Bad at Sports

Bad At Sports is a weekly podcast about contemporary art. Founded in 2005, badatsports.com focuses on presenting the practices of artists, curators, critics, dealers, various other arts professionals through an online audio format.

Bad at Sports Episode 942: Embajada Gallery 05/14/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 941: Myra Greene 05/11/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 940: Emily Llamazales 04/29/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 939: Sarah Higgins 04/19/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 938: Tori Tinsley 04/15/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 937: Nato Thompson 04/13/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks 04/08/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 936: Damon Locks 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 — Ryan (Peter Miller) — Damon Locks — Goldfinch Gallery — Lumpen Radio — Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project — Stateville Correctional Center — Artists / Art References Charles White — Raymond Pettibon — Emory Douglas — Kerry James Marshall — Music / Punk References Bad Brains — Minor Threat — Government Issue — The Clash — Siouxsie and the Banshees — The Damned — Big Black — Naked Raygun — Black Flag — Comics / Illustration Influences John Byrne — Neal Adams — George Pérez — Marshall Rogers — /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40775855

Bad at Sports Episode 935: Chicago Critics Roundtable 04/06/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 934: John Stezaker 04/03/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 933: Kate Sierzputowski and EXPO Chicago 2026 03/31/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 932: Michi Meko 03/23/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 932: Michi Meko 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 - Art Papers - Duncan MacKenzie - Brian Andrews - Louis Armstrong - Mark Rothko - Rothko Chapel - Ellsworth Kelly - Bob Ross - J. M. W. Turner - Thomas Cole - The Goat Farm Arts Center - New Orleans Savannah Gulf of Mexico /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40593875

Bad at Sports Episode 931: Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias 03/18/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 931: Berenice Vargas Bravo and Krystal Lemonias 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 — Krystal Lemonias — Andrew Rafacz Gallery — Andrew Rafacz — Janelle Dawson — School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) — NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) — EXPO Chicago — Western Exhibitions — Bazaar Magazine (France) — /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40521390

Bad at Sports Episode 930: Antonio Darden 03/10/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 930: Antonio Darden 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 – Craig Drennen – Jared Christian – Devonté Hynes – Blood Orange – Young Thug – Shawty Lo – Pastor Troy – Lil’ Kim – John P. Kee – Gillian Anderson – Dana Scully – The X-Files – Tupac Shakur – Michael Jackson – Law & Order: Special Victims Unit – Olivia Benson – Gordon Ramsay – Kitchen Nightmares – Kanye West – Bound 2 – The Ponderosa Twins Plus One – The Undertaker – Priscilla Presley – Leslie Nielsen – The Naked Gun – Cyclops – X-Men ’97 – Radcliffe Bailey – Art Papers – Fire Ecology – /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40388170

Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe 02/24/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 929: Dan Attoe 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 — Barry McGee — https://www.ratio3.org/artists/barry-mcgee Chris Johanson — https://altman-siegel.com/artists/chris-johanson Jean-Michel Basquiat — Titian — Giorgione — Arthur Danto — https://www.columbia.edu/cu/philosophy/faculty/danto.html Dr. Woo — Natalie Goldberg — Stephen King — George Saunders — Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Jean-François Lyotard — Jean Baudrillard — Walker Art Center — Iowa Writers’ Workshop — Iron Maiden — Danzig — Twin Peaks — Dragonlance / Larry Elmore — New Art Dealers Alliance –– /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40216050

Bad at Sports Episode 928: Robert Burnier 02/17/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 928: Robert Burnier 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 – Andrew Rafacz Gallery – Corvi-Mora (London) – Bad at Sports – Lumpen Radio (WLPN 105.5 FM) – Agnes Martin – Ambrogio Lorenzetti – The Allegory of Good and Bad Government Bo-Kaap (Cape Town) – Buddhism – Chicago Architecture Biennial – Christopher Wool – District Six Museum – Oak Park, Illinois – Piet Mondrian – School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) – Schopenhauer – Stony Island Arts Bank – Takashi Murakami – Tarot – Yoruba Divination (Ifá) – /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40142255

Bad at Sports Episode 927: Alfred Steiner 02/16/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 927: Alfred Steiner 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 — NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — Untitled Art Fair — Ethereum blockchain — Mitchell Chan — https://mitchellchan.com Rick Astley (via Rickrolling NFTs) — Lawrence Weiner — https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lawrence-weiner-2124 U.S. Copyright Office — Supreme Court of the United States — Morrison & Foerster Alfred Steiner - /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40131565

