son who’s just turning eighteen is like literally working his way through the top one hundred films on Letterboxd. So he’s like, I want to watch this like French New Wave stuff, right? Or like, like, actually, I think people don’t want to live in this kind of weird Non-space of like social media. People want to see, people want to go to raves. People want to, you know, you know, like dating club running clubs are replacing dating apps, you know, like, like people are doing the, I don’t believe in it, but like these kind of sauna rave things. Like people want to feel alive. And I think art does that. Artists do that. So I really, really believe in the power of artists. I think it’s actually in some ways more powerful than before, because they can reach more people more quickly. And obviously you have to figure out how to adapt your art to do that. But like, I’m really, in this sense, kind of like utopian about this. Like, I don’t think art is less powerful than before. I think actually, as much as we should talk the algorithms, they are effective at putting things that you would never have discovered before, before you, you know, um, you know, and there’s still great, there’s, I’m still seeing, I just saw this amazing Lawrence Abraham show, Lawrence Abu Hamdan Peace at the Venice Biennial, where he, like political art, is really hard to make, and he made an amazing political work.

01:07:23 Ajay Kurian: He’s he’s incredible.

01:07:24 Marc Spiegler: It wasn’t shown in the Venice Biennale. It was in Canicula, which is like a show curated or co-curated by Alessandro Roberti, which is from and it’s from the Italian, I think, Foundation for Art and film in this church. And you walk in and you’re like, wow, this is so powerful. And like people are lining up to see it, you know? And it’s about the use of, um, uh, sound wave technology against rioters, you know, and like, this is not, this is not a happy clappy piece. This is like, this is like a really fucked up piece. And he’s just figured out how to do it really well, you know? So I think there’s great art being made out there. I think it’s I think it’s not the problem is not the art itself.

01:08:03 Ajay Kurian: It’s the distribution channels.

01:08:05 Marc Spiegler: And it’s, it’s, and it’s, it’s also not the, it’s, and it’s not the ability of people to be moved by art. They’re still moved by it. You know, they may not want to read extensive texts about it, but like artists have more tools at their disposition. You know, AI allows them and technology allows them to do things they couldn’t do before. Right. Technology allows them to broadcast their work in a way that they couldn’t do before. You know, it allows them to find their audiences. You know, it allows really niche things to actually get enough momentum to support itself, like whether it’s through a Patreon or a Substack or doing performances and people buying merch or whatever it is, you know, like we’re actually living in the era of like the specialist and the consultant and the niche and like artists are perfectly positioned for that. And the only question is what is the role or the big question? There are many, many questions. The only question like, what a stupid way to start a sentence. Um, but the big question in terms of the market is what is the role of galleries? How do they do this with and for the artists?

01:09:11 Ajay Kurian: And this comes after Marc Glimcher sitting down with the New York Times, Adam Lindemann writing a response piece. Uh, to quickly summarize, Marc, I think feels like the system as we know it is somewhat broken. Yeah. And he’s scaling down accordingly, right? I mean, accordingly, in what sense? It’s all relative.

01:09:32 Marc Spiegler: I think they still I think if you subtract fifty artists, SpaceX will still have more than eighty artists, right.

01:09:37 Ajay Kurian: It’s still a gigantic, gigantic gallery. Yeah. Adam’s response was essentially that none of this is broke. Mega-galleries are doing exactly what Mega-galleries do, and they’re going to keep doing it and sort of develop their lifestyle brands in the case of Hauser. Yeah. And, uh, you know, platform in the way that they platform, it’s just midsize galleries are fucked.

01:09:58 Marc Spiegler: Yeah. I mean, I, I wrote to Adam, um, after he wrote, he, he, um, he put that piece out and I said, you know, that was a really interesting piece, very solid. And I fully agree Mega-galleries are the last people we need to worry about, right? Right. The problem, and it’s the same in so many cultural industries. It’s not specific to the art world. But the problem is you have this. It was always a pyramid, but it’s just getting very, very, very steep. You know, like the like the power is still at the top of the pyramid, but it’s just very narrow with very few people in it. And of course, you know, you see this and this has been happening for a long time where like mega galleries now work with very young artists, you know, um, often those artists get kind of shipwrecked in their programs, but like artists are making a choice and hopefully someone is advising them, um, about the risks that are involved with jumping into the big pond where you are a small fish, you know, but certainly, um, the mega galleries are playing at a different scale and are in some ways better adapted from an environment where you need to invest in digital, you need to build up a lifestyle experience thing. Now. Um. At the mid level, I think the danger is when people try to play the mega gallery game.

01:11:13 Ajay Kurian: It’s impossible.

01:11:15 Marc Spiegler: And I think the smarter thing is to build more again, around, you know, build a community of collectors, of artists who you’re very close to, you know, integrate yourself in your lore, in their lives, you know, integrate them, you know, like basically, you know, and this is, I know this is going to sound utopian, you know, let’s just, let’s just wait for all the comments and, you know, um, but the point is like. There’s a version of a mid-level gallery, which is basically like, everyone knows what their job is like. The artist’s job is to produce great work. The collector’s job is to support their work. It’s to buy art. It’s to try to understand the art. It’s to support the shows that they’re doing at the biennials and museums, etc. and the gallery’s job is to, you know, on the one hand, take care of the artists and give them the resources that they need, both financial but also emotional and, you know, and intellectual in some cases. And the collectors job is to is. And and then their job is to identify the collectors that make sense. You know, within the roster, in essence, like people talk about a gallery’s roster of artists, but there’s also, in essence, the roster of collectors. And that should be, you know, you want to build the right people in there. You want to build the people who you think are going to be beneficial for your artist. You know, and what’s interesting, of course, is there are very few collectors that are owned by a single gallery, you know, but there are also more and more artists that are working with many galleries, often in varying ways. You know, I think I think we have a much more kind of fluid system when it comes to representation, you know, but but I think what doesn’t change is the fact that in the end, what drives human behavior is the narratives in which they find themselves or choose to place themselves. And I think that the, the there was a this is way back. There was this famous writer, a New York writer, who was a journalist called Damon Runyon. And he wrote a lot about like the mobsters and the horse touts and from like nineteen thirties, nineteen twenties in New York. And he has this great story called. He has his great short story called The Story Goes With It. And it’s basically about this guy who’s like trying to sell people on picks at a horse track, you know, and like, he’s not just saying, this guy’s going to win. He’s like, there’s a reason there’s, you know, there’s the, there’s the jockey is in love with this. And so he’s not going to ride as hard or. But the point is that that the job of a gallerist is to, is to take the objects that an artist has made to understand the magic and to figure out how to convey that in a very specific way to the very specific person standing in front of them and get them into it. And I again, like, I’m sure, you know, it’s funny because like some people think I’m very cynical and some people think I’m very naive, you know, which is, you know, which is fine.

01:13:57 Ajay Kurian: Whatever suits them.

01:13:58 Marc Spiegler: Yeah. Whatever suits them. In essence, people’s perception of you is as much about them as it is about you. But the point is that at the risk of sounding naive, I really think that. The more successful the art is sold as a kind of magical portal into the artist’s world, the more successful you’ll be because you’re actually changing the lives of the people in front of you, not by giving them an investment, but by giving them access to something which makes their life more special.

01:14:35 Ajay Kurian: I am curious what people think of that.

01:14:37 Marc Spiegler: I’m curious too. I’m okay. I mean, I know, I know that I’ve had this experience. I’ve seen other people have this experience. I know that, you know, people say like, there’s this kind of endless stupid question, like, what is art? You know, like, I don’t play that game, you know? For me, it’s like, what is good art? You know? And for me, good art is work that transforms you. It transforms your way of seeing or thinking about the world or thinking about a specific issue or a person or, or, you know, thinking about a society, but in essence, like a good artwork, a great artwork does not leave you unmoved.

01:15:16 Ajay Kurian: For sure.

01:15:16 Marc Spiegler: And I think, I think the job of the artist is to create something that can move people. And the job of the gallerist is to put the people who can be moved by it in front of them.

01:15:28 Ajay Kurian: Do you think they’re upholding their part of the job?

