Context: Jerry Saltz on Art as the Greatest Operating System

[00:00] Welcome to Season 1, Episode 2 of Context, Views on Crypto and Culture, presented by Boys Club. [00:06] With me, your host, Blake Finucane. [00:09] Today, we welcome Jerry Saltz to the podcast, one of the most legendary, highly decorated, highly respected, and groundbreaking art critics of our modern era. [00:20] This interview is so inspiring and energizing. [00:23] He talks about how the acts of making and engaging with art are so incredibly personal, [00:29] It takes radical vulnerability to do both well. [00:32] You have to trust yourself and your taste and how something makes you feel. [00:37] That's how you know it's good art. [00:39] It doesn't matter what anyone else actually thinks. [00:41] And I believe this mindset will help a lot of listeners in developing their point of view of what makes good crypto art, among many other things. [00:50] And Jerry has a real call to action in this episode. [00:53] Make, create, and build. [00:56] Do not hold back. [00:58] Whatever your art is, whether that's building a company, a product, writing, making podcasts, making crypto art. [01:05] Whatever it is, committing yourself to produce... [01:08] This is the only way to develop your point of view and get better. [01:12] I think you'll get so much out of this episode, even if you're not interested in traditional art. [01:18] As the way he speaks and frames his ideas... [01:21] really apply to anything you're working on building. [01:23] whether that's personal or professional. [01:26] It was a dream of mine to speak to him. And what can I say? Boys Club makes dreams come true. Let's get into the episode.

[01:42] I have the tremendous pleasure today to welcome American art critic Jerry Saltz onto the show. He's the senior art critic and columnist at New York Magazine, a Pulitzer Prize winner, [01:53] a New York Times bestselling author. And he has a fantastic new book out called Artist Life. It's right beside me here. And Jerry, also upon doing my research, [02:03] I also stumbled upon the fact that you are a Pisces Aquarius cusp being born on February 19th. As am I. [02:10] Wow. Thus, we are astrologically aligned. I think that's a very strong start to our interview. [02:17] Now, I will just say, you know, my personal experience, his work is accessible. It's encouraging. It's inspiring. Being art as life for me was so energizing. The way, Jerry, that you're able to show what the power of art can do, what it represents, the hope and importance of art and artists. It's just amazing. [02:38] A dream to have you on. Thank you so much for being on the show. [02:42] Thanks, Blake, for having me. Honestly, we're all pretty much alone in our studios and offices and secretly thrilled when anybody wants to ask us anything. So I'm very, very grateful to you and the listeners. [03:12] in technology.

[03:13] art in the market, art in its display, as I think you write so eloquently and insightfully about all those topics. And they're so relevant to the movement and the medium that we've seen come up in the last couple of years being crypto art. [03:27] So let's get into it. I want to start with a quote from your 2015 essay featured in the book that's called Is There Great Art on Instagram? You write first Facebook, then Twitter. [03:40] then Instagram, all changed the way I see criticism in the art world. Social media makes our world much bigger, more participatory, and even possibly more horizontal. It makes me think hierarchies can be flattened, but there are many ways to form communities. [03:55] So with this quote, considering the onset of TikTok, NFTs, and crypto art, since you published the essay in 2015, [04:05] Do you see these new platforms and mediums working in the same way as the existing ones that you mentioned? [04:12] Being agents of more participatory and accessible art. [04:17] absolutely i see all of this as a game changer a game changer as much as the invention of electricity [04:27] These are what I call perfect inventions that in a way you don't need a guidebook to know how to use a light bulb, for example. A perfect invention is the light bulb, the camera, birth control, airplanes.

[04:57] what that is, but as far as art, [05:01] I would say that social media turned out to be a game changer, a complete game changer, that when I got into this, Blake, and as listeners may hear as we keep talking, I have no degree. I'm 71, so stop listening. [05:31] years old, because like you, you big babies listening to this, I was listening to the demons inside of me saying, well, I have nothing original to say. I have bad ankles. I'm an idiot. I don't know how to schmooze. I didn't go to the right schools. I'm poor, blah, blah, blah. I'm sorry, [06:01] You don't mind me backing up to answer a really important question. Yeah. When I was 40 years old, I was driving from New York to Florida. [06:10] and New York to Texas once a month, one or the other. [06:14] I had started as an artist. [06:18] I made art. I sold art. My art was written about. In the United States, I got something called the National Endowment for the Arts Grant, which was a huge sum of money, which I took to move from Chicago to New York. It was $2,000. This would have been sometime around 1980.

