franknews

Defining Terrorism

by Victor Asal

August 7, 2018

This interview was orignially conducted and published in frank on April 28, 2018.

This interview with Victor Asal, a professor and chair of public administration at Rockafeller College University of Albany, was conducted and condensed by frank news. It took place April 16, 2018.

My name is Victor Asal, I’m a professor of political science and Chair of Public Administartion at Rockafeller College at University of Albany, State University of New York.

I have three main areas of research. My first area of research is why people would go 400 miles out of their way to blow up people they’ve never met before. So criminal justice most times, most homicides are committed by people who know the other people. But going and killing people you’ve never met before, why would specific organizations do that? What are their strategies? That’s one area of research that I focus on.

My other area of research is why people are discriminated against by the State or by societies. Why are some people treated badly just because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or their sexual identity? I research all of those areas there.

I will note that I believe there is a strong connection between people being treated badly, and people blowing things up.

These two areas of research are definitely connected.

My third area of research is the area of pedagogy in political science. What are effective ways of teaching students about political concepts, about the theories of politics? Specifically in the areas that I research. I’m a big fan of games, excerices, simulations — making a student a lab rat in their own experiment is much more useful than discussing why did Stalin do this? If I have an excersise where you are Stalin, and you did it, everyone else in class can ask you to explain it, it can be a different understanding.

Related to political violence I spent a great deal of time focusing on collecting new data that allows us to get traction under analysis on the organizational level, within a couple different contexts. The area of violent non-state actors. Why do certain organizations turn to violence? And when they do, why are some organizations much more lethal than other organizations? One of the things that I’ve found in my research is strong support for an argument that Ted Gurr made 47 years ago, about why men rebel.

In that work Gurr is making the argument that discrimination and oppression are critical in why people turn to violence.

There were a lot of people who disputed this and argued about this — but there's been growing literature that’s been focusing at the ethnic group level, that this is true, that this is one of the drivers of the use of political violence. I’ve been looking at this at the organizational level using a dataset called Minorities Risk Organizational Behavior dataset. And that’s ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa that claim to represent an ethnopolitical group, minority group. From the analysis, some of them are violent, some of them are not violent.

Can you tell me who some of them are?

Hammas, Amal, the PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), lots of different organizations, again some are violent, some are not, and some go back and forth.

It’s very clear in our analysis that State oppression of the organization is a key factor in these organizations turning to violence.

That makes sense.

The other data set, that really is the genesis of myself and colleague, Karl Rethemeyer here at U Albany, is the Big Allied and Dangerous data set, which has the acronym BAAD. The BAAD Dataset is the dataset of organizations that have already turned to violence, that are using violence, and to be able to look at why some of them are so much more lethal than others, or use CBRN weapons [chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear ] in terrorism and such.

One of the interesting things that we’re finding is that organizations that are networked tend to be much more lethal than organizations that are not networked.

What do you mean by networked?

Having allies. For example, how many things have you gotten by knowing somebody?

Nearly everything.

Right, so we’re finding that that’s true of organizations also. Organizations that have connections tend to be more lethal, tend to get a lot more done, in a lot of different ways. Friends can be very, very helpful.

The other thing that we’re finding is that organizations that are lethal tend to generate more rivals. There’s a cycle process. But there's another issue here, that really drives these organizations, and that’s ideology. There’s some really interesting theoretical and case study work by a guy named Mark Juergensmeyer. He talks about how ideology can compel organizations and people to kill. Because they have this power of othering…have you ever seen the movie Aliens?

No.

You should see the movie Aliens. It's a great movie. Our heroine, Ripley, she’s trying to protect this young girl from aliens. And the aliens are these sentient, intelligent creatures, that have this unpleasant habit of eating humans. Ripley stumbles into a nursery of baby aliens. I mentioned that the aliens are intelligent beings?

Yes.

Well, Ripley also has a flamethrower when she stumbles into this nursery, and she flame throws all these babies, killing them all. And whenever I’ve watched this scene with other people, do you know what they do? They cheer! And this captures this sense of othering.

