I belong to a generation shaped by white flight. I was born between Eight Mile and Nine Mile, in that charged space where Detroit and its suburbs were divided by municipal boundaries, race, fear, and class. People can get understandably prickly about who gets to claim Detroit, particularly when someone grew up near the city rather than within its official limits. I don’t want to blur those distinctions. But Detroit was the cultural, psychological, and economic center of the world I grew up in, and the consequences of its abandonment were visible everywhere.

At the same time, I grew up around an unusually inventive artistic community. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1995, there was a lot of excitement around artists such as Jorge Pardo and Pae White and the way their work moved between sculpture, design, architecture, furniture, and installation. That cross-pollination was often described as something new. I don’t say this to diminish what they accomplished, but it didn’t feel new to me. I had already seen artists in Detroit working across disciplines because the divisions between those disciplines were never especially useful or convincing.

Figures such as Jim Pallas, Diana Alva, Stephen Goodfellow, George Clinton, Lowell Boileau, Jerome Ferretti, Niagara, Robert Sestok, Tyree Guyton, Rico Africa, Cary Loren, Lacy Sterling, and especially Matt Blake moved freely between art, music, performance, design, architecture, social space, and everyday life. They weren’t necessarily waiting for permission from institutions, and they weren’t overly concerned with maintaining clean professional categories. They made the exhibition, the environment, the furniture, the poster, the event, or the community around the work.

That taught me that improvisation was not simply an aesthetic gesture. It was a way of operating. You used what was available, built your own context, and allowed one form of activity to contaminate another. Style came out of that same condition. It wasn’t just surface or taste; it was a means of self-invention and sometimes self-preservation.

I’m cautious about romanticizing survival, because hardship is not inherently creative or noble. But growing up around Detroit taught me to be resourceful, skeptical of established systems, and comfortable making something coherent out of contradiction. It also taught me that an artistic life could be built laterally, across forms and communities, rather than through a single discipline or institution.

It made making things feel completely normal. Art wasn’t presented as a special or elevated activity in my family. It existed alongside carpentry, welding, repair, illustration, jewelry making, painting, organizing, selling, and figuring out how to make a living.

My father was a carpenter and worked for Armor Guard, fortifying houses in Detroit during the height of the crack era, including houses connected to Maserati Rick and the Chambers Brothers. His Armor Guard van was essentially a mobile welding shop, packed with tools, steel, cables, and equipment. The interior was coated in grinding swarf, and I still love that hot metallic smell.

As a kid, I sometimes went with him to jobs in Highland Park and Detroit. I watched him measure, weld, fabricate, improvise, and adapt to whatever kind of building he encountered. When that work became too dangerous, he left the city again and began building sun decks for upper-middle-class families in the suburbs. The same skills moved between completely different worlds: reinforcing houses against intrusion and violence in Detroit, then building platforms for leisure outside the city. I didn’t have a grand interpretation of that at the time. It was simply the landscape I grew up in.

My mother brought another kind of discipline into the house. Before I was born, she worked as an art therapist at Pontiac State Hospital. She left while she was pregnant with me after a patient tried to stab her, but she never stopped making things. Throughout my life, she has painted, made jewelry, shown work at art and craft fairs, run an artist craft fair, and later became a gallerist.

She has an incredible capacity to keep working. She could make the work, build the booth, arrange the display, talk to people, sell it, and then do it again the following weekend. She is a hardcore entrepreneur. I don’t mean that as something separate from her creativity. Her particular gift is her ability to bring creative work into contact with other people - to organize it, present it, create a context for it, and build a community around it.

My uncle John Yates represented another possibility. He went to art school in the late 1960s and later became a staff illustrator at Creem, working there during Lester Bangs’s heyday. His drawings were intensely psychedelic - strange, funny, highly detailed, and completely embedded in the music and counterculture surrounding the magazine. Through him, it seemed natural that an artist might work inside publishing and popular culture rather than only within a gallery.

So I grew up with several different models of what a creative life could be. My father approached making through construction, welding, and physical problem-solving. My mother brought discipline, organization, persistence, and entrepreneurship. My uncle showed me art moving through music, publishing, humor, and counterculture.

None of it was treated as particularly unusual. The categories between artist, carpenter, craftsperson, illustrator, organizer, dealer, and entrepreneur were never very fixed in my family. You worked with your hands, you adapted, you figured things out, and you found a way to keep going. That probably shaped me more than any early idea I had about what an artist was supposed to be.

