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Hello Celia,
Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 6:18 PM
Celia Glastris <celiaglastris@gmail.com>
Thank you for sending over your questions. You can find my response below. It would be nice if I could go over them again before you submit.
Let me know what you think.
Love,
Q: How did y’all learn what you know to make FM possible?
FM: Can you expand on that? :-)
Q: What do you use your platform for? What do you hope people get out of Freeze?
FM: The content on Freeze didn’t change much since it started but its context changed a lot. Today, I’d say Freeze is a platform to collaborate and criticise while making silly jokes. I hope people get a collective feeling it and feel more encouraged to question things inside and outside the artworld.
Q: Who do you think your audience is?
FM: I’m not sure what an alternative would be but the audience isn’t probably the best word here. It suggests a different hierarchy. The authorship of memes can be attributed to people but memes exist as long as they are socially engaged by a group. So anyone interested is welcome to join the gang.
Q: Why are you anonymous? What is the value in anonymity?
FM: Well, Freeze didn’t really start as an anonymous project because it was just an OC shitposting account. There are various reasons why it is anonymous today. Many people contributed to the project and it might harm their personal and professional lives to be associated with Freeze. This is also one way of sharing the "clout" that Freeze generated with its 26k “followers”. It’s difficult to credit a people as much as they deserve. Plus, I’m not a very photogenic person.
Q: What’s the power of a meme?
FM: It’s an easy way to illustrate (and normalise) ideas and spread them to people.
Q: Do you consider yourself an art critic? If not, what label would you give yourself?
FM: It’s nice that people consider Freeze memes as critical but don’t think that would make me an art critic. My identity isn’t a part of the project so don’t think my title really matters.
Q: To paraphrase, You said in a post online that museums and galleries are flooding our feeds with meaningless content—— what is it that we should actually be paying attention to right now that’s available on social media?
- What do you think the art economy will look like post coronavirus?
- What does it look like right now that’s different than it did before?
FM: If we’re talking about the art market, it’s probably gonna advance in two directions. One side of it is going to become more like the financial sector. Volatile, online and lots of data but no artistic experience. (Tax-free too probably) And the other side will consist of art practitioners directly reaching their audiences via online platforms. More genuine, artistic and less about money. I hope the latter side wins :-)
Q: Just to really ram in the theme here— What knowledge is being gate kept either knowingly or otherwise by the art world? I.e. what are people in positions higher in the art pyramid aware of that you think younger people aren’t?
FM: Many people who we see as high up in the artworld get there by burning through a lot of money. Art journalism doesn’t really reflect the difficulty of getting to a financially sustainable position in the artworld. The financial boom era that started in the 90s is now over so it would be naive to assume that the artworld will employ more people in the near future.
Q: (Basically the same question, you can choose to answer one or the other if you think it’s redundant): What should young artists, fresh out of or soon to graduate from university know?
FM:
Young people should stop thinking about the current logistics of the artworld that are controlled by older people and embrace digital. That’s one thing older people can’t figure out. The gaming industry is a good example of this.
Did I leave anything out that you want to say? That you want people to know?
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