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Peter Bauman: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this Le Random podcast. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, the Editor-in-Chief at Le Random. Today we are beginning our special Fun Friday episodes as a companion to our Monday editorials. Well, this week there was a bonus Thursday editorial. Our first guest on this new day is the wonderfully interesting and colorful Jared Madere from Yeche Lange and VVV. And I'm also joined by the great Conrad House, Le Random's collection lead. Conrad and I chat with Jared. We ask him a lot of questions and we end up with a long and sprawling conversation where we cover a lot. We talk about Jared's early days and how he got to that solo show at the Whitney. Then we talk about higher-level topics like who controls the levers of culture and art world politics. It's a super interesting and maybe our most colorful chat ever. We're really excited to share it and we have a lot to go over. So let's begin.
I'm interested in that period when you broke and got to the Whitney in 2015. How far was that after your career started? I just wonder about how that experience shaped the rest of your career, because I'm imagining it happened fairly early-ish on. Then you've also talked a lot about how artists need to learn how to eat shit and that experience of striking out publicly. I'm assuming something like that came from experience. It seems like you've had the full gamut of experiences yourself, and I just wonder how having maybe that already earlier in your career shaped everything else that came after.
Jared Madere: I think with the eat shit publicly thing, I really mean that in relationship to NFTs in particular. The only reason why I ever had that observation was because in the trad contemporary art world, it is not a necessity that a gallery will insulate you from having that be revealed to the public.
The anecdotal thing I always speak about is you talk about these mega artists like Jeff Koons or Jenny Holzer, whoever. All these people had years where they lost tons of money, where they didn't have heat in their homes, whatever. And those are moments after their initial boom and bust cycle. This is why the trad art world is so terrified to participate with the on-chain universe, because you're committed to transparency. And that whole game doesn't acknowledge the volatility that's actually present, whereas everyone who's given a fuck about NFTs ever is all too familiar with the conversation of what happened in 2021 versus what continues to happen.
The first part of your question about the Whitney stuff: that was all very early in my career. When I say career, it depends on how you wanted to define that. Very early into me starting to show in a commercial environment. I guess I'd rephrase that again: working directly with a dealer consistently.
I started showing pretty much right out of college, just in group show context around New York. Had a number of my own spaces. The one in New York was this project called Bed Stuy Love Affair. I showed a number of artists that were part of my friend group. This was our mid-20s when this was going on.
At the time, I always had this attitude that I was making very uncommercial work at that point. It was a lot of things made out of perishable material, stuff that would be very large format and very perishable, versus I knew a lot of people that were making things that were more like a painting that was the size of a mini fridge, which is a lot easier to sell. Those people were getting attention from dealers a little earlier than I was because it was easier to do something with commercially.
And the reputation I had amongst friends and the larger circuit I was a part of was like, Oh, Jared's a cool, smart guy. We like Jared, but what can we do with Jared's stuff in a business capacity? So I do group shows and this thing.
And then I got invited to do a project at this museum. It's more like an art center. It's like the French version of a Kunsthalle, this place called Le Magasin. That was a space that I never thought I'd have the opportunity to show. It was a space that a lot of my favorite artists showed in, and I thought, Oh, before I'm 70, I want to do something there. I got invited to be in this group show there. To be fair, the artists that I'm talking about usually would have solo presentations there, but they'd also be significantly more advanced in their careers than I was at that time.
I was making these works at the time that were these installations that were reinterpreted every time they were installed. An example of this was, I was in this group show that Ben Schumacher put together. He's one of the people involved in Spiky DJ. This was a show that there were two iterations, one in New York and one in Berlin. And I made this sculpture that was a few tons of road salt that they put down when there's ice and snow. And hired someone off Craigslist to come in and make an illustration of a bunch of female panda bears in lingerie, opening up college acceptance letters at the breakfast table in an orphanage.
So it was a form... Now, it's really easy to use corny analogs like human prompting or something like this, but that's essentially what it was. It was giving people these scripts that were intentionally... There were pitfalls in the interpretation of them where I'd be allowed to be surprised, if that makes any sense. There'd be parameters given that I knew could be misinterpreted and materials provided to execute them, and it'd be different every time it was installed.
I got invited to do this thing in France that I worked with a team there and a graffiti artist to execute it. At the time, I was working a lot with tattoo artists and graffiti artists and people that were... The idea there being they had a very direct relationship to making images. It'd just be like, Okay, this is what I'm being asked to draw. I'm banging it out. Someone wants a raspberry with a knife through it with their pets' face on it. I got an hour and a half session. Let's do it.
And I did this project at that space in Grenoble, Le Magasin. It was a 70-foot wall of raspberry shish kebabs in figure-skating hair nets. That was this connect-the-dots image of a queen inside and outside of time, looking across a fjord at a group of her concubines going down on each other in a huddle. And then there was this thing in front of it that's based on that OutKast song, "Toilet Tisha," but mixed with the Ringu girl. So it was these teleporting ghoul girls. There was this BuzzFeed viral image about school girls in Korea getting punished by having to kneel on bags of frozen peas. So it was like the girl from the ring as Toilet Tisha, and then the girl from the ring as the school girl kneeling on the peas, and them merging in space.
I don't know if you've ever seen this X-Files episode about matter transposition with the Native American lady and the lizard. It's like someone ends up in the body of this ancient Native American woman, and then the other occurrence is a lizard gets fused with a stone because they were in the same location but at different times. So there's some temporal matter fusion thing. So it was that thing with Toilet Tisha, Korean, all this stuff.
But basically, sorry, long story short, that kicked off the Whitney show and this thing. And it was a moment where people... It's just a weird string of events where people got to see a fuller expression of my work, I guess, and that kicked off a chain of interest.
Peter Bauman: That work already showed a lot of interest in these unusual, uncanny, real-world combinations. I wonder if you could talk about the influence of Robert Smithson and those juxtapositions, and then also how you see that relating to now what's happening with the Solana avant scene, where it's all these unusual and uncanny juxtapositions, it seems, in a lot of ways rooted in that tradition of Robert Smithson that, especially your early work, seems to also be greatly influenced by.
Jared Madere: Yeah. I mean, it's funny. Smithson was a really big deal for me in high school. That was a very mind expanding moment for me. Before, I really wanted to make electronic music. I was really obsessed with Autechre. When I first saw that Robert Smithson piece, Glue Pour, that was really transformative for me in that it was this aha moment. I was like, Oh, whoa, there's this arena on Earth where you can take a bucket of glue down a hill and people will give that a lot of attention and a lot of thoughtfulness. And that was very intriguing to me.
It's interesting what you're saying because I don't know if I've connected those dots from that moment. That in a certain way is the first time I really thought of art in a turbo profound capacity. And I was a few years out of puberty. Now what you're asking me about, I'm like, that's what I'm thinking about this second, and I'm not sure I've completely connected the thread.
I guess for me, it's nice to go to the NFT stuff. The question was about the smashing together of meaning and overlapping quasi-related images, I guess. I think with Yeche, absolutely. Worm and I are both... We care a lot about art history, and I think especially thinking sculpturally, thinking in terms of installation, thinking about those sorts of things. A lot of the Yeche projects, the physical location, the New York location, there were a lot of these skeuomorphic illusions to physical space. We had this auction and a few other projects that exist in these 3D environments.
Our whole attitude, again... this is a stretch, and I feel like I'm being really sloppy with the significance of these things, because the parallel I'm drawing here is really literal. It's just like, Oh, well, with Smithson there's land stuff. There's also land stuff where we'd be constructing these. We made a network of islands that our program jokingly coined as the Yeychelles, that was this environment where this auction took place in, and you could hop across these hovering lilypads and be Wretched Worm weaving through this mud landscape.