01:15:33 Marc Spiegler: I think in some cases, yes, in some cases no. I think I think people struggle. You know, I think, um, you know, I, I got a lot of very positive and supportive comments, um, from gallerists when the piece came out in the New York Times. I’m sure there were others who felt differently about it, but a lot of people and very wide ranging, like, even like secondary market dealers with whom I have no relationship. Gallerist with whom I’ve really been in the trenches, you know, for the fifteen years in Basel, very young gallerists who are not even on the fair circuit, you know, um, you know, and I think, uh, you know, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a very tough space to be in. And I, I think it’s true to say that almost every gallerist who is chosen to do this as their life’s work could have had a simpler, easier, wealthier life somewhere else. Like by definition, without question, by definition, a gallerist is someone who has very strong social skills, in most cases, access to some degree of financial capital. You know, an amazing work ethic, highly resilient to things like things like jet lag and fatigue, you know, um, and an ability to, to read the room to, you know, to understand the cultural zeitgeist, see where it’s going to see things before they, before other people see them. And these are skills you could deploy in, in politics, in media, in real estate, in luxury, you know, etc.. And I think, I think. Artists. Most artists I know are artists because they cannot imagine doing anything else. Yeah, I think gallerists are people who could imagine doing something else and have chosen to do this despite knowing how hard it is. And I think this is why, for example. When Andrea Rosen closes, when Gavin Brown closes, when Bluhm closes, you know, the people who are their successors find it so difficult because they see someone who is doing what they’re trying to do, shutting down.

01:17:48 Ajay Kurian: Right.

01:17:49 Marc Spiegler: Because they feel like this is their aiming. If when you know, when the person who you want to become decides they don’t want to be that person, it feels existential, right?

01:17:58 Ajay Kurian: Right.

01:17:58 Marc Spiegler: You know.

01:18:00 Ajay Kurian: How do you how do you stay? How do you have this much energy?

01:18:03 Marc Spiegler: How do I have this much energy?

01:18:05 Ajay Kurian: Like how do you. I’ve been in this business for so long. You’ve been doing it at such a high level. You’ve been under a lot of scrutiny for most of it. Why are you this excited still?

01:18:22 Marc Spiegler: I don’t know, I love art, I mean, I don’t know, it just sounds so stupid. I mean, it’s genetic, you know, like, I’m, um, I, I, you know, I don’t know, like, I.

01:18:33 Ajay Kurian: Like, you don’t seem as worn out as I would assume someone who has been.

01:18:39 Marc Spiegler: AM I not spent enough for this podcast?

01:18:41 Ajay Kurian: It’s you were plenty spent enough. It’s I guess it’s like.

01:18:45 Marc Spiegler: What does spent mean? Because when I hear spent, it means like, like.

01:18:49 Ajay Kurian: Yeah, I mean, I think the reason why I spent, uh, as a title appeals to me is that, um, we can’t necessarily tackle all the, the broad range ideas that are going to run for the next two hundred years. What I can talk about is how are we feeling in this moment together? Because a lot of what I’m interested in right now is regardless of what happens with technology, regardless of what happens with AI, the one thing that is going to systematically always be there is that we need to find ways of being together. We need to find ways of being able to talk to one another and be able to enjoy each other’s company.

01:19:26 Marc Spiegler: So I think I’m a very bad guest for this podcast because no, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not spent. But the point is, but the point is, like, for me, this is like, this is kind of a microcosm for. Why art is important to me and the energy I derive from it. Yeah. Right. This conversation, because it’s not an easy time, you know, to be a cultural strategist. Like projects come and go and get postponed and all that kind of stuff. You know, I have two teenage kids, I love them. It’s challenging being a parent, you know? Um, we live in a society which goes in many ways against my beliefs in terms of where things are going politically, in terms of where things are going in terms of discourse. But like, for me, this kind of conversation, and it could also be the conversation I have hopefully later with Doug Aitken’s work, you know, where Doug isn’t even present. But like I think of the conversations I’ve had with him or even, you know, like, I barely know Lawrence. Like we’re friendly, but we think we’ve only had one meal together, you know, a long time ago, but like, like, or Jon Rafman, you know, again, someone I’m very friendly with. I don’t think we’ve eaten one meal together, but like, when I see how people are thinking about society, what the comments they’re making in society, how they’re transforming that into interesting new narratives. Like that’s really exciting. Like, I don’t feel spent at all. Like I feel less spent dealing with art than almost anything else except maybe also music, you know? Um, you know, when I think about cultural things, it’s like, you know, like, you know, I have like my, my free ride snowboarding, which also kind of gives me energy and the cold plunges and all that kind of stuff. But the point is like, like talking about art, talking about the systems of art, talking about like, what’s wrong and how we can fix it. And like not getting too down in this kind of doom and gloom is like really important. Like it’s, it’s, you know, yeah, it’s a difficult time and like, and it’s a crisis, you know, and I think, I think a lot of people are having these really existential questions about what it means to be an artist and what it means to be a gallerist, and how are we going to find our way through. And like, what we’re definitely not going to do is find our way through. By not looking around. I think we have to question our assumptions. I think we have to re-examine some of the sacred tropes. I think we have to think about what everybody’s role is and could be. I think we have to think about how how we do business. Like there are some galleries, you know, who should be doing more fairs because they happen to be in a place where there are not a lot of collectors around them, you know? Or because they’re representing artists who actually don’t make any sense in their home market, but make a lot of sense somewhere else, right? Like this is one of the, you know, um, one of the fascinating things about the whole fair ecosystem is that it’s predicated on the notion that that the market for your gallery may be stronger somewhere abroad or by connecting, you know, a collector in Asia and a collector in Brazil and a collector in Los Angeles and a collector in, in Berlin. Um, then it would be about just sitting in your gallery. So I think you have to do both, you know, um, you know, and I think it’s, but it’s so I think, um. I think people need to keep in mind that like every artist is their own singular market and, and the, the amalgamation of all the artists within a gallery’s program define how it needs to operate within the market, you know, and I think I think what people need to think about very carefully is like, and it’s the thing we should ask ourselves as people like, who am I? Who do I want to be? How do I build the structure that allows that to happen?

01:23:08 Ajay Kurian: Mark, I want to thank you for coming.

01:23:10 Marc Spiegler: I want to thank you for having this great conversation.

01:23:12 Ajay Kurian: Yeah.

01:23:12 Marc Spiegler: It’s been more awake now than when we started.

01:23:15 Ajay Kurian: I hope this is the first of many conversations we have.

01:23:18 Marc Spiegler: I’m into.

01:23:18 Ajay Kurian: It. All right, man.

01:23:19 Marc Spiegler: Cool.

01:23:20 Ajay Kurian: Yeah. That’s a wrap.

01:23:22 Marc Spiegler: That’s a wrap.

01:23:28 Ajay Kurian: Is a podcast hosted by Ajay Kurian and edited by Peter Groppi. Thanks to Need to Know Studios, our brilliant guests and listeners, Mary Akpa, Elvira Horvath, Tara Douglas, and Jasmine Amani. Follow us at New Christs on Apple Podcasts, Substack, Spotify, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok for the latest updates on spent. And thank you for spending time with us.


Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe

Baseera Khan joins Ajay Kurian for a conversation that begins with a Garfield drawing contest and expands into an exploration of storytelling, identity, and the politics of material.
Khan reflects on finding her artistic voice through tracing comics, navigating graduate school as a search for self rather than an entry into the art world, and developing works that blend performance, sculpture, painting, and sound. Together, they discuss Braid Rage, acoustic blankets, museums, language, surveillance, and the hidden histories embedded in everyday materials.
Throughout the conversation, Khan shares how dreams, humor, intuition, and personal experience shape a practice that resists fixed definitions while examining capitalism, representation, and belonging.
About the Guest
Baseera Khan is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores identity, labor, material culture, and systems of power through sculpture, painting, performance, installation, and sound. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and Participant Inc., and they were the winner of The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist.
https://baseerakhan.com/
00:00 Intro
00:20 Garfield, Nermal & learning to draw through comics
05:20 Finding an artistic path through Cornell and self-discovery
12:20 Storytelling, language, and the influence of Michael Asher
18:50 Braid Rage, dreams, and making work without sketches
26:50 Fabric, family, and the materials of memory
29:50 The “I AM MUSLIMA” Nike project, identity, and capitalism
34:45 Performance, acoustic blankets, and surveillance
42:30 Petroleum, plastic, and giving museum objects a voice
50:50 Working with museum archives and historical collections
54:20 Reality television, identity, and staying grounded
1:00:30 Art, ambition, and closing thoughts
00:00:00 Ajay Kurian : Welcome to the forum from the new podcast. I’m your host, Ajay Kurian. The forum is a free monthly gathering in New York where artists and thinkers come together for a live conversation. Well, you’re about to hear was recorded in front of a live audience. For details on upcoming events, sign up for our newsletter at new dot studio.
00:00:19 Ajay Kurian : I was really tickled by this like, fact that I learned about Baseera literally just a few days ago, and just a few minutes ago, I had this idea. Um, so we’ll see how it goes. But basically we both got into art. Art meaning like drawing of any kind image making, um, through Garfield. And I didn’t know this until a few days ago.
00:00:47 Baseera Khan: So do you guys know who Garfield is?
00:00:50 Ajay Kurian : Yes. Okay.
00:00:52 Baseera Khan: Do you know who Nermal is? Of course you don’t. Because that was the femme cat behind Garfield.
00:01:02 Ajay Kurian : It’s true. What I wanted to see if Baseera would be down to do is if we did a little Garfield drawing contest right now.
00:01:12 Ajay Kurian : Do you guys.
00:01:13 Baseera Khan: Like that idea?
00:01:14 Ajay Kurian : Yes.
00:01:15 Baseera Khan: I haven’t thought about Garfield in a very long time. And I have to also tell you the reason why. The reason why I started drawing Garfield was not because I innately was interested in like, Garfield and drawing. It was that I was interested in the stories and the storytelling. And, um, my brother would always run to the library and rent all of the books. And he was in his phase where he didn’t want to share. I mean, he’s a very generous human.
00:01:49 Ajay Kurian : Is he older or younger?
00:01:50 Baseera Khan: Two years older.
00:01:51 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay. So it’s close.
00:01:53 Baseera Khan: He’s a generous human. You know, I know I’m being recorded. Love you. William. But at the time, he was going through a phase where he wanted everything to himself. So I would sneak the books out of his bag and I would trace them. I would trace the drawings and make my own books. And I think through tracing the books, I started creating my own version of the cat. So just my pardon. If the cat looks like other things.
00:02:24 Ajay Kurian : That’s totally fine. This is all in good fun. Um, and I also, it’s again, like, it’s just crazy to hear that that’s also how you came to it because weirdly, there’s ideas of familial surveillance. There’s ideas of like having to take a story and make it yours because it wasn’t being offered to you in the first place. There’s just like strange dynamics that feel like there’s parallels in the work itself.
00:02:52 Baseera Khan: One more thing before we start this drawing contest. Um. Garfield was a bully.
00:03:00 Ajay Kurian : This is true.
00:03:02 Baseera Khan: So I, I was interested in the narrative of how he kind of came into the room and took all his space.
00:03:10 Ajay Kurian : I never thought about it.
00:03:11 Baseera Khan: I was really interested in normal story, and I thought that I would fashion a career of what would normal do.
00:03:20 Ajay Kurian : Wow.
00:03:21 Baseera Khan: But that never happened because.
00:03:23 Ajay Kurian : My normal was the. It’s, I guess in the context of the comic, it’s like normal was the exhausting, annoying, um, cousin. I don’t know what what the relationship was, but it hearing it from like hearing it out. Like as an adult now I’m like, oh yeah.
00:03:43 Baseera Khan: Nermal was the intelligent, femme capable cat and she knew a lot and it intimidated the more rugged It kind of, you know, like boyish charm that Garfield kind of, like, took advantage of. It was patriarchy.
00:04:06 Ajay Kurian : For sure. I don’t think it was boyish. He had very much old man energy to me.
00:04:11 Baseera Khan: But sometimes I think that boys and old men are very similar.
00:04:16 Ajay Kurian : Okay, I can see that.
00:04:18 Baseera Khan: Anyway.
00:04:18 Ajay Kurian : Yeah, here we go. I can totally see that. All right. Um. No stopwatch. We’re just going to do this quick and see what comes out. All right, let’s go. I mean, I drew him like a, like a thousand times. I would say this is like a very psychedelic Cheshire I’m here for it, though.
00:05:00 Baseera Khan: I think that is the CIA. He was like, did you know? Did you really draw? Garfield, let’s do a contest.
00:05:09 Ajay Kurian : That’s that’s the.
00:05:10 Ajay Kurian : Rest of the interview. Is me just grilling you?
00:05:12 Ajay Kurian : Yeah.
00:05:15 Ajay Kurian : I want to start in all seriousness with.
00:05:19 Baseera Khan: I am an artist, I promise.
00:05:22 Ajay Kurian : She’s an amazing artist. So this is this is, I guess I’m I want to start here, but I also am curious about like this, this ten year lapse. Um, but this was your first major show in New York at participant Incorporated and, um.
00:05:37 Baseera Khan: It’s, it’s participant Inc you know, participant. I know that you like long words, but.
00:05:42 Ajay Kurian : I’m gonna get killed all night. So among other things, this is like when we first see the acoustic blankets, which we’ll talk about. This is the first time. Is this the first time where Brad Rage was performed?
00:05:56 Baseera Khan: Yes.
00:05:57 Ajay Kurian : Okay.
00:05:57 Baseera Khan: That was commissioned. Most of those works were commissioned by the by the gallery.
00:06:02 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Okay, cool. And how how did. I mean, how did that whole relationship start?
00:06:10 Baseera Khan: Actually was introduced to Leo through Jeffrey Gibson, who was. I was his teaching assistant at Cornell. Oh, cool. And he was doing his show, um, at that time with participant. He had just received a capital, a creative capital grant, and he was working on his solo show. And in a way, even he’s so big, you know, in our minds, but in a way, like that was one of his first shows.
00:06:37 Ajay Kurian : Right.
00:06:38 Baseera Khan: So he was like, you know, in due time, you know, I’ll introduce you to, you know, this magical person. And I was like, I’m going to jump the gun here and just go meet her. Um, so I went out to a show that she was doing. I saw Jeffrey show, introduce myself to her and brought her over to Cornell. And so we kind of started a friendship and a very cool kind of a work life relationship at that point. Mhm.
00:07:06 Ajay Kurian : Okay. So it developed over a period. And then like through those conversations, like, did she, I mean, did she get, was she in your corner from the start?
00:07:18 Baseera Khan: Leah’s in every artist’s corner. But I have to say that when I was in grad school, I had like Xerox printout cutouts of horses behinds. I, I was thinking about a fake book of like archiving, I, I refused to paint, but I was painting. It was a very, it was a very interesting time period for me. And, um, I’m, I’m just really lucky that I did it off site because Cornell is not really a place that people go to be artists. That’s my bad.
00:07:55 Ajay Kurian : It’s I mean, it’s yeah, it’s not like one of the super well-known MFA programs, but I do think it’s to me, what’s interesting about it is that like, I think a lot of people in MFA programs get a lot of attention before things are fully cooked. And I think sometimes it’s nice to just be away and like, have some time for things to, to marinate on your own time. Mhm.
