The Custodians Of Beauty Became Its Gravediggers

[00:00:00]So I worked with artists who were at the one point trying to produce a critique of contemporary arts institutions. Uh at another they were talking about genders.

[00:00:10]Another one they were talking about borders. Um and in probably one of the most s of poignant bits of self-reflection, I remember artists asking me to remove the windows in my gallery so that I could bring in this artwork made of um trash. literally made of trash because it was so big you could not fit with it all. Um, and that work um had recordings of the story stories of refugees trying to migrate into Australia and it had a big neon sign uh above it saying your country does not exist.

[00:00:46]I look at all this now and wonder what got into me and maybe my intellectualism was not in fact as as developed as I thought it might have been at the time.

[00:01:01]Pierre, the institutions charged with preserving and transmitting beauty have been captured by people who are perhaps not only indifferent to it, but actively hostile to it. And you know this because you were one of them. You built your career inside the contemporary art world. You helped construct what I think you now refer to as its false foundations. and then something happened during the the pandemic where the spell was broken. You've you've walked away and you built something else in its place. And this conversation, I suppose, is about what happens when the people who are supposed to be custodians of a culture actually become its gravediggers instead.

[00:01:41]Pierre, you wrote in The Critic that what you were once faithful as an adant to the cult of contemporary art, but then you changed. What broke the spell?

[00:01:52]I'm I'm going to have to say that that the usual form of a podcast appearance is to start with how lovely to be here.

[00:01:58]I'm a great fan of yours, John, and vice versa. But you start with an accusation.

[00:02:03]So, let's let's go with that. Thank you first of all for actually boing to read my slightly comical confession of a reform art dealer in the in the critic.

[00:02:13]Comical partly because there is this kind of form in which we have to disavow the things we used to be in our in our youth. But I think in in my case that was that was genuine in a sense that I spent my days these days trying to reflect on the thing that I helped to create as you as you put it. So very briefly biographically I I did the kind of very tiresome eaten Oxford St. Martins routine that that everyone does.

[00:02:42]I was partly a geek but also wanted to follow in my in my mother's footsteps of being a public intellectual. And the only way I could think of doing that is by starting a gallery after I left art school. And this was in the heady days of the 2000s when things could only get better as as Blur had promised us. And indeed funding for the arts was such and so abundant and so unconditional that um sort of irrational exuberance was the only way to respond to it. I was at the time in my 20ies so maybe didn't quite understand that I was buying into a set of ideological choices. You know we we don't understand what ideology we we we swim in as we do. But all I wanted to do is to be surrounded by clever people who challenged the the thinking around them.

[00:03:32]And would you believe it at that time I found that in the art world this came from at the time from from artists who we now think have ruined everything. So I was working with a whole bunch of artists who made the work political who sort of posed themselves as anarchists.

[00:03:53]Um, and I have to say that even though I was never politically on on their side, I was thrilled by all of this. So my practice sort of found its foundation in this mixture of thinking about politics, thinking about cultural categories and thinking about aesthetics.

[00:04:15]what happened over the years and I did contribute to this in in some sense that the the market the political the state funded sort of all got mixed up to the extent that um the fidelity and the resolution of the various ideas being proposed uh became completely blurred.

[00:04:36]So I worked with artists who were at the one point trying to produce a critique of contemporary arts institutions. Uh at another they were talking about gender.

[00:04:45]At another one they were talking about borders. Um, and in probably one of the most sort of poignant bits of self-reflection, I remember artists asking me to remove the windows in my gallery so that I could bring in this artwork made of um, trash, literally made of trash because it was so big, it could not fit through the door. Um, and that work um had recordings of the story stories of refugees trying to migrate into Australia and it had a big neon sign uh above it saying your country does not exist.

[00:05:22]>> I look at all this now and wonder what got into me and maybe my intellectualism was not in fact as as developed as I thought it might have been at the time.

[00:05:32]Um, how how did I check how did I snap out of this? Well, I I kind of did the kind of classic way of getting hound myself hounded out of the art world. After I closed this program, closed this gallery. I started writing what I really thought about the art world. And even before co cracks were beginning to show, um we had this experience of of complete excess after years of austerity in Britain. Uh after years of evil Tory cuts to arts funding, evil Tory cuts obviously and and and and well both both in and out of scare quotes um I started understanding that artists were concerned primarily with their own well-being and their own welfare. Um this in the context of this massive expansion of the artistic fields in in Britain and and Europe where unlike the US um state manipulation of of the field does actually have downstream effects.

