July 31, 2016

Ep.#150: Jessica Backus of Artsy-- on Peres Projects in Berlin (before, during and after the market crash), and her TEDx talk "Why You Don't Get Contemporary Art"

1 hour 12 minutes

Jessica Backus of Artsy talks about:

Her past and current jobs at Artsy- formerly leading up the Art Genome Project, which catalogs artists and art works to control data on the site; and her current job leading up a team of approximately 20 gallery liaisons; how Artsy's gallery sales model works (galleries pay a monthly fee to be listed on the site but don't have a percentage taken out of their sales); and Artsy's mission as "the art world online," with three businesses in one: a media business (their magazine), a listings business (with galleries), and an auction business; her earlier job with the gallery Peres Projects in Berlin, which she took after having studied the East German Leipzig schools while living there; her oddly impactful exposure to art history through her class with Rosalind Krauss, along with my and a fellow student's version of encountering her class; her work with the comp. literature giant Gayatri Spivak at Columbia, and her gradual departure out of academia into art…Backus boils it down to a dichotomy between whether one sees things as conveying text or as conveying something visual, performative, etc.; working for Peres Projects in Berlin over the course of the art bubble around 2006 (when she arranged for helicopters for Peres and his artists in Mikonos, because all the water taxis were booked), through the financial collapse and coming out on the other side when all the glitz and glamour were suddenly gauche; her transitions from Peres to grad school in art history and then on to a job at Phillips auction house, where she wound up in 'Special Projects', putting together a curatorial program; and how her work managing gallery liaisons for Artsy is analogous to being a choreographer, where her role is to find the movement and the vision in moving together amongst all the diversity.

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