This week Bad at Sports favorite art world wanderer, Nato Thompson. We chat through all of Nato’s current diversions such as independent curating, building the 21st Century Museum and AI’s role in that work, the Alternative Art School and the value proposition of contemporary arts education, and Dreaming in Public.
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Live from NADA New York… maybe more than a year ago but certainly last time we were at NADA NYC… NATO THOMPSON returns to the show to talk about “seeing power” and how we need to think about our relationship with culture, and culture’s relationship with us, especially when we are talking about “high art,” “museums,” and the tools of hegemony. What’s an artist to do?
Since moving here, I’m beginning to wonder if Los Angeles is just a microcosm – I hate that word, but there you go – of the US generally. In Los Angeles, there is a horrific gap between the rich and the poor; general public disregard for public institutions; shitty public transit; overwhelming belief in outmoded or disappeared dreams. Proposition 13 heralded a nationwide tax revolt and subsequent gutting of social services, leading in part to the evacuated and disjunct nation we have today. And if art can do anything in LA, perhaps it is a signal of what art – or anything, or anyone – might be able to do in the US generally, across all of its destroyed or depressed cities and towns.