[00:06:34]Um and COVID completely broke the spell for me because if you recall in the early stages of the pandemic um there were no end of artistic campaigns that um and institutional campaigns that posed artists as the fourth emergencies emergency service demanding funding for theaters which were at that point closing closed down um as a matter of national urgency. And that somehow struck me, seems almost silly to to have to have had to remark on this at the time as slightly out of balance with what was going on. You know, not only were supposedly tens of thousands of people dying every minute, um the entire future of the world is being reshaped in this kind of drastic both authoritarian and apocalyptic way. yet yet it would be artistic production that would keep us sane. Um it didn't I wrote a few pieces too many to critiquing some of those to um allow to to be allowed to return into any of the respectable circles of the art world. And because during co I was already hanging out with a few people who shared my views, um I convened an uh a reading group back when it was illegal to to to to get people together. We started organizing little events to like question what it is that we were landing into. Um yeah, and I've continued continued ever since. So I am now a reformed character who's who has to start every public appearance with this kind of Mayor Koopa um for for for ruining it for everyone >> and also obviously not going to be able to save it from this or anything else at this stage. This is your land acknowledgement. Yeah, you you you mentioned that what you learned in the art world was that artists are primarily concerned about their own welfare.

[00:08:39]And my question, I suppose, understanding most artists output these days and in your words and in people's eyewitness testimonies, trash and urininals and the like, how is it that the art world has developed like this? How does it actually contribute to the welfare of the artists themselves to produce such >> products? I'll say rather benignely. I will I will now roll back on quite a lot of my contrition and and and disagree with you quite strongly that trash is the mode main mode of operation at the time span you you indicated by including Dump's 1917 Phantom in in your question.

[00:09:33]Look, the reactions to modernity, the the the impossibility of modernity to sort of, you know, turn the cliche into another cliche are profound. And I think 20th century art history is not altogether should not be read cannot be read as one sort of smooth trajectory towards the the kind of decline that we can identify in British art practice. I think around 2010, not necessarily that much earlier. In American art practices, this this happens a few decades earlier in different ways, which does allow us to point to a couple of moments. one I think the 1960s where what we now know as contemporary art briefly named uh postmodern art if if you recall when contemporary art becomes conceptualized and contemporary art becomes conceptualized in a kind of post Frankfurt school vein where critique of the indust of the cultural and entertainment industries is set out um and there's the merging of the understanding byent new left who are hegemonic or become dominant in the culture that capital of all culture and point particularly in American conduct but Makuza sort of in parallel to what happens in France in 19 is sort of the apex revolution some way and artists do end up believing this now it's impossible to make like uh completely um straightforward history of contemporary art because despite its um intended and recently very obvious globalism and sort of coordination through now an unavoidably visible set of NGO principles. Um this this this takes different trajectories in different countries and at different times. But there is a there is a sort of inevitability that um when when we produce a whole generation of artists who believe that their politics is at the forefront of not even a revolution but of critique there there is an incentive to multiply that that kadv to expand it to give it certain protections. Um and eventually as the revolutionary project or the political project of this class starts failing which again it does at different points at different times. 2008 is one of those times but earlier elsewhere and different trajectories. The Vietnam war for instance is sort of a cold shower for the nent contemporary art in in the US art world where lo and behold artists failed to stop the Vietnam war. Um as as these failures become apparent, the class the artistic professional managerial class which I think become indistinguishable recently they they are drawn to protect their own interests.

[00:12:47]In Britain in particular um the expansion by sheer numbers but also just sort of the multiplication of new art institutions happens post new labor.

[00:12:59]there is massive investment and that investment into the art world is very confused.

[00:13:06]It's at one point everyday creativity is great. You know this is and and another point it's culture is a is a great export thing for Britain. Remember creative Britain, the creative economy. At the same time, social amilaration, social intervention is seen as being fluidly delivered by by art.

[00:13:30]All of this is turned upside down with austerity after 2010. So this massive estate which does include tens of thousands of art school graduate many of whom have been lured into those degrees by the promise of art being a a vehicle for social mobility they are left alone but because they have been imbued with certain maybe not very practical but polit but still some political principles they organize and they give rise to an aesthetic of essentially discontentment. So if you to go back to your question finally, if you find yourself in a gallery and what you look at it's not necessarily trash but overtly calls for look, this object deserves attention.

[00:14:22]This artist deserves attention. This artist has been marginalized.

[00:14:26]The production of interest in identity politics in the art world comes from exactly this. the the belief the sort of belief borne out I guess by experience of of steady decline is that indeed the artist is worth saving.

[00:14:42]>> I think that's that's how we got here more or less and is this study decline what you have referred to in some of your writings as the slow vibe shift towards a postcultural state. So you basically say that these buildings are still the same.

[00:15:03]They are still staffed by people. There are still exhibitions that are opened on schedules and it seems like a cultural institution has been preserved. But actually what you're saying is the substance has been evacuated.

[00:15:17]Is that what you're getting at?