00:08:18 Baseera Khan: I didn’t really necessarily know. I know this sounds like it sounds as goofy as me knowing how to draw Garfield, but I really didn’t know about Yale and about I didn’t even know what a tenure track position was when I got into Cornell. My dad on his like last days of health and wealth before he went to the cosmos. Right. He died. He was like, how did you get into Cornell? Because I was like failing out of every institutional interaction I ever had, like elementary school. I was put into a locker because they let you do that back then to discipline you. They put you in lockers.
00:09:03 Ajay Kurian : Oh my God. Wait. The administration put you in a locker?
00:09:07 Baseera Khan: Mhm. And we’ll talk about that later over drinks. Um, and then, you know, in college. Oh, gosh. Like failed out of that. I actually failed out of grad school too, but I got my I got my papers and I’m a professor. I’m a beloved professor. In fact, um, people like me, I’m very good at what I do. But what I’m trying to say is I really didn’t understand this world. Mhm. Even at my ripe age of thirty something. Mhm. When I entered into grad school, um, I was really happy that I could go to a school that I didn’t have to pay for. And in fact, they paid me a stipend because I did a tenure track or because I did a teaching assistant. Right. Um, and then I learned about myself. I, I was invested in learning from Iftikhar Dadi and Salah Hassan, who Salah Hassan started the first africana study, uh, department in the country. Wow. And Cornell is oftentimes looked upon for think tanks because it has created academia for a lot of, you know, indigenous studies, South Asian studies, queer studies. Um, it’s an incredible school. So instead of learning necessarily about contemporary art, I was trying to figure out where I fit into the world.
00:10:37 Ajay Kurian : I know notes, that’s just.
00:10:39 Baseera Khan: And then there was Leah, because I know that that was the that was supposed to explain the whole.
00:10:43 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. But it’s just so grounding.
00:10:44 Ajay Kurian : It’s so grounding to hear that like, that’s, that was the the cultivation of that journey. Like it’s a you didn’t it didn’t come from a place of like being hungry about an art world. It came from a place of just really seeing this place as a, you know, uh, almost like a temple of scholarship.
00:11:05 Baseera Khan: I mean, I wouldn’t say it was a temple of scholarship. I was very hungry about learning about me.
00:11:11 Ajay Kurian : And.
00:11:12 Baseera Khan: And not me as in Baseera Khan. But but.
00:11:15 Ajay Kurian : Where like.
00:11:16 Baseera Khan: Where am I? I know I exist, and I know there’s a ton of me out there.
00:11:19 Ajay Kurian : Mhm.
00:11:20 Baseera Khan: So where is that?
00:11:21 Ajay Kurian : So what was the first thing that really connected for you, at least in maybe let’s, let’s narrow it down to like visual culture.
00:11:29 Baseera Khan: Okay. I was going to say all the martinican writers and, and, um, you know, like I was, I was kind of going on the, like, I’m gonna be a theory militant person.
00:11:41 Ajay Kurian : Cool.
00:11:42 Baseera Khan: And I’m kind of not that anymore because I really like clothing, and I like champagne and pizza, you know, that kind of stuff.
00:11:51 Ajay Kurian : Sylvia Wynter was a dancer and a poet and, like, she was a star. So I think I think you can do both.
00:11:58 Baseera Khan: Yeah. And that’s what we’re here for. We’re trying to create these unique identities so it can be co-opted by capitalism. Um, so the question is again, please.
00:12:08 Ajay Kurian : I’ve forgotten. Um. Oh, the question was, uh, so okay, you said the martiniquan writers. So we’re talking cesaire. Um, I’m now everything’s falling out of my head.
00:12:21 Baseera Khan: Yeah. So you were asking me what was the first moment where I kind of got into the contemporary art world thinking about the visual. Like what compelled me in grad school? Actually, the thing that compelled me was Michael Asher.
00:12:37 Ajay Kurian : No kidding.
00:12:38 Baseera Khan: And that’s not visual. It’s an idea. It’s a spin. So I was really interested in the spin. So even if I’m making these beautiful paintings that like, ooh, yummy, like look at these colors, it’s the spin for me. It’s the storytelling for me.
00:12:55 Ajay Kurian : Why do you say spin?
00:12:57 Baseera Khan: Okay, so Michael Asher, I don’t even know what he looks like, but he did this project in Chicago where he his job was just to take a sculpture out from the front of the facade of, like, a museum and place it in its sort of antiquity, instead of having it represent what it means to be American.
00:13:22 Ajay Kurian : Okay, okay.
00:13:24 Baseera Khan: So so he was trying to, you know, take away a symbol that sort of it’s not oppressive. It’s just that, you know, when there’s two, when there’s two many representations of a certain kind of figure, I’m basically trying to explain like when there’s too many white dudes that are cool that that are monuments, right? Or they’re not cool and they’re monuments. That’s, there’s an oversaturation of that brand. So what he was like, let’s take this oversaturated brand of this white man and put him back into like a, a room in the museum where it belongs and give the front of the space kind of like a new look.
00:14:12 Ajay Kurian : Okay.
00:14:12 Baseera Khan: You know, something that’s more contemporary, something that that’s more like, um, the likeness of what Chicago is.
00:14:21 Ajay Kurian : But what’s interesting to me is that you’re using language that’s like couched in PR that it’s not like decontextualizing or it’s not like art historical language, it’s spin.
00:14:31 Baseera Khan: No, I’m using, um, Creole. Um, I’m using what Amy Cesaire taught me because again, like I woke up in grad school, I learned how to be a part of the art world kind of in grad school. So the most important lesson I learned is how you tell the same story. Mhm. So noticed I didn’t diss anybody. I just said there’s an oversaturation of a certain kind of brand which would be a white man. And so we want to, we want to let some love in some other kinds of different types of people in Chicago, right, that live there. So that particular project that Michael Asher did was really important to me. It wasn’t really PR talk. It was a kind of deconstruction of a English or French language, which is what Amy Cesaire was trying to do is not fight physically, but kind of like intellectualize the language itself. And I’ll give you an example in a description through cruelty, and something that Amy Cesaire would use as an example would be one version would be like, there is a mansion on the hill. There’s a mansion on the hill. Then he would say, instead of saying, there’s a mansion on the hill, you can say there are thirteen bathrooms on the hill. Does that make sense? So instead of saying there’s a mansion, there’s this legacy and this historical building that I, I should bow down to. I’m, I’m explaining something very specific, like there’s thirteen bathrooms in that structure on the hill, right? And it’s a way to just deconstruct and sort of like level out the kind of like, uh, grandeur of language. Right? Yeah.
00:16:32 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. I mean, it’s different than saying there’s like seven staircases or fourteen bedrooms, thirteen bathrooms.
00:16:40 Baseera Khan: Thirteen bathrooms. And what do we do in the bathroom? I mean, we realize ourselves. We look in the mirror.
00:16:48 Ajay Kurian : Wow. Wow. It keeps going. So this is okay. You’re getting to know yourself. You’re getting to understand what these different shifts in language can do for you. And I mean, in thinking about kind of that relationship of spin and this performance. I mean, the first person that came to mind for me was, uh, Matthew Barney. Um, in just in terms of thinking about kind of. So there was an earlier project of Matthew Barney’s drawing restraint, um, where setting up, uh, athletic restraints to then make a drawing was kind of the conceit, um, with oops. With this performance. There’s a whole lot of other things at play that complicate that kind of. I don’t know the the blankness of that situation. Um, for one, the cast of your body. So there’s ninety nine casts of your body that have gold chains, gold and silver chains in them, and you’re traversing them through these braids. And to me, I think one of the things that you said about this that I thought was like, just so nice and I hadn’t, um, I hadn’t really thought of it this way is that it’s a, it’s a piece about economies that masquerades as identity art. And that was really, for one, I feel like it was such a different moment. I’m curious, like, would you would you want to make something that masquerades as identity art now and what that means, but also like, how did that how did that whole process come about in terms of like thinking through this performance and thinking through like, this is this is the way I want to tell this story about these economies.