If I can build an ideology that makes me the good guy, and makes you evil, or not really even human — that enables me to say I can kill as many of you as I want, and I can kill as many civilians as I want. So ideology, particularly religious ideology, has an important impact. And the combination of religious and ethnonaturalist ideology have a very, very important impact on the behavior of these organizations.

The issue of killing civilians gets at one of the core debates we are having about terrorism. Because the term terrorism can be used in many ways. And there are lots of people who use the term terrorism to describe any violent organization they don’t like. Those are the terrorists, these are the good guys. And if you’re trying to study this phenomena from an analytical, theoretical perspective, in my mind that is highly problematic. Because what that means is the definition of what we’re looking at is whether we like you or not. And that might be a great definition for seventh grade friendships, but not a great definition for doing analysis.

And there are big debates about what, and how we should capture terrorism, even if we’re talking about it in an analytical fashion.

How would you like to define it [terrorism]?

So I define terrorism not by if I like you or don’t like you. I define terroism by, are you a political organization, with a political motivation, who is blowing people up, and specifically targeting civilians?

Intentionally targeting civilians.

Yes. Intentionally targeting civilians, to hurt and kill civilians. Now, there are organizations that are insurgent organizations that target soldiers, there are organizations, terrorist organizations, that intentionally target civilians, and there are lots of organizations that do both.

I will note that sometimes civilians get killed that are not being targeted, and in my mind, that is not the same thing as targeting civilians to kill civilians.

It's one thing to shoot somebody in uniform, I don’t have to like it, especially if I’m wearing a uniform, but I would consider that very different behavior than blowing up a nursery school.

How do you feel about US military action, especially in the Middle East, where they are not fighting people in uniform?

When I say uniform I am using it prosaically — I’m saying fighters.

Any figher? Even if they happen to be a civilian?

If they are in a militia, they’re fighters.

There is a huge difference between shooting at somebody who’s got a gun, and killing parents and children who are not involved in the conflict.

Let me very clear here, there's another distinction about terrorism, when people talk about terrorism, mostly what they’re talking about is non-state actors. There is a whole discussion about State terrorism. In my mind, if the State is intentionally targeting civilians, they are involved in State terrorism. But again, that's a controversial topic as well. Which gets back to my other focus, which is political discrimination and political oppression. When it comes to violence, I primarily look at non-state actors. Both insurgents and terrorist organizations, and what factors are pushing towards targeting civilians and other kinds of behavior. But States can be pretty awful. And if we want to compare which kind of organizations, between non-state actors and States, which have killed the most amount of civilians, there is no contest. Russia did a phenomical job under Stalin slaughtering millions of people. Hitler. I mean, we could go on and on about States. There have been States that have been lax, and have killed civilians by being lax, and not paying attention. And there have been States that have intentionally targeted civilians, who they meant to kill.

Do you think your research can help inform policy or military action in dealing with these organizations?

I would hope so. One of the key aspects of the kind of data I’m collecting is that it can help you identify who to be most worried about. You should know that most terrorist organizations don’t kill anybody because they are fairly incompetent. And very few kill many people.

The second component is, and I’m not the only person saying this, other researchers would strongly agree with me, is that treating people badly is a bad idea.

A really sad example of this is the invasion of Iraq. Where the U.S conquered Iraq and then fired the entire military, and put them out of jobs, and took them out of organizational structure, and that was a big mistake. Oppression in general is not a smart policy.

What are the fundamentals of understanding terrorism as you define it?

I think there’s normative components here, and empirical components. When it comes to thinking about terrorism,

I think it would be very helpful for the general public to realize that terrorism is a political strategy that is focusing on killing civilians to try to move forward a political effort.

Try to understand why these organizations are doing this, strategies to make them stop is important, and something we need to be paying attention to. And being able to draw a distinction between violent organizations, we may or may not not like their ideology, but they are not killing civilians. It's important to make the distinction between organizations that maybe you do like, that might be killing civilians. A concrete example is John Brown. His goal was to stop slavery. I am in favor of stopping slavery. John Brown slaughtered civilians. Intentionally. That makes him, in my mind, a terrorist, whether I like his ideology or not. Being able to make that distinction is important both analytically, but also normatively, for how we understand the world around us.