[00:15:19]>> Yeah. I mean at the moment we're in a very interesting moment where I mean the vibe ship is a term that refers to the culture of the the dissident which is the the right I guess at the moment. So I'm not sure whether there is a any recognition of a vibe ship within the sanctioned art world, the official art world in Britain. But we do begin to see a sort of decline by which the institutions are no longer really able to even pretend that they're interested in the artistic address that can support artists. So we have on the one hand places like stretching out very lightweight exhibitions into many months where they would normally last two and a half months and be replaced by a new production simply because the budgets are no longer there but also the claims become sort of displaced where the claims that art does this particular thing to society is no longer sustainable. Um you could see this at a grand scale. For instance, the outgoing um director of Tate Modern, Maria Bolshshire, for instance, one of the things she presided over is the um the associations of of museums and I I forget which which technical body it is that that she that she did this with, but essentially the all many institutions in Britain signed up to making climate change the primary bit the primary object of the programming and operation. So, it's not only that we must stop printing out things on pieces of paper because it's bad for the planet, but raising consciousness about climate change for our visitors should drive the program. Um and that it's not necessarily that that is cheaper in the context of something like somewhere like like tape Britain tape mo tape modern um but rather it aligns the interests of that estate with things that are external nonautistic and I think the bet would be the climate change would be the thing that persists in this kind of consciousness. the thing that you mentioned the term that you mentioned of the postcultural state I think is somewhere slightly different or or maybe it's a totality so as a term I think this is um in fact brought about by Lola Salem who also writes for the critic and the I think the Catholic Herald who I'm working with quite a bit at the moment and Lola is a very good analyst of of the same field who comes from also the French tradition where the crumbling of the state is slightly different the cultural state so I think what the postcultural state describes is actually different in as much as that the state's political interest maybe at the level of policy um is so evacuation of an understanding of what it is that culture does and what potential culture and investment in culture has to unity identity you know, how people vote. Um, that the state no longer really makes any attempt whatsoever to navigate this.

[00:18:30]Um, I'm going to say briefly, but actually I'm incapable of giving a brief answer as as you can hear.

[00:18:38]I think if we go back to sort of the the origins of neoliberal culture, particularly in an American context, there is sort of like a co-optation of all sorts of grassroots cultures into the mainstream. This happens already in the 1970s in the US, not in Britain. Um, and the US can bear it because it has all these quilting traditions. It does have black art that was never incorporated into the mainstream.

[00:19:05]So this that allows the US to to still consider its culture as having some kind of nation building, society building purpose. Britain comes to this kind of move much later.

[00:19:20]Um again Blairite terms and we are by that point entirely evacuated of any semblance of grassroots culture.

[00:19:30]whatever community arts movement existed in Britain in the 70s and 80s were completely was completely killed by the art mainstream by the art establishment and this kind of proto PMC drive. So when the British state under Blair puts serious energy into investing in culture, it has absolutely zero interest in any of this kind of sociological state apparatus nation building questions.

[00:20:00]And that brings us finally to the present in which whoever it is that might try to >> think of deploying state culture and and literally in Britain it is only the state that can deploy culture. It it costs money. It is the state that has all these assets. We we don't have a culture of philanthropy like the US does. Um the state doesn't know how to do that. The playbook is not available.

[00:20:26]You cannot propose to, you know, either any of the right-wing contenders, let alone Labor and certainly not the Greens, that, hey, if you want British society to look like X, Y, and Zed in 20 years, you would foreground A, B, and C types of programming. They they just do not see the connection. And and I think that that is in a sense the the true horror of the postcultural state in which we are living now in which the relationship between the entity that is charged with looking after culture its institution and its people are completely un theorized and in fact possibly no longer present.

[00:21:12]>> H it's fascinating.

[00:21:16]seems there's a a grim irony in there which I think you see broadly across the cultural landscape and I mean that at a at a national level where those who are ostensibly on the left of the political landscape and are typically hoping to be speaking truth to power and living righteous lives tend to find themselves serving it in some way. um as you say through state intervention. You've you've written as well Pierre that you believe the art world >> should be seen as the west in miniature.

[00:21:57]>> This is why perfectly selferving as a as a deployment. I've got two things about homosexuality and culture. These are the things I think about and write about.

[00:22:07]You chose not to interview about inversion, my my antihomosexual book.

[00:22:11]So, so we're going with this. I Yeah.

[00:22:13]So, ve very basically I think that artists are the downfall of everything because that allows me to comment on them now. But beyond this very glib glib glib point >> um there there has been a lot of belief by the new left for sure. I already referred to Herbert Marcusa for instance whose street theater was sort of an attempt to make a certain class of an intellectual um the ascendant political political actor. Um there is a belief that artists as intellectuals can open doors to power.

[00:22:52]I also disagree with your characterization that is it's not just the state that that leads to the corruption, the co-optation.

[00:23:03]>> We are in this really annoying moment at the end of neoliberalism that that while I also instinctively absolutely hate anyone who will just say, "Oh, it's capitalism's fault." We have forgotten that the state is now either synonymous or in such close competition with capital that actually its actions mimic capital. So if we went back to say Adonian critiques of of the cultural industries, I think they apply in the apex the fact that the things that we believe the slogans which we um to use your phrase deploy to speak to power those slogans are indeed produced by capital. Yeah. Like there there is absolutely no way out of this at this time. Um and that that there's the more depressing thing. You know, I I would like I would like the individual somehow, you know, the the the bits of my my consciousness that are deeply conservative are those that think that individual agency is indeed the beginning of a reconstruction that by thinking about things quite seriously, we get to move the needle somehow.

