WesRecs x WHALE: Art Media Spotlight #004
A quick rundown of cool art reads & views curated for WHALE Members by Wes Hazard
A recurring series highlighting worthwhile writing, podcasts, & videos of note pertaining to digital art, NFTs, blockchain and the WHALE Member’s mission to become the MoMA of the Metaverse.
⭐ Artist Decoded Podcast (#223) [12/13/21]
Sarah Zucker — NFTs and The Cassandra Complex
If you are a creator who has been grinding for years to develop your voice, sharpen your skills, and build awareness for the authentic work you’re bringing into the world but you feel frustrated about not yet achieving whatever level of success you’ve set for yourself: LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE!
💊 If you’re not inspired to keep going after this you might want to do a pulse check on your mental approach because…damn.
What a wonderful conversation with digital artist and writer (and fellow Jeopardy! champion woot!) Sarah Zucker who has firmly established herself as one of the most influential and successful artists working in video & GIFs today (both in the NFT and TradArt space). With several billion views of her work on Giphy, multiple museum exhibitions, an NFT auction at Sotheby’s and inclusion in many of the most notable Crypto Art collections in the space — it might be hard to imagine an artist of Zucker’s stature grappling with self doubt in regard to her practice. Yet in this open, lengthy, vulnerable, and highly entertaining conversation with Yoshino of Artist Decoded, Zucker traces her career path, and the long road it took to become an “overnight success”.
Hearing Zucker discuss the development of her singular style (a combination of video, animation, vintage tech, glitch aesthetics, and razor sharp wit) in the heyday of Tumblr and Crypto Art’s emergence (when creators were doing it all for no attention and even less money) is just fascinating here, especially at a time when the actual art and messaging in this space is so often obscured by talk of price and “utility”.
Repeatedly we are brought back to the fortunate (and completely unpredictable) alignment of tech, audience, & zeitgeist that set the stage for Zucker to seize the moment of the recent explosion of NFTs after working so long in a web2 paradigm tilted against the proper compensation of artists.
Alternatively the discussion does a great job of highlighting the doomed-to-failure money grab approach of people flooding into the scene with only the thought of making a quick buck, and no work ethic or artistic conviction.
… it might be hard to imagine an artist of Zucker’s stature grappling with self doubt in regard to her practice.
Zucker is as talented an orator as an artist, so this is filled with many worthwhile gems 💎 and I strongly encourage a full listen. The YouTube version is above but if you’re more into podcasts you can check it out here or, as they say, wherever you get yours.
⭐ About the Arts: Leo Castelli, 1976 interviewed by Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel
Leo Castelli is stands as a towering figure of 20th century art…but I admit personally knowing nothing about him until recently. So it was pleasure, amidst my ongoing mission to teach myself about art & art history, to find this wonderful interview with the man from nearly 50 years ago.
A gallerist and art dealer whose career spanned 5 decades, Castelli was instrumental in the early careers of several major artists such as Cy Twombley, Robert Rauschenberg, & Jasper Johns. Here he sits down for a half hour interview on public television speaking about his career, the early days of Abstract Expressionism, the then-current state of Pop Art, the uptown vs downtown art scenes in NYC, and how he saw his role as a dealer and gallery owner.
I would encourage anyone to watch the entire interview but I really enjoyed what he had to say about his view of his mission:
Well the function of an art dealer can be various. Certainly a good art dealer, an art dealer who really cares for art and not about making money should be to find new artists and make them known to the public before museums can do it, they function in a much more cumbersome way they have to figure out schedules well ahead of time and so we are the real vanguard and if we are alert, the good dealers, we can just make things happen so much more rapidly than if we had to rely only on museums. The museums will then, sometimes very rapidly sometimes more slowly, judge what we are doing and go on from there.
I feel I’m more than somebody who wants to sell paintings. The selling of paintings seems to be a secondary thing. I have to of course sell them and to finance my activity but the activity really is the important aim of my gallery and I am very happy to just tag along in the midst of tremendous financial difficulties as long as I can keep the gallery going.
⭐ RIP Ken Knowlton, Computer Art Pioneer
I would perhaps not have noticed this story a month ago. But having been glued to the launch and evolution of typed.art (the new text-based NFT marketplace on Tezos) for the past few weeks I am suddenly attuned to the history of ASCII, ASCII art, & its pioneers in a way I’ve never been before.
On that note: RIP Ken Knowlton — the computer graphics pioneer who did so much to further the possibilities & awareness of ASCII art. His most famous work “computer nude” (aka “Studies in Perception 1” the fancy title that was added later in an attempt to class it up for mainstream audiences) was made from a photo scanned with a camera and then rendered in binary and output to the 96 characters then available.
Most saw it as a novelty but some, like Robert Rauschenberg saw the outline of a new dawn of art +tech. He showed the piece at his loft. The NYT included an image of Computer Nude the next day (thought to be the first full frontal nudity depicted in the history of the paper). 📰
Here are some of Ken Knowlton’s own reflections on his pioneering computer graphic work at bell labs, the evolution of it brought forth by others, and the relationship between artists and scientists. One quote that really resonated with me was when Knowlton talked about having recently debuted the first tech demo of a short film made entirely from computer graphics. It had originated on punch cards, and it spat out a tutorial film that detailed the process by which the film itself was made. Bell Labs announced it in the press and a reporter got in touch w/ Knowlton to ask if one day you could make a Hollywood movie that would feature performances from deceased movie stars.
Knowlton dismissed the idea out of hand as ridiculous and of course was proven wrong in the decades to come.
This illustrates a lesson I’ve had reinforced for me over and over again in my time in this space:
The idea or tech or project that you think is dumbest/most useless/most frivolous thing often has the potential to grow into the most important (and valuable) innovation out there.
There’s a lot of junk and hype and grift here in Web3, but I never dismiss anything new that I encounter just because my initial reaction is that it’s “dumb” or “too niche”. It may well end up being exactly that - but whether it’s some new application of AI in art or a novel approach to the generative art minting process, I’m always sure to at least think about it a bit and reflect on what it might become. 🐣
⭐ Meet the Collectors | Troy Carter
Art Basel
“For a lot of people breaking barriers is doing something like going to space, for us breaking barriers sometimes is just getting out of your neighborhood and being successful in the career you want to be in”
Here’s a short look at the personal art collection and collecting philosophy of LA-based talent manager Troy Carter. Aside from offering a peek at some of the most vital Black American contemporary art of the past decade this video shows off how collecting itself can be a creative active act. Very few of us will have the $$$ necessary to acquire and display art at the scale that Carter is doing here (seriously, the ground floor of his house is museum quality) but anyone beginning a collecting journey can probably benefit from some of the insights he offers about:
🔑 supporting artists when they need it most (at the beginning of their careers)
🔑 collecting only that which you find personally meaningful
“Thelma Golden, who runs studio museum in Harlem, she basically said you want to support artists when they need you the most, and that’s at the beginning of their careers, when their rent cant get paid, when they cant afford materials, when they’re trying to figure out how they’re going to pay for a show. People don’t need you when they have 10,000 people on the waiting list, they’re pieces are now 500K, or a a million dollars or whatever, you just become one of many people who want to be a part of that artists life, but if you are there and you show up early, that’s when they really need you.”
OK, those are the current recs, but certainly not the only art-related media that we’re discussing in WHALE Members!
Be sure to stop by our Discord and check out the 👉 #art-edu 👈 channel for additional recs & dope conversation!
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