And for us, there was always this attitude. When ETH NFTs were a big thing, there were a few people that took these stabs at, Okay, let's have a gallery, like an online gallery. And the form that usually took was a network of white rooms with wooden floorboards. I always just thought this was so weird, given especially you're dealing with a largely extremely digitally native audience. This is a generation of people that grew up playing video games. You grew up with zero-gravity environments with hovering platforms you're jumping from and rows of metal teeth that are clomping at you out of nowhere. You know what I mean? When you think about how dynamic some of the video game environments that we all grew up playing are, it seemed demented that you'd be like, Oh, yeah. The best thing we can come up with is an analog of what a corny gallery at a university would look like.
So we tried to take it to that place with a lot of these projects. And Yeche was always a very evolving thing. We did a lot of this 3D stuff. And then at a certain point, we're like, Okay, let's move away from that skeuomorphic idea about space. There's something to be said for screen native form.
As far as the current Solana NFT space, it's interesting because a lot of those people, they're enthusiastic about art history, but for a lot of them it's not a significant part of their background. One thing I always joke about that I think is so interesting is for people my age, a lot of us went to art school. A lot went to New York, to LA, Berlin, whatever, and we're like, Oh, if we want to be serious players in this thing, we've got to be in this place. There's a network of schools that you could go to, and then you got to be in one of these places. Socializing in those places has a certain decorum to them and all this stuff.
What I found really interesting, obviously, post-COVID, I think this decimated a lot of that for younger kids. You had a lot of kids that coming out of college, it was like, Oh, I'm going to live at my parents house again, and I'm going back to my hometown. It's not that classic, Finish college, now time to get to the big city. More and more people stayed where they grew up or chose not to migrate to one of the top five obvious culture destination cities.
I think the surprising thing about that was that for people 10, 15 years ago, they couldn't fathom that something so much more sophisticated could exist outside of those environments. And that's something I always think about. So many of the people in the Solana NFT circuit, they come from a background of fashion or comics or online rap music, this stuff. But their comprehension of culture is so much more sophisticated than the people that I knew in New York that were in their late 20s doing group shows, doing solo shows, this thing. And it remains that way. For the vast majority of my trad art friends, their conception of culture feels really unc compared to people that are doing NFTs that are in rural Virginia, rural Pennsylvania. So I think that's a really fascinating shift.
And this idea of slapping so many contradictory types of images and meaning together, I think that's collage in the expanded field. These people are existing in these hyperpoliticized environments. You go on Twitter, you go on any of these platforms, the way information is exchanged and the way it's punctuated. I don't think a lot of people who aren't bathing in those environments all the time... I don't know that they're as exposed or as able to wade through that density of charged media.
Conrad House: I really like what you said with the comprehension of culture. I think that's really significant. You really need to understand not just what's happening in the broader scope of the world, but what's happening in these online spaces and what has been happening in online spaces for decades all over the world. It's really fascinating that you mentioned that. An Arkansas kid who's been a 16-hour computer screen Andy his entire life is probably going to understand the avant scene on Solana a lot more than a traditional gallerist maybe that lives in Berlin and has been steeped in these very refined formal exhibitions. This is a very routine. This is how the traditional art world looks. And they have this very microscoped tunnel vision thing on how the world works, rather than these chronically online kids that seep in gigabytes, terabytes of information in different ways and exchange references to so many things in different ways.
I also like what you said about the skeuomorphic obsession that this space has to want to, for some reason, stick to traditional mediums and traditional rule sets. I think when NFTs first started out, the whole extremely exciting thing was like, yeah, we can push away from traditional art norms and start our own thing. But the more and more we got into it, the more and more we just started going to the traditional art world. We have these cyber galleries, but when you open up a gallery, like what you said, it's white walls with a wooden floor rather than...
“And this idea of slapping so many contradictory types of images and meaning together, I think that's collage in the expanded field. These people are existing in these hyperpoliticized environments.” — Jared Madere 18:21
Jared Madere: Exactly.
Conrad House: I think that this even goes further than just those galleries. I think even the websites are a huge thing. You go to these very formal, artistic gallery, digital NFT websites that are so professional and clean, and they're pretty to look at, and they're easy. But then you go to Yeche, and you go to some of the websites that you guys have written, and it's just this information overload to some people, I'm sure. But it really reeks of the culture that at least I want to embrace. This is what I like to see. I like to see these insane amounts of sprite usage and random gifs and vulgarity images that are like, what the hell website am I on, rather than, oh, yeah, I'm at this very professional thing. I'm going to click buy here and this is what I do. So yeah, I think I resonate with that a lot. It's the comprehension of culture and understanding the people that you're trying to reach out to, this younger audience and this chronically online audience. We want to seep more into that digital side of things, that Internet culture side of things.
Peter Bauman: Well, I totally agree. I think those are historical references like Smithson. Another one of my favorites. You mentioned collage, and I think there's obviously Neo-Dada and Dada, and they all came as responses to these geopolitical shifts or World Wars. Another one that I really like that I feel like the space references, either intentionally or not, is the Victorian photo collage. It was women in Victorian England venting their frustration through collage in the 1860s through the '80s about their place in society and just how society was industrializing. A lot of that same sentiment seems to be coming through in that Solana scene. So yeah, it seems like Smithson and Victorian photo collage are two of these strong touch points that I think if you understand them, it can help you understand the scene, even if maybe they didn't directly impact the artist making.
Jared Madere: That makes a lot of sense.
Conrad House: Another thing I wanted to ask, and this is actually one of the questions, but you touched on it before. You mentioned the traditional art world. One of the reasons that they may be so scared of the NFT blockchain on chain ledger thing is that it is so transparent. You can't really hide the flaws that come with traditional art as well as you can usually in the physical space, where you have a lot of control over what the public is seeing, what the public is hearing, all these things. And I think this is a layer of censorship that happens in traditional art, where the galleries are constantly trying to censor what is being seen just to keep this public image there. And I feel like a lot of what... Maybe even what you did with Bed Stuy and now going to Yeche, do you ever feel like you're trying to censor yourself to maintain a specific image, or do you feel like you're much more free to... I don't care what's shown. I don't care how vulgar anything is. I don't care how maybe political something might be. Do you ever feel like you're ever in a state where like, Hey, I'm censoring what I'm doing, or is it just I'm showing whatever I want to the world at any point?
Jared Madere: I think that's a very interesting question.
Conrad House: Maybe even to compare it to when you were doing something like Bed Stuy compared to something like Yeche now, do you feel like you have even more freedom now at Yeche compared to what you're doing in some of your other more public initiatives or curatorial initiatives that you had before? Or do you feel like ever since the start, you were always like, Hey, I don't care about this traditional public image. I'm going to be perfect all the time.
Jared Madere: They're different things in the sense of there are forces at work in the world. I think it goes in different ways. In a certain way, contradictory, because what I was trying to do at different times was different. Meaning when I was doing Bed Stuy, everyone involved in that was super young. The reputation we had was like, We're the smart people that also do drugs, or something like that. It was like, We're the smart people that can hang, and we're not dorks at the party. That was the reputation we had. It was like, The Smart Party Kids was the rep of that project. I'm never thinking about being responsible, but at the same time, there wasn't anything.
I think the place I'm going with this, it's different, which is: in the trad world, it's a much smaller pool of collectors and people that are going to support you versus NFT. It's the game of, I'm selling a pie, is it six people that are buying it, or is it 10,000? In both situations, they're very different.
