Hi Crowd!

Almost 10 years ago I began flirting with the idea of getting a PhD. A friend of mine got one and I thought, “oh that sounds cool.” This is entertaining for many reasons, not the least of which is that I’m a college dropout. This was, in part, some of what I was doing while we lived in Tokyo and the idea went from crazy idea to viable reality smack into invisible wall and eventually thrown to the wayside, which is fine because it was a crazy out of nowhere idea to begin with. I still sometimes think it would have been an interesting thesis to write, but also far too big of a thing just to write for my own entertainment.

Around the time I was realizing it wasn’t going to happen Tara thought maybe it could. (For her). She’d been hanging out with yamabushi and exploring shinrin-yoku and had an idea which she pitched to the forestry school at UBC which ended up being the primary reason we eventually relocated from Japan to Canada. Years of researching and testing and writing and rewriting and calculating and re-rewriting she finally handed in her thesis earlier this year and last month took the walk to become Dr Tara Tiger Brown. The work she put into this has been awe inspiring to watch, and I’m so proud of her. She’s humble but this was the first human test subject project at UBC Forestry ever and she’s pretty much the worlds expert in forest bathing at this point so if you have questions she has answers and you can follow along with one of her related projects over at Silent Trails.

We rushed back to Vancouver for these celebrations after a somewhat spontaneous trip to Bhutan with friends. If you follow either of us on the socials then you probably saw some of those exciting photos along the way, though next time we'll know not to drink the water. Bhutan is one of the only carbon negative countries in the world (maybe the only?) and has been mining bitcoin for a decade. The constitution mandates that 60% of the country be forest covered (it's over 70% right now) and rather than focusing on income they measure Gross National Happiness. We met the king. We learned about Night Hunting. We were protected by dicks. He heard stories of the divine madman and mythical creatures like dragons, yetis and tigers. If you just thought "wait tigers aren't mythical" so did we and we were informed that just because we know they are real now doesn't mean they weren't mythical before, and when we eventually know yetis and dragons are real they will also still be mythical. Needless to say it's a super interesting place that is off most people’s radar but worth looking into, and I'll write more about it later.

I was just in Tokyo for a few things including the launch of Chiba Tech's School of Design & Science and the annual New Context Conference which some of you know I used to help organize and also where Safecast was born all those years ago. The theme this year, the morning sessions anyway, was Zen and AI which I found fascinating. There’s no shortage of doom and gloom when it comes to AI discussions so consciously taking more of a philosophical perspective and considering alternative futures and interpretations was refreshing. One idea that came up with several of the speakers was the aspect of feeling, so not “do I like this?” or “do I dislike this?” but rather “how does this make me feel?”

As an artist the “feeling” thing is no joke. I often talk about how I’m trying to tell a story and create an atmosphere but there’s a translation gap in the mix. How I want people to feel and how they feel are not 1:1, nor is how I feel when I’m making it. And that’s something we (artists) have to be OK with, it’s outside of our control and we’re trusting the viewer to have their own experience with our work. With AI, and AI art specifically (even writing) a frequent criticism is that the AI isn’t feeling anything and isn’t trying to convey any feeling, so whatever experience the viewer has is somehow hollow, even if they don’t know it. This ties into the idea that artists must suffer (or have experienced suffering) to be able to create art. AI can’t suffer, so if AI produces work that invokes an emotional reaction in a viewer, the viewer is supposed to disregard that reaction because the source didn’t suffer for it - or some would argue anyway.

I don’t want to get into that debate right now because it’s sort of beside the point, but I do find thinking about that final bit interesting - focusing only on the reaction. How does this make me feel? This also relates to the balance between concept and execution. Ideally we want a good bit of both, though good high execution with low concept is generally much more welcomed than high concept low execution. If you like the art at face value, learning the concept behind it can improve that, but if there’s no concept you still have the attractive visual. So then, what’s the difference between an artist with no concept and an AI both producing visually attractive work? Again not arguing for one or the other here as much as I am picking at the overall ideas. Personally I’ve played with high concept and both high/low execution as well as no concept to various receptions (I think my Two Bit Punks collection suffered from perceived low execution even though people seemed to appreciate the high concept).

While listening to the talks I realized that “how does it make me feel?” Is relevant when thinking about noise (music) too. Because explicitly, by design, the execution is “low.” Of course that’s not actually true, there’s often considerable work going into the execution but that’s intentionally obfuscated because the point is the experience not the production. It’s about the feeling, it’s not like a song with lyrics and perfectly timed chord changes that is specifically trying to make you feel this one specific thing, but it is about making you feel something. 