00:18:49 Baseera Khan: Um, okay. So the Matthew Barney part, um, people in their forties didn’t really grow up with the internet, um, or did not grow up with the internet. And then at some point in their twenties, they could choose to be a part of the internet, right? Mhm. Um, I was really into music and networking through the music scene in Denton, Texas. So any chance I got, I went through the portal, which would be a window in my bedroom. I’d sneak out, I’d, you know, change my clothing and I would go and see all these bands play in all these different, they call them manors because they were like, um, squatters. There’s a lot of squatting that was happening. It was pretty cool. It was very Berlin, kind of squatting. You know, they were all in school, but they were squatting homes, abandoned homes. Um, so one of the parties there was this artist who was a conceptual artist. He had just graduated, and he was on his way to New York and he was going to Columbia University. So I was like very in awe. I was like, what are all these things? What is Columbia University? And he sat me down at one of these events, one of these musical events, and he was like, do you know who Matthew Barney is? And I was like, who is that? You know, like, do you know what Printmaster is? And so he walked me through what grandmasters world was. Um, I think he had done grandmaster number one at the time. Okay. And that’s kind of how I got locked in. So there are certain artists I locked into because I was at the right place at the right time, You know, it’s like that. So in terms of the next question.
00:20:41 Ajay Kurian : Which is so you’re locking into Matthew Barney and then, um.
00:20:46 Baseera Khan: Would I ever make identity art? Is that what you’re asking?
00:20:50 Ajay Kurian : Well, I mean, let’s maybe just stay with the, the how this got generated. Like what? Um.
00:20:59 Baseera Khan: Maybe I’m subconsciously trying to, like, avoid the question. Um, so, um, I don’t have, like, a very astute answer for you. That’s probably why I don’t like to talk about the way I make my art, because I just had like a series of dreams. And I know that’s very cheesy.
00:21:18 Ajay Kurian : It’s not cheesy.
00:21:19 Baseera Khan: But if you lock in, you can really kind of like understand a lot that’s going on in the world. As long as you don’t like become an oracle or like some kind of like.
00:21:30 Ajay Kurian : Cult leader.
00:21:31 Baseera Khan: Cult leader about it. But I. I just had a series of dreams and the original. I wish I had shared the original braid rage wall with you. There was like a massive hole on the back wall with a huge braid coming out of it. Oh wow. When it came to the time of actually creating this, this wall to climb. Uh, you know, the founder of participant was kind of like, um, I don’t think we need a glory hole. Let’s just stick to this and we can double back on that in your next show.
00:22:03 Ajay Kurian : Interesting.
00:22:04 Baseera Khan: So, um, so there was a lot of like, you know, I, I had the privilege of working with a great curator. Yeah. You know, a great scholar.
00:22:13 Ajay Kurian : Mhm.
00:22:14 Baseera Khan: Um, so I kind of locked into the idea of a collective self. I was really interested in the language, of course, which is like no corners. It’s no curves. You know, I want to, I want to use the word corner, not curve, because I was thinking about how like the fem body enters into the museum space either naked, drawn naked, or had to sleep with somebody and they had to be naked. So, you know. So I was, I was, you know, that’s, um, you know, not my language. Right? Sure. It’s the guerrilla girls, but, um, I was kind of thinking about the language of which I would kind of like, make this work. And I didn’t think about putting in the chains or the hypothermia blankets or the hair at first inside of each one of those objects. But I was kind of thinking about DNA and how we’re all sort of, um, we’re all disconnected through levels of economy that have happened since the biblical age.
00:23:26 Ajay Kurian : Since. Yeah.
00:23:26 Baseera Khan: The very, so, so, you know, like India was all a part of Africa at some point that broke away, for example, or, you know, First Nations came in from northern Europe because that part of the world was connected. I kind of just thinking in those really like kind of, I, I’m thinking about how if I am doing anything, I’m kind of doing it because I wonder what capitalism would be like if it was still a money making machine, but it wasn’t like exploiting and extracting all the time from a certain kind of person. Mhm. Um, and it wasn’t sneaky, you know? So, so the sneakiness of making money off of someone that looks like you or me or anyone in this room, it’s not necessary. Because what are you going to do with three hundred and forty trillion dollars? Really? You know.
00:24:29 Ajay Kurian : Do you think that capitalism can ever not be sneaky?
00:24:33 Baseera Khan: Um. I mean, I. I don’t know. I think you’re just I think that question can just be left unanswered.
00:24:44 Ajay Kurian : Okay.
00:24:45 Baseera Khan: Uh. I’m sorry. I like, can I just say that I, I’m trying to talk about my artwork, but there’s just so much in my mind that comes before the actual artwork. Because when I’m actually making work, I’m not thinking about anything. I can’t be smart. I can’t be witty because it’s such a formal practice.
00:25:06 Ajay Kurian : I totally get that. I mean, when you’re in the process of making something, I think there’s a blankness that you’re just doing the thing that needs to be done. Yeah.
00:25:16 Baseera Khan: And I don’t work with sketches or research material in terms of like how something’s going to look. I just have these kind of researched ideas. Then I go into the material. And I’m like, what would it look like if we attached an arm? You know, I’m doing that right now in my studio. I’m making a prototype of a sculpture. I’m really interested in the material of cement all of a sudden. So I’m thinking about what the world would look like if I made a sculpture out of cement. So I’m not like, I don’t have, like, things pinned up on the wall and like red thread that connects everything. And I’m not trying to find the boogeyman. I’m just like, I am just making work. And then if it doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. It’s there’s no sketch.
00:26:03 Ajay Kurian : I get that. Um, but when you say that you’re not looking for something, what it makes me think of is that you had mentioned that PD, PD Ouspensky’s In Search of the miraculous was an important book for you, and that.
00:26:22 Speaker 5: Oh yeah.
00:26:24 Ajay Kurian : That there is a search for for something. It’s not necessarily like a concept, an idea, or something that’s completely carved out, but there is something that you’re searching for. And I’m, I’m wondering if maybe there’s motivations that push you towards the things that you want to see in the world rather than saying, okay, this is how it’s going to be, and this is how I’m going to sketch it out.
00:26:51 Speaker 5: I think that I, I’m.
00:26:53 Baseera Khan: Whenever I’m in the sort of system of making like I have my casts, I have my colors, I have or my paint brushes or whatever I, there’s like a moment where I’m seeking a surface like a substrate. I’m thinking about skin, for example. That’s always something that pops up into my mind, either skin or textures of fabric that I grew up with. Because I didn’t have teddy bears when I was growing up. I had bolts of fabric. Mhm.
00:27:24 Ajay Kurian : Can you go on.
00:27:26 Baseera Khan: Because my because my mother was, uh, like, worked at Neiman Marcus leather factory. Uh, she made all of our clothes. You know, our family was very much like, let’s maintain the South Asian ness to the max. So the bolt of fabric that was chosen at the local fabric store or later on at Hobby Lobby or whatever, would become the curtain, would become the tablecloth would become the couch, pillows would become the dress. Um, so I kind of there was no room in the house to store those materials. So they would just kind of sit on the side of the bed. Is my mom here? It would sit on the side of the bed and, you know, I would be hugging the bolts of fabric.
00:28:20 Ajay Kurian : Wow.
00:28:21 Baseera Khan: Yeah. And there were no animals in the house. Teddy bears and pictures of people because there was some kind of kind of like debate about being Muslim and not having representations of figures. And somehow my teddy bear became in the line of fire.
00:28:43 Ajay Kurian : I didn’t want to put such a fine point on it, but it was what came to my head. I was like, is this a anti iconic kind of thing? Like no animals, no representations.
00:28:55 Baseera Khan: It, it sort of was like, I think that if I had created a PowerPoint presentation of why I should keep the bear, my family would let me keep the bear.
00:29:03 Ajay Kurian : Wow.
00:29:04 Baseera Khan: And I just came in from Texas last night and I have this big, amazing family. Um, and my nephew from Aleem, my brother who’s two years older, he has this little bear. And I don’t think he understands how lucky he is to have this bear, you know. And so that’s another thing that I think about with materials is like the kind of like, I don’t take the material lightly. Mhm. Even if it’s a bear, you know, or a raggedy bear, you know. Yeah.
00:29:37 Ajay Kurian : So I mean, even a pair of sneakers.
00:29:40 Baseera Khan: Oh, yeah. Those sneakers. Yes. They’re kind of ugly. You know, it’s like if you’re a sneaker head, you wouldn’t be looking for those sneakers, right? But they are a one of a kind.
