We Eat Art

Molly Crabapple is a journalist/artist who just put out the memoir Drawing Blood. We talk about the book, and about New York, activism, art vs illustration, artistic lineage and how you go from being a naked art student to an international correspondent with work in the MOMA.

Ted Mineo makes objects that shouldn't exist--mixtures of lurid color and uncanny texture. We talk about a lot of things, including how they relate to fiberglass New Orleans restaurant food ad sculptures

Mark Thomas Gibson makes powerfully graphic paintings oozing with poetic weirdness. He also went to the same art schools as Zak and shows at the same gallery. So we had a lot to talk about.

Mary Reid Kelley has just been officially declared a genius by the MacArthur Foundation. She makes densely allusive videos that refer to classical mythology and literature and freak everyone out. We talk about art, jokes, puns, wordplay and poets--especially AC Swinburne.

Raymond Pettibon is known for the pulpy intensity of his ink drawings, the cryptic text that accompanies them. Nowadays he shows internationally all over the world, but when he started he was just a guy who was studying economics and drew some album covers for his brother who was in a band called Black Flag. We talk about all of that--plus weird brushes.

Carolina Miranda is an art editor and art writer at the LA Times. We talked to her about how she ended up doing that and what that's like, plus garages, being a fox in a world of hedgehoggy writers, dick jokes, recording the shitshow of art for humanity, and more...

Diana Cooper makes wonderfully detailed microcosmic abstractions that start with painting and drawing and then go where they need to from there. She got like a Guggenheim grant and a 10-year retrospective at the Cleveland MOCA and is generally a badass. We talk about painting, dancing, music, frustration, tiny worlds and other things.

Gary Panter is a manic expressionist painter, draughtsman and underground comic artist. He's the author of the surrealistic Jimbo, had work in the seminal 80s alternacomic zine RAW and, yeah, also did the set designs for Pee Wee's Playhouse. We talked about comics, meeting Jack Kirby, psychedelic light shows, making paintings versus making comics and a lot more.