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Art Papers, Fire Ecology, and Ending Well This week on Bad at Sports, we sit down in Atlanta with Sarah Higgins, Executive and Artistic Director of Art Papers, during the Art Papers symposium. What unfolds is a candid, generous, and surprisingly hopeful conversation about what it means to end something well. As Art Papers approaches its final chapter after nearly 50 years, Higgins lays out a model for institutional closure that resists panic, rejects compromise, and instead asks: what if ending is a form of contribution? From the "fire ecology" framework to radical transparency about budgets, labor, and sustainability, this conversation moves from grief to strategy to something like collective possibility. Along the way: the death of art criticism models, nonprofit fatigue, Chicago parallels, and why maybe nobody is coming to save us. Names Dropped (Bad at Sports style) Sarah Higgins — https://www.artpapers.org Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Art Papers Symposium — https://www.artpapers.org New Art Examiner — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Art_Examiner Dan Talley — https://www.artpapers.org Laura Lieberman — https://www.artpapers.org Real Art Ways — https://realartways.org Critical Minded — https://criticalminded.org Ponce City Market — https://www.poncecitymarket.com Jamestown — https://www.jamestownlp.com National Endowment for the Arts — https://www.arts.gov Mary Louise Schumacher — https://www.marylouiseschumacher.com Lucy – https://www.thenewatlantis.com/futurisms/the-muddled-message-of-lucy Scarlett Johansson – https://scarlett-johansson.net/ Morgan Freeman – https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/f/fo-fz/morgan-freeman/

Recorded live at the Art Papers Symposium in Atlanta, this episode features a deeply personal and wide-ranging conversation with Tori Tinsley. Joined by Brian Andrews and Duncan MacKenzie, Tinsley reflects on caregiving, grief, motherhood, and the evolution of her "hug" figures across painting, sculpture, and animation. Her practice emerges from lived experience, particularly her mother's diagnosis with frontotemporal dementia, and expands into a broader inquiry into emotional labor, embodiment, and the absurdity of contemporary life. Humor, instability, and tenderness coexist in work that resists resolution while remaining deeply accessible. Name Drop List (with links) Tori Tinsley — https://www.google.com/search?q=Tori+Tinsley+artist Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Art Papers — https://www.artpapers.org/ School of the Art Institute of Chicago — https://www.saic.edu/ Georgia State University (GSU) — https://artdesign.gsu.edu/ William Kentridge — https://www.kentridge.studio/ Brené Brown — https://brenebrown.com/

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Abigail Satinsky sit down with Nato Thompson for a conversation that spans collapsing institutions, alternative economies, and what it actually means to sustain a life in art. Recorded in the context of an art fair ecosystem that increasingly blurs community, commerce, and survival, Thompson reflects on his path from Creative Time to Philadelphia Contemporary (RIP unrealized museum), and into his current multi-pronged practice: consulting, artist support, and the evolving Alternative Art School. What starts as a casual catch-up quickly becomes something sharper: a diagnosis of failing art school models, a critique of nonprofit dependency, and a proposal for artist-centered infrastructures that actually function. Along the way: dark matter artists, subscription economies, global classrooms, refrigerator exhibitions, and the radical idea that maybe art isn't a career ladder at all. Names Dropped (with links) Nato Thompson — https://natothompson.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Abigail Satinsky — https://www.abigailsatinsky.com/ Creative Time — https://creativetime.org/ Philadelphia Contemporary — https://philadelphiacontemporary.org/ Alternative Art School — https://alternativeartschool.net/ e-flux — https://www.e-flux.com/ Anton Vidokle — https://www.e-flux.com/about/anton-vidokle/ Powerhouse Arts — https://powerhousearts.org/ Raqs Media Collective — https://raqsmediacollective.net/ Tania Bruguera — https://www.taniabruguera.com/ Guadalupe Maravilla — https://www.guadalupemaravilla.com/ Jeremy Deller — https://www.jeremydeller.org/ Lexa Walsh — https://www.lexawalsh.com/ Times Square Arts — https://www.timessquarenyc.org/times-square-arts

Locks' exhibition operates as a split composition: the back gallery leans into layered, exploratory collage rooted in his teaching experience with Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project at Stateville Correctional Center, while the front gallery delivers sharper, declarative works built around text and figuration. The conversation frames this as a kind of A-side / B-side logic, with one space functioning like improvisational jazz and the other like a stripped-down, urgent punk track. Locks pushes back on easy analogies, but embraces the underlying idea: that both bodies of work are driven by different modes of attention and response. A major thread is process. Locks describes an almost anti-archival system of working, where stacks of Xeroxes, prints, and sampled sounds are mentally cataloged rather than digitally organized. This produces a practice grounded in rediscovery and accident, closer to crate-digging than database searching. Equally central is pedagogy. His decade-plus engagement with incarcerated students becomes a generative force, not a side project. The "homework" he assigns becomes his own studio method, expanding into the work shown