Latest / Thinking Class / #135 - Pierre d'Alancaisez - 'I Helped Build The Cult Of Contemporary Art And Then I Walked Away'

Transcript

#135 - Pierre d'Alancaisez - 'I Helped Build The Cult Of Contemporary Art And Then I Walked Away' · Thinking Class

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hello, classmates, and welcome to Thinking Class.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking to Pierre Dallangsa.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre is a writer, curator, and researcher working with the multiple politics of the arts.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_00: He is the resident art critic for the English magazine The Critic, and his writing has appeared in outlets such as Art Review, The Spectator, and Compact.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: In 2024, he co-founded Verdun, a space for experimentation in aesthetics, learning and the difficult conversations which drive today's culture.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: In this conversation, Pierre and I think out loud about how his gallery career began in the Blair era funding boom, which became an ideological one without him noticing, why artists have become primarily concerned with their own welfare rather than their craft, the Frankfurt School's long afterlife inside British cultural institutions, why Covid broke the spell and cost him his standing in the art world, the post-cultural state and the institutions that are structurally intact but actually hollowed of substance.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Patronage from the Medici to the modern British collector and why the American tradition differs, a direct challenge to the dissident right.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_00: Why won't it fund the culture it claims to want?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: What is missing from identitarian aesthetics and what would need to replace it?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Building Verdun as a counter-institution rather than waiting for reform, and what changed Pierre's mind about art, evidence, and belief.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: If you value serious long-form conversations like this, then subscribe to Thinking Class on YouTube, follow on Spotify, and support the show on Substack.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Enjoy the show, classmates, and now Pierre D'Alangsain.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre, the institutions charged with preserving and transmitting beauty have been captured by people who are perhaps not only indifferent to it but actively hostile to it.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And you know this because you were one of them.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: You built your career inside a contemporary art world.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You helped construct what I think you now refer to as its false foundations, and then something happened during the pandemic where the spell was broken.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've walked away and you built something else in its place.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: And this conversation, I suppose, is about what happens when the people who are supposed to be custodians of a culture actually become its gravediggers instead.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre, you wrote in the critic that what you were once faithful as an adherent to the cult of contemporary art, but then you changed.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: What broke the spell?
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to have to say that that the usual form of a podcast appearance is to start with how lovely to be here.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a great fan of yours, John, and vice versa.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: But you start with an accusation.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So let's let's go with that.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Uh thank you, first of all, for actually bothering to read my slightly comical confession of a reform art dealer in the in the critic.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Comical partly because there is this kind of form in which we have to disavow the things we used to be in our in our youth.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: But I think in in my case, that was that was genuine in a sense that I spend my days these days trying to reflect on the thing that I helped to create, as you as you put it.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: So very briefly, biographically, I I did the kind of very tiresome Eaton Oxford St.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_01: Martin's routine that that everyone does.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: I was partly a geek, but also wanted to follow in my in my mother's footsteps of being a public intellectual.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: And the only way I could think of doing that is by starting a gallery after I left art school.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: And it was this was in the heady days of the 2000s when things could only get better as as Blur had promised us.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And indeed, funding for the arts was such and so abundant and so unconditional that um sort of irrational exuberance was the only way to respond to it.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was at the time in my twenties, so maybe didn't quite understand that I was buying into a set of ideological choices.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we we don't understand what ideology we swim in as we do.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: But all I wanted to do is to be surrounded by clever people who challenged the the thinking around them.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: And would you believe it, at that time I found that in the art world, this came from, at the time, from artists who we now think have ruined everything.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I was working with a whole bunch of artists who made the work political, who sort of posed themselves as anarchists.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I have to say that even though I was never politically on on the side, I was thrilled by all of this.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: So my practice sort of found its foundation in this mixture of thinking about politics, thinking about cultural categories, and thinking about aesthetics.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_01: What happened over the years, and I did contribute to this in in some sense, that the the market, the political, the state-funded sort of all got mixed up to the extent that um the fidelity and the resolution of the various ideas being proposed uh became completely blurred.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I worked with artists who were at the one point trying to produce a critique of contemporary arts institutions.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh at another they were talking about gender, at another one they were talking about borders.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in probably one of the most sort of poignant bits of self-reflection, I remember artists asking me to remove the windows in my gallery so that I could bring in this artwork made of um trash, literally made of trash, because it was so big we it could not fit through the door.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that work um had recordings of the story stories of refugees trying to migrate into Australia, and it had a big neon sign uh above it saying, Your country does not exist.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: I look at all this now and wonder what on earth got into me, and maybe my intellectualism was not, in fact, as as developed as I thought it might have been at the time.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: How how did I chit how did I snap out of this?
