SUPPORT ARTISTS

“Many artists price per square inch. So that really, if you're doing like $1.50 per square inch, it really just is a great way to understand how that price is going to balloon as you keep getting bigger. Now, a lot goes into pricing and figuring out that what that price per square inches—are they an emerging artist? Are they a little more established?”

“I would I would tell you what happened. She decides to write a biography about Paul. She names it Paul Robeson, comma, Negro. It's written in the third person to make it seem more scholarly. And on the surface, it reads like a loving tribute to his life and accomplishments. But if you read between the lines, she's calling him lazy. She says that she has to constantly chase after him to get him to rehearse and be a professional. She says that he is barely interested in Pauley. She calls him a massive flirt who is not cheating on her, but if he did cheat on her, he would never leave her.”

“I may get some pushback from this, but I don't think that MFAs are really necessary anymore. I think they're incredibly expensive, and if you want to go get a master's, go get a business degree. Because the amount that is expected from artists, Farnoosh right before we were talking about as an author, you have to have so many skill sets... part of that is marketing, understanding your financials.”

“Now Paul, at this point, is so wildly famous. I saw this quote that said that he was as well known during his lifetime as Abraham Lincoln. He was an athlete, an actor, a singer. It's like he would have sung the national anthem at the beginning of the Super Bowl, played in the football game, and then performed the halftime show. He was also a lawyer and spoke a bunch of languages, including Russian, Greek, Swahili, and French.”

“There's lots of key words that I want you to be able to be like, I just heard this. Is this something I should know? You know, like the common language. And that's I do think that that jargon and that common language is often a barrier to entry to a lot of different worlds. But for the art world, there's a lot of things... I want to take away all of the guesswork.”

“The art world at a certain level just exploded. And people were inside their homes looking at their blank walls. They, I think the interior design, art world, all of that really just had this interesting moment of people thinking so much more about their own spaces because they weren't going out. And they wanted to be able to make their own space reflect them and how they wanted to live.”

“For centuries, Russia's labor system of choice was serfdom. Everyone always points out that it's not slavery. Peasants were just legally bound to the land they were born onto. And they had to work that land and couldn't leave or change jobs or travel or marry without the landlord's permission. Russian czars kept this up until around the time of America's civil war. Then they freed the serfs, who were not slaves, but left them with no resources and forced them to live under Jim Crow esque restrictions. Black people around the world began to identify with Russian serfs.”

“Paul lands a job at a law firm where he's subjected to all kinds of racism, all kinds of indignities. They hate that. So Esi is like, Paul, you know what you should do? You should quit being a lawyer and you should become a full time actor. Paul is like, what are you even talking about? She's like, no. No. No. I think you're a generational talent. I see something here. And so she stays on him for years until he does it.”

“I served you faithfully for thirty two years and Mandy, twenty years. At $25 a month for me, $2 a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to $11,680. Add this, the interest for the time of our wages have been kept back and deduct what you paid for our clothing and three doctor visits for me, pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. If you fail to pay us for our faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future.”

“But that's the thing. Right? You say we forgot. We didn't forget. We never knew. The information like, his life had been redacted. And and I think and this is the thing that I I think about all the time, is that if you can't beat me at any of the things, right, if I am objectively better at at all of the things, my my intellectual capacity, my athletic capacity, my my creative capacity, my fervor and spirit. The only thing left to to get me is is to make it so that I never existed. Right? It's to turn me into a ghost.”

“I remember the first time I noticed that I didn't want to see a black person in the films because of the way they were gonna show up, which was Gone with the Wind. I just remember feeling really ashamed of, like, that's what I would have been. I was going to these movies as a form of escapism. And then whenever black people showed up in the movies, they were always serving. They were always poor. They were always versions of myself that maybe I feared.”

“Paul is in Moscow. He's entertaining in his hotel room, and some uninvited guests arrive. Then Esi, who's back in London, gets a call telling her that Paul is in the hospital. She rushes to Paul's side and is told that at some point during or after this party, Paul went into his bathroom and slit his wrists. He says that he finds compelling evidence that the CIA and British intelligence may have conspired to administer LSD and mind control and chemical interrogation research program known as MK Ultra.”

“The way history is being reshaped in this moment, it's about power. It's about how The United States is changing. I think I've read the phrase sliding towards authoritarianism countless times this year. But it's not a slide, is it? It's more like steps. Steps we the people are taking. Not just politicians, all of us. We're changing too. Taking steps so small you can miss them.”

“As we get more and more in the world of AI and all of that digital age, there are people that are coming to me and saying, I'm so excited about things that are made by hand, that are made by a person that I can connect with. And so we talk so much about who the artist is, as much of what the artwork is, because I think that is where people are connecting.”