I really struggled in art school. In undergrad, I moved through several different programs before eventually attending the University of Michigan School of Art. But I often got more from the humanities than I did from the studio program, particularly from people like Joseph Grigely and Walter Spink. They gave me ways of thinking about language, history, perception, and culture that felt more expansive than the conversations I was having in many of my art classes.

I didn’t relate to many of the other students. By that point, I had already been showing work and had collaborated and exhibited with George Clinton when I was twenty. I wasn’t coming to art school waiting to discover that an artistic life was possible. I had already seen art operate through music, publishing, craft, performance, commerce, and community. The formal setting often felt narrower than the world I had come from.

Graduate school at ArtCenter was extremely competitive, but not always in a way that was productive for me. There was a great deal of ambition, positioning, and self-consciousness around how an artist was supposed to speak and behave. I had difficulty separating the useful pressure of critique from the less useful pressure to perform a particular kind of seriousness.

Moving to Los Angeles also introduced me to a new level of class and ethnic segregation. Detroit had obviously been shaped by racial and economic divisions, but I understood their codes because I had grown up inside them. Los Angeles had a different rigidity that I wasn’t prepared for. The art world could appear very open and progressive while remaining sharply divided by money, education, geography, and access. I became increasingly aware that taste and professional language could function as social boundaries.

What art school confirmed was that I had a real appetite for ideas, criticism, and historical context. I valued the people who complicated my thinking and helped me become more precise. What it did not confirm was the hierarchy surrounding fine art or the belief that institutional recognition necessarily reflected the most vital work.

I came away with more resistance than certainty. I learned how to take what was useful - the rigor, the argument, the exposure to other histories - without surrendering the instincts I had arrived with. Those instincts came from people who made things because making was part of how they lived, not because they had first been authorized to call themselves artists.

It came naturally, although I’m not sure I experienced it as resistance at first. Staying within one medium simply wasn’t the model I grew up with. My father moved between carpentry, welding, fabrication, and problem-solving. My mother painted, made jewelry, organized fairs, ran a gallery, and built a business around creative work. My uncle made psychedelic illustrations within the worlds of music and publishing. The artists I encountered in Detroit also moved freely between sculpture, architecture, performance, music, design, and the creation of social spaces. So the idea that an artist should refine one recognizable medium or procedure never seemed especially natural to me.

I tend to begin with an idea, an image, or sometimes a physical sensation, and then determine what form can carry it. That might be a drawing, a painting, a piece of furniture, a sculpture, a sound work, or an entire environment. I don’t think the meaning exists independently of the material, but I also don’t feel obligated to keep returning to the same material in order to establish continuity.

Art school and the professional art world made me more conscious that this could be viewed as a problem. There was often pressure to develop a legible identity - to make work that could be recognized quickly as yours and understood as part of a consistent trajectory. I understand why that is useful to institutions and markets, but it can become a kind of branding. For me, repetition only becomes interesting when it remains capable of producing surprise.

The continuity in my work is probably not medium but attitude: a willingness to improvise, to let materials redirect an idea, and to allow supposedly incompatible languages to occupy the same object. I’m interested in what happens when something handmade collides with something industrial, when decoration becomes structural, or when an object shifts between sculpture, furniture, prop, and character.

So yes, the movement between mediums came naturally. The resistance developed later, when I realized that other people wanted those boundaries to be more stable than I did.

Fast Friends really began in the early 2000s, while I was working the door at the Little Joy and spending time around people like Matt Fishbeck, Don Bolles, and Ariel Pink. In many ways, it was a reaction against the emphasis on pedigree and professional positioning that I had encountered in art school. I wanted to work with people because something was happening around them - not because they had already been validated or knew how to present themselves properly.

The flyers were handmade and heavily worked, often under the influence, for underground bands that were still operating in very small scenes. Some of them - Ariel Pink, Holy Shit, Animal Collective, Black Dice, Dead Moon - would eventually reach much larger audiences. But at the time, the attraction was that the music and the people around it felt unstable, obsessive, and difficult to categorize.

I was also making performance environments, so the work was never simply about promoting a show. The flyer, the room, the performance, the audience, and the social atmosphere were all part of the same thing. It didn’t fit neatly into the poster scene, but it also didn’t fit comfortably into the art world. It belonged more to a lineage of obscure weirdo culture, although I wasn’t fully aware of that lineage at the time. Later, I could recognize affinities with figures like Johanna Went or the Los Angeles Free Music Society.