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I I kind of did the kind of classic way of getting hound myself hounded out of the art world.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: After I closed this programme, closed this gallery, I started writing what I really thought about the art world.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And even before COVID, cracks were beginning to show.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um we had this experience of complete excess after years of austerity in Britain, uh, after years of evil Tory cuts to arts funding, evil Tory cuts obviously, and and and both both in and out of scare quotes.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I started understanding that artists were concerned primarily with their own well-being and their own welfare.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, this in the context of this massive expansion of the artistic fields in Britain and and Europe, where unlike the US, um state manipulation of the field does actually have downstream effects.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and COVID completely broke the spell for me because if you recall, in the early stages of the pandemic, um there were no end of artistic campaigns that um and institutional campaigns that posed artists as the fourth emergency emergency service demanding funding for theatres, which were at that point closing closed down, um, as a matter of national urgency.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that somehow struck me seems almost silly to have had to remark on this at the time, as slightly out of balance with what was going on.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: You know, not only were supposedly tens of thousands of people dying every minute, um the entire future of the world is being reshaped in this kind of drastic, both authoritarian and apocalyptic way.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yet, yet it would be artistic production that would keep us sane.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um it didn't.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote a few pieces too many uh to critiquing some of those to um allow to be allowed to return into any of the respectable circles of the art world.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And because during COVID I was already hanging out with a few people who shared my views, um I convened a reading group back when it was illegal to get people together.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: We started organizing little events to like question what it is that we were landing into.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, and I've continued ever since.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I am now a reformed character who's who has to start every public appearance with this kind of mea cooper um for for for ruining it for everyone.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And also obviously not going to be able to save it for from this or anything else at this stage.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is your land acknowledgement, Pierre.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: You you you mentioned that what you learned in the art world was that artists are primarily concerned about their own welfare.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_00: And my question, I suppose, is understanding most artists' output these days and in in your words and in people's eyewitness testimonies trash and urinals and the like.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: How is it that the art world has developed like this, and how does it actually contribute to the welfare of the artists themselves to produce such products?
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'll say rather but benignly.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: I will I will now roll back on quite a lot of my contrition and and and disagree with you quite strongly that trash is the main mode of operation at the time span you you indicated by including Deschamps 1917 fountain in in in your question.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: Look, the reactions to modernity, the the the impossibility of modernity to sort of you know turn the cliche into another cliche are are profound, and I think twentieth century art history is not altogether, should not be read, cannot be read as one sort of smooth trajectory towards the the kind of decline that we can identify in British art practice, I think around 2010, not necessarily that much earlier.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: In American art practices this this happens a few decades earlier in different ways, which does allow us to point to a couple of moments.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: One, I think the 1960s, where what we now know as contemporary art, briefly named uh postmodern art if if if you recall, when contemporary art becomes conceptualized, and contemporary art becomes conceptualized in a kind of post-Frankfurt school vein where critique of the industri of the cultural and entertainment industries is set out.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there's the merging of the understanding by the new left who are hegemonic or become dominant in the culture in that capital of all culture.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: And point, particularly in American converbed Marcusa, sort of in parallel to what happens in France in 19 is sort of the apex revolution some way.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: And artists do end up believing this.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now it's impossible to make like a complexly straightforward history of contemporary art because despite its um intended and recently very obvious globalism and sort of coordination through now an unavoidably visible set of NGO principles, um this this this takes different trajectories in different countries and at different times.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: But there is a there is a sort of inevitability that um when when we produce a whole generation of artists who believe that their politics is at the forefront of not even a revolution but of critique, there there is an incentive to multiply that that cadre, to expand it, to give it certain protections.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um and eventually, as the revolutionary project or the political project of this class starts failing, which again it does at different points, at different times, 2008 is one of those times, but earlier elsewhere in different trajectories, the Vietnam War, for instance, is sort of a cold shower for the nascent contemporary art in the US art world, where lo and behold, artists fail to stop the Vietnam War.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um as these failures become apparent, the class, the artistic, professional managerial class, which I think become indistinguishable recently, they they are drawn to protect their own interests.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_01: In Britain, in particular, um the expansion by sheer numbers, but also just sort of the multiplication of new art institutions happens post-new labour.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: There is massive investment, and that investment into the art world is very confused.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's at one point everyday creativity is great, you know.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: This is and another point, it's culture is a is a great export thing for Britain.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Remember, creative Britain, the creative economy.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, social amelioration, social intervention is seen as being fluidly delivered by art.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_01: All of this is turned upside down with austerity after 2010.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_01: So this massive estate which does include tens of thousands of art school graduates, many of whom have been lured into those degrees by the promise of art being a vehicle for social mobility, they are left alone.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: But because they have been imbued with certain, maybe not very practical but polit but still some political principles, they organize and they give rise to an aesthetic of essentially discontentment.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: So if you to go back to your question finally, if you find yourself in a gallery and what you look at is not necessarily trash, but overtly calls for look, this object deserves attention, this artist deserves attention, this artist has been marginalized.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: The production of interest in identity politics and the art world comes from exactly this the the belief the sort of belief borne out, I guess, by experience of steady decline, is that indeed the artist is worth saving.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's that's how we got here more or less.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: And is this steady decline what you have referred to in some of your writings as the slow vibe shift towards a post-cultural state?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you basically say that these buildings uh are still the same, they are still staffed by people, there are still exhibitions that are opened on schedules, and it seems like a cultural institution has been preserved, but actually what you're saying is the substance has been evacuated.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Is that what you're getting at?