I'm a big believer in... I campaign for everything I believe in. That's a big part of being a gallerist. And it's different from being an artist exclusively, because when you're an artist, you can alienate people. Not saying that I don't alienate people ever as a gallerist, but you can alienate people more justifiably. A lot of people still don't, because the life of being an artist, again, is so precarious. You have to be in the good graces of the few people that are going to support you. So it's paramount to people not to alienate people also. I think you get what I mean, that the role of an artist, it's more expected that this person would fly off the handle and say, Fuck you, sometimes, than someone who's in the position of trying to create a stable livelihood for a group of artists. You know what I mean? I think I'm more unhinged, probably, than a lot of traditional business or something like this.
To go back to this campaigning thing, doing a project like Yeche or VVV, these things, it's not like being an artist where you get to be coy and quiet and shy. If you're doing that, you might as well fucking go home. You're not doing your job. You're out there to get on a pulpit and advocate for the thing you really believe in. To a lot of artists, that feels really corny. To me, it feels corny often. It's more fun being quiet in a dark field, but I get to have a more mysterious personal experience that way than getting on the pulpit. But that's part of the job description.
What goes with that is being strategic about messaging. I don't know if I'd say it's censorship. It's very rarely censorship. I can think of a few times that were like that. The most glaring example of this to me was when we first opened Yeche. It was very important to me with Drifella in particular. I really believe those are the most interesting painting or image-making conversation of the last 30 years. None of my trad friends had ever seen one. If you don't know how to navigate Tensor, you can't. It's completely opaque. So it was really important for Worm and I to get that out there and get eyes on that.
And originally, Biscuit was like, I'm thinking I want to do this one that says, You're a fag and all your shit's retarded. And I was like, I love that one. But part of why we're opening this is to be an ambassador between the two worlds. And basically, coming out with that in the first show can almost guarantee no trad person is going to even feel comfortable voicing that they liked anything about the show. You know what I mean? It's a clash of values.
And again, to go back, it's really interesting to go back to this idea of terminally online people. A few years ago, my friend Darja Bajagić, there was a huge campaign to cancel her in New York because she was... Her work has a lot... I don't know if anyone here is familiar with it, but it plays with a lot of themes that are very obviously controversial. A lot of kidnapped girls, nudity in a very violent setting, extremely violent imagery, stuff that's associated with historically dark themes, a lot of stuff like this that people take issue with.
I found it so strange. Basically, someone put her in an exhibition with this artist named Boyd Rice. I don't know if anyone here is familiar with Laibach or Whitehouse or this stuff. It's different kinds of noise music stuff. Whitehouse, they're part of this genre called power electronics. And a lot of the people who are involved are allegedly pedophiles. But then there's also a lot of people involved that are like, I scream about pedophilic stuff. Or this Boyd Rice guy, he's a gay guy that dresses up like a Nazi and makes noise music. And there's obviously a big lineage of that. You get into these different scenes where you're like, Oh, if you're from a noise music background, that's very trodden territory. People are very familiar with faux-Nazi, faux. There's a lot of this masquerade thing.
Then you have a rise of certain political sentiments happening in the trad art world. The thing that always confused me about this specific thing is it seemed like conflating being an actor playing Darth Vader and being Darth Vader. And it always was strange to me not to be able to see the line there.
So with Darja, it was similar. That world got very up in arms about it. And you look at a space like Twitter. What she does is already more acceptable than... I think the world that was living on Twitter, they're ready to handle, you're a fag and all your shit's retarded, and they're not going to take it the same way. In the trad art world, there are a lot of people that would call that hate speech, to see that on a painting. They'd think it went so far beyond the line of what's acceptable that they couldn't even play with it as poetry or as collage or something. They'd be like, to put those words in a public space. They'd start reacting to language like this.
To go back to the original question about censorship: obviously, this is a very slippery slope, but I think in this instance where our role is to try to be an ambassador between these two worlds, we've definitely made decisions based on what communication is going to be most legible. That's stuff that we don't try to hide. We don't try to say, Oh, you can't say this. You shouldn't do that. It's more like, for our first time out the gate, our first introduction where we're trying to warm these people up to this idea, it's probably going to make them slam the door pretty quick. So maybe we'll save that for chapter two.
So I guess the way I think of it, it's something conversational. You meet someone's parents that you're dating and you know that they are closed-minded about X, Y and Z thing. If you care about having a lasting, decent, standing relationship with them, you probably are like, I'm going to wait till New Year's Eve when we're drunk to lay it on them that I feel this way, after they know me so we can be playful about it. You know what I mean?
Peter Bauman: That's interesting, the contrast between the online world and, I guess, having to accept it in its totality, I guess, to a certain extent. Also what ends up being presented as culture in a gallery space in a white cube, which is completely sterile. You go from a very messy version. The real version is really messy and really punk and feels more... But yeah, it is what it is. Then what actually typically gets presented in a gallery space is just basically the entire opposite. I guess I just wonder how... Yeche, was that something that you were thinking about bridging? And I wonder, too, you mentioned Biscuit and Drifella. How did you go about finding and figuring out which artists were going to be the ones that you wanted to present in this context?
Jared Madere: I think Biscuit, in particular, Biscuit was the reason for urgency there. That was the thing that I was like, The trad world needs to see this. It's unacceptable that they are unaware of this conversation.
I think that's always been the mission of physical Yeche, to export the things that we think are most exciting in that space that the other space would not have exposure to. And conversely, bring things that we're most excited about from the other space into this one that those people might not have exposure to.
I always think about a few years ago, this character, Hickey, who's Sevenstar on Twitter. He came to hang out with Worm and I in New York. We were going to a bunch of museums, and he bought a bunch of art books, and we were looking through. We were on the train. He's flipping through this Duchamp book, and he's like, I mean, this stuff is really cool. This shit's great. But what about Drifella? He's like, Why would you give a fuck about this when there's Drifella? I was like, Fair. But even Drifella, all this new stuff that you're so hyped on, 99% of it is still faces.
This has become less true, especially since the launch of VVV. One thing that we were really surprised by last summer, fairybaby put out this collection, Squishy Drifters, that was one of the first non-figurative collections in that scene. I had done one called Tense. fairybaby did Squishy Drifters. I'm trying to think what else was really non-figurative.
That whole scene took a pause once people found out that we were doing VVV. We started talking with all the artists in the scene about it last autumn, and everyone was like, Oh, well, if you guys are putting something out, that's where we want to release our next thing. There were a couple of projects that came out later that started to hint at this. There was a record of Hyperwar. That was a non-figurative collection.
Then one of the things that really shocked us when we opened the doors for VVV, the collections that people started putting out. I guess you'd also say card NFT to a certain degree as a non-figurative one. But there were so many collections people were coming out with that were these very abstract forms of collage, things that way more closely reference extremely deconstructed collage or painting and these kinds of things.
But the reason I bring up that thing with the Duchamp book and Hickey is just to illustrate this difference where the NFT stuff is still so much in its infancy. You look at 20th century art and it's this exercise. I always think of 20th century art as an exercise in demonstrating everything that you could possibly conceive of that art could be. Anytime someone saw an opportunity to expand the definition of it or redefine it, whether it's linguistically or in form or in its framing or whatever. It's this giant constellation of everyone trying to poke out the boundaries of it a little further or invert them or whatever.
NFTs are so much in their infancy that it's a lot like classical portraiture. The friend that got me into NFTs is another art history person, and they made a comparison early on. They were like, it's a lot like portrait painting, where now, depending on what your relationship to art history is, you go into a gallery, you're in Vienna or something, and you think, Oh, this is such a lovely painting of this guy or this girl or whatever. And then here's this landscape. The original meaning or the social conditions of them, a lot of people are not thinking about that. A lot of people aren't thinking like, he didn't want to paint this guy. He thought this guy was a fat fucking slob, obnoxious ass guy that he couldn't believe he had to go back and do another session painting this asshole. You know what I mean?