Bad at Sports Episode 926: Gabriel Barcia-Colombo 02/11/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 926: Gabriel Barcia-Colombo 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 — Chicago Architecture Biennial — Media Stream - Gabriel Barcia-Colombo - Times Square public art installations Animalia, Chordata The Hereafter Institute Nam June Paik — Bruce Nauman — Paul Pfeiffer — Christian Marclay — NYU Tisch School of the Arts — Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) — Neon Museum, Las Vegas — /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40056695

Bad at Sports Episode 925: Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) 02/10/2026

Bad at Sports Episode 925: Nicholas DiLeonardi (Gitler&_____) 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 — · NADA Miami (New Art Dealers Alliance) — · Untitled Art Fair — · Scope Art Show — · Audubon Mural Project — · National Audubon Society — · Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) coverage — · Robert Moskowitz- · Andrew Spence- · Western Exhibitions- · Submissions- · Canada Gallery- · Mac’s Club- · Gitler&____- /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/40056605

Bad at Sports Episode 924: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein is Jerry G part 2 12/12/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 924: Hilde Lynn Helphenstein is Jerry G part 2 In Part 2 of the Hilde Lynn Helphenstein (Jerry Gogosian) conversation, the discussion turns raw, vulnerable, and deeply structural. Hilde speaks candidly about burnout, public vilification, online pile-ons, and the emotional cost of living as a persona inside an unforgiving attention economy. She describes losing followers overnight, being labeled with extreme political accusations, and watching the art world take visible pleasure in her public failures while remaining silent during her successes. She recounts the personal toll of constant media exposure, professional pressure, and economic precarity: marriage collapse, total exhaustion, and a year-long withdrawal from work following multiple suicide attempts. Jerry, she explains, has evolved from a meme engine into a living, walking performance — where even the most banal moments of daily life become content whether she wants them to or not. The episode confronts what it means to live as a meme in a broken matrix of attention, validation, and misrecognition. The conversation pivots into economics and geography. Drawing on her business school training, Hilde walks through quantitative tightening, interest rates, the collapse of NFTs and crypto, and the bursting of the 2022 speculative bubble. She frames art explicitly as a Veblen good — a luxury asset that fails first when the economy tightens. She argues forcefully that New York is no longer an artist city, but a financialized transaction hub. Instead, she advocates for artists to relocate to affordable cities like Chicago or even small towns, building localized collector bases rather than chasing validation from elite centers. What emerges is a sharp, pragmatic model of survival: cultivate 12 lifelong collectors, embrace regional ecosystems, make work for people you actually live with, and stop imagining museum permanence as the only measure of success. Hilde rejects the mythology of infinite institutional validation, arguing instead for circulation, use, disposal, and lived attachment. The episode closes on the tension between speculation and sustainability, between global markets and local communities, and between career branding and genuine artistic life. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian New Art Dealers Alliance John Waters Peaches (musician/performer) Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) Maurizio Cattelan Brice Marden Magnus Resch Pace Gallery Roxy Theatre, San Francisco (The Roxie) Soho House Ice Palace Studios, Miami (Art Fair Venue) New York MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority) Federal Reserve (The Fed) Whitney Museum of American Art Chicago, IL New York City, NY Dahlonega, Georgia Miami Beach, FL Basel, Switzerland /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/39382585