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I mean at the moment we're in a very interesting moment where I mean the the vibeship is a term that refers to the culture of the dissident, which is the right, I guess, at the moment.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm not sure whether there is a any recognition of a vibeship within the sanctioned art world, the official art world in Britain.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: But we do begin to see a sort of decline by which the institutions are no longer really able to even pretend that they are interested in the artistic cadres that can support artists.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_01: So we have, on the one hand, places like stretching out very lightweight exhibitions into many months where they would normally last two and a half months and be replaced by a new production, simply because the budgets are no longer there.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: But also the claims become sort of displaced, where the claims that art does this particular thing to society is no longer sustainable.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um you could see this at a grand scale, for instance.
• 17:01
  SPEAKER_01: The outgoing um director of Tate Modern, Maria Bolsho, for instance, one of the things she presided over is the um the associations of of museums and I f I forget which which technical body it is that that she that she did this with.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: But essentially they all many institutions in Britain signed up to making climate change the primary bit, the primary object of the programming and operation.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: So it's not only that we must stop printing up things on pieces of paper because it's bad for the planet, but raising consciousness about climate change for our visitors should drive the program.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that it's not necessarily that that is cheaper in a context of something like somewhere like like Tate Britain, take modern.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but rather it aligns the interests of that estate with things that are external, non-artistic, and I think the bet would be the climate change would be the thing that persists in this kind of consciousness.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that you mentioned, the term that you mentioned of the post-cultural state, I think it's slight somewhere slightly different, or or maybe it's a totality.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, as a term, I think this is um in fact brought about by Lola Salem, who also writes for The Critic and the I think the Catholic Herald, who I who I'm working with quite a bit at the moment.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: And Lola is a very good analyst of the same field who comes from also French tradition, where the crumbling of the state is slightly different, the cultural state.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what the post-cultural state describes is actually different in as much as that the state's political interest, maybe at the level of policy, um, is so evacuated of an understanding of what it is that culture does and what potential culture and investment in culture has to unity, identity, you know, how people vote, um, that the state no longer really makes any attempt whatsoever to navigate this.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm gonna say briefly, but actually I'm incapable of giving a brief answer as you can hear.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: I think if we go back to sort of the the origins of neoliberal culture, particularly in an American context, there is sort of like a co-optation of all sorts of grassroots cultures into the mainstream.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: This happens already in the 1970s in the US, not in Britain.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the US can bear it because it has all these quoting traditions, it does have black art that was never incorporated into the mainstream.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_01: So this that allows the US to still consider its culture as having some kind of nation-building, society-building purpose.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_01: Britain comes to this kind of move much later, um, again, Blairite terms, and we are by that point entirely evacuated of any semblance of grassroots culture.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever community arts movement existed in Britain in the 17th and 80s were completely was completely killed by the art mainstream, by the art establishment in this kind of proto-PMC drive.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: So when the British state under Blair puts serious energy into investing in culture, it has absolutely zero interest in any of this kind of sociological state apparatus, nation building questions.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And that brings us finally to the present in which whoever it is that might try to think of deploying state culture, and and literally in Britain it is only the state that can deploy culture.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: It costs money, it is the state that has all these assets, we we don't have a culture of philanthropy like the US does.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um the state doesn't know how to do that.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: The playbook is not available.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot propose to you know either any of the right-wing contenders, let alone Labour, and certainly not the Greens, that hey, if you want British society to look like X, Y, and Z in 20 years, you would foreground A, B, and C types of programming.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: They they just do not see the connection.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think that that is in a sense the the true horror of the post-cultural state in which we are living now, in which the relationship between the entity that is charged with looking after culture, its institution, and its people are completely untheorized and in fact possibly no longer present.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a a grim irony in there, which I think you see broadly across the cultural landscape, and I mean that at a at a national level, where those who are ostensibly on the left of the political landscape and are typically hoping to be speaking truth to power and living righteous lives tend to find themselves serving it in some way, um, as you say, through uh state intervention.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: You've you've written as well, Pierre, that you believe the art world should be seen as the West in miniature.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: Why is that perfectly self-serving as a as a the deployment?