[06:42] But when I got to New York, I listened to those demons that I was just talking to all of you about. I self-exiled and became this long-distance truck driver. After about 10 years of doing this, I never stopped seeing art shows. But after 10 years of doing this, I realized that I was so miserable that anything, [07:12] doing. So I taught myself, I thought, oh, I'll be an art critic. That must be easy. [07:19] Thank you. [07:19] And has anybody in your audience, anybody listening to this that has ever tried to write will know? And Blake, you know this because you say you have how many degrees? Just two, Jerry. Just two. Just two. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I have four honorary PhDs. I know, one of them from the University of Chicago. I can add that to the intro. Just a couple casual universities with PhDs, yes. [07:49] If anybody listening to this wants to give me an honorary PhD, I'll come, give a killer lecture and do it for free if you give me an idiot degree. [08:01] So, [08:02] I learned to write by reading the [08:06] Art World Porn Magazine, which of course is a magazine called Art Forum. I want every making person, every creative person, every artist, every crypto artist to at least make it their business to look at this magazine. It's a porn magazine because you'll be envious of everybody in it.

[08:36] week, but this is how I learned to write, which is the way they still write, which is something like the late commodified object of post-Cubist or post-capitalist society finds itself interrogating the dialectic between nature and culture to find a haptic and liminal space. [09:06] And eventually I learned to... [09:08] Not right that way. [09:10] A long story short, you can see I don't wear authority well. I aspire to it, but I can't don the mantle of it because I don't believe in that kind of hierarchy, frankly. I think anybody listening to this has a shot. [09:28] Anybody listening to this, if you'll get off your big baby lazy rear and just get to work, work, work, work, work. [09:39] you've got a shot. So I believe... [09:43] that for me, [09:45] long answer to your beautiful question is that social media for me inverted and [09:55] and bottomed out an old structure which was pyramidical. That is, of the one speaking to the many. [10:03] that I found by accident in the mid-2000s on whatever the site would have been, Facebook, where we all used to post the status. It was called, What is Your Status? Oh, I remember.

[10:18] Yes. I'm going to the dentist, you would write. With a picture, maybe. Maybe post a photo of yourself at the dentist as well. Yes. And then at the end of the day, you would come home, look at the comments, and it would have sad emoji, you know, laughing emoji. [10:48] And it said, I think the Marlene Dumas recent show has plateaued that for these reasons and those reasons that she's kind of running on empty. [11:02] And this is not so good. And then I came home that evening and I found 500 comments on my Facebook tearing me a new one. [11:13] And I had a revelation, I swear. I saw that I could invert the model of the one speaking to the many as the art critic to make it the many to be able to speak to one another on the one hand. And on the other, I understood that, [11:38] I could be a kind of moderator of this platform by making one incredibly simple rule. You can attack me and call me any name you want, but you may not attack any other person in this thread a name. So within a fraction of a second, I made what is still the rule for me, and it became

[12:08] anymore. I'm told that whatever I post on Instagram is still there, but I have no idea. You know, when you get old, this is what happens. But what happened is, in short, [12:22] is that my Facebook page became a kind of bar, a kind of great club where everybody could go that was already alone and compare ideas, and it was safe relatively quickly. [12:38] and accredited because I couldn't attack you. You can only attack me. [12:44] In around 2014, I used to be on the art world top 100 power lists, and I thought, [12:54] This is cool. I love this. Even though they're all completely ridiculous, and they select only the super curators and the richest galleries and their advertisers. But around that year, Art Review from London wrote in their entry on me, if Jerry Salt continues to practice art criticism online, [13:24] And I thought, [13:26] Fuck off. I want to go out into the wild blue. I want to be myself. I want to fail as myself. I want to push myself as hard as I can. I want to learn from the collective. I want to learn from the group mind. I don't want just to be the authority. Long story short.