here and into related musical output like List of Demands. Throughout, Locks positions his work within a lineage that moves fluidly between comic books, punk ephemera, Black radical print culture, and contemporary art. The result is a practice that refuses clean categorization, operating instead as an ongoing negotiation between sound, image, politics, and community. Names Dropped  Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Ryan (Peter Miller) — http://ryanpetermiller.com/ Damon Locks — https://damonlocks.black/ Goldfinch Gallery — https://goldfinch-gallery.com/ Lumpen Radio — https://lumpenradio.com/ Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — https://pnaep.org/ Stateville Correctional Center — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateville_Correctional_Center Artists / Art References Charles White — https://www.artic.edu/artists/23067/charles-white Raymond Pettibon — https://gagosian.com/artists/raymond-pettibon/ Emory Douglas — https://www.moma.org/artists/13246 Kerry James Marshall — https://kerryjamesmarshall.com/ Music / Punk References Bad Brains — https://www.badbrains.com/ Minor Threat — https://dischord.com/band/minor-threat Government Issue — https://dischord.com/band/government-issue The Clash — https://www.theclash.com/ Siouxsie and the Banshees — https://www.siouxsieandthebanshees.co.uk/ The Damned — https://www.officialdamned.com/ Big Black — https://touchandgorecords.com/bands/big-black/ Naked Raygun — https://www.nakedraygun.org/ Black Flag — https://sstsuperstore.com/collections/black-flag Comics / Illustration Influences John Byrne — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/b/byrne_john.htm Neal Adams — https://nealadams.com/ George Pérez — https://www.marvel.com/comics/creators/126/george_perez Marshall Rogers — https://www.lambiek.net/artists/r/rogers_marshall.htm

Guests: Annette LePique, Curtis Anthony Bozif, Pia Singh, Gareth Kaye Recorded with the support of Columbia College Chicago - Colum.edu What happens when you gather a room full of critics in a moment when criticism itself feels both endangered and newly alive? In this long-awaited return to the Chicago Critics Roundtable, Duncan sits down with a new multi-hyphenate crew of writers, curators, artists, and exhibition-makers to unpack the shifting role of criticism in a fractured "art ecology." What emerges is a conversation about care, attention, subjectivity, labor, and the strange intimacy of thinking deeply about someone else's work. From the death of legacy media to the rise of Substack, from writing as love to writing as agitation, this episode positions criticism as a lived, embodied, and often obsessive practice. Criticism is relational, literary, emotional, and deeply entangled with the conditions of making and showing art in Chicago today, and certainly never "neutral".  Name Drop List (with links) Duncan MacKenzie—https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews—https://www.brianandrews.org/ Annette LePique—https://sixtyinchesfromcenter.org/byline/annette-lepique/ Curtis Anthony Bozif—https://www.curtisanthonybozif.com/ Pia Singh—https://curatorsintl.org/collaborators/22319-pia-singh Gareth Kaye—https://chicagospleen.substack.com/ Derrick Guthrie—https://derrickguthrie.com/ Lane Relyea—https://www.artic.edu/authors/71/lane-relyea James Elkins—https://www.saic.edu/profiles/faculty/james-elkins Michelle Grabner—https://www.michellegrabner.com/ Lori Waxman—https://www.60inchcenter.org/lori-waxman Charles Baudelaire—https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/charles-baudelaire Dave Hickey—https://www.artforum.com/contributors/dave-hickey Werner Herzog—https://www.bfi.org.uk/filmography/werner-herzog Timothy Morton—https://www.timothymorton.net/ Rachel Carson—https://www.rachelcarson.org/ Peter Schjeldahl—https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/peter-schjeldahl

Recorded at Gray Gallery This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, and Ryan Peter Miller, sit down with legendary British artist John Stezaker inside the unexpectedly elegant library at Gray Gallery. The conversation centers on Stezaker's recent exhibition RAFT and expands into a wide-ranging meditation on collage, photography, landscape, and the strange psychological terrain "between images." Stezaker reflects on his long-standing practice of working with found imagery, particularly Victorian-era topographical prints and film stills, and how his recent shift into landscape collage emerged during lockdown while living on the coast. What begins as a search for calm quickly mutates into something more unstable, even apocalyptic, mirroring broader cultural and political upheavals. The conversation touches on risk, intuition, the rejection of intentionality, and the generative power of getting lost in one's own archive. Stezaker's framing of collage as a way to examine the "abyss" between images becomes a central thread, offering a compelling rethinking of how we see, construct meaning, and navigate visual culture. There's also a candid and surprisingly funny detour into photography skepticism, pedagogy, and the emotional cycles of artistic production, including what Stezaker calls the "terrible moment" between bodies of work. Names Dropped John Stezaker — https://www.stezaker.com/ Duncan MacKenzie — https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews — https://www.brianandrews.org/ Ryan Peter Miller — https://www.ryanpetermiller.com/ Gray Gallery — https://graygallery.com/ Maurice Blanchot — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/blanchot/ Slade School of Fine Art — https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/ Images Stezaker 2025, courtsey Gray Gallery.

