Bad at Art Forum #1: Unpaid Intern

by | Nov 15, 2021 | Blog

Welcome to the Bad at Art Forum! A monthly post from your (non)local artist-cum-mad-scientist, Keeley Haftner.

Every third Monday of the month until the world ends, or Bad at Sports expires on its best-before date (aka 20th anniversary) on September 4th, 2025 (whichever comes first), I will be bringing you content ranging from the who’s who in materially-driven ecological art practices and interviews with fellow art, science, and design nerds, to book reviews and art observations from across the pond. There will be three other Writers-In-Residence (TBA) bringing you content the other weeks of the month. I am based in The Hague, Netherlands, but when not in lockdown (while 20,000 Dutch folks, some from an extreme right group displaying the Dutch Nazi flag, show up to protest new (weak) measures as we reach our all-time highest confirmed COVID cases at 16,287 in a single day), I attempt to experience art in other European locations. You can probably expect some obligatory Canadian content too, since as we all know Duncan MacKenzie is a fake Canadian 😛 who has been in Chicago too long to remember the homeland, or the temperature of the soul when it is -30°C without windchill in the sixth month of winter (that’s -22°F, my non-Northern friends).

Speaking of Canada, I like the idea of a Quirks and Quarks style “Questions” post now and then, dedicated to interviews with folks who can answer art questions posed by readers (what do they call a message board for the discussion of questions of public interest? I forget 😉 ). Additionally, I’ve volunteered to return as the “unpaid intern”* (aka “Production Assistant” – or so says my CV) manually tidying corrupted code** from the archives to ready it for an eventual publishing. Did you know, for example, that “c is a quotation mark, while ö is an ‘o’ with an umlauw? “Ööööö,” you remark. Back in 2017 it took me months to discover that  was simply a glitch that occurred in copy-pasting… (Riveting, I know).

So, you (and I) have (somewhat of) a sense of the vibe of what’s to come. I invite you to stay tuned for the next post, coming at you December 20th, 2021. For now, I’ll leave you with a bold statement that I believe holds up: Bo Burnham’s film “Inside” (available on Netflix) made over the 2020 lockdown is some of the best Art I’ve ever seen. But be warned! If you don’t watch it from start to finish in one sitting, you are not allowed to have an opinion. 😉

Wishing you safety and good health until December,

Keeley

*Spoiler alert: everyone who has ever or will ever work for Bad at Sports is unpaid – a project of sheer will and sports-fan-like commitment perhaps only paralleled by the passionate fanbase of Ted Lasso’s AFC Richmond

**Go ahead and tell me an easier way to do this – trust me, I have tried many a code hack, to no avail (sigh)…

Keeley Haftner
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