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: I've got two things about homosexuality and culture, these are the things I think about and write about.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: You chose not to interview about inversion, my my anti-homosexual book.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: So so we're going with this.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_01: I yeah, so very basically I think that artists are the downfall of everything because that allows me to comment on them.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: Now, but beyond this very glib, glib, glib point, um there has been a lot of belief by the new left, for sure.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: I already referred to Herbert Marcuse, for instance, whose street theatre was sort of an attempt to make a certain class of an intellectual um the ascendant political, political actor.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, there is a belief that artists as intellectuals can open doors to power.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: But I also disagree with your characterization that it's it's not just the state that that leads to the corruption, the co-optation.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_01: We are in this really annoying moment at the end of neoliberalism that that while I also instinctively absolutely hate anyone who will just say, oh, it's capitalism's fault, we have forgotten that the state is now either synonymous or in such close competition with capital that actually its actions mimic capital.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: So if we went back to say Adonian critiques of the cultural industries, I think they apply in the apex, the fact that the things that we believe, the slogans which we um, to use your phrase, deploy to speak to power, those slogans are indeed produced by capital.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like there is absolutely no way out of this at this time.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and that that there's the more depressing thing.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: I would like the individual somehow, you know, the the bits of my my consciousness that are deeply conservative are those that think that individual agency is indeed the beginning of a reconstruction, that by thinking about things quite seriously we get to move the needle somehow.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of skeptical as to whether that freedom is afforded to us.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: The most depressing for me, going back to, you know, why is it that culture matters to me in particular, the most depressing thing that I have heard voiced is that the bright back doctrine that culture is no that the politics is downstream from culture that might no longer apply in in a near future.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it is it is possible that even though the art world sort of looked as a microcosm of the Os will be arranging themselves, even though we had evidence that George Soros started suspending whole society through the open society, first through investing in contemporary art and Eastern you know interest in art as far as we know, um, that now these priorities um might be might be reversed.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_01: And that's an interesting moment to reflect on the art world because it the art world mainstream has not yet understood this.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: It has not understood that it's continued production of this kind of globalist open border squeering decolonization discourses, it it might be all for absolutely nothing, that the the movements are now pre-configured somewhere elsewhere, which could be geopolitics, for instance, or by I don't know, it's sort of above my pay grade to understand what might take over the culture.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking about historical examples of patronage in the art world.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: So if you go back to the Renaissance, you can find Michelangelo and all the greats having some wealthy financial backer commissioning them to do works of great statue and sculpture and art, and obviously the capital flows still today.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think it says about the mindset of the I'm not going to use the word elites, but the leaders uh in the cultural, the political, the financial world comparatively then and now, given if you compare the output of each of these eras, one stands head and shoulders above the other.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is there something instructive about what we see based on the quality of the world?
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_00: Disagree with so many of your conclusions in this.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um Yeah, look, look, there's nothing to do with that.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I also share some of this reactionary tendency to think that only if only we could go back to the phone.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_01: Do it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: No means that as the novice I am, as far as I understand, were horrific for most most of those involved.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, things things would somehow get better.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I how how would it make things better get back to the Medici?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the Medici established collections, established sort of proto-museums precisely for the um for the purpose of political and social and geopolitical and diplomatic manipulations that we have maintained um are states and private collections now.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to I'm going to recommend a conversation I had with Nizan Shakard, uh, who wrote a book about wealth and museums.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: I forget the title, I'm I'm if it's it's it's on my website, this conversation.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: So she tracks the way in which all arts institutions, from the private ones, all the way from the Medici to the contemporary museum in the US, have always reserved as the prime principle the reproduction of capital.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the underwriting of certain either cultural or indeed even tax risks by the state or by the people and so on and so on.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Having said all this, I will concur with you and actually even deepen my critique, if not condemnation, of the kind of patronage class, particularly in a British context.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the US has a tradition of patronage about which I think it's difficult to generalize because it's massive and diverse and has actually, at the moment, it's not producing anything evil.
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: At the moment, it's sort of like flatlining, you know, like the excesses of sort of woke hyper woke 2020 culture have paused for the moment in the US.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: In Britain, we invested a hell of a lot in the 2000s, 2010s into developing private patronage for cultural institutions, which resulted in some kind of leadership and an emergent class of mid- and low-scale philanthropists.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what the patron in Britain does not share with the Americans is any idea of humility.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I found it very frustrating as a gallerist to find that the demand that people made on one when they either donated money or or paid for work.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's like they were they always wanted something extra.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you were like, mate, you know, this is legitimately worth£20,000.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_01: Dinner is extra, you know.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_01: Having the artist fly over to for you know for whatever.
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a Greek island, stupid example.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_01: Like that is extra.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: There was this kind of expectation that culture is such a frivolity that you could you could determine as the patron what that is.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: Would the Medici not have been merely demanding or the artist's personalities or the you know the protege artist personalities or not is another question.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: What is happening now in the dissident sphere, I think, is very strange given the stated aims.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: So I said this to you before we started recording, and this is sort of a bit of a bit of a downer I've experienced in the last few weeks having spent a lot of time in the company of people who should be funding things left, right, and centre.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: I do not see that this new want to be particularly the kind of reactionary Christian conservatives, which are of course not joined at the hip in anything because that includes free marketeers, it includes protectionists, it includes all sorts of all sorts of economic orientations.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: I do not see that that class sees culture as anything but entirely frivolously um discretionary.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that might mean that there is a development project waiting for for someone, someone like you and me maybe.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because this did have to happen in the liberal art world.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was 20 years of like lobbying.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: How do we turn you know bored wives who want to who want entertainment on a Thursday evening while the while the husband is somewhere else?
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_01: How do we turn them into people who feel an intellectual, emotional investment in these industries?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um But yeah, I'm not seeing I'm not seeing the the reactionary right, at least spending any money on any culture.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: The barrier might be that the reactionary right is not seeing any reactionary art being made.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I will disappoint them by telling them that the reactionary art is not going to bring about the reaction, the social reaction that they are hoping for.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um these things cannot work like this.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: There is a reason that we stopped producing a certain type of portraiture by and large.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_01: There was and the the the you know sculpture looks different now than it did in the late 1800s.
