Whitehot, the Franklin Edition
dissidentmuse.substack.com
Whitehot, the Franklin Edition
John Barrymore interviewed me yesterday on Twitter Spaces for Whitehot. There is a recording.
What it says in the subhead. The interview runs a bit over an hour and touches on all kinds of topics, including my Miami roundup for The New Criterion, whether we’ll ever see another Clement Greenberg, how AI art changes things and yet doesn’t, and how the museum sausage is made. This was my first Twitter Spaces experience but it seemed to go pretty well. I invite you to judge for yourself.
John Barrymore is a Miami-based artist. We know each other from many pleasant interactions on Clubhouse, and finally met in person this past February. My thanks to him and to Noah Becker, proprietor of Whitehot Magazine.
The next time one of these rolls around I’ll try to let readers know in advance so they can tune in.
I'm glad you articulated that, for practical purposes, officially public museums can and do operate essentially the same way as private ones. Given public funding, the problem with that practice is beyond obvious and quite serious, no matter how oblivious to it such museums appear. The regrettably-named Pérez Art Museum in Miami is a good example of that. And yes, my response to said practice has been to walk away, not just out of lack of interest but out of active disgust.
One wonders how a publicly funded museum could possibly operate as if its only audience (that matters) were the museum staff and a small clique of local "major collectors" and related art scene insiders. The public, not to say the great unwashed, is in effect treated as incidental, meaning it can take the museum's programming or leave it, but it's no skin off the museum's nose either way. I won't spend a penny on such an outfit, and even on a free-admission day, I won't pay to park in its garage. In other words, if you want my support, especially monetary, you need to deserve it--on my terms.
That was a really good interview. Let me know, when you start your own Twitter spaces on art