[00:24:14]>> Um I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of skeptical as to whether that freedom is afforded to us.

[00:24:23]The most depressing for me going back to you know why is it that culture matters to me in particular. The most depressing thing that I have heard voiced is that the bright doctrine that culture is no that the politics is downstream from culture that might no longer apply in in our near future. Um so it is it is possible that even though the art world sort of looked as a microcosm of will be arign arranging themselves even though we had evidence that George Soros started spending whole society through the open society first through investing in contemporary art and eastern you no interest in art as far as we know um that now these priorities um might be might be reversed and that's an interesting moment to to reflect on the art world because the art world mainstream has not yet understood this.

[00:25:18]It has not understood that it's continued production of these kind of globalist open borders quering decolonization discourses.

[00:25:27]It it might be all for absolutely nothing that the the movements are now preconfigured somewhere elsewhere which could be geopolitics for instance or but I don't know it's sort of above my pay grade to understand what might take over culture I'm thinking uh historical examples of patronage in the art world. So if you go back to the Renaissance, you can find Michelangelo and all the greats having some wealthy financial backer commissioning them to do works of great statue and sculpture and art and obviously the capital flows still today.

[00:26:21]What do you think it says about the mindset of the I'm not going to use the word elites but the leaders in the cultural the political the financial world comparatively then and now given if you compare the output of each of these eras one stands head and shoulders above the other. Is there something instructive about what we see based on the quality of >> disagree with so many of your conclusions in this? This is quite quite difficult in which you live.

[00:26:56]>> Um yeah, look look there has nothing to do with that. I mean I also share some of this reactionary tendency to to think that only if only we could go back and show me as the novice I am as far as I understand were horrific for most most of those involved. um you know things things would somehow get better. I how how did make things better get back to the Medici? I mean the the Medici established collections established sort of proto museums precisely for the um for the purpose of political and social and geopolitical and diplomatic manipulations that we have maintained um are states and private collections.

[00:27:40]Now I'm going I'm going to recommend a conversation I had with Nitan Shakad uh who wrote a book about wealth and museums. I forget the title. I'm if it's on my website this conver conversation.

[00:27:54]So she tracks the way in which all arts institutions from the private ones all the way from the Medici to the contemporary museum in the US have always reserved as the prime principle the reproduction of capital. So the underwriting of certain either cultural or indeed even tax risks by the state or by the people and so on and so on.

[00:28:19]Having said all this, I will concur with you and actually even deepen uh my my critique if not condemnation of the >> Mhm.

[00:28:30]>> the kind of patronage class particularly in a in a British context. I mean the US has a tradition of patronage about which I think it's difficult to generalize because it's massive and diverse and and has actually at the moment it's not producing anything evil. At the moment it's sort of like flatlining you know like the excesses of sort of woke hyperwoke 2020 culture have paused for a moment in the US. In Britain, we invested a hell of a lot in the 2000s, 20110s into developing private patronage for cultural institutions, which resulted in some kind of leadership and an emergent class of mid and lowcale philanthropists.

[00:29:18]Um, what the patron in Britain does not show with the Americans is any idea of humility. So I found it very frustrating as a gallerist to find that the demands that people made on one when they either donated money or or paid for work. It's like they they always wanted something extra. You go like mate, you know, this is legitimately worth £20,000.

[00:29:43]Dinner is extra, you know, having the artist fly over to for whatever. I'm not Greek island. Stupid example like that is extra. There was this kind of expectation that culture is such a fivolity that you could you could determine as the patron what that is.

[00:30:00]Would the medit not have been nearly demanding or the artist personalities or the you know the protetéé artist personalities or not is another question.

[00:30:10]What is happening now in the dissident sphere I think is very strange given given given the stated aims. So I said this to you before we started recording and this is sort of a bit bit of a downer I've experienced in the last few weeks having spent a lot of time in the company of people who should be funding things left right and center.

[00:30:38]I do not see that this new want to be particularly the kind of reactionary Christian conservatives which are of course not joined to the hip in anything because that includes free marketeteers. It includes protectionists. It includes all sorts of all sorts of economic orientations. I do not see that that class sees culture as anything but entirely frivolously um discretionary.

[00:31:06]And that might mean that there is a development project waiting for for someone like you and me maybe. Um because this did have to happen in the liberal art world. There was 20 years of like lobbying. How do we turn, you know, bored wives who want to who want entertainment on a Thursday evening while the while the husband is somewhere else? How do we turn them into people who feel an intellectual emotional investment in these industries? Um, but yeah, I'm not seeing I'm not seeing the the reactionary right at least spending any money on any culture. The barrier might be that the reactionary right is not seeing any reactionary art being made.

[00:31:47]And I will disappoint them by telling them that the reactionary art is not going to bring about the reaction the social reaction that they are hoping for. Um the these things cannot work like this. There was a reason that we stopped producing a certain type of portraiture by and large there and the the you know sculptures looks different now than it did in the late 18 1800s. Um modernity it happened. We had wars, things did change.