[13:51] Okay. [13:52] whether you like social media or not, and of course it's a love-hate relationship, it changed the game. More people could take the field than ever took the field before, including a four-time loser like me, who was then, probably in his 50s or 60s, still just starting. [14:18] Interesting. That's an incredible answer. Thank you so much for going through your background. It made no sense. No, no, no, no. It's so helpful, I think, because it paints a picture. Again, I think you're so bold and you're so full of hope and optimism in terms of what's actually possible and what then social media has been able to actually do for you and can continue to do for artists. It changed my life. And I think it's made a lot more artists feel a lot more visible to a lot [14:48] And it's just changed the game. It's made it more fun, certainly. Do you think that with social media that... [14:58] I find now that there's a lot of artists that are making work particularly for a screen. [15:04] Whether that's your personal computer, whether that's your iPhone. And that then changes the way that like art making really happens because the medium has is so different and you're making it then for reproduction and circulation immediately in ways that we've never seen before.

[15:27] I think while that's true, that every tool, every medium tends to have that algorithm built into it. I think that art is the greatest operating system that our species has ever created. [15:44] developed to explore consciousness. [15:48] You... [15:49] you embed consciousness and material into, [15:57] You embed consciousness and thought into material. [16:02] enter social media, enter the digital now in the last couple of decades. To me, a digital file is [16:12] is material. I make no distinction of the digital file that you're embedding in social media and making that file public, usually for free, than a billion-dollar oil painting. To me, it's all [16:42] A digital file is obviously material. Words are material. I'll go a step further and say something that no one in this audience will believe, but I actually, for that reason, don't even believe in copyright. I truly believe copyright.

[17:01] Well, maybe all of you don't believe in it, but I truly believe if you took my book, my most recent book, Art is Life, [17:09] and reprinted it. [17:12] and signed your name to it, I have no problem with you saying that the book is by you, Blake, and that if you can make a profit off it, it's fine with me because you took my material and did something with it. We in the art world know that one plus one is [17:33] equals three. That if you take your material... [17:38] and combine it with me, my material, you're going to get a third new material. So if you want to take my negative review of this podcast and change all the negative words to positive, I'm fine with that. You're just taking my work. I don't believe, I'm sorry, people, in ownership. [18:08] disagree with this. I make work that is stolen, that people take the money from what I do, and I'm fine with that. I'm sorry. I know we're going to disagree on this, but that's what I believe. I think that's what the algorithm wants. It's trying to [18:27] reproduce itself. What's so interesting about art

[18:32] and the algorithm so far in this operating system is so far art has stayed well ahead of AI art. Because AI art can only plug in algorithms that already exist, other people's ideas. It hasn't been able to quite [18:55] create an [18:57] a new work of art. It's a combination of, I know you're going to disagree, with many other works of art that still has not created, as it were, a new genre. It's like the way that Mary Shelley woke up one morning and wrote, overnight wrote a book called Frankenstein that began with other [19:27] A sentence that began something like, on a dark and stormy night, Victor Frankenstein was trying to create a new human body. [19:40] She took all those ideas and created a genre the same way Scott Joplin took classical music, changed the time signatures and the chord progressions, and invented ragtime in the next way that the blues is invented. The point being, and yet another too long answer, is genres are gigantic structures. Yeah.

[20:06] substructures, machines, operating systems that then give birth to new things. Right now, AI is at the beginning of its journey. It still does what all artists do. You plug in an idea and [20:27] and out comes something. And to me, that's really fucking thrilling. The internet is a game changer. [20:37] All of you are talented if you just get to work. Make bad AI art. Make bad painting. Make bad sculpture. Make bad lithography. Digital art is no better and no worse, no more and no less than painting, a pencil, photography. I don't care what you embed your thought in. I don't care. [21:07] I mean, I think where I would come back to is, you know, and you could come back to me, but the technology, the medium itself – [21:17] comes with very stringent conditions or can that seem new to me in that, [21:24] The immediate transaction from me to you of an NFT is, [21:29] creates very clear ownership. Ownership being I hold it in my wallet and I can see how much oftentimes how much you pay for it. So there's this, I guess, transparency that exists on the

[21:44] Um, that, uh, [21:46] Great. Good. I'll accept that. Do you think that creates any new conditions for artistic creation or you can build that into – [21:56] practice in a new way or not? That's not interesting to you. [22:01] To me, there's two answers to that. I think any new condition will spawn new ideas. Every new medium creates a million possibilities, and that the medium only dies when every one of those possibilities have been explored. In other words, no medium, once it comes into being, [22:31] disappears and then we don't know about it. Am I interested that I can know how much you paid for it? Not particularly. I don't really know what anybody pays for anything. I'm not that interested in judging your art as based on its medium, to be perfectly frank. I'm interested in art that [23:01] I'm not judging your art based on the material it's made. I'm judging it based on what do you do with those conditions. [23:10] And, you know, [23:12] Do you think then with that, there's no special criteria or no special kind of