This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews sit down with Kate Sierzputowski to talk about the evolving identity of EXPO Chicago under Frieze and what 2026 signals for the fair, the city, and the Midwest at large. Now Director of EXPO, Sierzputowski reflects on scaling up leadership while doubling down on care for Chicago's ecosystem. The 2026 edition marks a shift toward a more curatorial, thematic, and relational fair model: smaller in scale, more intentional in layout, and driven by embedded curatorial frameworks rather than parallel programming. Major highlights include a deep institutional partnership with the Obama Presidential Center, a rethinking of the fair's floor plan and visitor flow, and a stronger emphasis on Midwest networks and inter-city cultural exchange. Across the conversation, Sierzputowski frames EXPO not just as a marketplace, but as a platform for storytelling, regional identity, and long-term relationship building. At stake is a bigger question: what does it mean for Chicago to be both global and defiantly local?     Kate Sierzputowski – EXPO Chicago Director – https://www.artnews.com/art-news/market/kate-sierzputowski-director-expo-chicago-essence-harden-1234760346/ Duncan MacKenzie – https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews – https://www.brianandrews.org/ Frieze – https://www.frieze.com/ EXPO Chicago – https://www.expochicago.com/ Obama Presidential Center – https://www.obama.org/presidential-center/ Dr. Louise Bernard – Obama Presidential Center Founding Director – https://www.obama.org/press-releases/obama-foundation-announces-dr-louise-bernard-director-museum-obama-presidential-center/ Katie Pfohl - Detroit Institute of Art – https://www.diaart.org/ https://dia.org/about/media-room/news/detroit-institute-arts-names-katie-pfohl-associate-curator-contemporary-art Essence Harden –https://www.essenceharden.com/ Independent Curators International – https://curatorsintl.org/  Images by Leslie Hewett and courtesy of EXPO Chicago 

Recorded at the Art Papers Fire Ecology Symposium, Atlanta Atlanta artist Michi Meko joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews during Art Papers' symposium weekend for a wide-ranging conversation that moves from southern port cities and landscape painting to pandemic solitude, mental health, and the strange spiritual work of making art. Meko discusses his exhibition So Black and So Blue, a body of work developed between New Orleans and Savannah that reflects on color, history, and the charged atmosphere of southern coastal landscapes. Working with shimmering surfaces, deep blues, blacks, and gilded frames, the paintings operate between abstraction and landscape. They draw viewers into spaces that feel both cosmic and terrestrial, somewhere between daybreak and nightfall. The works are designed to be experienced in person, where layers of marks, reflective materials, and shifting color create movement and depth impossible to capture in photographs. The conversation expands into the tension between hard-edge abstraction and expressive mark-making. Meko describes his earlier work using nautical signal flags as coded language about survival and buoyancy in America, while also poking at the seriousness of modernist abstraction. From there, the group debates the emotional power of painting, touching on artists like Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly, asking what makes a work spiritually or emotionally resonant and why some paintings leave viewers cold. A major turning point in Meko's practice came during the COVID-19 shutdown. When Atlanta closed down, he packed his car with camping gear and disappeared into the mountains, spending long stretches alone hiking, fishing, and writing. The period became a personal reckoning. He stopped painting entirely, turned inward, and began confronting anxieties and habits that had previously gone unexamined. Through solitude and outdoor wandering, he reframed landscape not as scenery but as a metaphor for the inner terrain of the mind. When Meko eventually returned to the studio, that experience reshaped his work. The paintings that emerged began to reflect internal states rather than external views. Horizons divide mind and body. Shimmering skies become metaphors for thought and anxiety. Dense fields of mark-making hold viewers inside the work, drawing them in and out of the image in a restless visual rhythm. Throughout the conversation, Meko reflects on the strange transformation that can occur through isolation, describing the experience of leaving society and returning "a little feral, a little monk-like," carrying new perspectives about art, masculinity, therapy, and the ways people search for healing. What emerges is a portrait of an artist navigating between wilderness and studio, darkness and wonder, abstraction and landscape. For Meko, painting becomes both exploration and survival, a way of mapping the landscapes inside ourselves. Name Drop List (Bad at Sports style) Michi Meko - https://www.michimeko.com Art Papers - https://www.artpapers.org/ Duncan MacKenzie - https://kurasmackenzie.com/ Brian Andrews - https://www.brianandrews.org/ Louis Armstrong - https://www.louisarmstronghouse.org Mark Rothko - https://www.markrothko.org Rothko Chapel - https://www.rothkochapel.org Ellsworth Kelly - https://ellsworthkelly.org Bob Ross - https://www.bobross.com J. M. W. Turner - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/jmw-turner-558 Thomas Cole - https://thomascole.org The Goat Farm Arts Center - https://goatfarmartscenter.com New Orleans Savannah Gulf of Mexico