So the chemistry I look for in other people has less to do with polish than with intensity. I’m drawn to people who are already building a world around what they do, even if that world is small, provisional, or barely visible. They don’t need to have everything resolved. In fact, it is often more interesting when they don’t.

I look for people who are committed but not precious, who can let different forms contaminate one another, and who understand that the social conditions around the work can become part of the work itself. I’m interested in a chemistry where authorship becomes porous and everyone is altered by the exchange.

The best collaborations don’t feel like two established identities being placed side by side. They produce a third thing - something stranger, less stable, and more alive than either person would have made alone.

Collaboration breaks my own stasis. When I work alone for too long, I can become overly protective of the internal logic of the work. I know how to make it cohere, but that coherence can become a trap. Another person brings in decisions I wouldn’t make, associations I wouldn’t follow, and forms of risk I might otherwise edit out.

Working with Alex Bag was especially important because it changed how I thought about authorship. In making an installation together, I had to let go of the idea that every element needed to be traceable back to a single intention or sensibility. The work existed between us. It wasn’t simply my work plus her work. It became something neither of us fully controlled, and that loss of control was productive.

Alex has a very distinct intelligence and presence, so collaborating with her didn’t mean smoothing out our differences. It meant allowing those differences to remain active within the work. That taught me that authorship could be shared without becoming vague, and that a work could have a strong identity without belonging neatly to one person.

Courtney Garvin, my former wife, was also a huge part of Fast Friends Inc. She taught me how to let go again - not only aesthetically, but practically and socially. Fast Friends depended on allowing other people’s energy, taste, labor, and instincts to redirect what it was becoming. Courtney helped me understand that openness wasn’t a loss of rigor. Sometimes holding on too tightly was the thing preventing the work from becoming fully alive.

I’ve collaborated with many artists, writers, and musicians, and projects like the Semiotext(e) work at the Whitney Biennial expanded that exchange into publishing and institutional spaces. Each collaboration creates a different structure of permission. A writer changes how I understand an image. A musician changes my sense of duration or atmosphere. A performer can turn an object into a situation.

Solitary studio work allows me to go deeply into my own language, but collaboration exposes the limits of that language. It forces me to give up some control, reconsider ownership, and respond to something outside my established habits. Ultimately, it helps me break my own stasis and arrive somewhere I couldn’t have planned.

I’m usually drawn first to something neglected, abandoned, or slightly out of place - something that has fallen outside its original use or lost the context that once made it legible. I’m interested in what happens when an object has been discarded but still seems to carry some residue of intention.

I tend to notice the runt of the litter. The awkward version, the damaged copy, the thing that doesn’t quite perform the way it was supposed to. Those objects often feel more specific to me than the successful ones. They have been altered by use, neglect, weather, repair, or failure, and all of that becomes part of their character.

What interests me is the possibility of recuperation, but not restoration in the traditional sense. I’m not trying to return something to an original state. I want to place it in a new condition where its strangeness, vulnerability, or stubbornness becomes visible.

The most compelling things are often the ones people pass by because they seem too ordinary, too broken, or too embarrassing to deserve attention. I’m drawn to the moment when something familiar begins to feel slightly unmoored from itself. That is usually where I want to begin.

I’m looking for something that already has personality. Usually it’s sentimental, awkward, funny, a little overdesigned, or trying too hard to be charming. Garden gnomes, trolls, holiday decorations, novelty signs, fake fruit, souvenir objects - things that were meant to feel familiar or reassuring, but start to feel different once they’re taken out of their original setting.

I’m not interested in neutral objects. I want something that already carries taste, memory, class, humor, and some trace of the person who chose it or lived with it. A lot of these things are trying very hard to be cute, festive, or friendly, and I find that effort moving. There’s something vulnerable in it.

I’m also drawn to the runt of the litter - the damaged one, the badly proportioned one, the one that has gone out of style but is still hanging around. Those are usually the most specific.

Once I bring them into the studio and start putting them together, they begin to feel like a cast of characters. But there’s also a point where the accumulation becomes monstrous. Individually, the objects can be harmless or even sweet. In a crowd, they start to compete, overwhelm one another, and take on a different kind of force. Painting them black helps unify them, but it also makes that mass feel denser and more imposing.

I’m not trying to rescue them from bad taste or turn them into something more respectable. I want to keep the humor, discomfort, affection, and history they already have, then push them into a new situation where the familiar can become a little excessive, unstable, and threatening.