[23:19] Outlines that make a good crypto artwork versus a good painting or sculpture or installation, you would all judge them through the same criteria? More or less, I would judge it through the same criteria. And I'm afraid... [23:36] I don't know the criteria. The criteria is, as it's always been and always will be, subjective. You cannot prove that Vermeer is better than Beeple. [23:51] You sense it. You know it. It's like the Supreme Court judge that had to judge what is pornography. And he or she said, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. I would say that I'm judging your NFTs by a same abstract set of standards as it were my own as the way I judge every art. And you [24:21] Yes, there is consensus that Vermeer is good or Rembrandt is good, but sometimes you look at a Rembrandt and you think, [24:32] It's kind of brown. A bit dark. It's pretty dark. Yeah. Yes. And so then you're... [24:39] asked by the group mind that has decided that this art is good, right? What is [24:48] What would you like about something if you were the kind of person that liked it? That's what I always ask myself. But still, your Hamlet is different than my Hamlet, and my Hamlet is never the same each time I see it. These are the standards. What do you do with material, you dumb artist? What do you do with scale? Surface. Surface.

[25:14] color, medium, [25:17] Touch, time, space. What do you do with the conditions of your particular art form, be it photography, NFTs, dance, sewing, or tapestry? [25:32] that can might reach me and break into eternity for a split second, like ABBA, Dancing Queen. How did that happen? We don't know, but we can explore and get inside of it. So the answer is no. I don't judge your dumb NFT any different than I judge a dumb, all-white painting. [25:57] I hear a lot of people, when I talk to them about crypto art, they go, well, I'm not really an art person. I don't really get it. I don't know what I think is good or bad. That's bullshit. Everybody knows what they think is good and bad. You just have to get very quiet inside, Blake, as you know, you get very quiet in yourself. And you never ask what something means. You ask not what a work [26:27] A work of art, be it NFT or macrame or music, is something that's doing something. It's a verb. And the strange thing about it, Blake, is there's never been a time in recorded history when we haven't had art.

[26:50] that kind of verb magic [26:54] priest craft, as it were, to keep going. If we didn't need art, [26:59] It has no other use other than we need it. We just don't need it, know what we need it for. [27:07] You don't understand Mozart. [27:09] Never ask that. You experience it. And so with an idiot NFT... [27:16] It's confined often to a screen either the size of a desktop, an iPad, I'm the only old person still using an iPad, or an iPhone. [27:28] All of these technologies will be gone in 13 or 14 years. We'll be looking in different ways. All of this will seem ridiculous. It's what are you doing inside of that arena? That's all I'm interested in. I love that. And I think that will be really helpful to people in terms of building up. I want to use the word confidence because I think that what you're talking about is confidence in... [27:54] like viewing art actually is a reflective of confidence in yourself and your heart and your soul and your viewpoint. [28:01] Absolutely. Blake is telling you all the truth, my loves. What she's saying is what Proust has said. Every reader, when he or she is reading a book, is reading themselves. Every viewer, what Blake is saying, is not looking at a painting, say. You are looking at yourself.

[28:31] looking at, what you're reading is yourself. And you are the living only authority on yourself, person. You and only you know how you're reading something. Of course you're scared, but I want you to know something. [28:48] Every artist is afraid while they're making their work, but every work of art has courage in it. Every person looking at a work of art is kind of afraid. They don't know what the hell this is. I don't know what a Vermeer is. I'm afraid, but you have courage while you're looking at it. Have faith. Certitude is. [29:14] is the enemy. [29:16] To me, a certitude, certitude is the lack of, [29:19] of faith, the lack of courage. It gets inside of rules. It says, these are the rules. This is right. It's so male. [29:29] It's so male. Men can only count to two. Good, bad. Black, white. Right, wrong. Fuck off. Nobody knows anything. The world is amorphous, a cloud. And the digital space that many of you inhabit [29:47] has become too male. [29:51] it's become too male. I made an NFT and I found that the space was very bro, very quickly. And I would say to the men in this space, the same thing I have to say to myself, you know, nothing, Jon Snow, to quote Game of Thrones. Exactly, to quote Game of Thrones. And that's why I think the boys club is so important because we certainly are trying to push through those spaces and make