00:29:50 Ajay Kurian : Yeah.
00:29:50 Baseera Khan: Yeah.
00:29:52 Ajay Kurian : What what triggered this process in terms of to me, when I think when I see custom sneakers, there’s class relationships, there’s things that really like run through my head of like, I don’t know, there’s like aspiration culture to that in a way. And then to see it emblazoned with what it is emblazoned with like to say I’m a Muslim on, on the sneaker.
00:30:15 Baseera Khan: Yeah. Well, this was coming close to the time when I was doing the show at participant. So it was the show was finally set to twenty seventeen. Though she wanted me to do it two years, like for two years, she was like, when are we doing the show? And at some point she just put it on the calendar. Um, okay. I think she has that problem a lot where she like endows somebody with an opportunity and they don’t believe it until it’s right in front of them. Um, so anyway, I, I was working at a, an essay, I was working at a, um, what do you call essay? It’s like a charter school. Okay. And um, I was teaching photography, but everyone in the school had a brand new Apple computer and it was online. So they all looked very intent on what I was saying. But then when I went around the room to look at the screens, everybody was on the Nike website trying to make their own shoe. Okay. So I was able to kind of take be nimble and sort of take that into account at some point, but to get back at them, because I, I wanted to spite you. So this was actually just a spite shoe for my students at this charter school. Um, and I knew they were all coming to see my show. So I went online to make my own shoe and I wanted to call it I am Muslima because that was purportedly the mythological name of the show, you know, all this stuff. Um, so that’s kind of how the shoe happened. It wasn’t some big, oh, there’s a boycott. And I just kind of was like, I’m a, I’m a spiteful person. I want to have this shoe so that I can show them that I have, you know, fashion sense. I don’t even know what’s the word like that. I, I’m on fleek. I don’t know anyway, whatever. It’s too much. Um, uh, I. I kind of fell into a major thing because the shoe kind of became a, a representation of the spin, the capital spin, because Nike shoe in their bylaws said that putting the word Muslim or Islam on the shoe was inciting violence.
00:32:44 Ajay Kurian : You’re kidding.
00:32:45 Baseera Khan: That is that is in there. That was in their bylaws.
00:32:48 Ajay Kurian : Wow.
00:32:48 Baseera Khan: So that was just like an interesting time period. You know, it’s twenty twenty six now. We’re all happy family here. It’s just we all know that Muslims are sweet. So it’s all good. But, um, but at the time, it was a little crazy. And then, you know, we, we didn’t have a female president, which was annoying because the I am Muslim show was sort of like the, the mythology of it all. And, you know, the first female president and I had all these plans for programming, um, for all of that. Um, and then we had the other president, right. So then that other president decided that American citizens who were in quotations Muslim, which means nothing really like you can wake up tomorrow and say you’re Muslim. Like, you don’t have to go through any kind of rigorous induction to be a part of the family. Right? So, so that means nothing. Like you can’t really, um, you can’t really pinpoint what’s in somebody’s heart.
00:33:58 Ajay Kurian : It’s a screen for racism.
00:34:00 Baseera Khan: Yeah. But what? Yes. That’s that’s why you get paid the big bucks. It is a screen for racism because, you know, there was a line there’s like Nigeria, Syria, Iran, you know, Pakistan, like all the countries, right? Yeah. Where we like to buy our our clothes or where the clothes are made and sold at H&M. So, you know, there’s like all these kinds of like, um, ideas of distribution. Where is the material coming from? Like there is a exploitation and what are the patterns of that? So that’s kind of in the background. So if I’m making any plans that’s in the background. Okay. And then everything else is formal, if that makes any sense.
00:34:43 Ajay Kurian : Yeah. I mean, in terms of, I feel like this is the beginning of a conversation about censorship and surveillance and, um, how the acoustic blankets play a role in, I don’t know, almost taking some ownership over that space. Um, and being able to speak from a place of not being seen and, um, the strange I’m talking about it and I should just put it up on here so you all can see. Okay, so these pieces on the side. Here are the acoustic blanket piece. And, um, you can see that there’s one hole with golden embroidery around it and you would perform in these, um, which I’ll show, I’ll show a little bit of, of.
00:35:36 Baseera Khan: I’m gonna have a glass of water while you do that.
00:35:39 Ajay Kurian : Okay. Um. This is.
00:35:53 Speaker 6: I feel so right handed. AM I on the right side of this thing now? Where am I right now? If I was center before, could someone tell me where I am now?
00:36:17 Speaker 7: For the voice. That you know they have. That’s how I feel right now.
00:36:28 Baseera Khan: I feel like if you had seen what happened right before, it wouldn’t seem so daunting. I was reaching for the microphone, but I couldn’t see myself. I was reaching for the microphone and it was placed wrong. Like we had marked everything off and it was placed wrong. So I was reaching for it and no one was helping me, clearly, because it’s a performance. So. So a lot of like the performance is spontaneous spontaneity and kind of like, you know, in the back, those voices that always come up in the back of your head. So I release those voices.
00:37:01 Ajay Kurian : I’m going to jump to. Here we go.
00:37:12 Baseera Khan: Name three. things that you did today in your blue ish shirt.
00:37:22 Ajay Kurian : I’m going to pause it there.
00:37:25 Baseera Khan: It’s it’s a vibe. This is weird. I promise, I promise. It’s kind of cool.
00:37:31 Ajay Kurian : There’s well, there’s like playful spite throughout.
00:37:35 Baseera Khan: It’s spiteful.
00:37:37 Ajay Kurian : And I would say in the in the other documentation, this comes through a little bit more. But, um, I mean, there’s a, there’s a handful of things going on like it is, it is playful. It doesn’t, I don’t think it takes itself too seriously. I don’t think the piece is like trying to be heavy for the sake of heaviness. Um, I think there’s a lot of humor in it.
00:37:59 Baseera Khan: But maybe like the offering is generous. So there’s like, I do this bite and then I offer something generous, like the music.
00:38:06 Ajay Kurian : Right, right.
00:38:08 Baseera Khan: I have my little music tools under the blanket here. It’s like Mary Poppins.
00:38:54 Ajay Kurian : You do sing as well. I th you should you should watch this. You can, you can watch, uh, a different version of this online. Um, but I, I like something that occurred to me and I think you’ve mentioned it in some interviews somewhere, um, that you had seen Philip Guston’s KKK paintings like this is a Jewish man wrestling with, um, you know, making depictions of, of these hooded figures. And there was something about just like seeing you walk in, in this kind of like, hooded way that felt like your own way of reckoning with like, a lot of strange ways of self-identifying and self-censoring and like removal that I don’t know exactly what the connection is, but I feel like there’s one there and you can tell me if I’m wrong, too.
00:39:49 Baseera Khan: I think that the word connection in terms of like talking to me as an artist is the wrong word. Because there’s, I think that because I, because I have dreams or because I kind of work from a place where let’s just see how things go. Um, even now I’ve been strictly just painting, you know, just see how things go. Let’s draw a shape. Right. I think that, um, Philip Guston again, was an artist that was very available to somebody aspiring to be an artist before the internet. Sure. But it was also, um, there was a, a collection at the university that I went to at North Texas. And at some point, you know, everybody needs a job. So I was like the collections person, like I made sure I didn’t do anything. I was a terrible, terrible employee. Um, but, you know, one of the jobs was like these yellow sheets with people would sign up and want to borrow the artwork from the collection. So then we’d bring it to their department and try to hang it through this Alfred Barr system that I still can’t really tell you because I failed at a computer science. Um, so the Philip Guston thing, like I had those images posted in my studio. And so the silhouette was interesting to me because it was just so confusing to see a villain. Yeah. Um, but then, but then I think I, I saw it from an innocent place where I just saw a veiled person. And then I started to understand the background of it being a kind of like connection to the Third Reich or a kind of like oppression that a certain figure sees, um, like, like a, a, a Jewish intellectual who’s, you know, fighting for freedom. And, and, you know, it was, it was very heavy when I figured it out, but I still kept it posted. Yeah. Um, so there was a naivety of me coming to that image and that set of paintings. It wasn’t because I was like an aspiring painter who wanted to rule the world with my work and use Philip Guston as my inspiration.
