follow-up

Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com> To: Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >

Thu, Jun 9, 2022 at 8:53 AM

dear Lauren,

thanks again for the conversation / meeting and just to quickly follow up.

In writing to Teresa and Farah I recognized a couple of blindspots that I wanted to fill in with you.

1. How long do you think the text from Teresa should be? do you think my estimated 1500-2000 words is too long?

2. Should we discuss a project timeline? I sort of estimated in my email to Farah that we can wrap things up by the end of the year, given the timing of the funding results, but it might be helpful to draft something more anchored together.

3. Here is the link to Mariane's text in progress.

https://docs.google.com/document/#redacted

4. In conjunction with planning the timeline, it would also be a good idea to develop a sort-of storyboard or overview. I think it is important to have this material pinned down in advance of a meeting with Art Met / FCG and graphic design.

5. I have attached Marina's essay that she produced for the catalogue of my project, Subsidy.

6. Finally, here are my notes / thoughts about NFTs and Duchamp...

a. Duchamp established a precedent where anything that an artist calls art is, or can be art. I think Rosalind Krauss discusses this in her essay Notes on the Index. b. NFTs use, or exploit this denominative function of art, the legal strictures that might bind other types of financial trading can be avoided because NFTs are called and collected as "art", even though, if stripped bare (duchamp reference) they are actually financial speculation (the "artworks" that are appended to the NFTs are predominantly irrelevant). This ties in to Marina's conclusion to the paper that if you want a job, you're better off convincing someone that it's an artwork. The mutability of art allows for a suspension of the rules that limit capitalism's innumerable exploitations.

I think that's it for now...

thanks again and again,

Lauren Wetmore <████████████████████████████████ >

Mon, Jun 13, 2022 at 10:32 AM

Hi Josh!

Thanks for this summary. I’ve responded specifically below.

Lauren x

I do think that this word count is quite long, particularly as we will have both of our introductions. Visually, I was imagining that this would sit on one page so, depending on design, I think we should think about 800 words maximum. Let me know what you think about that I can follow up your email to Teresa.

I agree and I can work on drafting this timeline in the coming weeks.

Thank you. I will let you know once I have worked through it.

I agree that a practical / visual overview of the book will be very useful, particularly for our meeting with Farah (I’m not certain how much the publishers will care beyond having an overview of what will be included in the publication - for which the Publication Brief I just shared with you should suffice).

To start working this out, it would be good to have from you a list of the component parts of the Archive - this can be very simple as in what material will be included and how you envision an approximate page count. If you make a draft of that I can add a summary of the contributed essays section. Then we can come together with a few ideas about how it could all look together - though I think we should stay open to Farah’s input (but being able to give her this raw material information will be essential so thank you for sparking the discussion!).

On this note - if you can find a copy of the catalogue for the current Whitney Biennial it would be good to hear what you think about their use of tabs and organisation of information. Looking at it reminded of some of the conversations we have had.

THANK YOU!!

Josh Schwebel <privatejosh@gmail.com>

Tue, Jun 14, 2022 at 5:28 AM

hi Lauren,

just a quick response to yesterday's email.

re: Teresa's intro, 800 words sounds great to me. You are totally right on that one.

I will look for a copy of the Whitney catalogue, but I don't have one at hand. Do you have one that you could photograph?

otherwise, maybe we can mention it in the meeting with the designers.

I will try to draft a kind of publication mock-up as well, but I agree that this will be more for the meeting with the designers, and less for the publishers.

Finally, I doubt we will hear back from Marina for a while, and might need to recontact her in a few weeks once the flames of panic have died down a bit.