[30:21] to everyone else. [30:23] How are you doing that? I need to know. Yeah. So I think content like this is really important where we're having more accessible conversations. Yeah. [30:35] I think that we have a lot of events that happen. So we have a really, really active community. We have Zoom meetups. We have office hours. We have zines. We have – [30:50] kind of a bunch of different levels of entry points for people to ask questions, whether they're like super crypto people or whether they're just starting out and making sure that people just have time and space to ask questions and actually participate in ways that work for them. And I think that people, I mean, that's a universal thing. I think participation, people are like, I kind of want to, but I don't even know what participation looks like. [31:20] again comes back to confidence being with yourself and sitting with those very uncomfortable feelings of, okay, what am I doing? This is the crux of it. How do I jump in? [31:34] I love that you're saying that. We're all scaredy cats. I was scared to talk to you, Jerry, because I admire you so much, and you've made it so kind and lovely for me. So there you go. [31:46] I love hearing that I could have scared anybody. If any of you ever look at a picture of me, I'm a short, overweight, bald, Jewish man, you know, a loser. So when I look at you, I'm in shock that you would want to talk to me and with your knowledge base. So here's the thing.

[32:08] 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of all artists make money. The problem in the art world and the crypto world is that 99% of the attention is given to the 0.001% of the artists making money. This is a world out of balance. What's so beautiful about crypto is... [32:32] And this is different from my distant point of view that knows fuck nothing, is that while a few artists are making a lot of money, and that's who gets the coverage, there are many artists making money. [32:49] some money. And that to me is the key because I want to tell you what the definition of success is. [32:58] The definition of success is time. [33:02] to have the time to make your art, your bad art, your shitty art. I want all artists to have time and money, the good, the bad, and the very bad. So that includes me, you, and anybody listening to this. And that [33:23] If you're working 40 hours a week, [33:26] That's hard. [33:27] I've done that. I've worked 70 hours a week. I would have to go back to being a truck driver if I got displaced. The point about NF fucking Ts and crypto and digital art is it allows a lot more artists to make a little more money, and a little more money will give you a lot of

[33:49] more. [34:04] and time. Let me give a piece of advice, Blake. I need it. [34:09] I want it. [34:11] Make. [34:12] An enemy... [34:13] of envy. [34:16] Envy makes you small. Envy makes your eyes look out, constantly scanning this horizon, and it only sees the other. It stops seeing you, and it will make you bitter. It will eat you alive, and it will make you a buzzkill. It makes you boring. It makes you cynical, and it will eat your work alive. I mean, social media just creates so much envy, though. You [34:46] But, you know, all you're looking at is people's best moments. And, you know, in a crypto investment perspective, you know, how much money this person made, how early they were on this. [34:55] You know, it's a hard balance. I don't disagree, but you're going to have to make an enemy of that constant human feeling. Of course, that's human. But then get on with it, you big babies. I'm sorry you didn't win that particular lottery. The lottery that you're going to win is the one you win. And I promise you, any artist working is a success. I'm sorry.

[35:25] me. Just keep it to yourself. Don't be an asshole. It's hard to not be an asshole, but just chill. You don't really know the trauma that anybody that you're envious of has gone through. You have no idea, John Snow. You just don't know. You don't know who's living with cancer, who has been abused, [35:55] And I'm sorry you have all this baggage, but every artist who ever lived has baggage, and [36:03] Baggage is art. That is your art. You have to be radically vulnerable artists. Just make it out of yourself. Don't try to be right. Try to be yourself. Don't try to be the most expensive. Just try to fake out at least five people to buy your bad art and you'll have a great life. [36:33] success looks like making art and actually having the time to do that. One of the, one of the other quotes I want to pull out and one that stood out to me and, and was kind of continued throughout artist life is money and art always had sex together in public. They're just doing so now more than ever. I think that, [36:54] My read on it is that crypto art seems like a new iteration of this, that NFTs are actually a new level of financialization of art because I will tell you.