Even this week I'm excited about the brand new Breakfast Audio SLAB pedal that I just got, which is a beautiful piece of industrial design, and a fair bit of electrical engineering making a really lovely distortion pedal which an actual musician might be able to write some powerful songs around. Me, I'm going to put it in a chain with 3 other other distortion pedals, a muff, a fuzz, and a few reverbs which will obliterate it into absolute chaos, but that's kind of the idea. Using my guitar as the initial source, it's less about which notes I'm playing, and more about how I'm playing them and when. In a way music is about how what it sounds like makes you feel, but noise is really just about how it makes you feel. Also, there are other distortion pedals available, why this one? Duh, look at it. It a giant slab of aluminum, it's about how you feel when you look at it.

Speaking of feelings...a few weeks back I sent out a post saying something like “all the sudden I'm feeling like I want to open an art gallery again” and it was one of the most responded to things I’ve said publicly in a while, the vast majority of people essentially saying “do it.” Of course an urge to do something and an executable plan to do something are very different things but it still got me thinking - what did everyone envision they were encouraging me to do? The more important question I realized is what/why now, and what/why is that different from before? This gets especially interesting now after this week’s surprise Blum & Poe announcement that they are closing all their gallery locations and transitioning to a private studio model with no set artist roster.

The gallery business was hard. It was great too, and I met several people through it who have become life long friends, but it was hard. The two biggest hurdles we faced were fierce competition from “rival” galleries without the same budget restrictions poaching artists and collectors (actively, intentionally). One gallerist was famous for doing high profile “group shows” which artists would feel honored and excited to be invited to, and an hour before the opening they would be presented with a multi year exclusive contract and be told if they didn’t sign it their piece would be removed from the show. Another would tell collectors inquiring about pieces in upcoming shows, that they were being reserved for “loyal collectors” who weren’t buying work from other galleries. Brutal cut throat shit from people who would smile and shake your hand if they saw you in person. "It's just business!"

Art Fairs also changed the entire landscape and increased costs without similarly increasing profits. Instead of hosting a show and selling work to local collectors, we'd host a show and hear collectors were interested but saving up for art fairs, then ship work around the world only to have the same local collector see it at the fair and want to buy it, then ask if they could just pick it up at the gallery later, and also ask for a regular/local buyer discount since we didn’t need to ship it to them. “You are shipping it back to the gallery anyway, right? I'll just grab it there!” It just became unsustainable without a deep pocketed benefactor or a trust fund. 

To be fair, I wasn’t very good at playing the game either. I didn’t suck up to people the way it’s expected, and I had a low tolerance for bullshit/drama/games which others in the industry seemed to really enjoy. 

Blum & Poe (our neighbors in Culver City circa 2005) was orders of magnitude larger with several physical locations in major cities around the world and a roster of artists that dream were made of. Though they were also sort of famous for not “playing the game” as noted in this hot take that position wasn’t entirely consistent. So while they lasted 20 years longer than I did, I’m sure that wasn’t without headache and can only guess what lead up to this decision. Of course this announcement is monumental, and the shockwaves will be far reaching. I’m genuinely curious to see how it plays out, and sending posi vibes to gallery staff and represented artists who are probably reeling. What’s next, but also what does this mean for the other galleries, and is this just the first sign of a larger change that is still coming for the industry? Just this morning Adam Lindermann also announced he’s closing his gallery and going back to just being a collector. No private studio behind the scenes dealing, just pure fan mode.

At the same time, Ryan Zurrer just announced that Noah Bolanowski is joining 1of1 as Managing Director and Eli Scheinman, broakerer of every deal you've heard of recently, updated his Twitter bio to note that he’s now an advisor to Art Basel, and some not insignificant part of the $25M grant Node Foundation launched with is going towards building an exhibition space in Palo Alto. So it's not that things are over, but that they are changing, and people are making changes too. So given all that, what the hell am I thinking? Well I'm not really, I was just kind of musing though there is something really exciting about being a part of shaping the art world, which I truly believe extends out to the rest of the world as well. Artists are the voices, the observers and commenters of the now, and the people paying attention follow them and take inspiration from them back to their own lives and build from that. I think there's a moment happening right now, or about to happen, which will be monumental and while I think I'm in a place to see it, there's nothing quite like participating. But at the moment I have no solid plans, but who knows what tomorrow will bring.

For today, I'm appreciating the Peacock Chair. On it's own, depending on how much wicker furniture you grew up around, it might be missable. Relegated to a corner or picked up at a garage sale with the assumption there might be a good story behind it. But you'd have no idea of it's roots, it's history, where it's been, and what it's projected. Lounged in by Huey P Newton and Morticia Addams? It's storied history runs deep, especially these older ones which were likely made by inmates in the Philippines. It's a whole thing, and that's part of the weight they project, even though I imagine they are actually quite light.

This reminds me of something else I wanted to tell you but that's going to be a whole thing, so I'll leave you with that for now and work on something else to follow this up with soon. Promise.

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I'm going to go watch the Grok 4 launch livestream and so how hard they try not to talk about MechaHitler.

-s