With PFPs, there's a structural aspect to them that I think people... When you get into these more deconstructed PFPs, the game of it starts to become more present, like those conversations with more Fivercore PFP stuff. It's like people aren't always there because they love the art, and then these things get a bad rep for them.
“I always think of 20th century art as an exercise in demonstrating everything that you could possibly conceive of that art could be.” — Jared Madere 39:09
I think with ETH stuff, there was a pretty significant division. If you were talking about PFPs that weren't Punks, they get disrespected a lot compared to a Harm van den Dorpel or something like this. To me, that's another huge difference. Solana is trashy. And what I mean by that is, I always joke it's like Solana's NASCAR. ETH is F1.
But I think that goes in a couple different directions also. I think artists, at least the artists I came up with, we're interested in perversion. Our eyes light up just as much about going to the Midget Strip Club as someone's like, I want to go to this ultra-minimal temple. You know what I mean? And I think a lot of the projects, the Solana stuff is degenerate, and Solana itself is degenerate.
Versus ETH, I think a lot of the collecting impulses on ETH come from... ETH people are fucking sharp, and crypto gets a lot of flak. So you've been in this game. You've been a serious ETH person. You've been building on ETH. If you don't come from an environment where having a tongue-in-cheek relationship to perversion is rewarded, then you're probably sick of people calling you a crypto bro. You want to be taken seriously. You look at certain things in trad art and you're like, Oh, this is respectable, this white cube thing, minimalism, these specific types of historic lineages that feel safer and whatnot, versus these people did not get the memo that Jeff Koons was fucking his porn star wife that became an Italian senator, and that was also high art. You know what I mean? Whereas Solana is way more like, Fuck, yeah. Let's run that.
So I think that's a big part of it. And PFP is a crass format, I guess, is what I'm getting at. So I think there's a big interest in that scene in flipping that inside out and playing with it, perverting it, distorting it, all of that. I think that's an interesting thing, that now a larger world is starting to be able to see it that way.
Peter Bauman: Well, yeah. I think it'd be difficult to create another PFP project after the Drifella series. I think it would be difficult to...
Jared Madere: People try.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. Well, of course, you should try, but it'll be hard to top. I think it's interesting what you said about Hickey and what he was saying about, I don't know, artists like Duchamp. I think it would be showing people, I don't know, even our age, I think, like Fellini. It's like you would probably still like it and get it, but you wouldn't maybe understand it as if you were seeing it for the first time in the '50s or '60s. It's the same with these people who really did move art in the 20th century, like you were talking about. Somebody like Duchamp. It's hard to understand their significance a bit more in retrospect.
It was something like Drifella, too, and what you said about Biscuit. If it's the most interesting painting conversation in 30 years, I feel like then we need to be shouting it from the rooftops. How do you communicate that to the world? Because I don't really know enough about the painting of the last 30 years to say that it's the most interesting conversation myself.
Jared Madere: But I do. Let me revise that. Maybe like 22 years.
Peter Bauman: Even if it's five years, I mean, yeah, any time period.
Jared Madere: Definitely 15. Easy 15.
Peter Bauman: I feel comfortable saying that just the generative coded stuff that I've seen over the last... that's come out, at least as an NFT, over the last four or five years since, I guess, 2021. I think it's some of my favorite work. I think, well, Drifella 3 is the more refined version of it, and Drifella 2 is the more mimetic version. But there are two projects that I think combined are some of my favorite work over the last five years, I think.
Jared Madere: I couldn't agree more. I think they're incredible.
As far as to answer your question, what you do with that information: shout at any opportunity that one gets to talk about these things. Wretched Worm has these videos that they're my favorite video art. Easy, 15 years. They're honestly my favorite trad art. I mean, well, they're not trad. They made them for Twitter and for TikTok, but they're my favorite art period of the last 15 years. And yeah, I guess it's just a matter of, for some people. Again, I think it speaks to a lot of dynamics, right? To go back to this idea of being hyper online.
I always feel like I have two different lives. When I talk to my trad friends, their world is just so much more stable, and it feels like so much more of a continuation of yesterday for them. They have these geopolitical events that they think of where they're like, Oh, the tariffs. I'm concerned about... I've been reading in the Times about the tariffs for the last three and a half months, or the election or something. You know how it is on Twitter, the pace of the news cycles and how extreme the news cycles are, how quickly the culture changes and how quickly who's the dominant conversation changes, all these kinds of things.
I say in addition to that, that's another example of how fractured the world has become. Ten years ago, I think there's a lot of people. Ten years ago, it was almost unfathomable that you could be a creative person and have conservative politics. Now, you go on Twitter and that conversation has 10 trillion different faces. And 10, 15 years ago, that was an extremely rare position.
And at the same time, you still have people that are in major cultural positions. You have people that write for the New York Times. Obviously a weird example, because we know we are living in an age where that is not considered a remotely neutral source of news anymore. But you have other things like basically any curator at any major art institution. They would think the same thing, right? They'd be like, you're telling me there's an artist that would not vote the same way I would, that would see things differently, that would have different ideas about gender roles in a familial structure. These are conversations that explode everywhere on Twitter and everyone...
It's just not so black and white as it was in 2010, 2015, where it was like, Oh, if you're a creative person and you like weird music, then we can all pretty much assume we're all going to vote the same way. We're going to have the same ideas about what family should look like. We're going to have the same idea. You know what I mean? All that's been decimated and fragmented in the broader world tremendously, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's the people you walk next to when you're in a Home Depot or a Target. All that has really been fractured and grown in its own little alcoves and exacerbated in its own little corners and this stuff. And some worlds remain oblivious to that having happened. I'd say the trad art world being one of them.
I guess the reason I brought it there is because in a certain way, people still treat the trad art world as, Oh, that's the most legitimate one. Sort of. Which one has more people actively buying? Which one has more people in? Which one do the individuals spend more money in? It's all different ways of weighting it. Which one are more people entering into? Which one are more people dying and no one's filling their shoes? Which one has more things opening? Which one has more things closing? It's all this huge reshuffling, and I think it's related to so many types of reshuffling.
You see all the... There's these classic memes that are like my parents in their 30s, and it's the healthy couple being like, let's buy a house. And then there's the me in my 30s, and he's balding and his eyes are falling out and his face looks like he just sucked on an exhaust pipe for two hours. And he's talking about trading meme coins so he can buy lunch.
I think, similarly, you have these things that I'll never forget. During COVID, one of the craziest things that happened in the traditional art world was Gavin Brown closed, which was one of the most brilliant gallerists of the last 50 years. This guy discovered so many hugely influential artists. There are a billion metrics by which you can say what this guy did was absolutely... That just happens left and right now. You have so many galleries closing. There's a reason why. It's because the pool of collectors is shrinking. Kids aren't as interested in inhabiting their parents shoes in that way. They're like, Oh, yeah, art's cool, but I don't know. My world has more mobility and access than that. I don't feel like I need to go chasing different Art Basels and different art fairs all year. That doesn't give me as much juice as a billion other ways of spending my money and time.
So I just say that to say that I think there's a huge renegotiation of who does control culture. I went to this talk. It was the best art talk I've ever been to. It was Dean Kissick and Gavin Brown doing this Christmas talk a couple of years ago at TJ Burns in New York. I've never seen someone so fucking beat to shit publicly. It was crazy. Gavin was just hanging his head the whole fucking time. It was just super real, talking about, I used to be excited about selling art. I used to be able to find an artist that I really believed in, that I thought brought something new and exciting into the world. I was influential enough around a group of people that I could get them excited about the work also and bolster its place in the world. And that was a really cool way to be able to interface with the world.