I think it starts with toys. I continued playing with them secretly well into puberty. I was a late bloomer socially, and at a certain point, there was shame attached to still wanting that imaginative world. You were supposed to have outgrown it. So toys became complicated for me very early. They still offered comfort and fantasy, but they also carried embarrassment, secrecy, and the anxiety of being seen doing something inappropriate for your age.

That contradiction is still present in the work. I’m drawn to visual languages that appear harmless - cartoon characters, alphabet books, children’s decorations, novelty signs, family-room décor. They’re designed to communicate immediately and not demand much from you. But they also teach behavior. They tell you what is cute, safe, normal, funny, masculine, feminine, or appropriate.

Slogans were a big part of the blue-collar culture I grew up around. They were on bumper stickers, T-shirts, garage walls, bars, and novelty objects. The language was often blunt, sentimental, defensive, sexual, or built around innuendo. Humor gave people a way to say something without fully admitting they were saying it.

I love that kind of subtext. In these drawings, I’m using the visual language of an educational alphabet or a child’s activity book, but the phrases are things like Don’t Upset Daddy, Drug Friends, Sperm Donor, or Are We Okay. The illustrations seem cheerful and familiar, but they keep undermining the words - or making them worse. Something that initially looks instructional begins to feel psychologically loaded.

I’m interested in twisting language until it reveals what was already hiding inside it. A phrase can sound affectionate, funny, or casually crude, but underneath it might be fear, family tension, sexual anxiety, aggression, or the need for reassurance. The work lets those meanings coexist without deciding which one is the joke and which one is the confession.

So what interests me about these supposedly low-stakes forms is that they’re never really low-stakes. They’re where people rehearse values, disguises, threats, desires, and family roles without having to speak about them directly.

“Beauty in dysfunction” is probably less an idea I apply than a condition I’m naturally drawn to. It describes my work, but also my life, my friends, and the kinds of people and things I tend to love. I’m rarely interested in something because it is resolved or functioning exactly as intended. I’m interested in the moment when the flaws become inseparable from its character.

In practical terms, that means I don’t try to correct every awkward proportion, damaged surface, strange association, or failed gesture. I pay attention to what the mistake is producing. Something can be clumsy, excessive, funny, sad, threatening, and beautiful at the same time. Often, the thing that appears to be wrong is what gives the work its emotional life.

It also affects how I assemble things. I’m not trying to make every part agree. I like it when different materials, objects, references, and moods remain slightly at odds with one another. A cute object can become menacing. A crude joke can carry real vulnerability. Something badly made can have more presence than something perfected. The tension is more interesting to me than resolution.

I don’t mean dysfunction as something to romanticize. Some kinds of dysfunction are simply destructive. But people develop strange forms of humor, style, loyalty, and invention around what doesn’t work. That’s the beauty I’m talking about - not the damage itself, but what grows around it and sometimes survives because of it.

When I’m making something, I know it’s becoming alive when I can no longer reduce it to one clear tone or intention. It may still be awkward or unstable, but it has found its own internal logic. For me, beauty often appears at exactly that point: when something stops trying to become correct and becomes fully itself.

I’m always attempting a balancing act. I’m trying to keep memory, humor, shame, and desire active at the same time without letting any one of them take over. The work can become sentimental, cynical, didactic, or simply jokey very quickly. I’m always trying to ride that line without falling into a corner or a dead end.

Wrangling those elements is really the challenge. Humor can make shame bearable, but it can also become a defense. Desire can make an object feel alive, but it can also make the meaning too obvious. Memory gives the work emotional weight, but I don’t want nostalgia to close it down. I know the balance is working when the piece can hold conflicting feelings without resolving them too neatly.

I also want to leave enough space for the viewer’s own experience to remain intact. I don’t want the work to function like a code that has to be solved correctly. My references may begin in very specific memories or in a language largely made up of Americana, but I’m trying to use those things as an entry point rather than an endpoint.

The symbols may be culturally specific, but the underlying experiences - embarrassment, longing, family tension, humor, attraction, fear, the need to belong - aren’t limited to one culture. I want the work to create a vocabulary that can be understood on that human level, even when the viewer brings a completely different history to it.

I usually know I’m close when the work refuses to settle into a single interpretation. It can be funny without being only funny, personal without becoming confessional, and specific without excluding someone who doesn’t share my references. The balance isn’t a fixed point. It’s more like keeping all those forces in motion.

I’m trying to preserve the things culture decides are embarrassing, obsolete, badly made, or no longer useful. That includes objects, but also ways of making, kinds of humor, minor histories, subcultures, and emotional states that don’t fit comfortably into the present.