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um Modernity, it happened.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: We had wars, things did change.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_01: Our society looks different, our streets look different.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_01: And that's not to say that art must be evacuated of certain sort of idealism, that it should not pick its vision of beauty.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is a word that that's quite quite quite popular in in in in conceptualization of aesthetic reaction.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_01: But it does have to speak to the people today, and the people today are not the people of 1880, they they really are not.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't think that we can overcome this so straightforwardly without necessarily going through a project of like educating the tastes of that kind of ascendant power, power class.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um my tiny bit is that when I write for the critic, where I I which I where I write art criticism every month in the magazine and more often on the website, for a readership of mostly conservatives, I allow myself often to challenge them by telling them, look, there's video art here, you should go and look at video art.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's not terrible.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: It is you look at video on your phone, you can look at video in a gallery, it can make you feel things, it can make you disagree with video art as an idea, but you should still look at it because this is what the people we call artists are making.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and on the other hand, the the kind of patron is just to round up, you know, there there's another type of dissident right that is a lot less self-righteous um because rather than be reactionary conservative, it sort of has.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to I'm not going to say fascist.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like, but what's what's what's a you know there is a right that gets accused of being fascist that is not necessarily just tr traditional.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: They they have an interest in aesthetics that has nothing to do with reaction, has nothing to do with art history, and that I'm finding quite quite interesting, but I don't yet know how it relates to a conception of the people that that kind of politics of this slightly more militant right, more more dissatisfied right, a futurist right, so to speak, um how that relates to its people.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: So we don't yet have a futurism that have indeed been attempts by some artists to re-invigorate 20th century futurism for a British context.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that's going anywhere, particularly.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the the aesthetics I see being proposed by those political groupings is one of a void.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_01: So, for an example, if you recall memes, this came up in a conversation at the event at Votorand that you that I hosted and you you led with Harrison Pitt and David Goodhardt.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: If you recall the memes of Restore Britain, they in my assessment just sort of portray a lack.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: They show us under us, under our government, these people, these phenomena, these aesthetic elements will be absent from our country.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, that's great.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: But what will be present in our country?
• 36:29
  SPEAKER_01: What what is it?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Which which people um which people which which ideas, which colours, you know, to be to be really boring about it.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's all yet to to be developed.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: And maybe maybe that's a positive thing to end this this rambling answer to and rambling jacuz to all these people who know better and should support what we're trying to do before then.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: I agree.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_00: I as you know, look around and realize that the issues facing Britain to the Anglosphere are manifold and they are driven by many things, the financialization of everything, mass immigration, all of the things that we speak about a lot within the cultural landscape.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: But culture is also produced by people, and you are absolutely right to put the onus on people to say, what exactly is it that you are practicing and bringing into being that is a more positive vision, that is a a living embodiment of the culture that you hope to see, rather than only pointing at the things that you don't want to see or that you think is missing.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: You're absolutely right to bring that up, and that void, I think, is perhaps explained by a shallowness almost to our daily lives and perhaps how we've been swept up in what people call liquid modernity, and we can sit there and talk about how everyone could uh do more, be better, that it shouldn't be this way, and yet we spend so much time engaging in that that we don't actually get out there and make the contributions to create the creative.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_00: Whose job is that we want to be better.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's just better than I'm not sure I have a have a great answer.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I terrified myself and I don't know if you agree with that as well as wrote about sort of question of wh which populism can can exist in any art world structure and thinking about these I refer to the American uh American art world co-opting, community art, the beginning of neoliberalism, I'm sort of wondering whether whether UK aesthetics, this kind of mass multipolarity of identities, ethnicities, cultures, which the art world proper here tried to officially guide into some kind of idea of diversity.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: Diversity is our strength kind of narratives, whether that kind of UK of our culture is not actually the next frontier.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: So the culture industries having collapsed, they are no longer relevant, but capital itself without the interface of of the institutions can just eukify absolutely everything until the point at which um that that becomes the official state culture.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we're not very far off from there in any sense, are we?
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they like UK aesthetics, they account on on X, just the sheer volume of images that one, frankly, in the very polite bits of London where I live, one doesn't encounter that often.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: But it does look like Britain has already been devoured by this kind of fragmentary TikToky type type of interaction of the aesthetic and and the mediatic.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_01: How that is different from what happened under the guise of an official state ideology, I think is both terrifying but all but also interesting in a couple of ways.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_01: One, as my friend Nina Power, who I run this idea past, pointed out.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we we also have Islam, so Islam might deal with all these ideas very, very differently.