[00:32:21]Our society looks different. Our streets look different. And that's not to say that art must be evacuated of certain sort of idealism that it should not pick its vision of beauty. This is a word that that's quite quite quite popular in in in in conceptualization of aesthetic reaction.

[00:32:44]But it does have to speak to the people today. And the people today are not the people of 18 1880. They they really are not. Um, so I don't think that we can overcome this so straightforwardly without necessarily going through a project of like educating the tastes of of of of that kind of ascendant power power class. Um, my tiny bit is that when I write for the critic where I I which I where I write art criticism every month in the magazine and more often on the website for a readership of of mostly conservatives. I allow myself often to to challenge them by telling them, look, there's video art here. You should go and look at video art. It's not terrible. It is you look at video on your phone. You can look at video in a gallery. It can make you feel things.

[00:33:39]that can make you disagree with video art as an idea, but you should still look at it because this is what the people we call artists are making.

[00:33:50]Yeah. Um and on the other hand, the the kind of pattern is just just to round up, you know, that there's another type of dissident right that is a lot less self-righteous. Um because rather than be reactionary conservative, it sort of has I'm not going I'm not going to say fascist like but what's what's what's a you know there is a right that gets accused of being fascist that is not necessarily just tra traditional they they have an interest in aesthetics that has nothing to do with reaction has nothing to do with art history and that I'm finding quite quite interesting but I don't yet know >> how it relates to a conception of the people that that kind of politics of this slightly more militant right more more dissatisfied right a futurist right so to speak um how that relates to its people so we don't yet have a futurism there have indeed been attempts by some artists to reinvigorate 20th century futurism for a British context I don't think that's going anywhere particularly but the the aesthetics I see being proposed by those political groupings as one of a void. So for an example, if you recall memes, this came up in a conversation at the event at Vand that you that I hosted and you you led with Harrison Pitt and David Goodart. If you recall the memes of of Restore Britain, they in my assessment just sort of portray a lack. They show us under us, under our government, these people, these phenomena, these aesthetic elements will be absent from our country.

[00:35:42]Okay, that's great. But what will be present in our country? What what is it?

[00:35:46]Which which people um which people which which ideas, which colors, you know, to be to be really boring about it? That's all yet to to be developed.

[00:35:57]And maybe maybe that's a positive thing to end this this rambling answer to and the rambling jacuzz to all these people should know better and should support what we're trying to do for them.

[00:36:28]I agree. I, as you know, look around and realize that the issues facing Britain, the Anglosphere are manifold and they are driven by many things. the financialization of everything, mass immigration, all of the things that we speak about a lot within the cultural landscape. But culture is also produced by people. And you are absolutely right to put the onus on people to say what exactly is it that you are practicing and bringing into being that is a more positive vision that is a a living embodiment of the culture that you hope to see rather than only pointing at the things that you don't want to see or that you think is missing. You're absolutely right to bring that up and that void I think >> is perhaps explained by a shallowess almost to our our daily lives and perhaps how we've been swept up in what people call liquid modernity.

[00:37:38]And we can sit there and talk about how everyone could uh do more, be better, that it shouldn't be this way. And yet we spend so much time engaging in that that we don't actually get out there and make the contributions to create whose jobization that we want to be better.

[00:37:59]>> It's just it's just better to >> I'm not sure I have a have a great answer.

[00:38:04]I terrified myself and >> I don't know if you agree with that. I just wrote wrote about sort of question of which populism can can exist in any art world structure and thinking about these I refer to the American uh American art world co-opting community art at the beginning of neoliberalism. I'm sort of wondering whether whether UK aesthetics this kind of mass multipolarity of identities, ethnicities, cultures which the art world proper here tried to officially guide into some kind of idea of diversity. Diversity is a strength kind of narratives where that kind of UKification of our culture is not actually the next frontier. So the culture industries having collapsed they are no longer relevant but capital itself without the interface of of the institutions can just yukify absolutely everything until the point at which um that that becomes the official state culture. I mean we're not very far off from there in any sense are we? you know, they like UK aesthetics, they count on on X just the sheer volume of images that one, frankly, in the very polite bits of London where I live, one doesn't encounter that often. But it does look like Britain has already been devoured by this kind of fragmentaryary tick- tocky type type of interaction of the aesthetic and and the mediatic.

[00:39:47]How that how that is different from what happened under the guise of an official state ideology I think is both terrifying but but also interesting in a couple of ways. One as my friend Nina Power who I I I run this idea past pointed out well we we also have Islam. So Islam might might deal with all these ideas very very differently. So you know there are five British values might sound very very different when Sharia law is one of those values. I'm being obviously very glib this is not this is not a threat that I necessarily think we need well maybe maybe we need to think about it in cultural terms and and institutional state building terms.

