The Forum 22 | Baseera Khan

SPENT: Episode Five | Marc Spiegler

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 [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 [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:

The Forum 22 | Baseera Khan

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. Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

SPENT Episode Four | Erin Jane Nelson

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 Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Forum 21 | Lucas Blalock

Lucas Blalock’s photographs often look like they’re interrupting themselves. Objects bend out of place. Edits remain visible. Corrections become part of the image instead of disappearing behind it. Rather than using photography to create the illusion of clarity, Lucas uses it to expose the decisions, accidents, and contradictions that make images possible in the first place. In this NewCrits conversation, Lucas sits down with Ajay Kurian for a discussion about photography, discomfort, and what happens when the process becomes part of the final work. The conversation begins with a story Lucas has returned to in recent years: a childhood accident that resulted in reconstructive surgery using his own toe to replace his thumb—a collision of advanced medicine and old-world improvisation that he jokingly describes as “the first bad Photoshop.” Lucas reflects on discovering art through CD covers before museums, studying at Bard, and coming of age as digital tools began changing the medium itself. Instead of treating manipulation as something to conceal, he became interested in making it visible. Again and again, he returns to the same idea: images become more interesting when they stop trying to appear effortless. 00:00 — Intro 03:10 — The Disney Accident and “The First Bad Photoshop” 09:45 — Origin Stories and Discovering Photography 15:30 — Album Covers, Culture, and Looking Before Art 20:10 — Studying with Stephen Shore 26:00 — Photoshop as a New Problem for Photography 31:20 — Signature, Style, and Staying Strange 36:15 — Making the Worst Possible Image 41:00 — Working for Vik Muniz 46:10 — Labor, Accident, and Unfinishedness 50:20 — Pictures That Resist Digestion 54:15 — Photography, Bodies, and Sensation 58:40 — AI, Anxiety, and the Future of Images 1:03:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

SPENT: Episode Three | Whitney Mallet

SPENT: Episode Three | Whitney Mallet Whitney Mallet has spent years moving through magazines, galleries, performances, readings, and the shifting ecosystems that surround contemporary culture - not as an observer standing outside of it, but as someone committed to paying attention. In this conversation, Whitney sits down with Ajay Kurian to talk about criticism, instinct, and what it means to build a practice around curiosity. They discuss magazines as art projects, the lag between cultural change and cultural criticism, and why making connections between unlikely people, scenes, and ideas can create something more exciting than simply reinforcing what already exists. Whitney reflects on developing taste, not as something fixed or innate, but as something shaped through obsession, attention, and years of showing up. They talk about influence, authority, and the slow process of learning to trust your own perspective. Throughout the conversation, Whitney returns to a tension that runs through both criticism and creative work: the pull between analysis and instinct, busyness and reflection, skepticism and hope. What emerges isn’t a defense of optimism so much as a practice of remaining open. Believing that culture can still surprise you, that intensity is worth pursuing, and that staying curious might be one way of resisting disappointment. Hosted by Ajay KurianEdited by Peter GroppeProduced by NewCrits  The Whitney Review of New Writing:   https://www.whitneyreview.org/ [https://www.whitneyreview.org/] 00:00 — Intro 04:50 — Running a Magazine by Instinct 09:20 — Taste, Influence, and Learning What You Like 15:10 — Building Unexpected Encounters 20:30 — Trusting Your Own Authority 27:15 — Information, Obsession, and Developing Taste 33:40 — Work as Practice 38:20 — Edging Burnout 43:45 — Busyness, Avoidance, and Personal Writing 49:30 — Disappointment, Intensity, and Staying Optimistic 55:15 — Criticism, Attention, and Cultural Delay 1:01:20 — The Internet, Institutions, and the Changing Role of Reviews 1:07:15 — Writing Without Permission 1:11:40 — Earnestness, Cynicism, and Seeing Through Things 1:16:20 — Breakthrough or Burnout 1:18:00 — Outro Get full access to NewCrits Substack at newcrits.substack.com/subscribe [https://newcrits.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]