Forward Union Fair

by frank

October 16, 2018

This interview with Forward Union, a coalition-building initiaitive connecting social justice organizations with artists and creative communities, was conducted and condesned by frank news.

frank: Could you tell me more about how Forward Union Fair was founded?

Jennie Lamensdorf: Shortly after the election, we went through an exercise assessing what everyone was talking about in the news and online. I took stock of my privilege and one of the things that I took stock of was that I have access to space in New York City, and I wanted to do something with that. I work with a real estate developer who had empty retail space in Manhattan that felt too extraordinary not to take advantage of. I have access to this space. I want to do a thing, and I don't know what the thing should be.

I was honestly thinking something small like, "We could make protest banners", or "We could do guided meditation". What could we do? It was around the time of Art Basel and so we were in this mindset "art fair season", and Holly Shen proposed an anti-Art Basel fair.

We didn't want to generate something new because we knew there were all these people doing really good work, and we didn't need to step into the fray to produce something from scratch. We wanted to create a platform that could support the people who already do the things. Then we wanted to do something that created face to face conversation.

Julia Clark: Get people offline.

Jennie Lamensdorf: Get people offline! The internet was already super toxic. It was frustrating all of us, and making all of us really angry. We wanted to create a space, supporting people doing good work, that made people interact differently.

In a tense political climate, do you think art helps us focus on culture? Focus on politics? Or is there even a discussion about people making art for arts sake at this point?

Jennie Lamensdorf:

At all times art can be made for all reasons.

Artists make their work for whatever it is that moves them. I think maybe it's possible that more artists are being explicit about their political values right now.

An artist we work with named, Emily Noelle Lambert, makes paintings and sculpture and she produced all the furniture for our lounge the first two years. Her work didn't change but her titles changed in a way that made the painting a lot more politically explicate after the election. Her values didn't change, she was just being motivated to be a more political.

I also don't think art has to be about anything ever. It's just I think what I'm interested in might be changing, and what the audience is interested in is be changing, but I don't think the artist has to do anything ever. It's for the greater audience to shift the attention not the artist. Otherwise it comes off fake.

How do you select artists for Forward Union?

Jennie Lamensdorf: We've been working with a core group all three years and it is personal because they came out and supported us no questions asked in the beginning, when we had no track record and we were doing this on a three week timeline, and it seemed a little bit bonkers. There are a lot of artists that have been working with us and continue to do so.

This year we have a big instillation by Jesus Benavente. We have one by Aram Han Sifuentes and Lizania Cruz. The selection process is organized by Holly and me, who we're interested in working with, and who has an exciting project going on right now.

For the first time this year all the artists are getting paid W.A.G.E guideline fees.

We're not W.A.G.E certified, because we haven't gone through the process, but each artist is getting a fee based on the guidelines that are on their website. In the past we haven't had the resources to be able to pay the artist to produce work for us so that's really exciting. But in order to do that we had to have fewer artists. The first year we had 35, and this year we have 13. We have fewer artists, making fewer things, with better resources.

I think it also comes from learning how the fair works. The first year we had normally sized work on the walls. We had a lot of paintings that we hung by number of artists. What we realized is through an event of this scale, these domestically scaled objects get lost in the fray.

The spirit of the fair is a civics fair more than an art fair. The aesthetic is all over the place. It's rather DIY. We want to encourage that and make everything feel accessible. We want to encourage that in this space, because Redbull Arts is way more like a gallery than where we've been before, it's way more polished and feels a lot more professional, but we also don't want our audience who isn't part of the art world to all of the sudden feel like this isn't a space for them. The big work is more successful. You can see it from all angles, it occupies more space, its responding to the energy.

Who is this fair for?

Julia Clark: It's for everybody. The idea was to bring it offline – this is tangible, this next step, this action. This call to action. Obviously the art world is our audience and our network, bringing the creative community to the organization is sort of this new resource and outlet for them.