Recorded during Miami art week at NADA, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with artists Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias to talk about painting, fiber, migration, labor, and the strange textures of building an art practice across borders. Vargas Bravo and Lemonias both arrived at NADA through Andrew Rafacz Gallery, but their paths into the fair and into the United States are very different. Vargas Bravo, a painter originally from Mexico City and currently completing graduate studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, discusses work that reimagines familiar structures of division. Her paintings pull from the visual language of Western painting while subverting its traditions, including a monumental image of a collapsed chain-link fence that imagines the fall of structures meant to separate and contain. The conversation moves through borders as both literal and symbolic constructs, and how living in Chicago has reshaped the stakes of the work. Lemonias, a Jamaican-born artist working in fiber and print processes, describes a practice rooted in care labor, migration, and material culture. Drawing from her experiences as a nanny in the United States, Lemonias incorporates children's clothing, food packaging, and other domestic remnants into textile works that trace the economies of caregiving and consumption. The materials themselves carry the stories of the households they passed through, mapping the intersection of labor, class, and migration that often remains invisible in the art world. Along the way the discussion opens into a larger conversation about mentorship, access, and the informal knowledge that structures the art ecosystem. Lemonias reflects on learning the unwritten rules of American cultural institutions while navigating race, class, and belonging, while Vargas Bravo speaks about the complicated promise of the "American dream" from the perspective of an international artist whose time in Chicago has included both opportunity and trauma. Both artists also unpack the evolving relationships between artists and galleries, describing representation less as a hierarchy than as a collaborative process built on trust and dialogue. Recorded amid the hum of the fair floor at New Art Dealers Alliance during Miami art week, the conversation moves easily from the practical realities of art fairs to the deeper social forces shaping contemporary practice. The result is a candid and thoughtful exchange about what it means to make work in a world structured by borders, labor, and the fragile networks that allow artists to keep going. Name Drop List Berenice Vargas Bravo — https://berenicevargasbravo.com Krystal Lemonias — https://www.krystallemonias.com Andrew Rafacz Gallery — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Andrew Rafacz — https://www.andrewrafacz.com Janelle Dawson — https://www.janelledawson.com School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) — https://www.saic.edu NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://www.newartdealers.org EXPO Chicago — https://www.expochicago.com Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com Bazaar Magazine (France) — https://www.bazaar.fr

Recorded in Atlanta during the Art Papers symposium: Fire Ecology Artist Antonio Darden joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews in Atlanta, where the conversation opens with one of the most arresting images in Darden's recent work: an alien laid out on an autopsy table. What begins as a discussion of a strange installation quickly unfolds into a deeply personal exploration of grief, memory, and the ways artists translate trauma into form. Darden describes the work Last One Left, a project that emerged from a cascade of personal losses: the deaths of his mother, brother, and father, leaving him the final surviving member of his immediate family. The alien body becomes a surrogate figure, a way to approach unbearable realities obliquely. Humor, conspiracy culture, and pop imagery become tools for making painful subjects accessible without dulling their impact. As Darden explains, confronting audiences with a literal body can shut down reflection, but a grey alien opens a space where grief can be processed at a distance before it lands. The conversation moves through the complicated emotional landscape that shaped these works: family histories stretching from Trinidad to New York, the lingering trauma of police violence after his brother's death in Atlanta, and the strange burden of becoming the keeper of a family archive of memories, objects, and stories. Darden reflects on what it means to inherit not only possessions but also responsibility for the narrative of a family's past. From there, the discussion shifts to Darden's increasingly theatrical performance practice. He recounts a recent performance staged in an entirely blacked-out theater that blended wrestling