00:42:15 Ajay Kurian : Sure, sure. Yeah. Um. I don’t know why my computer’s, like, hallucinating over here, but I’m gonna go back. Yeah. Here. So these kind of disco ball chandeliers, um.
00:42:29 Baseera Khan: That is a knife holder. What? Those little crystals that I put down on my blanket. Those are. Those are knife holders. So when you’re in the kitchen and you’re like cooking, you can put your knife down on it.
00:42:44 Ajay Kurian : Got it. Okay.
00:42:45 Baseera Khan: Not that that’s not important. It still looks disco y and it’s crystal and it reflects light. And I was using this green. The green is, um, it’s a machine that, that, um, art historians use to check and see if a work is authentic.
00:43:02 Ajay Kurian : Okay.
00:43:03 Baseera Khan: Um, I use that to create the light?
00:43:10 Ajay Kurian : Are we still talking about the. I’m a little lost.
00:43:14 Baseera Khan: Oh, it’s because I saw it and you didn’t. You didn’t do your homework.
00:43:18 Ajay Kurian : I guess not. What part of this are we talking about right now?
00:43:22 Baseera Khan: I feel like we don’t have enough time to get into it, but, you know, it’s in there when you watch it. There’s these objects that I pull out from the hole. Yeah. And I put them down and I reflect light and there’s like patterns that get displayed on the floor.
00:43:39 Ajay Kurian : And there’s a, there’s a along with the music and yeah, yeah, what I was.
00:43:43 Baseera Khan: Sorry.
00:43:44 Ajay Kurian : What I was addressing was the, the sculpture in the background, um, that I’m gonna go to the Brooklyn museum show, um, where these are kind of above throughout the corridor of the museum. Um, and I think plexiglass is a material that, you know, I’ve used. But I think what’s so what was so interesting to see here is that something that was so shiny and reflective was also really specifically in this work, deeply connected to the petroleum industry behind it and like the sort of geopolitics of the material that wasn’t I mean, I think I was the unnatural of the material was something that was fascinating to me. But the finer point that you put on it here is, uh, is really cool because it’s just so it’s like, it’s so effective, it’s so effective because you’re, you’re entranced by it and you kind of fall under this like hypnotic spell of just seeing all of these things turning and it’s beautiful. And then there’s this whole other dark system that’s also at work. Mhm.
00:44:57 Baseera Khan: Oh, I need like another hour to talk about that material, but let me see if I can Say a few things. Um, the figure in front is a work from a series called Bust of Cannon. And it is plastic as well. It’s it’s the plastics, the plastic industry. It all comes from crude oil. That’s something that’s very fascinating to me from a cultural perspective, um, economic perspective, but mostly from a political perspective, because certain materials are as ascribed to a certain kind of body type and weirdly, a certain religion. Mhm. Um, so the figure is, um, me 3D scanned and printed out in PVA, which is what I chose for the 3D printer to print out. Um, and it’s, it’s akin to a lot of the antiquities that were in the Brooklyn Museum collection, but also at the met. So this is the Yakshi. And so I was really interested in the way that these deities are kind of, um, they’re s-curves or kind of impossible. They’re like bodies are kind of impossible and they hold all this power. Um, but somehow they’re either seated or sort of frozen onto a wall, but when they’re shown in these museum spaces, you know, there’s a lot of, um, ingenuity happening within contemporary art. One of which I don’t think is happening is the South Asian Islamic corridors. Mhm. Or the Far East corridors, you know, why is it so silent? Why is it so without voice? You know? So I kind of thought that why don’t I create voice for this sculpture? Mhm. So if you go back to the image from the show, The show is called I AM an Archive. It was a show that I did from twenty one to twenty two at the Brooklyn Museum. And that kind of bubble that’s coming out of her chest is a music box. So I did also create an album that goes with the exhibition, and it was on display as well. So when you saw the Chandelier’s turning, when you entered into the room and you met this figure, you also got to hear the voice. And that was important to me, if that makes any sense.
00:47:38 Ajay Kurian : It makes plenty. I mean, yeah, I think it made sense the entire time. Mhm. Well, um, it’s such a bizarre object, like the, the protrusion of, of the music box is so strange to me. Like it’s really drawing to see in person. And it’s, it has this like oily, slick texture to it. Um, and it’s cut. It’s sort of cut and assembled at the chakra points of the body as well. Correct. Um, it feels like a giant, I don’t know, it almost has like a leech, like quality. It’s like a really aggressively strange object. I’m not saying that that’s the only resonance that it has, but.
00:48:19 Baseera Khan: Um, it’s interesting to hear what people think. So say what you want.
00:48:23 Ajay Kurian : It’s, it really is like it, it’s one of those objects that like, as soon as you see it, it pushes your body. Like, you know, when you see something that’s in a certain posture and then your posture changes. That’s how I felt when I was in front of it.
00:48:38 Baseera Khan: I’m really glad you said that.
00:48:40 Ajay Kurian : Okay, good.
00:48:41 Baseera Khan: Because, um, posture and prostration, that’s like everything in my life. Mhm. I can’t live a day without thinking about the moon or my body or even though I’m not. I’m. I’m a bad Muslim. But, you know, it’s like that stuff you grow up with. Like some people grow up in, um, as a carny, right? You’re part of a carnival. You you’re in a circus, you know.
00:49:07 Ajay Kurian : So I can’t believe that’s the first thing that came to your mind. It’s like.
00:49:12 Baseera Khan: I’m a really big fan of Bastian Otter as well. And I was just thinking about the previous question about grad school and and I think he was a part of a carny.
00:49:20 Ajay Kurian : Okay.
00:49:21 Baseera Khan: So there’s that. But what I’m the point of the story is you are who you are by the age of who is bothering me.
00:49:35 Ajay Kurian : I know there’s like.
00:49:36 Baseera Khan: Like a specter in here. You are the age that you are by the time you’re seven. You know, Carl Jung says that, I guess. Um, so in a way, you know, I picked up on certain cues of how to be. So, um, I was always going to be attracted to, arabesque patterns, um, reflecting light textures, certain colors. Um, and then the, and then the rest is like a mirror in a way. Like what does the museum represent you as? Mhm. Do you have any power over that? Obviously at seven you don’t. Right. Um, so, you know, I, I tried to find myself in, in different forms in TV, um, because that’s what I had, I had the, the music box for me was the little television set. Right. Um, so I was into Mr. Peppermint, I was into Pee-Wee Herman, I was into the Munsters. I, you know, Bob Ross taught me everything I know, you know, kind of. And, you know, the antiquities. Um.
00:50:51 Ajay Kurian : These are I really like these pieces a lot.
00:50:54 Baseera Khan: Cool.
00:50:55 Ajay Kurian : Um. Because I guess it layers a whole number of things very beautifully and very simply. There’s like such a economy to it. Um. You were working with the conservators for this, you were working with, when you got to the museum, you really wanted to see like how you could handle these objects and you were handling them with the, um, kind of the museum staff. Mhm.
00:51:24 Baseera Khan: Yes. Um, so I think that kind of like a year prior or less, there was a lot of, um, conversation about opportunities to, to really dig into my practice. Yeah. And I’m always like, what? Like, no, just do this. I want to go to bed, you know, but then, you know, like the curators were helping me kind of really dig deep. And so there was a PDF that was circulated. I feel like really strange saying the word PDF these days, but there was a PDF and it had like a list of all of the archives that I was interested in. So I was like, I’m really interested in, um, uh, you know, African, South Asian and Islamic antiquities. Okay. So there was like a circulation of about maybe forty pieces. And out of the forty pieces, I kept being drawn to certain objects. What we’re looking at here is an Iranian rug. Um, I think this rug was from. Oh, Lord, this is being recorded. Um, here we go.
00:52:39 Ajay Kurian : Well, this is the title, which I know just includes, like, the objects themselves.
00:52:44 Baseera Khan: That’s why I did it, because I knew I wasn’t smart enough to remember.
00:52:47 Ajay Kurian : That’s not why.
00:52:48 Baseera Khan: It’s. It’s an antiquity. Okay. So whatever the the standards are of it being an antiquity. Um, but, but what I was drawn to was that, um the language is, is in Farsi.
00:53:00 Ajay Kurian : Mhm.