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there are five British values, might sound very, very different when Sharia law is one of those values.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_01: I'm being obviously very glib.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: This is not this is not a fact that I necessarily think we need.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, maybe, maybe we need to think about it in cultural terms and and institutional state building terms.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: So scrap, scrap that.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: But what I would countenance that that warning with is that I'm not entirely sure whether even Islamic culture would be immune from capital cooptation.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that does Adorno still still apply to Islam, probably if it happens in post-neoliberalism.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, again, I have a feeling that the best solution I have to all of this is the same solution that that every middle-aged creative person or intellectual person tells you, well, at the end of the day, I can only do so much, which is to sit in my sofa and have difficult conversations with people who disagree with me about the extent of the of the ongoing collapse, but equally don't have any any access to any any great kind of transformational shifts.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: Having said all this, I do actually feel incredibly optimistic.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: Like after COVID was such a low point for our culture to believe in the ability of any cultural apparatus, any individual, any movement to gain any ground.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I think we are at a point at which, you know, there are so many, for example, there have been so many podcasts like yours, there's a compliment here, in this heterodox media sphere, that after years of people just sort of glibly saying, Oh, you know, you could go and participate in the culture wars like this, podcasts precisely like yours, which are serious, which are above shoulder, you know, shoulders above the kind of content that the sphere has produced, produce seriousness, produced an invitation to whoever listens, to whoever participates, to actually build something next, as opposed to just swallow in the misery of, oh, you know, what they took away from us, what, you know, and well, it doesn't matter whether it's migrant or capital or the combination of all of this, or populists, whatever your your your boogeyman is.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think we are now at a point where enough people in the cultural, political, intellectual field have heard themselves pronounce the same diagnosis of the ailment, that either they need to retire or they will produce something better.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm also encouraged by the fact that despite me not seeing much evidence of the Zuma generation being fluently able to participate in this conversation, because frankly, they had a really tough time being brought up by millennials who are super fragile, and a lot of the Zoomer generation also like came.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of age during COVID, where they were told that the internet was both punishment and and every joy in life.
• 44:07
  SPEAKER_01: That can't have been good.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: There are significant factions of them who opt in to the conversations that you and I are having.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: And and I think this this is good.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, we need more more individuals doing what we are doing, hopefully not just crowding up the the very small monetizable media sphere, but like actually doing the thing that we say we believe in.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: You put on courses, you have exhibitions, you even do book publishing now, and you're designed to do what I think a lot of institutions don't do, or at least they do, but shy away from various things.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_00: And you you host honest conversations about art and culture, politics, philosophy.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this show, as you well know, deals a lot in the notion that recovery requires from building within the ruins.
• 45:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh the inspiration of King Alfred as he uh as he as he set set set England on to be uh a unified nation, having overthrown the Danes and then moved on with a moral vision.
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's Saint Benedict keeping the flame of civilization alive.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's what Verderan does.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_00: I know I might have uh overshot it a little bit uh using those figures, but ultimately, metaphorically, that is what you are doing.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you're showing that you're trying to build something outside of the institutional framework which has been crumbling, and there are practical implications to that, financial implications, and indeed emotional ones.
• 46:03
  SPEAKER_01: You've learned so we we get a project to burn the institutions outside of completely ruined already on the five.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: Look, this is kind of tricky, and I have been trying many different forms of of what Verduin is.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: So very briefly, Verdoin is named after Madame Verdoin, who's a character in Post, she runs a literary salon, and I know there is there is no worse combination of two words in English than literary salon.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was I was supposed to solicit a laugh, but never mind that.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um Madame Verdoin is possessive, she wants people to come only to her salon, she she you know, she she sort of runs a little cult, un petit clan.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I'm I always place myself sort of at the centre of of events, everything we do here, to say that AOA have a certain certain limitations, but also to invite others to do their own thing in the way, in those kind of flawed ways.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: At the same time, there is such a need to produce counterinstitutions, however small they are.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the the team is, you know, it's it's me, it's Nina who works with me a hell of a lot, who who gives me counsel and and two or three volunteers.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_01: And publishing, we have a much bigger team of there's five five of us because that's that requires commitment and expertise.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the institutional form itself is like annoyingly constantly under discussion.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_01: And it changes and it projects itself very differently, depending on which interface it is that I'm at.
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I have that freedom, particularly because we're very small, particularly because, to my great shame, we don't seem to have that much competition in a particular political and social sphere.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: Time and time again, I get you know, many times a week I get an email from someone, what you're doing is so amazing, to which I'm, you know, as your compliment as well.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_01: I I'm I'm very appreciative, but also say, you know, you can meet in a pub with your friends and organize your own cultural field.
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: It's really not that difficult.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like what is it that I'm doing other than put some things on a website and and organize a ticketing, ticking, ticketing back end?
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's really not that much.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: So you so yes, the the difficulty is that we are forever sort of thrown between wishing to critique the institutions, do better than them, bypass the institution, rescue the good people from the crumbling institutions, but also not compromise on the thoughts that this all necessitates.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like time and again, I'm presented with this idea that, well, if you want to make Verdun more popular, you would have to stop saying these things on your social media.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I just laugh.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, why why why would I do this?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: I have been expelled from the institutions.
• 49:16
  SPEAKER_01: Why would I stop myself mixing content, emotion, and politics the way that by the way, everyone else in the institutions allows themselves to do?
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm not I'm not better than any of these people, you know.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: I I have political desires, I have hormonal swings, and I also want people to come and listen to me being clever and challenging to other clever people.
• 49:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is all this is all great.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, anyhow, the upshot is that I think what a culture needs is many more projects like like mine, many more projects that are smaller than this, and they do exist.