[37:06] The medium, the container in which it's made in, this NFT, [37:11] operates on the same system as the money that's used to buy it. So, you know, commonly it's Ethereum, the digital currency used to buy an NFT, both on the Ethereum blockchain. There is like a total... [37:25] Like it's totally horizontalized. Now, um, [37:30] I wanted to get your thoughts on if you think that that's relevant at all in terms of a framework to actually engage with. But I do think there's something new with crypto art in the technology itself and money. [37:46] I think there's the difference again, and again, I'm sure I'm wrong because I know nothing about it. Jerry, you know it all. This is everything to me. We all know everything, but I wanted to not put down NFTs. Let me go back several steps, then get back to sex. Okay. [38:09] the art world instantaneously rejected nfts for two reasons one [38:16] was Beeple. [38:18] It saw the number 39 million and its envy destroyed it. It burned it out in the first day. 69 million. 69. If that doesn't make you envious, nothing will. Because you look at artists and they're all like the place kicker in football or the drummer in a band. You think, well, I could sort of do that.

[38:48] got 69 million and I don't. So it right away made a filter, horrible filter, which we can never break out of, called cynicism about money. [38:59] And I always say to people, you need to see the money, but then you have to see through it. You have to understand that even a Teletubby like Jeff Koons means every fucking thing he makes. Now, all... [39:17] Bad poetry is sincere. All bad art is sincere. Sincerity means fuck nothing, people. I'm sincere. You are sincere. But I want you to see through the money. The other thing... [39:32] The art world rejected NFTs instantaneously. It was out of the gates, and it was rejected in the same sentence. That, to me... [39:44] makes it one of the most interesting mediums you could possibly use why [39:49] In the early 1980s, if many of your viewers, listeners rather, have heard the word, Cindy Sherman is a photographer. Do you know that name? [40:01] Absolutely. Absolutely. And you've written about, you also write about her very eloquently in the book. [40:06] Thank you. [40:09] ... [40:09] The camera was a completely devalued piece of equipment. Photography was not considered art unless it was black and white. It had to be, quote, serious. It probably had to be made by white men. And women moved into this completely soiled, discredited, bad field called the internet or NFTs, called the camera.

[40:39] photography. I taught myself to make an NFT. [40:44] I made one stupid NFT patterned after the Beeple, which was called the first, he called his the first 5,000 of his first 5,000 posts. I called mine the first 10,000, which were based just on my first 10,000 Instagram posts. I made it. [41:05] And I sold it. For a lot of money. For about $100,000. Wild. Now let's take a pause. [41:13] Thank you. [41:14] good good you've paused i will now tell you what all of you are thinking fuck [41:20] him. Nobody's thinking that, Jerry. That bastard. What I understood, Blake, [41:27] was that if I was only dabbling, as it were, to learn what the medium was, could do, felt like, occupied myself with, [41:39] and was an art critic, that I should not make money from it. So I gave all the money, [41:45] to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital. In other words, I understood that as a critic, I needed to remove the deadly fake filter criteria [41:58] of money. [42:00] And what I learned about NFTs is they're a new fucking tool, a new fucking material. AI, I think it's called the DALI program. Yep, yep.

[42:10] Those programs are already easily out distancing, eclipsing, and will go much further, I suspect. I know nothing. Then the original NFT will be more like oil paint. It will be the high art of digital media. And these other programs... [42:32] will become great novels. [42:36] dances, films, paintings, architecture. We will [42:45] do in those programs what the cosmos is doing with us. That is, we get an idea in the mushy matter of the brain, [42:54] that somehow then embeds itself into another material that creates a new genre. That, to me, [43:05] Language embedded into selves, embedded into material, that holds a lot of promise. [43:14] And, you know, pulling on that to go back to what we mentioned before, where you said also in the book, but you've tweeted about it. Someday there will be a Francis Bacon of NFTs. [43:26] Yes. How close do you think we are to that person emerging? [43:31] Yeah. [43:32] That we can never know because... [43:35] Like Bob Dylan said, where do those songs come from? It's like a ghost is writing it. I know when we will see it.