He's like, And now I only meet one type of collector. They only want to participate at a 200K plus price point. Then it goes straight into storage. They only want to buy it if they are reasonably confident that in five years, it's going to multiply to X degree.
One of the points that he made during this thing: someone in the audience said something to the effect of, Oh, well, this space governs culture. The art world dictates culture. And he was like, When was the last fucking time you felt that way? Yeah, there was a time that was like that. There was a time when you could be like, Oh, that music video was super influenced by this other thing, or there was this idea of trickle down. And now it really doesn't feel that way. You can't point... It feels way more like things are coming from everything else. It feels like advertising campaigns, films, video games, social media stuff. All that memes, all that stuff has a way bigger impact on culture. It doesn't really flow the other direction the way it did at a different point in time.
Conrad House: One thing I do want to add. We keep talking about, we want to make the traditional art world or just the broader world more aware of what's happening with Drifella and all this avant scene. I think saying, Oh, yeah, you should check this out, this is cool. I feel like, at least for me personally, I have a harder time articulating why I find it so interesting, I think, most of the time.
I think Peter and I, we talked about this a bit on the Q3 Le Random talk we just had. And Peter talks about, yeah, there's such a deep sense of irony and cynicism with it, where people feel more alive online but they know they shouldn't. And there's this conflict in the work that attracts people to this. To me, it's maybe part of the reason where it's like, I just resonate with people that understand the culture that I sneak myself into more. So when I see, I don't know, a Drifella with a CS: Source background and a SpongeBob hat and upline meme text on it, that at least to me means like, oh, this artist understands the space that I'm living in. So that's what makes it relatable to me.
How do you articulate, especially when you come out and say something like, This is the most interesting painting conversation in the past 30 years, 20 years, 15 years, wherever we're going to say it, how do you articulate or even back up why you think that? What about this type of art gets those juices flowing for you so much?
Jared Madere: One thing, I don't know why I feel really compelled to say this, but maybe just because I think it's really funny what you're saying about cynicism and all this. I've never thought about it that way. When I think about it compared to apes or something like that, of course, I'm like, Oh, I get why you would say that. But I'm also like, Biscuit is, weirdly, one of the sweetest, kindest, most generous people I've ever met. I'm not saying you're saying otherwise, but it's so funny because those are the things that I associate with it. But I obviously see what you mean. I guess I think about it like a very sweet person that sees the world being askew and plays with that.
Conrad House: Because, again, another thing is, on that Q3 chat, we were chatting with our CFO, Zack Taylor at the time, who's a bit less familiar and sunk into this NFT space. When Peter and I are going off on these tangents of, did you see this latest Drifella thing? Did you see this Little Swag World thing? Did you see this floor? He's like, what is this? You guys explain it. We resorted to sending him pictures of Bugs Bunny with a penis in its mouth and some absurd hentai explosion. It's just something that's just so obscene to where him seeing this, he is definitely what you mentioned with the trad world. They're just going to shut the door on it right away.
How do you articulate? I find it really tough, when we were talking with Zack at the time, to articulate why we are so entranced by this stuff. It's really even comparing it to procedural art or Art Blocks. I found that, at least for me, really easy to explain to an outsider like, oh, yeah, I love math. I love procedural scripted things. I love order. I love the way that the emergence is evolving. But when it comes to avant art, I'm like, I don't know how to explain. There's just something about it that when I visually see it, some type of emotion is invoked. It's hard to explain what that is.
Jared Madere: Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I think Drifella is the one that I find easiest to talk about to a trad person in particular, because that one, for me personally, is the easiest to break down into the art historical rhetoric that I'm used to talking about contemporary art through.
The things I usually think about there are the misuse of HashLips is a big interesting thing. So first of all, there's a number of things that Drifella really makes clear. One, if you look at just one of them, you can be like, wow, that's really cool. But then when you start thinking, no, but he made 10,000 of them, and he's not dead. Then people are like, what do you mean? That begs the question of, okay, how do you do this?
And you say, oh, well, there's this thing called HashLips, and that's this tool for making really tasteless PFP stuff. Normally, it's for stuff that you all think is horrifying. It's like Greedy Gators or Lazy Lions or whatever the fuck the thing is. It's like, Oh, you have a folder that's like the baseball hat, the pinwheel hat, the cowboy hat, the sombrero. And you say there's a one in a thousand chance you get the sombrero. There's a one in a hundred chance you get the king's crown. There's a one in 10 chance you get the sun visor. Whatever it is. And you explain to them that it's this really simple stamp machine for changing the probability that you get these traits so you can trade them at different rarities. And it's so simple. It's like, are you getting the one with the zebra fur? Are you getting the one with the blue fur? Are you getting the one that's the beige fur, the silver fur?
Taking this tool that's arguably meant for... This is a game that contemporary art, and I guess the history of art period, loves to play. People love these stories where they're like, Jesus, who were his best friends? Prostitutes. The best painter from 1400, total degenerate alcoholic. Where did they get the idea to do shit this certain way? Because they were fucking vomiting in the back alley. That's where they got the fucking idea. For 20th century art, you have stuff like Ed Ruscha or a lot of these painters that they're like, Oh, well, their edge is that they're using sign painters paint. Or people that use airbrush. It's like, Oh, that's cool because it'll be in the gallery, but I saw it on the Venice Boardwalk. So that's cool. You get what I mean. People like these high, low transferences.
I think there's a brilliance in seeing this tool that's very limited, that it's literally a stamp machine for, Okay, you want the 3D glasses or the Ray-Bans? Or you want the... And being like, I'm going to make the most insane collage machine ever by totally misusing this thing. And you look at the traits, they don't even line up. I think that's where it starts to really push it, where the compositions just start completely disintegrating, but you're still making it with this tool that's meant for slapping faces together, and completely shredding that original use case and really flipping the thing inside out.
So there's that way of talking about it. We talk about it as a structural brilliance, the genius of seeing the way that something exists can be perverted and made into something so much greater than itself.
But then there's also just the brilliance of the actual images, the understanding of culture, which images are funny to put next to each other, to have the face that's made out of two Margiela shoes, that it's barely even a face. It's just something at the angle of a face, and then to have it wearing the In Dog Years I'm Gay hat. These like, Oh, this would be funny with that. It would be funny with this. It would be crazy with that. It would be like, It's going to fall apart when this goes on top of it. To play that game with such virtuosity at such a scale is really fucking insane.
To be able to have you look through Drift 2. You can't say this about a lot of NFT collections, because a lot of NFT collections have duds. There have been so many times when I'm like, Whoa, that one's sick. Let me mint that. And I'll be like, Let me mint another. Not as cool as the one I saw on the timeline. Drift really holds up in that way. You can look through all 10K, and you're not going to see a lot that you're like, That one's a dud.
“We talk about it as a structural brilliance, the genius of seeing the way that something exists can be perverted and made into something so much greater than itself.” — Jared Madere 1:03:58
To be able to use this tool that I think would also be maligned in the art world. Can you think of a tool that would be less cool to the art world scene than something that produced Lazy Lions, the thing that produced the least cool images in the world, and using that to make some of the most interesting work because of the demonstration of your aesthetic eye and your sense of humor and your comprehension of culture and your ability to blend all that together? I think is just incredible.