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_01: There are now factions.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: Thankfully, we don't have we have been spurred to this kind of totalizing understanding of Dimes Square that Manhattan went through, which was like the most anti-intellectual project we have ever seen that produced cult of a few personalities, um, and not that many interesting artifacts as far as I'm concerned.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, we are we are still at a point at which all that investment is yet to be realized and brought in.
• 50:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the financial question is super important.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_01: I remain unfunded.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: This this I finally find baffling, given that you know I I know I know people repeatedly tell me, oh, you're the only place in London that does this.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and where is this conversation going next?
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um but now yeah, I already complained about all of this.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um so yeah, the learnings are very diffuse, and I I'm making a very you know, my my stake is to like continue to throw things around in a very idiosyncratic way because I can, because I've been thinking about culture for more than 20 years professionally.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: I know which arguments it is worth for me to have in public, and I know that I need to keep on having the arguments with both sides, so it's a very small example of the event I had had with you, which was like a right wing and reactionary in some senses.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_01: This is not this is not a slight in any sense, but the audience that showed up had a very parti very visibly political orientation.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: I also did an event that was attended primarily by Marxists from Platypus and followers of sublation media, like so Hegelian Marxists and psychoanalytic Marxists, and we also had an argument for an hour.
• 51:52
  SPEAKER_01: This is good.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: We need to cultivate all of this.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_01: And what is I I guess the thing that would be depressing and would would give anyone pause is that let's say 20 years ago the universities were capable of doing this.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: When I was coming up in the art world, it was in conversations at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London that I understood that people can sit behind a table and have a panel and say things that are worth hearing for another 50 in the in the room.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_01: But how why that is gone it is frankly beyond me.
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm yeah, we don't even have to reinvent the wheel, we just have to be clever in public.
• 52:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's all.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's all serious.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: But then you also mentioned that compared to their American counterparts, there's a difference.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: Primarily what the patrons would expect documents.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_01: Before I asked my ultimate question than I am school of my guests, you could manage what the difference is between the British and the Americans and why you think it's a problem of contemporary art in in in in the in the US.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't mean that this is stuck forever.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um someone who I find quite tiresome as a thinker and even worse as an artist, um, called Hieter Steirel, who's a German artist who sort of has this idea of the museum as a battlefield, recently came out with this reflection that actually the the the sort of whitewashing and money laundering of the art world as a service is sort of losing its marginal benefits.
• 54:08
  SPEAKER_01: So it might be that a system of patronage in the US begins to collapse in the art world for for that particular reason.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was no longer that useful, whether for building legacy or for the tax benefits which do exist in the US unlike in the UK, um, this will no longer continue.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's one thing.
• 54:27
  SPEAKER_01: There is also a generational shift by which we do see that Zoomers, the heirs to fortunes, are much interested in very different types of artifacts.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, it's it's almost a cliche to say that they are more likely to collect sneakers than than than than than Rothko's.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I don't think we're even even there at the moment.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are many other industries, experience industries and the other types of creative or quasi-creative industries that will have absolutely no problem making their product a premium counted in a million millions of dollars.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way that contemporary art, and I was to a small extent, very small extent, part of sort of wave of people trying to do this in Britain in the 2000s.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, how do you convince someone who's a lawyer or an investment banker that art is an investment class vehicle?
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: It isn't, it really isn't.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like very little art has ever had that potential.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: But there is a type of rhetoric that convinces people that£50,000 gives you gets an investment.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: So the US has had a long tradition of um of investment in art that was primarily private.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_01: Britain, of course, did at the back of the industrial institutions, but the state came in, John Maynard Keynes and all that.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um one could one could say that what happened to Britain to be to be different in that in that measure from the US is that the 20th century.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: We we were actually involved in a war in a way that required a complete reconfiguration of a state and its relationship to to its people after the Second World War, whereas whereas the US never really engaged itself in its wars um in deployment of personnel at the scale, at the proportions that we did.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean that there's probably uh quite a bit more to this because the US did did also create a creative class through um through programs in the 1920s for massive investment in in cultural production.
• 56:43
  SPEAKER_01: All of this to say that at the moment we have in Britain we have arrived at a point where a certain philanthropic class is already mature, but it's also waning at the same time.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: So so we we we again have quite quite a lot to play for, I think.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and it might be that different people um might need to be asked to put the the money with the mouse on.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre, you have certainly kept me epistemologically humble in this conversation, whilst also highlighting your own your own humility uh uh with your opening biographical statement.
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's that's sort of an aesthetic question.
• 57:53
  SPEAKER_00: What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life?
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_00: Having to wear mass moral absolutely something more quoted than what was differently.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_01: But since you use the word epistemologically, um I will I will refer to my PhD, which I I dropped out of very recently.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that that sort of goes into a detail of how I thought the deployment of artists was useful in social or political terms.
• 58:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I will try to frame it as a warning.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_01: So I started a PhD program in 2019, partly because I thought it would help me to think in public, and it turned out that I can already do that.
• 58:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I asked her with a question of what it was that how we could enable artists to draw on knowledges from other disciplines.
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: So as a geek, one of my degrees was in science.
• 58:46
  SPEAKER_01: I worked in financial services for a bit alongside art.