mythology, Atlanta rap history, gospel music, cinematic references, and sculptural staging into a chaotic and emotional ritual. Undertaker imagery, Pastor Troy, Lil' Kim, and The Naked Gun collide in a deliberately excessive spectacle meant to mirror the overwhelming density of memory and grief. Throughout the conversation, Darden describes his work as a kind of mental montage. Cars, hip-hop, conspiracy theories, television shows, and family trauma coexist in the same symbolic landscape. Rather than separating high and low culture, he embraces the full range of references that shape lived experience. The episode also turns toward the future, as Darden reflects on fatherhood and the challenge of raising a young son while carrying the weight of family history. In contrast to the losses that haunt his work, his son's creativity and confidence offer a different kind of legacy. What emerges is a portrait of an artist using humor, spectacle, and cultural collage to navigate the most difficult questions of survival, responsibility, and memory. Name Drop List: Antonio Darden – https://www.antoniogdarden.com Craig Drennen – https://craigdrennen.com Jared Christian – https://www.instagram.com/jaredchristian Devonté Hynes – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dev_Hynes Blood Orange – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_Orange_(musician) Young Thug – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_Thug Shawty Lo – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawty_Lo Pastor Troy – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastor_Troy Lil' Kim – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lil%27_Kim John P. Kee – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Kee Gillian Anderson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gillian_Anderson Dana Scully – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Scully The X-Files – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_X-Files Tupac Shakur – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupac_Shakur Michael Jackson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_%26_Order:_Special_Victims_Unit Olivia Benson – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivia_Benson Gordon Ramsay – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Ramsay Kitchen Nightmares – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_Nightmares Kanye West – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanye_West Bound 2 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bound_2 The Ponderosa Twins Plus One – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ponderosa_Twins_Plus_One The Undertaker – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undertaker Priscilla Presley – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priscilla_Presley Leslie Nielsen – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Nielsen The Naked Gun – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Gun Cyclops – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclops_(Marvel_Comics) X-Men '97 – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_%2797 Radcliffe Bailey – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radcliffe_Bailey Art Papers – https://www.artpapers.org/ Fire Ecology – https://www.artpapers.org/fire-ecology/  

Recorded on the fly during art fair week, live at NADA, this conversation with Dan Attoe moves from metal-kid origin stories to Zen meditation, daily practice, tattooing, landscape painting, and the unexpected turn toward writing a horror novel. Duncan opens with a personal note: a Dan Attoe painting has been hanging in his home for 22 years, a wedding gift that quietly embedded itself into the fabric of his life, which frames the conversation, and traces Attoe's arc from rural Idaho and northern Minnesota outsider to one of the most recognizable painters of his generation. Attoe talks about the seven-year run of making a painting every weekday, a discipline that functioned less as a productivity hack and more as a survival strategy. What began as wild, sex-and-drugs-and-rowdy-party imagery rooted in imagined social worlds gradually shifted toward the meditative landscapes he's now known for. These aren't observed sites but constructed psychic spaces, built from memory, attention, and what he calls a process of "composting" experience. Zen practice, daily drawing, and tattooing form a three-part studio structure that keeps the work in motion. Learning to tattoo on his own body sharpened his attention to contrast, permanence, and empathy, feeding directly back into the paintings. Along the way we get patches, skate culture, Methodist guilt, Barry McGee installations, Walker Art Center bookstore theory dives, and the long road from being told to abandon heavy-metal imagery to fully embracing it as the engine of a mature practice. The conversation closes on writing: how Stephen King, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and decades of accumulated art-world experience led Attoe to channel theory, narrative, and lived history into a horror novel. It's a talk about attention, energy, and letting the work tell you what it needs to become. Images courtesy of Western Exhibitions -  A party for children, 2019 India ink and graphite on