[43:46] a francis or a francine bacon of nft probably they already exist yes [43:53] on the one hand. Probably there are about 40. Well, no, there's a constant that probably precludes that, but probably there are a bunch. I would say you will become the Francine Bacon when you find your own voice. Don't stay in your own lane. Don't be consistent. When you try [44:23] spin off things that you cannot predict. Okay. [44:30] What you don't like is as important as what you do like, because there's something in what you don't like. Let's just say it's Beeple or Jeff Koons that's telling you something about yourself. You must express love. [44:49] Radical. [44:50] vulnerability. [44:52] Even in the tech kind of – [44:57] world where everything is flat and the algorithms control... Easily. Okay. Easily. Let's just say [45:05] It's so easy. How do artists do it in any flat world? Do you think that Francis Bacon is not expressing his radical vulnerability? Art is a great abstraction. All art is an abstraction, insofar it's taking the two-dimensional world and making it three-dimensional, or the no-dimensional world, as I said at the beginning of the podcast, the no-dimensional

[45:35] dimensional world of material, be it digital, yarn, stone, or steel. [45:43] And the worst feeling in the world is not working. So anybody that loves feeling foul, be my guest. Go on. Don't write. Don't make your bad art. I'm interested in you failing flamboyantly. [45:59] Your audience will find you. Like I said, every bad NFT has courage in it. Just make your own. The minute I see somebody singing in their own voice, [46:14] That touches me. Just... [46:17] Get to work, you big babies. That's how easy it is. That's the call to action. If you just lower your fucking shields a bit, women, men, [46:27] Get to it. And, you know, I know that we're coming to a close. I think one of the biggest insights that I have is, you know, when you're talking about [46:37] art that you like tells you as much as art that you don't like about yourself. And that a lot of art that I don't like, there's envy in that. [46:46] There can be confusion, I think, a lot of times as well. I don't get it, but there's a [46:52] I think in terms of telling something about myself, ah, there's envy. Why that person? You know, there can be a story that's told around that and it has to do with envy a lot of times. [47:03] That's so smart. So if I'm envying the tall man, let's go to our darkest fears. That's telling me about my own thoughts, my own inner life. But the real point of all of this, you big idiots listening.

[47:20] Finish the damn thing. [47:24] You have to make your art and podcasts and communities and writing out of whatever is at hand. If you can't afford steel, you have to use cardboard. If you can't afford the best tech, use whatever tech you can afford. If you can't get it out there, you get it out there as much as you can. I'm not interested in people that are just complaining that they can't do it. Nobody can do it. I can't do it. [47:53] I really need you to understand that, that art is a self-advocacy. [47:58] organizing system and the art world. And that means NFTs as much as podcast, as much as writing. The art world is an all volunteer army. [48:11] If you don't want to be here, [48:14] You can live... [48:17] Fine. You shouldn't be here unless you really, really, really, really, really want to be here. Because it's a hard life. [48:26] It's easier than being a truck driver, but it's a hard life. It's a lonely life. The greatest radical vulnerability of all that it requires is showing up. [48:38] and trying to be yourself in, [48:41] And that's why I love... [48:42] Boys Club so much because anybody on the screen looking at each other's bad hair or better hair than yours had to have the courage to show up and admit that they are loser enough to want to be with each other. That is intimacy. Intimacy is love. And when you have community, you will not fail.

[49:07] And everybody listening to this, please follow me on my idiot social media. We'll be pushing that out, Jerry. Don't you worry. Everybody will follow. You can say anything to me and I'll learn more from you than you'll ever learn from me. And you'll learn so much from the other people on these idiot threads. I'm in awe. Listen to this podcast. Have a community. Man and woman and person up. [49:37] not interested in you if you're just worrying about it and not working. [49:41] I love you. [49:43] Jerry, thank you so much for being on today. You know, you talk about radical vulnerability, about creating a community to feel safe in, to take those risks, and you've really... [49:57] Made me feel so encouraged and so supportive today, which is a tremendous gift and, you know, provided kind of hope and optimism, which, again, is just so important. So thank you so much. I love what you're doing, Blake. I really love it. Thank you. When I heard about it, I was blown away. And how long did I take to say yes? One email? [50:19] Yes, one email. I couldn't believe it. My dream, Jerry Saltz, the critic of all critics, who shifts the art world, who actually opens it up, who's actually changed the world. I really believe you have and how you've... [50:32] position and framed art, for you to come on, like you are a world shifter. So for you to come on and kind of share your world with the audience and with the viewers. And I think what you'll do with this episode is really actually, you've given me and I think giving the listeners confidence in their own point of view and letting people know that a point of view is personal, is emotional,

[51:02] exercise, that is real empowerment to go through and share that. So thank you so much. [51:09] Thank you. That's why I love your site.