• 58:51
  SPEAKER_01: I kept on finding artists making art about art and the law, art and finance, art and climate change.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I sort of wondered why are all these projects so under-researched?
• 59:02
  SPEAKER_01: Why do artists know absolutely nothing about the law of finance or climate change, yet give themselves permission to make these grand statements and institutions to sort of buy this and invest, invest all of this?
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_01: So I started my PhD research thinking that I would produce sort of a toolkit for enabling artists to think slightly more seriously, to give them some idea of epistemic humility, and then you know be somehow incentivized to think about the secondary disciplines, the things that they wanted to correspond with, somehow more seriously.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_01: And as happens quite often, I think, to people undertaking PhD research, halfway through I had a crisis and realized that I was completely wrong, that in fact I should devote my life to stopping artists from making under-researched, completely unwarranted claims on knowledges they don't have access to.
• 1:00:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I was looking at practices of like forensic architecture who essentially use fancy graphs to explain how evil the state is in its use of lethal force.
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: Nothing incorrect, but but you know, at least we but but fundamentally this was like reorienting of artistic practices towards the regime of fact-checking, which I felt art was ill placed to to perform.
• 1:00:29
  SPEAKER_01: And now in the warning, the reason that I thought that this needed to be undone, or rather rethought, is that I understood that art had historically, as it did in its most recent time, as it moved to ideas from other um logical positivist type of disciplines, like ballistics, like the law and so on, had given up entirely on something that it used to be very good at in a way that very few arenas of life, of practice in our lives are, and that is the idea of belief, and I don't even mean faith in religious sense.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if we think about one of the roles of art as being connected to propagating wonder, propagating irrational attachment to certain ideas, which is not always bad, yes, not not every irrational idea is automatically demagogical.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um I have understood that one of the things that does happen to art as it makes these positivistic statements is that it erodes its ability to deal with the unprovable.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: And God, I want some art to convince me once in a while that two plus two equals five in a way that I don't even understand that it's doing it to me.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: I don't require art to serve me with provable truth.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_01: Because if the truth is provable through art mathematical proof, for instance, I I can already do that.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: If the proof is available in language, I I already have ample access to that.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: But I do want art to to show me things that I cannot rationally conceive.
• 1:02:27
  SPEAKER_01: And because I don't do drugs, I do still rely on art to do this to me once in a while.
• 1:02:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why I've changed my mind about art and epistemology.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: Very applied answer, but but it's quite fundamental, I think, and it it's it's sort of addresses the collapse that I think we we refer to to.
• 1:02:47
  SPEAKER_00: What it is that art no longer charges itself with with with doing Well, you have clearly spent a lot of time throughout the course of your life figuring out where you stand here, which is why I think, and it's probably only half jokingly that people suggest, and maybe even you suggest, that you should be the Minister of Culture, but there are very few people who who grasp uh the whole gamut of the art world and the different perspectives that take place there, and indeed the dearth.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's this not enough.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's really not enough.
• 1:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: So I could fight for refuse to write your writing for the authorship.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: I can address the company.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: We have Symposium on Death, for instance, coming up.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm trying to work up a symposium on the artistic avant-garde.
• 1:04:12
  SPEAKER_01: I am preparing a course on psychoanalysis as a critical tool with um Helen Rollins, with the publishing team, which includes Nina, my my former co-editor Amir Namann and Travis Jefferson and Emma Buletsky.
• 1:04:27
  SPEAKER_01: We are working on releasing the debut novel of um Liam Blackford called The Stud, which is going to be absolutely fantastic.
• 1:04:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like an Australian reproductive utopia stroke dystopia.
• 1:04:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um we are also going to launch a series of titles early next year called Genius Loki, which look at crime and geography and uh sort of establishing a new genre in a way that we we propose that the criminality, the things that shake societies are different, even in the age of um globalization.
• 1:05:01
  SPEAKER_01: What else am I doing?
• 1:05:03
  SPEAKER_01: I'm writing Column for the Critic, and I'm also trying to put together, and this is actually the one thing I will make a funding call for, I'm trying to put together a fellowship that's already programmed, just not yet funded, a fellowship for for young critics, sort of twenties to early 30s, people who would be able to um deal with the absolute poverty or the kind of cultural criticism in the mainstream.
• 1:05:32
  SPEAKER_01: While I will happily recommend a number of magazines, indeed, like The Critic and a few others.
• 1:05:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think the mainstream is has been terribly underserved the last the last few decades.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I would like to do something to bring back sort of seriousness and fidelity to the artifact and the way that we think about those things.
• 1:05:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd like to I'd like to put together a sort of elite elite training program.
• 1:05:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, other than that I I Oh I I well the FTS anyhow.
• 1:06:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um other than that I tweet about sex and death almost every every day, so come come join.
• 1:06:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well I I I hope I hope to hear digital wallets being pulled out as we're speaking.
• 1:06:35
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Sean.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much, Michael.
• 1:06:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I will make sure the links to your socials to further out are in the show notes.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for coming on and giving thinking class an angle that hasn't often been explored, and we will certainly stay in touch as we see your work develop.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: Pierre, it's been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:06:59
  SPEAKER_00: All the best, you know.