[00:40:31]So scrap scrap that. But what I would countenance that that warning with is that I'm not entirely sure whether even Islamic culture would be immune from capital c coation. So you know that does adorno still still apply to to Islam probably if it happens in post neoliberalism.

[00:40:55]So here again, I have a feeling that the best solution I have to all of this is the same solution that that every middle-aged creative person or intellectual person tells you, well, at the end of the day, I can only do so much, which is to sit in my sofa and have difficult conversations with people who disagree with me about the extent of the of the ongoing collapse, but equally don't have any any access to any any great kind of transformational shift.

[00:41:25]Having said all this, I do actually feel incredibly optimistic like after co was such a low point for for our culture to believe in the ability of any cultural apparatus, any individual, any movement to gain any ground.

[00:41:42]But I think we are at a point at which you know there are so many for example there have been so many podcasts like yours there's a compliment here in this hetro hetrodox media sphere that after years of people just sort of glibly saying oh you know you could go and participate in the culture wars like this podcast precisely like yours which are serious which are above should you know shoulders above the kind of content that the sphere has produced produced seriousness produced an invitation to to whoever listens to whoever participates to actually build something next as opposed to just wallow in the misery of oh you know what they took away from us what you know and whe it doesn't matter whether it's migrant or capital or the combination of all of this or populists whatever your your boogeyman is I think we are now at a point where enough people in the cultural political ical intellectual field have had themselves pronounce the same diagnosis of the ailment that either they need to retire or they will produce something better.

[00:42:53]And I'm also encouraged by the fact that despite me not seeing much evidence of the Zuma generation being fluently able to participate in this conversation because frankly they had a really tough time being brought up by millennials who are super fragile and a lot of the Zuma generation also like came of age during co where they were told that the internet was both punishment and and every joy in life that can't have been good. There are significant factions of them who opt in to the conversations that you and I are having and I think this this is good. So yeah, we need more more individuals doing what we are doing. Hopefully not just crowding up the the very small monetizable media sphere, but like actually doing the thing that we say we believe in.

[00:44:06]Well, well, you and the team at Veramp host events. You put on courses, you have exhibitions, you even do book publishing now. and you're designed to do what I think a lot of institutions don't do or at least they do but shy away from various things and you host honest conversations about art and culture politics philosophy and this show as you well know deals a lot in the notion that recovery requires from building within the ruins it's uh the inspiration of King Alfred as he as he as he set set England on to be a unified nation having overthrown the Danes and then moved on with a moral vision. It's St. Benedict keeping the flame of civilization alive. I think that's what Verdan does. I know I might have uh overshot it a little bit uh using those figures but ultimately metaphorically that is what you are doing and you're showing that you're trying to build something outside of the institutional framework which has been crumbling and there are practical implications to that financial implications and emotional saying that ruins are beautiful and so we we get attracted to all of them project the institute outside of those ruins already on >> that people within them >> um >> wouldn't understand.

[00:45:31]>> Yeah, look this is kind of tricky and I have been trying many different forms of of what Verto is. So very very briefly Verto is named after Madame Verdang who's a character in post she runs a literary salon and I know there was there's no worse combination of two words in English than literary salon. Um I was I was supposed to solicit a laugh but never mind that. Um my daughter is possessive. She wants people to come only to her salon. and she she you know she she sort of runs a little cult on partic um so I'm I always place myself sort of at the center of of of of events everything we do here to say that I have a certain certain limitations but also to invite others to do their own thing in the way in those kind of flawed ways.

[00:46:29]At the same time there is such a need to produce counter institutions however small they are you know the team is you know it's it's me it's Nina who works with me a hell of a lot who who who gives me council and and two or three volunteers in publishing we have a much bigger team of there's five five of us because that's that requires commitment and expertise um but the institutional form itself is like annoyingly constantly and the discussion and it changes and it projects itself very differently depending on which interface it is that I'm at. And I have that freedom particularly because we're very small particularly because to my great shame we don't seem to have that much competition in a particular political and social sphere. Time and time again I get you know many times a week I get an email from someone what you're doing is so amazing to which I'm you know as is your compliment as well I I'm I'm very appreciative but also say you know you can meet in a pub with your friends and organize your own cultural field it's really not that difficult like what what is it that I'm doing other than put some things on a website and and organize a ticketing ticketing ticketing back end it's really not that much.

[00:47:51]So, so yes, the the difficulty is that we are forever sort of thrown between wishing to critique the institutions, do better than them, bypass the institution, rescue the good people from the crumbling institutions, but also not compromise on the thought that this all necessitates. like like time and again I'm presented with this idea that well if you want to make the more popular you would have to stop saying these things on your social media and I just laugh sorry why why why would I do this I have been expelled from the institutions why would I stop myself mixing content emotion and politics the way that by the way everyone else in the institutions allows themselves to do I'm I'm not I'm not better than any of these people you know I I political desires. I have hormonal swings and I also want people to come and listen to me being clever and challenging to other clever people.