Then there are also the advocates and grassroots communities who aren't as involved in the art world, and they're more interested in the participants and the programs than the other things. It's bringing everybody together. Organizations are coming together and realizing that they are all overlapping, and they are having a conversation, and finding out how an artist can come and tap into that, and have a different view or perspective.

In some way the art is a conversation facilitator.

Julia Clark: Yes. And it complements. The same conversations are happening, and you can see them. Art has the capacity to communicate complex situations in an immediate fashion.

You talked a little about bringing things offline. It's no secret we're inundated with visual imagery all the time. When it comes to imparting a political message do you think that's helpful?

Jennie Lamensdorf: I am over the internet in some ways. I get social media specific, where I want to comment, I want to talk to people, and have a conversation, and organizing Forward Union Fair has us tapping into a world that we wouldn't necessarily. Learning about different organizations and being hands on and having a conversation is important. I do think seeing things online is also important.

Do you think art and activism are headed offline in a bigger sense?

Jennie Lamensdorf: No, I think we need both still. For example, Swing Left is coming to the fair and their big initiative now is called hashtag the last weekend (#TheLastWeekend) and that's because it is known that the most important moment to get out the vote for an election is the Sunday before a Tuesday election. #TheLastWeekend is a project to promote phone banking and knocking on doors on the last Sunday in October. What they're doing to promote that is a really big digital online social media push. The name of the project has a hashtag in it, in order to engender things to happen offline. In that way, I don't think you can remove the digital from anything.

Even here. We're basically only promoting the existence of the fair with online promotion. We did have print yesterday. We were in the Metro, New York.

Julia Clark: We did have a street team with post cards.

Jennie Lamensdorf: We did do some post cards. But mostly we are sending lots of emails we have a website, we are doing social media, and all of that work to get people to show up in real life.

Why is none of the art at the fair for sale?

Julia Clark: Selling art is a really hard job and we are not equipped to take on that role. We aren't sharing art that is very sellable and if someone was like "Oh my God, I am in love with Joiri Minaya instillation. I would like to acquire that" I would say "Amazing, here is Joiri's information." Selling art is really hard work and despite the fact all of us are from the art world, none of us are from the commercial art world.

Jennie Lamensdorf: When we organized the first fair, we without thinking used an art. A curatorial methodology, being that we though about the issues that were critical to our subject. Our subject being like "Oh My God that just happened, like Trump is now the president." So that is now the subject "What do we do next, what is going to happen? How do I survive? How do I get through the panic and the dark?" That was the subject matter and we used a curatorial methodology we looked at the subject matter we thought about all of the issues and we wanted each issue represented in some form. So that's how we targeted different organizations to participate.

Julia Clark: We felt like, we have to have representatives from immigrant communities, social justice communities, the health care community, gun control, LGBTQ etc. And that's how we reached out to all these organizations, and that's how we ended up with this, I think very diverse intersectional group of organizations because we have a lot of return. Every year there is some change but by and large we're getting lots of organizations over and over again. Turns out that is 100 percent the wrong way to organize an activist event. And environmentalism obviously. When activists do events is very subject oriented. So there is environmentalism and they have their events and there is women's reproductive health and they have their events and there is prison reform and they have their events and this is in part due to funding structures, they need to be tight to be on brand, on mission. Its tight because of the complexity of the issues.

Jennie Lamensdorf: In order to be an expert you have to be quite focused. I think its tight because of the way lobbying works and the way changing legislation works. So what we did was we did it wrong because none of us are traditional activists and we did it using the traditions and the structures of the world we come from and we ended up creating this amazing event that has all of these voices and one of the beautiful take aways from Forward Union is the incredible interdisciplinary networking that happens and opportunities for collaboration or thinking and idea sharing that come from it. So with the fair we actually open to the orgs two hours before we open to the public and we serve breakfast and we have this open mic where they can talk about what they do and do calls to action so they can all engage with each other.

I really think that the doing it wrong-ness and using the traditions of the art world to design a program that isn't exclusively for the art world is one of the things that makes Forward Union very different and very special and I think valuable, and adaptable, because it has morphed over the years and I think it has opportunity to continue to do so as like the world changes.

