Selling art to tech bros while critiquing capitalism in a footnote.

Thought #1: Running my contemporary art gallery (aka selling expensive art) while writing a thesis (pretending art is not connected to capitalism), while starting to build my first startup, was, unhinged.

When I was getting my Masters in Museum and Exhibition studies at the San Francisco Art Institute on a full presidential scholarship (yes, a full ride) in 2018/19, while producing 2-3 exhibitions a month at my contemporary art gallery, Ever Gold, I somehow managed to write a 100+ page thesis. I never wanted to reread it again, but I finally listened to it in an 18-minute podcast, and it wasn’t that bad.

Did grad school make me smarter or just prone to crying in the shower more?

Thought #2:  How the hell did I write 100 pages pre-AI?

I have no idea how I wrote 100 pages of anything, especially without the help of ChatGPT or Perplexity. In fact, that seems so foreign of a workflow to me now, reading endless books & taking notes, visiting the Getty's archives to pull out primary source material, and spending countless hours inside SFAI's amazing library (RIP). Draft after Draft. It's almost sad to think that this kind of writing process is dead. Or am I just in an AI tool bubble?? Do kids in school actually write these days? 

Question everything as you stare down the past.

Thought #3:  This was also the moment in time I was starting to really question the existing system of the art world I had worked in since 2009 as a dealer, curator, gallerist, publisher, editor, and conceptual artist.

As my collector based bifurcated into two buckets of customers: "art collectors" in NY, LA, Asia, and Europe interested in art as an asset class– and mega wealthy Bay Area individuals primarily working in Tech (yes I’ve sold to Zuck, no, not the Daniel Arsham sculpture) who just wanted to have nice/cool/ beautiful artworks on their walls – I started to question everything. 

The mash-up of art/culture history and theory + being around the innovation capital of the world – something clicked.

And that's how my first startup, On Approval (2019 - 2024), was born (and died): through a volatile collision of worlds and ideas. But I'll save that part of my journey for another day

(Our 2022 Seed round was led by Dave Samuel from Freestyle Capital—with participation from Signia Ventures, Scott Belsky, Pareto, Accelerator Ventures, and Jean Pigozzi).

3,000 square feet of archives and no clue what’s in them. 

Thought #4: Please help me.

So, over the last 6 months, as I've been cleaning out my old archives of Ever Gold, the flotsam and jetsam of my personal conceptual art practice, 300+ piece art collection, printed material from my ephemera and zine addiction, plus the massive archive I created as a byproduct of Publishing the San Francisco Art Quarterly (SFAQ) for seven years... I'm like WTF do I do with this stuff! My Thesis included!

Is it possible for Tom Sachs to have been in space without him actually traveling there? I’m asking for a friend. 

Thought #5: Wait, what sources did I cite?

I was having trouble remembering what I wrote about, besides the central thesis question about Tom Sach's Space Program and Sympathetic Magic, asking "did it matter if Tom didn't actually go into space or not to make it true"? What does that even mean, man? 

Supposedly, one way I position Sachs is as an "intellectual bricoleur," creatively using readily available materials and the concept of sympathetic magic to construct his unique artistic and personal mythology. This approach contrasts with the NASA engineer, who seeks to overcome limitations. Sachs, like a bricoleur, works within constraints, finding a unique kind of "magic" in his DIY aesthetic. This is evident in his demos, which serve as live performances enacting his constructed world and further solidifying his mythology through audience engagement with his bricolaged objects and environments. The demos embody the bricoleur's resourceful approach to bringing his Space Program to life within the existing context of an exhibition space.

My AI Tool Belt (yes, I’m a basic tool).

Thought #6: From deepfakes to vibe coding to a thesis podcast. 