paper 7h x 7w in   Fingertip Mountain, 2020 Oil on Canvas on Panel 24h x 24w in   Forest Path with Glowing Orb, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in   Dual Falls with Painted Arches, 2021 Oil on Canvas on Panel 36h x 24w in Names Dropped: Dan Attoe — https://www.danattoe.com Dan Attoe at Western Exhibitions — https://westernexhibitions.com/artists/dan-attoe Dan Attoe at PPOW — https://ppowgallery.com/artists/dan-attoe/ Clouds Tattoo (Attoe's shop) — https://www.cloudstattoo.com A Talking Tree — https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Tree-Dan-Attoe/dp/B0D4JGYR2F Barry McGee — https://www.ratio3.org/artists/barry-mcgee Chris Johanson — https://altman-siegel.com/artists/chris-johanson Jean-Michel Basquiat — https://gagosian.com/artists/jean-michel-basquiat/ Titian — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/titian Giorgione — https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/artists/giorgione Arthur Danto — https://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/faculty/danto.html Dr. Woo — https://drwoo.com Natalie Goldberg — https://nataliegoldberg.com Stephen King — https://stephenking.com George Saunders — https://georgesaundersbooks.com Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — https://www.harpercollins.com/products/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-robert-m-pirsig Jean-François Lyotard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lyotard/ Jean Baudrillard — https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/ Walker Art Center — https://walkerart.org Iowa Writers' Workshop — https://writersworkshop.uiowa.edu Iron Maiden — https://www.ironmaiden.com Danzig — https://www.danzig-verotik.com Twin Peaks — https://www.sho.com/twin-peaks Dragonlance / Larry Elmore — https://larryelmore.com New Art Dealers Alliance –– https://www.newartdealers.org/

Recorded live at the Stony Island Arts Bank with the Chicago Architecture Biennial Robert Burnier joins Duncan MacKenzie and Brian Andrews for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between sculpture, drawing, divination systems, urban planning, Mondrian, Agnes Martin, and the politics of place. Known for his bent and torsioned aluminum works—objects that hold gesture, decision, and duration in their skins—Burnier talks about a recent body of drawings made while traveling between Europe and South Africa. Working on translucent washi paper, the pieces attempt to register light, color, and spatial memory rather than image, emerging from time spent in Cape Town's Bo-Kaap and the erased landscape of District Six. The discussion connects these experiences to Burnier's upbringing in Oak Park and to larger questions about how communities are structured, protected, or destroyed through seemingly mundane formal decisions. From there the conversation spirals outward into the role of myth, tarot, and Yoruba divination as models for thinking through chaos, and into the slow time of art as a counterpoint to the speed of contemporary media. Lorezetti's Allegory of Good and Bad Government becomes a touchstone for considering how abstraction can carry ethical or civic attitude without becoming propaganda, and how form itself can function as content. Throughout, Burnier frames sculpture and drawing as "sites of possibility" rather than statements—tuning forks for thought that ask viewers to complete the work through their own duration and attention. The episode closes with talk of new material directions following a recent Pollock-Krasner grant and an ongoing commitment to work that never fully resolves, but keeps adjusting—open, provisional, and in motion. Images courtesy of Andrew Rafacz Gallery. Zulua Ĉ iela Kapo, 2025 (top) Acrylic on aluminum Nebulaj Ćeloj (Soyinka IV), 2023 (bottom) Acrylic on aluminum   Robert Burnier – https://www.robertburnier.com Andrew Rafacz Gallery – https://andrewrafacz.com Corvi-Mora (London) – https://www.corvi-mora.com Bad at Sports – https://badatsports.com Lumpen Radio (WLPN 105.5 FM) – https://lumpenradio.com Agnes Martin – https://www.moma.org/artists/3787 Ambrogio Lorenzetti – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government https://www.wga.hu/html_m/l/lorenzet/ambrogio/governme/index.html Bo-Kaap (Cape Town) – https://www.capetown.travel/areas/bo-kaap/ Buddhism – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Buddhism Chicago Architecture Biennial – https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org Christopher Wool – https://gagosian.com/artists/christopher-wool/ District Six Museum – https://www.districtsix.co.za Oak Park, Illinois – https://www.oak-park.us Piet Mondrian – https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/piet-mondrian-1654 School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) – https://www.saic.edu Schopenhauer – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/ Stony Island Arts Bank – https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank Takashi Murakami – https://www.perrotin.com/artists/Takashi_Murakami/1 Tarot – https://www.britannica.com/topic/tarot Yoruba Divination (Ifá) – https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ifa