Julia Clark: That's interesting. That access in itself. Its taking a somewhat closed off seeming methodology, a curatorial methodology and overlaying it on an industry that doesn't look at things that way. Right?

Jennie Lamensdorf: Yeah, we disrupted them.

Julia Clark: Yeah, that's an element. I agree with that. That's exactly why I think its important and interesting.

Jennie Lamensdorf: We did by accident the first year, and we sort of leaned into it the second and third year. The first year we didn't have the open mic, we started the open mic last year. We did it one day last year and it was so successful we're going to do it two days this year.

Julia Clark: And it was literally like "Somebody canceled what do we do?" Thing. And it ended up being all of our end of the day roses and thorns. It was so great.

Activism is weird in the sense that I think people really do stay in their lane. That's a shame.

Jennie Lamensdorf: So much! It's super weird.

Julia Clark: Activism has its traditions. I'm sure they look at us in the art world and think we do things wrong and I think it's just our outsider perspective that accidentally allowed us to create something beautiful.

There is an irony that the art world has an exclusivity reputation but you guys were the outsiders in this case. You were not the insiders.

Julia Clark: I find the art world to be an incredibly welcoming and inviting place, but I think because so much or what people outside the art world know about us is from headlines like "$350 million paintings", it tends to be really grand market stuff, and not the lived DIY reality of most people.

I agree.

An Interview with Jessica Backus

by Jessica Backus

October 11, 2018

This interview with Jessica Backus, the Senior Director of Gallery Relations at Artsy, was conducted and condensed by frank news.

frank: One of the things that we're talking about is technology and how there are so many different ways art is moved online. Art is moved online through the public getting to create it, art is moved online through social media, art has moved online through companies like Artsy, who are providing access to people around the world in every sphere of the art world. And in other ways. Like, performance art going online. I mean, I could go on and on. When you hear this mammoth question, what are the first things you think of as the highest impact ways that people are seeing art online today?

Jessica: That's a good question. You have to think what does impact mean? And that's actually the critical question a lot of us who work in this field are working on now. Five years ago, pretty much anyone who was doing a start up, working in a museum, working in the arts, knew that access had to be front and center. That's shifted today because, by and large, we've increased access tremendously. Even five years ago a lot of museums didn't want to put their images online because they worried about things like copyright, which is definitely a valid concern and you have to understand what it meant to have art online and what the ramifications are for an artist copyright or the artist estate.

But they also thought that it would compete with in person visits. That's something where we've seen a sea change. Today, you have a lot of museums that have opened up their collections via open access APIs. An API is a big data stream that you can tap in and use to develop an app, or use for whatever purposes you want to. And that's been a huge shift, and I think that museums have been very much at the forefront there, also working with various academic institutions, and companies like Artsy. We're working to think about how we can make art—and information about that art—more accessible.

Now, that brings us to today. Where are we today and how do we define impact? I'm going to speak a little bit out of order here, but I think it's worth it to think about what that impact has been for access. A few ways to talk about that access is the fact that every major museum now has a website, they have images available—you can visit the museum website and see a million different objects in the museum’s collection. Other pieces of that impact are at Artsy, and you know, not even just saying this as a plug, but honestly we have something like one million art works published on our site. And those are works from galleries often, from the primary market, from auction houses, works that most people never would have seen before.

If a gallery in, say, Dubai has an exhibition, and I'm based in New York, how am I actually going to be able to see those works? How am I going to know what's happening? You can do that online today. That was not the case five years ago. Yes, there's always room for improvement in terms of access to the actual works that are being created and access to information about artists. Now the question is becoming a lot more nuanced.

Nobody really knows how we're going to measure that impact or what that really looks like.

I always like to say that availability is not the same as access. You can put something out there, but that doesn't mean that it's going to go into the world and do anything. The big question is how do we get that art actually moving? How do we get it actually moving in the world and moving people? I don't know the answer to that, but I think if we can start to see that impact in a way that many people look at art and they're moved by it, people know more about it, they feel comfortable talking about it, and that they can have a personal relationship with it, I think that's when we'll know that we've been able to actually have an impact on access.