I’ve used most of them, created deep fakes of myself (if you see me in a McDonald's hat, that's “me”), vibe-coded my way into buggy products where it's impossible to keep up with code entropy, fine-tuned models and prompts using Gemini and OpenAI APIs, and endless GenAI experiments.  AI touches every aspect of my life these days, on the daily. It’s insane.  When I finally put my Thesis into Notebook LM and listened to an 18-minute podcast about it I was extra blown away tho. 

This podcast made me feel like I did last time I did a hero dose of LSD. Or became a dad. Or both.

Thought #7: My AI-generated thesis recap hit way harder than expected. 

My thesis actually sounds pretty rad. And what a trip to take a year of research and boil it down to 18 minutes. It’s like when you take LSD and have an ego death, or go to Hoffman, or get sober, or have your first child. That’s what I’m feeling like listening to this stupid podcast and questioning everything.

Is it pronounced Crinj, Cringé, or Cringe?

Thought #8: Joseph Beuys deserves better… It’s Beuys not Boues. The podcast didn’t seem to care. 

Here is the 18-minute recording. It's not perfect - it keeps saying Joseph Beuys’ name incorrectly, and I wish it would cite sources and years when it brings up specific artworks and exhibition references since I put so much work into citations in the research. But that kinda sums up what AI does - it takes the hard work of humans, the facts, decades of knowledge and experience–and blurs it into something else, something easy. Something without citations and captions. Something that is hurting my uncle Sergey. Cousin Aravind gets it, though.

Are we post-death yet?

Thought #9: Is long-form writing a lost art or just vinyl for word nerds?

Is long-form research and writing a lost art? Do kids in grad school, undergrad, or high school write anything anymore? Are we dumbing ourselves down in the context of speeding up our output? Are we losing our creativity or ability to put our own unique thoughts together, that is, to be uniquely human? Is AI the next battleground on losing our dignity of self after we so willfully lost that battle over our experience of reality to social media, including this Crinjy place?

*Unfortunately, there is actual research (done by humans) about how leaning on AI makes us dumber. This great piece by Sam Schechner in the WJS today (April 3rd) really hits on this hard.

From his article, “With creativity, if you don’t use it, it starts to go away,” Robert Sternberg, a Cornell University professor of psychology, told me. Sternberg, who studies human creativity and intelligence, argues that AI has already taken a toll on both."

Bonus thought: That's probably not good.

Are we feeding LLMs the wrong kind of data?

Thought #10: On synthetic knowledge, sacred archives, and shareholder value.

Data Shortage?  What happens when we continue to run into data shortages for our LLM overlords (I love you, please don’t harm me) and depend only on synthetic data to grow and expand our collective experience? Is it like us depending on Sympathetic Magic to get to the moon like Tom Sachs does in his Space Program? Are we in a race to the bottom in service of shareholder value? Are we all super smart now or just getting dumber? 

I don't know... but I'm going to do some research about it, the old-fashioned way to find out (in between vibe coding of course). Maybe I’ll write a thesis about it–most likely, it will be 200+ user research calls so I can do (build) something about it. 

Maybe it will be better as an invisible sculpture. 

Creatives hold the real data. It’s just trapped in inconvenient formats. This is good. 

Thought #11: To lock or unlock the magic, one dusty archive at a time, that is the question.

Unlocking Organic Data. Creatives (not creators), but real creatives have the archives, the data, and the magic we need to feed the machines. But it’s tucked away in annoying book-formatted objects. It’s private. It’s not for you. It’s locked away in dreams, in artist studios, in ephemeral experiences, in the way a Ledwig Mies van der Rohe building looks during magic hour, the way a Rothko makes you (me) cry, the way Anne Imhof’s “Doom” makes the viewers panic. The way Harald Szeemann or Hou Hanru curates an exhibition. The way Joseph Beuys lived with a coyote, the way Tom Sachs built a Space Program. That's the data I want. Not ChatGPT asking me, “If I could live forever, would you want to?”. No, I don’t, but you will, my friend… You will.  

If you want to read my thesis, hit me up, and I'll send you the PDF.