Recorded in Miami during art fair week: Alfred Steiner joins Bad at Sports live from Miami, arriving by bicycle from the beach in full cowboy boots and jeans, already soaked through and fully inside the psychic weather of art fair week. A painter, conceptual artist, and practicing intellectual property lawyer, Steiner brings a rare combination of market fluency, legal clarity, and genuine artistic skepticism to a conversation that moves easily between booths, blockchain, copyright law, and the unwritten rules that quietly govern the art world. The discussion opens with a pulse check on the fairs, moving from NADA's familiar "house style" of faux-naïve figurative painting to the broader diversity of the main fair. Rather than ranking winners and losers, Steiner frames art fairs as emotionally destabilizing machines, places where impressive work and baffling work coexist in ways that are equally exhausting. What matters most is not judgment but endurance, the daily labor of continuing to make work in a system that constantly measures value against visibility and sales. From there, the episode dives deep into Steiner's dual practice. As an artist, his work spans painting, language-based conceptual pieces, NFTs, and legal interventions that deliberately stress-test institutional systems. He walks through two blockchain projects that were designed to fail commercially, including one where each NFT generates a unique text based on a buyer's Ethereum address, and another where ownership includes the right to alter the work itself, opening the door to misuse, mischief, and unexpected generosity. NFTs check in as, Steiner recounts a moment when an NFT holder copied a high-value work by Mitchell Chan, prompting Chan to respond by turning the forgery into an original drawing. The story becomes a parable about trust, legitimacy, and the strange ethics that emerge when technology destabilizes traditional ideas of originality. The conversation touches copyright law, photography, and artificial intelligence. Steiner explains why registering a copyright still matters, even in an age of ubiquitous images, and why most photographs are protected by default despite containing little expressive decision-making. He outlines how current legal frameworks are struggling to catch up with AI training practices, predicting that future court decisions will hinge not on whether content was scraped, but on how models are used and whose markets they undermine. Threaded throughout is a candid reflection on professional identity. Steiner speaks openly about the suspicion artists face when they have parallel careers, the romantic myth of total artistic devotion, and the quiet prejudice against artists who appear too competent, too organized, or too financially stable. Having spent years working part-time at Morrison & Foerster before founding his own firm, Steiner argues that the art world's fear of "dabblers" says more about its investment logic than about artistic seriousness. Recorded live, mid-fair, with sweat, exhaustion, legal theory, and humor all equally present, the episode offers a rare look at how art, law, labor, and belief intersect... Just don't look to hard at it.   NAMES DROPPED Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com Ethereum blockchain — https://ethereum.org Mitchell Chan — https://mitchellchan.com Rick Astley (via Rickrolling NFTs) — https://www.rickastley.co.uk Lawrence Weiner — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lawrence-weiner-2124 U.S. Copyright Office — https://www.copyright.gov Supreme Court of the United States — https://www.supremecourt.gov Morrison & Foerster Alfred Steiner - https://alfredsteiner.com/

Gabriel Barcia-Colombo Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial Gabriel Barcia-Colombo joins Bad at Sports from a rain-soaked tailgate outside the Stony Island Arts Bank, in the middle of Chicago Architecture Biennial programming and an open-hours weekend that turns the city into both subject and stage. A media artist whose work consistently centers human presence inside technological systems, Barcia-Colombo is in Chicago to present Media Stream, a large-scale public artwork that brings the people of Chicago directly onto the architecture they move through every day. The project is built from hundreds of filmed participants, composited into an algorithmic, ever-changing flow across vertical LED blades embedded in a public building. Contributors are asked to perform ordinary gestures, then to imagine moments of sublimity or loss, producing intimate, vulnerable expressions that are scaled up and encountered by strangers passing through the space. The result is a work that reverses the usual logic of media spectacle, shifting attention away from screens and systems and back toward the faces of people themselves. From there, the conversation opens into a wide-ranging discussion of digital memory, data after death, and the uneasy permanence of media archives. Barcia-Colombo reflects on early works like Animalia, Chordata, his long-running interest in collecting and containing human presence, and later projects such as The Hereafter Institute, which staged personalized funerals for participants' digital lives. Throughout, the group wrestles with the problem of preservation in media art, from CRT monitors and film projectors to contemporary AI tools