[00:48:55]This is all this is all great. Um anyhow, the upshot is that I think what a culture needs is many more projects like like mine, many more projects that are smaller than this. And they do exist there the people do get together. There are now factions. Thankfully, we don't have we have been spurred to this kind of totalizing understanding of Dime Square that Manhattan weight went through, which was like the most anti-intellectual project we have ever seen that produced cult of a few personalities.

[00:49:29]Um, and not that many interesting artifacts as far as I'm concerned.

[00:49:36]But yeah, we are we are still at a point at which >> all that investment is yet to be realized and brought in. You know, the financial question is super important. I remain unfunded.

[00:49:49]This this I finally find baffling given that, you know, I I I know people repeatedly tell me, "Oh, you're the only place in London that does this." Okay.

[00:50:00]And where is this conversation going next? Um but now yeah I already complained about all of this. Um so yeah the learnings are very diffuse and I'm making a very you know my my stake is to like continue to throw things around in a very idiosyncratic way because I can because I've been thinking about culture for more than 20 years professionally.

[00:50:28]I know which arguments it is worth for me to have in public and I know that I need to keep on having the arguments with both sides. So it's a very small example of the event I had had with you which was like a right-wing and reactionary in some senses. This is not this is not a slight in any sense but the audience that showed up had a very particly political orientation. I also did an event that was attended primarily by Marxists from Platypus and followers of sublatian media like so Hegelian Marxists and psychonolytic Marxists and we also had an argument for an hour. This is good. We need to cultivate all of this. And what is I I guess the thing that would be depressing and would would give anyone pause is that literally 20 years ago the universities were capable of doing this.

[00:51:24]When I was coming up in the art world, it was in conversations at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London that I understood that people can sit behind a table and have a panel and say things that are worth hearing for another 50 in the in the room.

[00:51:40]But how why that is gone, it is frankly beyond me. So I'm yeah don't even have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to be clever and public. That's all so serious.

[00:52:11]you you've explicitly uh and implicitly spoken about the disinterestedness of not just the British right but British patrons in culture but then you also mentioned that compared to their American counterparts there's a difference in the appreciation what the patrons would expect before I ask my ultimate question that I ask all of my guests. You could tell us what the difference is between the British and the Americans and why you think there system of contemporary art in >> in in in the US that doesn't mean that this is stuck forever. um someone who I find quite tiresome as a thinker and even worse as an artist um called Hito Styro who's a German artist who sort of has this idea of the museum as a battlefield recently came out with this reflection that actually the the the sort of whitewashing and money laundering of the art world as a service is sort of losing its marginal benefits. So it might be that the system of patronage in the US begins to collapse in the art world for for that particular reason. It was no longer that useful whether for building legacy or for the tax benefits which do exist in the US unlike in the UK. Um this will no longer continue.

[00:53:43]That's one thing. There is also a generational shift by which we do see that zoomers, you know, the the the heirs to to fortunes are much interested in very different types of artifacts.

[00:53:57]Uh, you know, it's it's almost a cliche to say that they are more likely to collect sneakers than than than than Rokos.

[00:54:07]I I don't think we're even even there at at the moment. There are many other industries, experienced industries and other types of creative acquisive industries that will have absolutely no problem making their product a premium counted in a millions of dollars. In the same way that contemporary art and I was to a small extent, very small extent part of sort of wave of people trying to do this in in Britain in the 2000s. You know, how do you convince someone who's a lawyer or an investment banker that art is an investment class vehicle vehicle? It isn't. It really isn't. Like very little art has ever had that potential. But there is a type of rhetoric that convinces people that £50,000 gives you gets an investment. So the US has had a long tradition of um of investment in art that was primarily private. Britain of course did at the back of the industrial institutions but the state came in John Maynard canes and all that. Um one could one could say that what happened to Britain to to be to be different in that in that measure um from the US is the 20th century. We we were actually involved in a war in a way that required a complete reconfiguration of a state and its relationship to to its people after the Second World War. Whereas whereas the US never really engaged itself in its wars um in in deployment of personnel at the scale at the proportions that that that we did. I mean that there's probably quite a bit more more to this because the US did did also create a creative class through um through programs in the 1920s for massive investment in in cultural production.

[00:56:00]All of this to say that at the moment we have in Britain we have arrived at a point where certain philanthropic class is already mature but it's also waning at the same time.

[00:56:16]So, so we we we again have quite quite a lot to play for, I think. And and it might be that that different people um might need to be asked to put the the money where the mouths are.

[00:56:39]Okay.

[00:56:49]That was a fascinating analysis. Pierre, you have certainly kept me epistemologically humble in this conversation whilst also highlighting your own your own humility with your opening biographical statement as you well know as a big fan. And that's that's sort of an I question.

[00:57:09]What have you changed your mind on during the course of your life? having to wear mask more something more than what was over the age.