Culture moves very quickly now. Things are celebrated, consumed, and discarded before they’ve had time to become strange or gather much history. I’m interested in what remains after the original excitement or usefulness has passed - the toy that has gone out of fashion, the decoration nobody wants, the slogan that has become dated, the damaged object that still carries someone’s attachment to it.

I’m also trying to preserve forms of imagination that adulthood often asks us to surrender: play, fantasy, sentimentality, obsession, even embarrassment. Those qualities can be dismissed as immature or unserious, but they are often where people are most vulnerable and most themselves.

The same is true of scenes and communities. A lot of cultural history gets rewritten around whoever became successful, while the people who built the atmosphere, made the flyers, hosted the shows, introduced everyone, or created the conditions for something to happen disappear from the story. I’m interested in preserving that social residue - the energy around the thing, not only the thing that was eventually validated.

I don’t mean preservation as keeping something untouched. I’m not an archivist in that sense. I preserve things by putting them back into circulation, changing their context, and allowing them to form new relationships. Sometimes that means making them darker, funnier, more excessive, or even monstrous.

What I don’t want to lose is their specificity - the awkwardness, affection, labor, shame, humor, and desire embedded in them. Culture tends to clean up those contradictions very quickly. I want the work to hold onto them a little longer.

I approach the shelf works much the way a painter might approach a painting. Even though they’re made through accumulation, the decisions are formal - weight, rhythm, density, scale, silhouette, where the eye lands, and where it is blocked.

They develop through a long process of addition and subtraction. I’ll move something, remove it, bring it back, change the spacing, or introduce another object that throws the whole arrangement off. Eventually, the work either starts to pop or I feel defeated by it. There’s a point when all the individual objects stop behaving like separate things and the whole piece begins to hold together as a single image.

I used to obsess over that point much more. Every work felt like it might be the last thing I would ever make, so I wanted it to contain everything. That made it harder to stop. I was always trying to force one more idea or one more object into it.

I don’t feel that way anymore. I trust that there will be another work. Now, when something is working, I can walk away from it. Finished doesn’t mean resolved or perfected. It means the relationships are alive, the tension is holding, and anything more would probably explain too much or flatten what has finally started to happen.

Blackening the objects lets me interrupt their original identities without completely erasing them. A garden gnome, a toy, a holiday decoration, or a piece of domestic décor arrives with its own color, sentiment, and cultural instructions. Painting everything black takes away some of that immediate information. You still recognize the object, but recognition becomes slower and less certain.

It also allows the accumulation to operate as a single form. The objects stop competing through color and begin relating through silhouette, texture, scale, and density. In the shelf works, that’s important because I want the whole arrangement to register almost like a painting or a relief before the individual characters begin to emerge.

But black doesn’t make the objects neutral. In some ways, it intensifies them. Details disappear, while expressions, gestures, and awkward shapes become more pronounced. Individually, the objects may have been cute, festive, or harmless. Once they’re blackened and brought together, they become heavier and more imposing. The collection can begin to feel like a crowd, a monument, or a single monstrous organism.

Black also carries a lot of contradictory associations for me. It can suggest mourning, protection, elegance, menace, soot, tar, night, or something burned and preserved. I like that it can make a cheap object appear precious and threatening at the same time. I’m not trying to disguise the objects’ origins or rescue them from bad taste. The black gives them a shared condition while allowing all of that earlier baggage to remain underneath.

Practically, I know the black is working when I stop seeing a pile of separate found objects and begin seeing one image - but an image that still contains a lot of unruly individual lives.

Scale let me turn memory into something you could physically enter rather than simply look at. I wasn’t trying to reconstruct a particular house exactly. I was enlarging the emotional scale of domestic things - the porch, the handmade doll, the clothing, the flowers, the family car - until they became environments, characters, and architecture.

Homemade Ice Cream took place at Wasserman Projects in Detroit’s Eastern Market, and the exhibition became a kind of living, experimental think tank for me. I was constantly making and moving between sculpture, clothing, painting, ceramics, furniture, performance, and architecture. The house at the center of the show gave all of those forms somewhere to meet. It wasn’t just a sculpture of a house; it became a stage, a gathering place, and a social structure.

The large front porch was especially important. A porch is part of the home, but it also faces outward. It’s where private life becomes public, where people tell stories, play music, argue, visit, and watch the neighborhood. I invited Allee Willis, Penny Arcade, John Sinclair, Jeff Grand, Marsha Music, and Juan Atkins to perform there. Their presence activated the work and brought different histories of Detroit, music, performance, and storytelling into the environment. The exhibition could keep changing depending on who occupied it.