that threaten to erase labor, context, and material specificity. The episode also touches on Barcia-Colombo's collaboration with David Byrne, his role as co-director of NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, and the contradictions of teaching technology as a humanist practice inside systems driven by speed, spectacle, and capitalization. What emerges is a thoughtful meditation on how artists can still create moments of connection and care inside infrastructures not designed for either. Recorded live, mid-storm, with rain hitting the merch cart and conversation drifting easily between theory, jokes, and deeply personal reflection. Highlights & Moments Turning public architecture into a living portrait of the city LED "blades" as broken, moving images rather than seamless spectacle Directing strangers to perform the everyday and the sublime Data, memory, and what happens to our digital lives after death Early video art as prophecy rather than nostalgia The problem of preserving media art as technologies disappear Labor, erasure, and value in digital and AI-assisted work Teaching technology as a humanist practice at NYU ITP Collaborating with David Byrne under extreme time constraints AI as mirror, therapist, and deeply unsettling collaborator Names Dropped Stony Island Arts Bank — https://rebuild-foundation.org/site/stony-island-arts-bank/ Chicago Architecture Biennial — https://www.chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org Media Stream - https://150mediastream.com/ Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - https://www.gabebc.com/ Times Square public art installations Animalia, Chordata The Hereafter Institute Nam June Paik — https://www.paikstudios.com Bruce Nauman — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bruce-nauman-1478 Paul Pfeiffer — https://www.moma.org/artists/4595 Christian Marclay — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-marclay-732 NYU Tisch School of the Arts — https://tisch.nyu.edu Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — https://itp.nyu.edu Neon Museum, Las Vegas — https://www.neonmuseum.org

Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) Recorded in Miami during art fair week Nicholas DiLeonardi joins Bad at Sports from the middle of Miami art fair week, not from a booth but from the pavement between them. Assistant Director and consultant at Gitler&_____, DiLeonardi spends the week moving between fairs, collectors, hammocks, robot dogs, and banana sightings, offering a ground-level view of what art fairs actually feel like when you are advising clients rather than selling from behind a wall. The conversation moves fluidly from ranking fairs to questioning the psychic cost of sitting in a booth, from the pleasures of approachable painting to skepticism about over-packaged meaning. DiLeonardi talks candidly about advising as a practice, collecting as a responsibility, and why sometimes the best work is the work that does not want to explain itself. Along the way, the group unpacks the strange theater of Art Basel, the social logic of NADA, the pleasures and limits of Untitled, and what it means to keep showing up to a system that is both exhausting and irresistible. The episode also dives into Gitler&____'s public-facing projects, including the long-running Audubon Mural Project, and the blurred line between consultancy, gallery work, and artist support. It is a conversation about taste, access, labor, exhaustion, and the odd hope that keeps people flying back to Miami year after year. Recorded live, with roosters, bridges, hammocks, and just enough art world self-awareness to stay funny. Highlights & Moments Ranking Miami fairs while openly admitting bias Why NADA still feels like a New York fair dropped into Miami Hammocks as both seating and market distortion Untitled as the gateway fair for first-time collectors The Beeple robot dog spectacle and the freedom of not knowing how to feel about it Counting banana references across satellite fairs "No motive" painting and the desire for unmediated experience Art advising as a creative practice rather than pure transaction The psychic toll of booth sitting and forced enthusiasm Why pre-selling booths feels like theater everyone agrees to perform   Names Dropped: ·       Art Basel Miami Beach — https://www.artbasel.com/miami-beach ·       NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — https://thenada.org/nada-miami ·       Untitled Art Fair — https://untitledartfairs.com/ ·       Scope Art Show — https://scope-artshow.com/  ·       Audubon Mural Project — https://www.audubon.org/muralproject ·       National Audubon Society — https://www.audubon.org/ ·       Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) coverage — https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/beeple-pooping-robot-dogs-at-art-basel-miami-beach-1234765375/ ·       Robert Moskowitz- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moskowitz ·       Andrew Spence- https://andrewspenceart.com ·       Western Exhibitions- https://westernexhibitions.com ·       Submissions- https://www.submissions.art ·       Canada Gallery- https://canadagallery.com ·       Mac's Club- https://www.macsclubdeuce.com ·       Gitler&____- https://www.gitlerand.com/