[00:57:19]>> Um but since you use the word epistemologically um I will I will refer to my PhD which I I dropped out of very recently and that that sort of goes into a detail of how I thought the deployment of artists was useful in social or political terms and I will try to frame it as a warning. So I started a PhD program in 2019 partly because I thought it would help me to think in public and it turned out that I could already do that. Um uh and I asked her with a question of what it was that how we could enable artists to draw on knowledges from other disciplines. So as a geek one of my degrees was in science. I worked in financial services for a bit alongside art. I kept on finding artists making art about art and the law, art and finance, art and climate change. And I sort of wondered why are all these projects so under the research? Why do artists know absolutely nothing about the law or finance or climate change yet give themselves permission to make these grand statements and institutions to sort of buy this and invest invest all of this. So I started my PhD um research with thinking that I would produce sort of a toolkit for enabling artists to think slightly more seriously to give them some idea of epistemic humility and then you know be somehow um incentivized to think about the the secondary disciplines the things that they wanted to correspond with somehow more seriously.

[00:58:56]And this happens quite often I think to people undertaking PhD research. Halfway through I had a crisis um and realized that I was completely wrong. That in fact I should devote my life to to stopping artists from making underresarched completely unwarranted claims on knowledges they don't have access to.

[00:59:19]Um, and I was looking at practices of like like forensic architecture who essentially use fancy graphs to to explain how evil the state is in its use of lethal force. Nothing nothing incorrect but you know at least we but but fundamentally this was like reorienting of artistic practices towards the regime of factchecking which I felt art was illplaced to to perform.

[00:59:45]And now in the warning, the reason that I felt that this needed to be undone or rather rethought is that I understood that art had historically as as it did in its most recent term as it moved to ideas from other um logical positivist type of disciplines like ballistics, like the law and so on had given up entirely on something that it used to be very good at in a way the very few arenas of life of practice in our lives are and that is the idea of belief and I don't even mean faith in religious sense but if we think about one of the roles of art as as being connected to propagating wonder propagating irrational attachment to certain ideas which is not always bad. Yes, not not every irrational idea is automatically demagogui.

[01:00:52]Um I have understood that one of the things that does happen to art as it makes these positivistic statements is that it erodess its ability to deal with the unprovable.

[01:01:06]And God, I want some art to convince me once in a while that 2 + 2 equals 5 in a way that I don't even understand that it's doing it to me. I don't require art to serve me with provable truth because if the truth is provable through mathematical proof for instance, I I can already do that. If the proof is available in language, I I already have ample access to that.

[01:01:36]But I do want art to to show me things that I cannot rationally conceive.

[01:01:43]And because I don't do drugs, I do still rely on art to to do this to me once in a while. And that's why I've changed my mind about art and epistemology.

[01:01:55]Very applied answer, but but it's quite fundamental, I think. And it it it sort of addresses the collapse that that I think we we refer to what it is that art no longer charges itself with with with doing.

[01:02:29]Well, you have clearly spent a lot of time throughout the course of your life figuring out where you stand here, which is why I think, and it's probably only half jokingly, that people suggest, and maybe even you suggest that you should be the minister of culture, but there are very few people who who grasp uh the whole gamut of the art world and the different perspectives that take place there and indeed the destin I can address the complaint that you'd like to tell has a exciting program we have symposium on for instance coming up I'm trying to work up a symposium on the artistic avenuard I am preparing a course on psychoanalysis as a critical tool with um Helen Rollins with the publishing team which includes Nina my my former co-editor Amean and Travis Jefferson and Emma Bitki we are working on releasing the debun no of Liam Blackford called the stud which is going to be absolutely fantastic. It's sort of like a Australian reproductive utopia stroke dystopia.

[01:03:57]Um we are also going to launch a series of titles early next year called Genius Loki which look at crime and geography and a sort of establishing a new genre in a way that we we propose that the criminality the things that shake societies are different even in the age of um globalization.

[01:04:18]What else am I doing? I'm writing column for the critic and I'm also trying to put together and this is actually the one thing I will make a fund funding call for. I'm trying to put together a fellowship that's already programmed just not yet funded. A fellowship for for young critics sort of 20s to to to early 30s people who would be able to um deal with the absolute poverty or the kind of cultural criticism in in the mainstream. While I will happily recommend a number of magazines indeed like The Critic and and a few others, I think the mainstream is has been terribly underserved the last the last few decades. And I would like to do something to bring back sort of seriousness and fidelity to the artifact in the way that we think about those things. So I'd like to I'd like to put together a sort of elite elite training program.

[01:05:15]Yeah. Other than that, I Oh, I I won't be up. Yes. Anyhow, yeah.

[01:05:25]Um, other than that, I tweet about sex and death almost every every day. So, so, you know, come come join.

[01:05:35]Well, I I I hope I hope to hear digital wallets being pulled out as we're speaking.

[01:05:52]Thank you so much, John. Thank you so much. My pleasure.

[01:05:55]>> I will make sure the links to your socials to ver are in the show notes.

[01:05:59]Thank you so much for coming on and giving thinking class an angle that hasn't often been explored and we will certainly stay in touch as we see your work develop. Pierre, it's been an absolute pleasure.

[01:06:16]The best