Peter Bauman: My question was related to what we're talking about, too, with the art world and gallery spaces and how they're struggling. And there was this recent report by Artnet that came out about how all these galleries were closing, and it's because of high overhead. And also just they don't have... Their gallery space is expensive, and then these fairs are expensive. And they just don't have... Not enough collectors are coming in. There aren't as many collectors, and there's a lot of variance because there's only a handful, and one of them could die. And then there's just a lot of structural challenges that the art world, the traditional commercial gallery sphere is facing, and they have to solve these structural challenges. And then it seems like Yeche is going at it from a different angle. You're not in the hottest... You're not in... You're in Wall Street, which is an interesting...
Jared Madere: We're right in front of the bull, baby.
Peter Bauman: I'm interested in how you're balancing still having that presence in that world that's maybe not crumbling, maybe it's not forever crumbling, but it's certainly readjusting. It's going through a period of readjustment. Also, you have one foot in that world that's crumbling or readjusting, and another foot in this world that is fledgling. It's at the very beginning, really, or it feels like that. And how do you balance being in those two spaces that are both going under a lot of change and managing that at the same time?
Jared Madere: I think a few things. One, we would have never opened the gallery if our aims were making money in the trad art world. When we make sales there, that's great. That's icing on the cake. But the reason to do this has always been a lot of the people that are interested in this stuff, they've never had a physical place to congregate. They've never had the opportunity to say, Hey, well, this is interesting. I spend huge swaths of my time thinking about this stuff and looking at it in my wallet and racing to make sure I've got internet whenever I know there's a mint I care about. Shit, I could actually live with this shit. That'd be crazy. So that's really who we do this for.
Because of that, we don't do art fairs, and we've been approached to, and our attitude's always... The people we want to sell to aren't really there even. It's a different circuit for us to do Liste in Basel or something like this. The artists that they're used to thinking about have such a different pedigree, and that's what makes this exciting, that it isn't birthed out of that same... You go to a thing like that, and it's like every artist has gone to the same school, same five schools or something like this. The way people exist in those worlds, there are certain funnels, versus this, funnels are very different, and the field is much more exploded.
Yeah. So I guess our overhead is different. We're shipping a lot less work, or when we do ship it, we don't have to ship it to a fair, ship it back, store it, blah, blah, blah. We operate in a much more fast and loose way.
Peter Bauman: I guess since your audience is a bit different, you don't have to be right in Soho or in Chelsea. You don't have to travel to Basel and spend all this money. I guess, but is that a space that you do ultimately want to move into?
Jared Madere: Questionable. We've talked about doing some stuff, especially with VVV. We're playing with some ideas, but at the same time, we're more interested in what the face of what comes next is going to be. And we don't really believe it's that.
In a lot of ways to us, the reason to do that stuff is like when crypto people who don't know about cultural stuff outside of crypto, they see something like Jon Rafman and they go, How do I know this is legit? Oh, because he did Kanye videos. Same here. It's like, Oh, because we're in Art Basel. I've heard of that. But from our perspective, we're like, I don't know, bro. That's a desert. I'd rather be putting ourselves in other lines of sight besides that.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I guess. So what would those be? How do you communicate, if one of your goals of the gallery is making this convincing case for NFTs as the future of art and even the future of the contemporary art world, how do you communicate that without engaging directly with it or going to those fairs?
Jared Madere: I think a couple of things. You have people in those worlds that really advocate for us already that come out and say... Simon Denny wrote this thing for the year in review last year, we put, Yeche is the most interesting thing happening in the world. We get people saying that. So that's great. We love that.
I guess what I'd say is we do things in that world. I just wrote a big thing on meme coins for Spike. I do interviews related to my own work and Yeche and VVV stuff in those publications.
As far as what we're thinking about in terms of expansion, I think we think way more about the new face of these things that you have. That's really an old guard when you look at that universe, and you have all these new people that are politically very different. At this point, Retardio is extremely normal. If you're a 22-year-old pre-rich crypto person, that is the culture you're thinking about, or something adjacent to that. You know what I mean? That's a very mainstream thing. You go to Token2049, kids are walking around like normal ass kids, not some gay NFT kids. They've got a Retardio sticker on the back of their phone.
These people are going to inherit the Earth, and they're going to want something on their walls, and it's not going to be Robert Smithson. It's not going to be Tracey Emin. To me, that shit is incredible. I don't mean it like that. That stuff changed my life. But that's not the stuff. They're not going to be looking at... I love Seth Price, but that's not what they're going to be turning toward. They're going to be like, whoa, I fuck with Retardio, but this is insane Retardio, or whatever. It's going to be something that is a stepping stone toward or something like this.
Conrad House: Yeah, I think we mentioned it, but the infancy of this environment that we're in, you can't predict what's going to be the thing that's happening in the next five years. And there's almost no point to cater towards a traditional space or an art fair space when, hey, that's not what's interesting to us. We want to see what else we can build. And I think it's also profound to be almost like, we don't want to talk to them. We want to follow our own curiosities. And if our own curiosities are cool enough, people are going to be attracted to them nonetheless. Like Simon Denny or someone coming out and saying, Yeche Lange is the coolest thing happening.
And then, yeah, that's going to attract other people, where it's like, you don't have to be, I don't know, the cringy kid. It's like, Where's my hug at type of person, where you go into the street, show me some love, show me some compassion. You're like, no, I don't care about you. Soon enough, you're going to realize that what I'm doing is actually cooler than what you're doing. And then I think that is ultimately the dream, like northern star that you want to try to hit, is where what's happening at Yeche Lange and all this avant scene in Solana is almost too interesting and too culturally impactful to ignore, to some extent where they're forced to come to us and not you go to them. I think that is the really important thing to try to follow. I think you guys are doing a great job at that so far.
Jared Madere: Thank you so much. Thank you. That means a tremendous amount.
Conrad House: I think at Le Random, we have a tunnel vision on procedurally generative art, but it's really nice to... We can express our voice on anything that we think is super interesting in the space, and we don't have to be bound by maybe the original thesis of what Le Random is. But even though I do think there is generative processes in what we're talking about here. I think you talked about that a lot before, Jared.
Jared Madere: When you talk about the procedural, I think what we were talking about with Drifella earlier, I always think of that as a very procedural thing. I come from an algorithmic music background, like Max/MSP, SuperCollider type stuff. And to me, when I see that way of composing images, to me, it feels very similar.
Peter Bauman: I agree. I maybe wanted to ask a little bit more about VVV and the connection to Yeche. How are they connected? There's overlap. And then also, Yeche got an online presence as well. What is that relationship between Yeche and VVV?
Jared Madere: They're different entities, but a lot of the same people involved. And then fairybaby also involved. It came about for different reasons.
So Yeche originally, when it was just an online thing, when we first started, the rationale was we want to take the things that we're most excited about from the trad world and import them online, put them in an NFT context. Because I did an NFT and was like, I really like this. I'd like to bring more people from the world that at that moment I was more immersed in on board with this, and vice versa. So it was like a show with Spiky DJ and Amalia Ulman and Wretched Worm and myself and this artist, Nomemene. He actually has had a lot of different phases of ripping off its face.
So that was the first one, where AI wasn't anywhere near where it is right now. Worm and I were using it a ton, but in very crude ways compared to what's possible now. It was a lot of Google Colab notebooks and this thing. Because of that, we came out with a show that was basically each artist did one of ones. And the logic there was, most artists are going to go to the grave without ever making 10,000 of anything.
At that time, I was also very entranced by this idea of really meditative work. Spending 10 years on one painting, that thing. And I liked the idea of one of ones for that reason.
And I think as time went on, at that moment, we were still at a moment where you'd have artists making NFT collections, and then someone would go up to them in public and be like, Oh, talk about NFTs. And they'd go, What's an NFT? And be like, You just put one out last week. And they'd be like, Oh, that thing that so and so approached me to do? Oh, yeah, that digital art thing. They told me Murakami was doing one. So I was like, Sure, let me get a bag, too. Whatever.