I had this experience once, I was walking by a school looking at a piece of art, they must have been six or seven. And it was Starry Night. And every one of the kids was like, "wait, there's one? There's one Starry Night? I've seen it. What do you mean there's one?" Mind blown. Because they didn't understand, they couldn't understand that there's only one of these paintings in the world.

Yeah.

I think a lot about it. Is that piece of art, that image being available online, is that access, are they experiencing it? Does it matter how they're experiencing it? Does it matter that it's different online than in a museum? You have a really good distinction of what exactly access means. But how would you consider that in person, visceral, once in a lifetime, single painting feeling? Verus how it's put online.

There's nothing like that experience in the world. That in-person experience for the work of art is so unique and it's one of the unique things that we get to do as humans. I think Duchamp said that a work of art is a rendezvous. You are meeting a new thing. You're meeting a new being. And there's a person behind it that created it and this is like a snapshot in time of that person—or a snapshot over time, because it takes a long time to make a work of art.

I can speak passionately about why I love that experience and why I love art. I kind of feel that the closest thing to love money can buy is art. Honestly. When we experience people when we're in love, it's their whole being. It's their whole self. That's why vulnerability is so important in love. And if you're making a work of art, you're making yourself vulnerable as an artist. You're taking a snapshot of part of yourself. I'm not saying that art has to be biographical, I'm not saying it's about you. I don't believe that at all. I think as an artist you have to reach a lot higher and you have to reach out into the world around you to put something forward, but ultimately you're that distillation point through which this new work of art passes into the world.

Another metaphor I like to use about art, can I continue going on here?

Yes.

Okay. This is a fun thought experiment. I cannot take credit for this because I read about it in a New Yorker article. But here's the thought experiment: imagine you're a superhero and you have lots of different powers and some of them require a greater level of energy. How would you rank these super powers? Turning something a different color, making it levitate, making it disappear or making it come into being? What's the hardest?

Come into being, levitate, disappear, change color.

That's what pretty much everyone says, right? I think a lot of us think of artists as those who change the colors of things, but really they're like superheroes who have this unique capacity of actually bringing something into being. That's the hardest thing there is to do. I think that those are all of the reasons why unique art objects and that experience we have with them are always going to be a part of our lives as humans. I don't think that having access to an impression of that via an online channel is ever going to replace that, but I also don't think that's the goal of many online sites or market places.

There's parallels with the way we live our lives online. You can FaceTime with someone, but it's not the same as seeing them in person, but you're still going to FaceTime with them. Online access to the arts is kind of that analogy.

I've heard many times that we used to go online to escape our lives.

Like, via Second Life?

Right. But now, we shut our phones off and we get offline, to escape our lives. I wonder if the availability of art online is almost having the opposite effect that museums worry about and it's driving people into the in person experience. You see that with magazines. Now there's a ton of festivals around magazines. Music festivals are doing well. More access to art is going to create more desire to see them in person or go to a museum.

Do you think there's a bright side to having so much imagery in the sense that maybe that makes that moment even more valuable?

Yeah. I'm actually trying to think, what is the downside to having so much imagery everywhere? Historically, when we talk about the downsides, it's a fear that it's going to detract from in person visits. Or that people are going to have access to images and recreate them, and so copyright infringement has been a fear.

In general, in media studies too, there's a fear that being saturated with images means that we can't take in our real lives.

I think if anything, here I want to draw on Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the message. If anything, that is something to be aware of, in that it is going to form how you interact with these images and there is great power in being able to contribute in the way that that access is created. I think that's undeniable.

Being able to see more art is always a good thing. I do think if you're a creator and your images are getting out there, obviously you want to know that whoever is creating the ecosystem for these images has your back. You want to know that it's going to be an even playing field. You want to know that you're going to be presented in the best light. All those things are important.

One of the big barriers for people to see art in person today is that a lot of them don't know where to start.