Changing the scale also allowed familiar things to become less stable. A homemade doll enlarged to architectural proportions can feel comforting, protective, awkward, or overwhelming. A childlike car becomes part toy, part machine, part family monument. The domestic forms remain recognizable, but they begin to carry more psychological weight.

The black brought all of it into the same world. It connected the house, clothing, objects, flowers, and figures, but it also made the environment feel suspended somewhere between a remembered home, a stage set, and a shadow of one. There was affection in it, but also unease.

What the environment ultimately allowed me to do was collapse the separation between artwork, performance, audience, and social life. People weren’t just viewing a reconstruction of memory - they were entering it, occupying it, and adding their own experiences to it.

Besides space and time, I need something to ignore.

Years ago, I had a studio mate who would get extremely high on crystal meth, wander into my room, and talk at me endlessly. I wouldn’t hear a word he said. But as long as he kept talking, I kept working. It was strangely symbiotic.

Now I use AM sports talk radio. I’m not really interested in it, which is exactly why it works. It gives part of my brain something dull and repetitive to push against, and once I tune it out, I can focus. Total silence can make me too aware of myself, but a steady stream of low-level noise lets me disappear into the work.

What’s wild is how much of it I absorb anyway. I can ignore three hours of people arguing about the Clippers or complaining about the Angels and then later realize I know the entire conversation. So apparently my ideal studio condition is being distracted by information I don’t care about until it becomes knowledge I never asked for.

Probably the impulse to take something overlooked, awkward, or slightly embarrassing and see what else it can become. The mediums have changed, and the scale has changed, but I’m still drawn to the runt of the litter - to objects, images, jokes, and people that don’t fit comfortably into the category they were assigned.

I’ve also remained very hands-on. I need to make, move, cut, assemble, paint, and rearrange things before I fully understand what I’m thinking. Even when a work begins with language or memory, I usually have to work it out physically. The materials push back and redirect the idea.

The emotional balance has stayed consistent too. I’m still trying to make something that can be funny, sad, crude, affectionate, and a little threatening at the same time. I don’t want the humor to cancel the seriousness, or the seriousness to suffocate the humor. That tension has probably been there from the beginning.

And I’ve never stopped treating art as a way of building a world around the work. Sometimes that world is contained in a sculpture; sometimes it becomes a room, an event, a performance, or a group of people. I still want the work to create the conditions for something unexpected to happen.

So the consistent part may be less a recognizable style than a way of operating: finding something that has been dismissed, letting it keep all of its baggage, and pushing it until it becomes more alive than it was before.

The word “artist” is still useful to me because it names a way of paying attention and a willingness to move between forms without needing a practical excuse. But I’m less comfortable with it as an identity. When people ask what I do, I’ll often tell them I’m a Ghostbuster. That somehow feels less embarrassing than saying, “I’m an artist,” as though it explains my personality or grants me some special status.

I came of age with an older idea of the artist still lingering in the background - the artist as poet, obsessive, outsider, or person compelled to make things whether or not there was a market or a professional structure waiting for them. I’m aware that version was partly romantic and not available to everyone, but it shaped what I thought an artistic life could be.

Now the dominant model often seems closer to the cultural entrepreneur. An artist is expected to make the work, explain it, package it, promote it, maintain a public identity, build an audience, manage collaborations, apply for funding, and turn every part of life into content. Some of that can be empowering. Artists no longer have to wait passively for institutions to create opportunities for them. My mother understood that long before it became fashionable, and I’ve certainly built platforms, exhibitions, events, and communities around my own work.

But I’m not entirely enthusiastic about the shift. Entrepreneurship can easily become a substitute for art, and visibility can begin to matter more than the strange, private process that made someone an artist in the first place. There’s pressure to become legible as a brand before the work has had time to become confusing, difficult, or fully itself.

I also realize that I come from a time that is gone. The conditions that allowed certain scenes, publications, cheap spaces, and less professionalized forms of experimentation to exist have changed. I don’t want to pretend we can simply return to that, or that it was as open and romantic as memory sometimes makes it.

So the word remains useful when it describes an activity rather than a social identity. It gives me permission to follow something without knowing where it belongs, to take an object or joke seriously, and to build a world around an impulse. Beyond that, I’m probably still a Ghostbuster.