And then that became a thing where after 2021, one, collectors didn't want to play that game anymore. They had been burnt too many times by the guy being like, Oh, I'm in Discord. Now I'm disappearing. People being, you know what I mean? There was this like, Oh, we only want to support really crypto native people, people that are really invested in this. And that also, not just from a market standpoint, that became apparent to us. Even though in the beginning we had these fantasies about it being interesting to import people, that you couldn't really meaningfully have a conversation with this culture unless you were baptizing yourself in crypto Twitter 24/7. That otherwise, it was just like, how could you have a conversation with it?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I was looking into that Swollen Hearts round, I think. Is that how you say it? Show?
Jared Madere: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Peter Bauman: It's funny. Those pie NFTs, I was going to show them to you too, Conrad, but they're still available. The pie keys.
Jared Madere: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, that was a funny thing. Those were free, and then they went crazy because Gabagool promoted them. That was a really interesting thing, because the idea was we were just like, Oh, we're going to give away a thousand of these. It was like 1,100 or something. We thought, Oh, there might not even be that many people that want them. Then it really instantly... That's how we funded the gallery for the first couple of years, just off the volume of those, just secondary fees.
Basically, it became this thing where we went through many different formats. We did auctions where there were 30 different artists participating. We did very elaborate solo projects. We did virtual environments. We did other forms of more specific auctions. The first auction we did on Solana was a thing with Super Metal Bosch, these King MegaMons.
Peter Bauman: I just saw those recently, too. A couple of days ago, maybe. But yeah, those are one of one.
Jared Madere: They're like 100 one of ones. They're AI, but also hand-drawn. Yeah, they're really cool. And Bosch is really... He's so versatile. He's very good at shifting around multiple mediums. I think there's even sculptural elements in those, photographed, of course.
But as far as how VVV came about with Yeche, with all this stuff, we've always worked with Miles Payton to build all this stuff, and he's really brilliant. I can't even stress enough how much of a blessing it is to be able to work with him. I think it's really rare to have the opportunity to work with someone that they're so in sync with what you're doing. It's really easy to rip on ideas together and bring something into being. We're really fortunate to get to work with him on all these things.
We always have done these hyper bespoke projects. We have all these different environments every... Most Yeche projects continuously reinvent themselves, where each project is significantly different from the last.
When the Solana scene really kicked off with Little Swag World, it was very different than the meta of 2021 that we came out of, where everything was custom contract, hyper bespoke, all this thing. All of a sudden it was like, let's just get it out there. I'm doing launchmynft.com. Fuck it. Their URL sucks. It's embarrassing. But you know what? I don't have to ask for anyone's permission. I finish the collection at 10:00 PM. I've got the thing live by 11:30. Let's go.
Peter Bauman: Also with that, you were confined to working with these more corporate platforms.
Jared Madere: It's embarrassing to put a URL like that. I think in NFT space, maybe it was tongue in cheek. There were certain people that were like, okay, fine, whatever. But there were also a lot of collectors, a lot of ETH collectors, that if you were like, oh, the NFT you should be paying attention to right now is on launchmynft.com, they'd be like, not even Zora, man? What the fuck is this?
So VVV was born out of the idea that let's give as many people as possible that level of bespoke control over something that we give ourselves at Yeche, try to put that in as many hands as possible and build it in a way that as many artists as possible are going to want to work with it.
And the URL, the name itself, it doesn't mean anything. The idea was just to create as empty and generic of a slug as possible so that no matter what genre you were coming from, we wanted to have something that Biscuit would feel as excited to deploy on as Harm van den Dorpel, if there were a way to do generative NFTs on Solana, which we're going to be putting out very soon. We're working on a secondary marketplace right now. A lot of these things aren't even really supported on current Solana secondary marketplaces. So these are things that we're tackling at the moment.
So that was the impetus for that, to have a place where it had all the tools you would ever dream of as far as how one could ever want to do an NFT launch in terms of customizability, aesthetically, deployment, different whitelist functionalities, different kinds of a collection or edition formatting, all this stuff.
Yeche is this very curated thing. There's only so many projects we can do a year. And each project is very involved, whether the online-only projects. If you look at the Jim Spindle Scarecrows project, the mint site for that is extremely complex. The physical redemption side of it is really insane with all the AR functionality and all this stuff. So in a year, we'll only do so many Yeche projects, whether physical or otherwise, versus VVV. It's a permissionless thing.
I think this was a funny thing about it in the beginning, that people were saying, VVV has the best curation. And we were like, no, we actually just have the coolest friends, because these people are just deploying stuff without even telling us. So that's the most fun. I mean, there's a lot of things I love about doing VVV, but one of them that's really fun is you're watching culture shift in real time. And there have been so many projects on there that when they came out, we all went, holy shit. We had no idea someone was going to take it in this direction. We didn't think the scene was ready to absorb something that divergent. I think that's the most exciting thing, when you see, oh, whoa, no one's put something out like that before, and people are gobbling that right up.
Peter Bauman: I think you guys did it in a really smart way with attaching a gallery to this tooling model, because I think often these tools get put out, and they don't necessarily have anything backing them other than the tools. They don't have the culture or the connections, and it may be hard to sustain them, or they just never take off to begin with. It's building these tools, and then it's that unfortunate reality of living in this attention economy and having to then attract artists to actually use the tools. And VVV is having no trouble doing that now. But are you thinking about how are we going to be able to continue sustaining this?
Jared Madere: We're constantly thinking about expansion and sustenance. So yeah, I think a few things there. I think as attention has flowed into this thing, the number of people that want to collect and produce has exponentially grown.
And I think, again, to go back to what you were saying earlier, Conrad, we're not focusing so much on, do we go to Basel? Are these people going to come to us? But the thing I would say, the place where I think about even more than, are these people going to come to us, is, again, the kids with the Retardios on the back of their phone at Token2049. This thing that it's like, there's no shortage of people entering this broader world.
And culture is what people... It's like, what are people like? What are the things that people grind for? Some version of affection or sex or family, something along those spectrums, different ideas about leisure, food. These are things that people have aspirational aims to acquire. Culture to consume is a huge one of those, to varying degrees, how much someone foregrounds that in their life. But I think this goes without saying here.
It's interesting because in a certain way, in the trad world or in the broader cultural sphere, you'd say, Okay, what holds more weight? When you think about what cultural medium are people engaging with more, do people care more about, let's just say, imaginary young artist... and Addison Rae wins hand over fist, right? In terms of moving the needle in the broader culture.
It's not true in crypto. If you were like, who is the biggest crypto musical artist? People would go, music NFTs, I remember that. And then they'd be like, if you were like, Retardio or someone that put music on chain, Retardio is way more influential. You know what I mean?
I just bring that up to say I don't even think you can think about it in the same way that you would in the traditional world, where you think about wealth and where wealth spends its money, where you'd say, Oh, well, some wealthy people care about collecting contemporary art, but most wealthy people probably spend more on travel and concerts or something like that. You could make these analogs. They're more in touch with... They think more about music than they do... You get what I mean. There are a number of economic and spending pattern inversions with this new wealth. And also the artists themselves, they come from very different backgrounds. They have very different aims.
So honestly, I think it's just automatic. Again, you have the number of people pushing themselves into the doors on both sides every day. It's, again, to go back to the meme of my parents in their 30s stuff. It's like, what? How else? Drifella said this at some point, and this is a grim picture to paint, but in a tongue-in-cheek way, it can very easily be agreed upon by a lot of people. It's like, What are your options? OnlyFans or crypto, or are you just going to fucking die in the street? So I think a lot of people come with that from a lot of different angles. There's a lot of ways of getting in that door.