00:53:01 Baseera Khan: And my mother speaks Farsi, so it hadn’t been translated yet. So I found that to be an opportunity like, oh, I want to be the person that translates, translates this rug. Um, so, you know, I was trying to get my mom in on it and, um, then life happens. And in this particular situation, um, because we were kind of doing the work at the cusp of, uh, buildings opening again because of Covid, we started just looking at the documentation. And then I would send my assistant to go and get really refined prints of the documentation, like the official documentation became the antiquity at times. Right, right. Um, because if the, if the certain team wasn’t put together, then they couldn’t release the object. You know what I mean?
00:53:51 Ajay Kurian : Oh, in terms of like how it can be handled if the actual object. Right.
00:53:55 Baseera Khan: So in this situation, we took a print and I was actually able to do a lot more with the print. Um, then I could with the actual blanket and the, um, the glass vase that you see the conservator holding, that was an actual object.
00:54:18 Ajay Kurian : The whole experience of being on a, an art competition show. I really have so many questions, but we don’t have time for all of them. But I guess like, for one, I think it’s what I’ve really appreciated about you over the years is that I think you know really deeply who you are. And I think that that anybody’s perception outside of that really doesn’t seem to matter to, you know.
00:54:47 Speaker 7: What are you trying to say?
00:54:49 Ajay Kurian : I’m saying that to be on a to be on a show like that means like that. There’s a lot of people that have eyes on you in a way that I think a lot of artists would find very uncomfortable, and that they would be looked at in so many different ways. As soon as you reach a certain level or a certain level of notoriety, um, I noticed this after like the Whitney Biennial, like people start talking about you as like an entity rather than a person. And, um, and they can say whatever they want in the sense that like, if you were talking about Jeff Koons, you’d be like, he’s a fucking hack. He’s this, he’s that. And you’re saying like things about a person, you know, like.
00:55:34 Speaker 7: And what about the.
00:55:36 Baseera Khan: Senator that just passed away?
00:55:38 Ajay Kurian : I mean, he’s a monster and good.
00:55:40 Baseera Khan: You know, but the comments though, there should be like a people magazine that just lists the comments. You know, do you guys remember what people magazine was like? That was the only way I knew about the world was through people magazine.
00:55:53 Ajay Kurian : That’s when all the waiting rooms. Still. Still in all the waiting rooms.
00:55:56 Baseera Khan: I don’t go to waiting rooms.
00:55:57 Ajay Kurian : Okay. You don’t wait. You don’t wait.
00:56:00 Baseera Khan: I don’t wait.
00:56:03 Ajay Kurian : Anyway, what I was getting at is basically that you’re on a show where, like, I think people might be concerned, they might be like, oh, how does this make me look? How does this do? And then you win the whole goddamn thing. And like, it was stupid. It continues to, to sort of like build in a totally different way. What I’m curious about is like, what it felt like to say yes to a show like that and to be on it because I saw this clip and I was like, God damn, she’s just like, she’s so locked in because you were you were talking about how in one episode they were like, yeah, they kind of made me look like, uh, a Real Housewife. But, you know, it’s funny. And I was like, that’s amazing. Like, it’s amazing that you have like the, the sense of self to be like, yeah, there’s been here, there’s storytelling here. It’s interesting. It’s an interesting thing to observe in the world and that you’re not like, you’re not so attached to your feelings about like how this could like, oh, what does this do? What is this? How do I position? It’s like, it’s a totally different thing and I admire it. Mhm.
00:57:14 Baseera Khan: Um, okay. So. I think of the word collage when the first thing that came to mind was about the way you were describing what I was going through, which you were doing a better job. Um, is is collage because, um, maybe I am a housewife, you know, maybe I am, you know, half a dozen other things because I don’t know, being like identifying as a South Asian person in, in, in, in Texas, in Denton, Texas. You were exposed to so many things, and the mosque that I would go to, there were all kinds of people from all over the world that would come there, and everyone was in uniform, like everyone was in their like hijab. So you got all kinds of people. The collage and I was around all of them. And because my, my family helped build one of the first mosques in Texas.
00:58:18 Ajay Kurian : No shit.
00:58:18 Baseera Khan: Wow. And they still remain to expand it. And they are very much involved in theology and all that. And so is their family. So it’s like when you’re around that many big personalities, but they’re all in one uniform. You start thinking in, in a way where like, everything’s the same. Mhm. And I don’t know if the word disassociate is the right word, but when I’m performing, or even right now, I feel like a little disembodied. Like I could say anything. You could say anything. I don’t really care. Um, because maybe I, I do have a strong sense of self, but maybe it’s also, um, maybe it’s also just that, uh, I feel like everyone is this too. But maybe you just haven’t figured it out yet.
00:59:16 Ajay Kurian : I think that takes us back to the beginning where. It feels like the way that you think about identity is not like a. It doesn’t minimize or close an operation. It opens it. It’s like what you’re talking about hundreds of millions of people when you’re addressing particular structural things. Or like just being Muslim means that like you’re already talking about a massive population where it’s not, we’re not separated by these things. There’s like joint struggles, there’s joint ways in which we all participate and operate under these extremely oppressive conditions. And like, why not see ourselves in one another?
00:59:57 Baseera Khan: Thank you. Maybe you should be the mayor.
01:00:01 Ajay Kurian : No, we have a great one. Okay.
01:00:02 Speaker 6: We do.
01:00:03 Ajay Kurian : We do. He’s I.
01:00:05 Baseera Khan: Where is he? Why isn’t he at this thing?
01:00:08 Ajay Kurian : I want him to sit in this chair at some point.
01:00:10 Baseera Khan: Mom. Donnie, why aren’t you here anyway? I’m fine.
01:00:13 Ajay Kurian : Um.
01:00:14 Baseera Khan: He’s like one of those people that are kind of, like, overexposed.
01:00:18 Ajay Kurian : Well, I mean, he’s the fucking mayor.
01:00:20 Baseera Khan: I know, but does he have time to do his mayor? Like, he’s, like, always on tick tock. Anyway. Go ahead.
01:00:25 Speaker 8: He’s doing his thing. He’s doing his thing.
01:00:27 Ajay Kurian : I think maybe this is. There’s like, even in researching for this, like, Sarah has so many bodies of work and she’s done so many different things that I was like, there’s no fucking way, there’s no way we can do this.
01:00:39 Baseera Khan: But don’t, don’t say that because this is being recorded. And I do want On representation. And I like I want to be a successful capitalist, a conscious capitalist, you know, like I want those things. Like I want to provide for my family. I, I want to, you know, buy people dinner and, you know, I want to get my cat anything it desires, you know? So don’t say bad things like I’m, I’m fine.
01:01:08 Ajay Kurian : Like great things.
01:01:09 Baseera Khan: I feel like there’s a, there’s a, there’s lines. Yeah. That, that you could pull together so that, you know, people will want to show my work.
01:01:18 Ajay Kurian : Oh, I see what you’re saying. Okay.
01:01:20 Baseera Khan: Don’t make them scared.
01:01:21 Ajay Kurian : We’ll make it all I can say. I mean, Basra is a pleasure to work with. No no no.
01:01:27 Speaker 8: No.
01:01:28 Ajay Kurian : Everybody give it up for Baseera Khan.
01:01:35 Baseera Khan: I got through it. I was like, I got here, and he’s like, I got a great idea. Let’s draw Garfield.


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Erin Jane Nelson joins Ajay Kurian to talk about the gap between artistic success and creative fulfillment. They discuss the reality of making a living as an artist, navigating burnout, and why reaching long-awaited career milestones can leave you questioning what comes next.The conversation explores Nelson's evolving practice—from clay pinhole cameras and photography to spirituality, caregiving, and family history—as well as the emotional and financial realities that shape life in the studio. Along the way, they reflect on ambition, artistic purpose, and the kinds of relationships that sustain a creative life long after the accolades fade.Hosted by Ajay Kurian Edited by Peter Groppe00:00 – Erin Jane Nelson on the Whitney Biennial and making cameras from clay09:38 – Success, creative block, and the unexpected reality of becoming a full-time artist17:52 – Burnout, financial anxiety, and redefining an artistic practice23:30 – October 7th, Jewish identity, spirituality, and family history31:04 – Photography, caregiving, and finding balance beyond the studio40:06 – The economics of being an artist and why most careers aren't what they seem46:39 – Almost leaving art for law school—and the opportunity that changed everything51:41 – Ajay on ambition, loss, and rediscovering purpose through art


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