A lot of people don't know, for example, that you can go to so many different cities around the world and go into a gallery for free and look at art and nobody is going to bother you, you don't have to pay anything, you don't have to know anything about it, you can do that. The more familiar people can get with the concept of galleries where they are, what you do in a gallery, what kind of art you're going to see there, that familiarity is actually going to decrease those barriers to entry. To go out to a part of town that you maybe never knew before and actually feel confident walking into this foreign space and know that because you have that online connection to this offline world, you can feel comfortable in that.

You bring up an interesting intersection, galleries are for commerce, but in some ways, galleries are more accessible than museums, because most museums you pay for. When you're an artist that makes too much art, your value goes down. You want to be accessible but not too accessible when it comes to the market. How do you feel about the intersection of the commerce, gallery, auction world?

There's a lot there to unpack. It's funny because there's always been a market for art. I think that's a constant. And at the end of the day artists needs to sell their art to make a living. That's always existed. This is maybe a bit of a personal bias—I studied East German art history and see what happens when the arts are almost fully government funded. Obviously that's one extreme, but basically if you don't have a market for art, the question is, how else do artists survive?

Typically that meant governments support them. And that, of course, leads to a lot of censorship around art, a lot of ideas being clamped down on, and lack of artistic expression, at the same time a lot of artists could thrive and live financially from their works.

I think the market is a vital part of how art exists in the world today and it's not so much about this divide between the commercial side of the art world and the not-for-profit side of the art world that we should be making, but more a question of how do we improve the infrastructure across the entire art world so that the artists can survive? Because every part of the art world needs the other part. You need a market for artists to be able to sell their work and survive. You need museums for people to have access to art they might not otherwise have access to. You need to have curators who can work as art historians and keep that infrastructure up and running, and also look historically back at the past and make sense of the present moment in the context of the past.

And you need auction houses to ensure that there is the secondary market for art (if you purchase a work of art and you want to resell it, you typically resell that work at an auction house). It's similar to a secondary market for concert tickets. This is a very testy subject, but, if there is a strong secondary market for tickets, people are often more likely to purchase them in the first place because they know that there's a value attached to them that they can resell. The same goes for art. That's not to say people don't buy art out of love for their art. I think most people buy art that they love, that they've fallen in love with, or that moves them. But when you're shelling out sometimes thousands of dollars for a unique work of art, the more you know that it's also some sort of value, the likelier you are to also spend more.

I like to think of museums, auction houses, and galleries not as opposed to one another, though certainly frictions crop up, but they really all are supportive of one another.

Who do you wish could see more art?

Oh. I don't like to make proclamations about groups of people. I'm not a demographer.

Fair.

Everyone?

Let me rephrase the question. What do you think would get more people to look at, be moved by, and have access to art?

This is a huge question. I wonder if any single person knows this. I'm a bottom up kind of person in that I think the people who are closest to these issues are on the ground: artists who are actually creating their art and want to be able to create more of it; artists who want to be able to survive from their art.

When we talk about people having more access to art anyone who is out there who feels like there is something lacking in their life, they're going to be part of the change too.

For me this question comes down to who are the change agents? The art world creates something like three million jobs, and the services that people working in the art market take advantage of creates an estimated additional few hundred thousand jobs. That's a lot of people! There's also a new generation of people coming up working in the arts today.

I do want to highlight, too: I think it's very much a privilege to be able to work in the arts. The barriers to entry are high. You need to have a good education. It's not the most meritocratic industry out there by any means. If it could be a more meritocratic system I think we'd be able to attract a more diverse pool of people who work in the arts. Not that I want to make assumptions about who those people are, or what it is that they want to do, what their goals will be with their own career path, and with the place that they want art to have in the world. But I do think that the trend in the world at large is for industries to become more diverse and for the people in those industries to look for more. To want to grow the industry that they're in and to want to open up access.

What do you love most about your job? And your job could be your job at Artsy or your job as an art historian.

Wow. You know it's funny that I've talked about art a lot this time, and I've talked about it as very close to being human, but I'm also like any other person. I think one of the big things that drives me and the work that I do and the company I'm at is the people I get to work with. That's true.

It's a truthful answer.

It is, yeah.

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