Peter Bauman: I guess it's what we were talking about earlier. I think Conrad mentioned with how there's... I think there is conflict in the work. There's overt conflict with weapons and blood and things like that. But I think there's more subtle conflict, too. It reminds me of also what you were saying, that trouble of connecting, the art world's trouble of connecting to collectors in Silicon Valley because of these changing collector habits. I wonder if that more digitally-attuned audience might ever discover some of this more digitally native cultural work that isn't just code and math and celebrating those things, but also celebrating the actual culture that was born mostly online and through these digital means.
Jared Madere: You're talking about not crypto native, but just Silicon Valley you're talking about. Is that what you're asking?
Peter Bauman: Yeah, just the nouveau riche, that a lot of it is in that San Francisco, Silicon Valley region, and they historically have ignored fine art, basically.
Jared Madere: Yeah. I think this work is much more palatable to them. I think there's a lot of different narratives there.
Again, to go back to this cultural splintering. I remember a few years ago... I'm debating how much I want to bite my tongue right now. I'm just going to not bite my tongue. No, it's probably funny to include it. It's like, fuck it. If we alienate these people, fuck them.
I was hanging out with a friend in Greece a few years ago that he repairs boats, and he was fixing a boat for this couple that one of them was in charge of the YouTube department that specifically handles writing algorithms for identifying copyrighted music and taking the videos down. His wife was an intellectual property lawyer.
These people start talking about how they're the new artists, and what does it even mean to be an artist? And that's the artist of the future. I was so repulsed, because I'm like, I get the implication to be like, I'm building things, but you are literally building tools to take down a 13-year-old kid's video because they have a song in the background. That is not God's work, dude. I hate to break it to you, but that ain't it.
So I think there's that sentiment in Silicon Valley also. There's this like, what does it even mean? Da Vinci was an inventor. I am also building. Which I'm like, respect. I'm like, that is cool.
To me, I have this conversation with a lot of my friends who do things in the real world. I have a friend that does really serious stuff in advertising and commercial stuff. We're working on this TV show together right now about this Vajunny character I've been working on stuff around. He's always like, Oh, it's so cool that you get to talk about... People ask you to talk about art or talk about the artist you're showing or blah, blah, blah. That's really cool. And I'm always like, Man, it's so fucking cool that I can go into any duty-free shop at the airport and you're the mastermind of all the Shiseido ads. To me, as an artist, that's way cooler than being like, Oh, I'm in this little gallery. It's all about me. It's also only people who really give a fuck are ever going to see it. It's a form of expression where the expression can be more untamed, but it doesn't interface with the broader cultural fabric. You know what I mean? That stuff is really embedded in people's lives in a really exciting way. And to play with that fabric is really interesting.
I say that because the Silicon Valley version of that, like, fuck, yeah. Building Dropbox, badass. That's crazy that how many million people use that every day. B2B SaaS. Yeah, sure. We can call that art. I'm not going to argue about it. You know what I mean? So that is exciting. Building infra that millions of people use. That's fucking cool.
But I bring that up just to say I think there are people who have this attitude where they're like, Why make a picture that hangs on the side of the highway when you can make the highway? I'm like, respect. But there are a lot of people who are still like, I like making the highway. Making the highway is very amazing and it's an inspiring endeavor to be a part of. But when I come home, I like to have something on the wall. They're not in competition with each other. I think you see that already.
I think, again, to go back to these different value systems and speak to the political stuff, the way that those conversations have become so fractured or fragmented. You saw what happened when Elon posted a Milady a couple of years ago, and there's a reason why it's a Milady and not a Tracey Emin. It's like, oh, shit. These little based kids are crazy. Look at them. They've got a crazy floor. Look, it's all with this school shooter anime art. That's so crazy. That's so based.
I think, again, people get excited about culture that perpetuates their worldview. I think this is another thing. This was actually a really interesting conversation. It's been really interesting to me coming from contemporary art and now with VVV being in a position where... When I was living in Europe, I never met a VC. I was just doing NFT stuff online. Coming back to America was really crazy for me because in contemporary art, I had met art collectors, but I never was around founders. I was never around VCs. I knew nothing about that culture. Two years ago, I didn't even know what a VC meant.
Someone that I was speaking with last year that comes from a more tech... They're really art and tech, really. But they were doing some art advising, and they had a very interesting point. They said there was a client that they had been consulting for. This person's family created a tobacco product that was incredibly influential in the last decade. That's extremely influential in the last decade. When they were going to Gagosian or David Zwirner or something, they're not used to this dynamic of, Oh, you're telling me it's not enough just to have... You won't sell this to me unless you know what my collection already has in it. You know what? We actually don't like your fucking lefty politics. I'm literally selling kids cancer, so I'm not interested in your shit.
I think there's a lot of that. I bring this up also in a tongue-in-cheek way related to VCs. One of the first meetings I had with a VC, the meeting before us, the guy comes out of it and he was super excited to be meeting with someone that had Zyn in organic packaging. And to art people, this would be so horrifying. But in art, it's also a big irony, because then there's that saying in the Bible, that it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Usually, there are huge exceptions to this, but usually tremendous wealth is not always accrued in a way that is the fairest to everyone who is around the person accruing it. Sometimes that has ugly faces.
People flipped out when, I can't remember the name of the family, but the guy who was manufacturing tear gas that riot cops were using during BLM. This was a big scandal. The reality is if you played this, I'm voting with my wallet game, you're going to have a very hard time spending money on anything, because almost everyone that's in the position to sell you something, you're not always going to agree with their politics.
I think that's the thing also with Silicon Valley people. They have a very different worldview than a lot of culture industry stuff. So I think that culture that's produced out of a different political sphere, and again, I don't mean a conservative one. I don't mean a liberal one. I don't think these people that are 22 years old making these NFT collections, I know what their politics are like, and they're neither of those things. And I think that's also much more alignment with Silicon Valley stuff. A lot of these people have very different ideas about what is actually politically relevant, and their conception of politics might include thoughts about life extension way more than people who think politics is like Orange Man versus whatever.
Peter Bauman: Yeah. The values don't necessarily align with the traditional values of these parties that have been around for decades and centuries now at this point.
Jared Madere: Yeah. Not just the lines, though. I'd even say the lenses that they view them through. I think what the political means to these different camps means something very different. What's at stake is very different. I think that's also shifted. You're talking about people in different classes, obviously. Someone who is a founder and an investor in Silicon Valley that has a portfolio of VC activity with more companies than they can even remember, the way that politics interfaces with their life is very different than the way someone who doesn't have a Twitter account and works a job is, which is also very different than the way someone that trades meme coins for a living and spends most of their time on Twitter. All of these are not even... It's not even just political orientations. It's completely different, that conception of what it means for something to have political implications.
Peter Bauman: Well, I could just keep responding, and we could keep talking forever. But I do think these shifts in culture and politics and technology, and how they affect society, and then how the art then reflects that, is what great art is. The art that reflects that the best, in the most authentic way, and maybe the most direct or raw way. And I think that's what's so exciting about what's happening at Yeche and VVV, is that it's creating the conditions for people to express themselves in a way that is encapsulating all these shifts. And so it's really exciting. Thank you for having this conversation. I mean, I could literally keep going forever, I think.
Conrad House: Yeah. Thanks, Jared. Especially for being so late.
Jared Madere: Well, thank you guys for having me.
Peter Bauman: And thank you for making the time. Thank you, man. This was really great.
