Over the first nine months and thirty episodes of this little podcast we have heard the stories of some incredible guests: artists, curators, collectors, conservators, and more – and the nuggets of wisdom that they have shared along the way have been truly invaluable. This week we’re trying something a little bit new, and we’re calling it The Advice Episode – compiled on this week’s show are all of the moments of our guests sharing hard earned expertise and advice. Featuring in order of appearance:  Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Magda Sawon, Lynn Hershamn Leeson, Cy X, Tina Rivers Ryan, American Artist, Gary ...

This week on the show we are diving back into exploring what it looks like to collect time-based media art outside of institutions, by chatting with another collector who has developed a real passionate focus on time-based media art. Alain Servais has been collecting digital art for many many years, and not only lives among the work in his home in Brussels, but also operates a loft space specifically dedicated to sharing the collection with the public and serving as an experimental space for guest curators to continually reinvent how Alain’s collection is seen. Just a heads up – this ...

An Anti-Catalog was the work of the Catalog Committee of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). A landmark publication of the 1970s, its purpose was to protest the Whitney Museum of American Art’s bicentennial exhibition, which was titled “Three Centuries of American Art.” The Whitney show featured John D. Rockefeller III’s collection of mainly eighteenth and nineteenth-century American art–a collection that featured only one African American and one woman artist. The Catalog Committee, which consisted of fifteen artists and two art historians, spent almost a year producing an eighty-page book containing articles and documents. Originally conceived as a critique ...

Developed through conversations with members of the art world and written with the help of lawyer Robert Projansky in 1971, Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer And Sale Agreement was designed to safeguard the economic interests of artists, particularly in the case of an artwork’s resale, reproduction, or rental. Intended to serve as an accessible document for all artists, the contract was written in an easily comprehensible style and was widely distributed through art journals and magazines—characteristics shared by much of the artwork Siegelaub was currently representing. Since its publication in English, French, German, and Italian, the document has been ...

This unspeakable horror was prepared by Stylus, a “global innovation research and advisory firm, which works with businesses to stimulate innovation and growth.” Full of quotes like “Globally, 69% of UHNWIs have become more conscious about displaying their wealth in public over the past decade,” it’s a guide to trends in maintaining wealth and well-being while assuring nobody resents you for it. There are suggestions for how luxury brands can stand out through charity or “meaningful minimalism” and coerce the desired UHNWI’s to their brands. Also included are tips for where and how to hide when society crumbles. In times ...

Artists have continually questioned their status and place in society. The widespread vision of the artist as an outsider from the peripheries of social life, a utopia seeker, a celebrity selling works for millions or an erudite nonconformist who voices his or her opinions in the public debate, has spawned many myths concerning their privileges and obligations in the contemporary world. The exhibition formulates a question about the way artists define their status and position in the realm of an ever-widening economic gap: that of the possibility to reconcile dreams of social justice with the needmof artistic freedom and autonomy. At the same time, the show highlights the tension between artists’ rather ...

Digital Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility is a non-fungible token artwork, first minted on August 30, 2017 at InterAccess in Toronto. The artwork is significant not only for being one of the earliest NFT artworks to be exhibited and minted in a legacy art gallery, but also for imagining, in 2017, the ways that non-fungible tokens could advance the conceptualist project of separating the commodity form of an artwork from the experienced form. It also explored the ways the separation changes a collector’s relationship to art. The Digital Zones tell a story about how different concepts of ownership are fundamental to the experience of an artwork. The ...

It feels as if there are more and more magazines about art, culture, lifestyle and the like, more and more titles, both local and international, both good and undistinguished. But what to do with them? Read and throw them away? Or stack and keep them after all? This text wonders about the (quality of the) quantity of art magazines and about what exactly defines those that survive even frequent changes of residence.

The Gulf War did not take place, as Baudrillard notoriously put it. But now something else has taken place, and it did not happen in the doldrums of virtuality, but in the streets and squares of Tunis, Cairo, Benghazi, and elsewhere. It seems that the prospect of an all-encompassing condition of techno-saturated anorexia, perhaps appropriate for a time when communications networks and the tools for producing reality were situated in the hands of governments and telecommunications tycoons, has been inverted. No one could have foreseen the perseverance of reality over mass-deception, the weaponization of communications networks in the hands of ...

In the February 2009 issue of e-flux journal, Luis Camnitzer suggested in his essay “Art and Literacy” that a core problem in education (particularly for artists) can be traced back to an early stage when one is taught to read and write, in that order. On one level, it is simple common sense to suppose that one can only begin to write after learning how to read. But, at the same time, this ordering also takes for granted that consumption must necessarily come before production—only after you consume knowledge will you then be capable of producing it. It is a fundamental ...

This week on Explain Me William Powhida and Paddy Johnson chat with Los Angeles Times staff writer Carolina Miranda about David Geffen’s $150 million donation to LACMA and the questions surrounding the gift. Will he bequeath his collection to the museum? Later, we discuss the recent gentrification wars in Boyle Heights, a rather strange description of the non-profit 365 Mission and solicit Miranda’s advice on must-see LA shows!

At UNTITLED, ART San Francisco 2020, Withersworldwide presented a lively conversation titled, “Fresh Perspectives on Collecting; What New Collectors Need to Know.” Beginning the process of collecting art can often be challenging for new collectors. Listen to a distinguished panel of experts discuss methods and tips on building an art collection with topics that range from current market trends and art financing to conservation and art insurance. Panelists include Kimberly Almazan, Special Counsel at Withersworldwide and Chair of the San Francisco Bar Association’s Art Law Section, Sophia Kinell, Regional Lead for the San Francisco Bay Area at Phillips, and Paul Becker, ...