Mars Review of Books Podcast · Mars Review of Books

The Deal of the Art w/ Alexander Shulan

·51 min·2 clips

An NFT is described as “your right to trade this thing again,” not ownership of the image itself.

Art keeps attracting gamblers. Alex describes the uneasy moment when money shows up and a gallery has to tell committed patrons from short-term speculators. He mostly got lucky. The artists he represents did not get swallowed by the rush, though the pressure was still hanging around his exhibitions. Then censorship walks in. A disputed gallery show turns into a small-world fiasco, with protests, fallout, and attention landing on Daniel Miller and Nina Power. Nobody gets a soft landing here. The conversation keeps its dry, sideways bite while asking whether offensive art should be met with argument or shut down. Alex is blunt about the tension. He says he would probably reject many of the opinions floating around that gallery and still defend its right to keep operating. That is where the episode lives. Art spaces are not pure little temples. They can fall apart fast when disagreement turns into a campaign to remove people. H.R. Geiger becomes the stress test. In Alex's telling, the work uses imagery plenty of people would find disturbing, and the disturbance is part of the point. The host keeps needling him. A quick correction over Geiger's name becomes the show's usual mix of literary nerves, art-world gossip, and comic abrasion. The conversation refuses to stay tidy. By the end, it has wandered through strange paintings, George W Bush, Jeffrey Epstein's house, and the loose relief after an interview seems to have worked. The mess is doing the work. The show keeps testing how much ugliness, offense, money, and rumor art can absorb before everyone starts pretending the problem is simple.

As heard by us

An art-world argument about speculation, censorship, and H.R. Geiger.

This episode keeps close to the uneasy border between art and speculation, contrasting people who are there for the work with those who may be chasing short-term returns.

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Why you'd press play

You get art-market speculation, a censorship fight, and a Geiger detour, all with a straight face.

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