Bad at Sports Episode 923:Jerry Gagosian aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Part 1 12/06/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 923:Jerry Gagosian aka Hilde Lynn Helphenstein Part 1 At NADA Miami 2025, Bad at Sports’ Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller sit down with Hilde Lynn Helphenstein, better known to most of the art world as meme-lord and art-world agent provocateur Jerry Gogosian. In a conversation that swings between dead serious and totally unhinged, Hilde traces the unlikely origin story of Jerry: a near-fatal tick bite in Hudson, NY; weeks in the ICU where she went blind, deaf, and lost the use of her hands and feet; and the eight-month bedridden period that led her to start making art-world memes “six or seven a day” just to stay sane. She explains how Jerry Gagosian—a name cheekily mashed up from Jerry Saltz and Larry Gagosian—became an anonymous voice for the insiders, registrars, assistants, and “world’s oldest interns” of the art world. Positioned “at the cutting edge of stating the obvious,” Jerry’s memes mined the absurdities of art fairs, galleries, power, and self-seriousness, often circulating so widely that even Arne Glimcher at Pace blasted one to the entire staff. For Hilde, the memes were “fast food,” while the deeper writing and podcasting they spawned became the real work. The episode also dives into Hilde’s hatred of artspeak, her love of Pixar movies as real art, and the gulf between what artists claim their work does in press releases and what’s actually visible in the work. She riffs on turning incomprehensible exhibition texts into literal film scripts, skewers academic pretense, and praises the raw “holy” feeling of walking into a gallery without any language or theory at all. In the second half of the conversation, Hilde talks about going to business school at NYU Stern after years inside galleries and the market. Learning macro- and microeconomics, statistics, and reading things like Enron’s 10-K filings gave her a new lens on the art world as a distorted, unsustainable luxury market in a broader service-and-finance-based U.S. economy. From there, she and the hosts push into the hard questions: oversupply and under-demand for art, MFA pipelines, self-censorship, the moral theater of “perfect” artists, and why she believes most art schools should probably be consolidated or shut down. Hilde Lynn Helphenstein / Jerry Gogosian https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/ Jerry Saltz https://www.vulture.com/author/jerry-saltz/ Larry Gagosian Arne Glimcher https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/arne-glimcher/ Ben Davis https://news.artnet.com/author/ben-davis Kenny Schachter Magnus Resch Barbara Kingsley https://www.linkedin.com/in/barbara-kingsley-5b6b2411/ Delvin Duarte https://www.instagram.com/delvinduarte/ Keith Boadwee https://www.keithboadwee.com/ NADA Miami https://www.newartdealersalliance.org/ Art Basel Miami Beach Pace Gallery Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) NYU Stern School of Business San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) https://sfai.edu/ SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) Enron (corporate reference) Vancouver Art Gallery Pixar Up (Pixar Film) Inside Out (Pixar Film) Soul (Pixar Film) The Diving Bell and the Butterfly John Wick /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/39308270

Bad at Sports Episode 922: Andi Crist 12/04/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 922: Andi Crist Recorded at the Stony Island Arts Bank / Chicago Architecture Biennial tailgate In this wild, funny, and unexpectedly heartfelt tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Brian Andrews, Ryan Peter Miller, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with sculptor and arts worker Andi Crist in front of the Stony Island Arts Bank during the Chicago Architecture Biennial. The conversation moves fluidly between jokes about heated bamboo floors, fake Uber snacks, soggy bottoms, and bees swarming the microphones — but at its core, the episode is an unusually generous portrait of an artist who’s spent years inside the hidden labor structures of museums, galleries, and fabrication shops. Crist discusses her debut solo museum exhibition at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Live Laugh, Labor: Thoughts on Usefulness and Other Myths. She traces her evolution from preparator and art worker to exhibiting artist, unpacking how years of installing, patching walls, and fabricating for others shaped her own deeply self-aware sculptural practice. Her work twists familiar objects — especially extension cords, wet floor signs, and museum benches — into uncanny, absurd, and often poignant ceramic sculptures. A major highlight is Crist performing, in full BBC British-schoolmarm mode, the ChatGPT-generated Jane-Austen-style text she inscribed onto a handcrafted wet floor sign. The hosts derail repeatedly into laughter but also probe serious questions about labor visibility, materials, usefulness, and what it means to “gussy up” the hidden structures of the art world and present them as art. Throughout the episode, Crist reflects on her Southern-to-Chicago shift, her years of preparator culture, the pleasures and irritations of coiling cords, the aesthetics of infrastructure, and her dream of sneaking her replica Art Institute bench into the museum permanently. Her practice sits at the intersection of devotion, mischief, and craft — a perfect “match” for Bad at Sports tailgate chaos. Andi Crist https://andicrist.com/ EJ Hill https://ejhillart.com/ Jamila James (curator; formerly ICA LA, currently at Carnegie Museum of Art) https://cmoa.org/people/jamila-james/ Justin Witte (Director/Curator, Cleve Carney Museum of Art) https://cod.edu/academics/arts_communications/departments/art/faculty/witte.aspx Cleve Carney Museum of Art https://theccma.org/ Stony Island Arts Bank https://rebuild-foundation.org/arts-bank/ Chicago Architecture Biennial The Art Institute of Chicago UIC School of Art & Art History Columbia College Chicago — School of Visual Arts https://www.colum.edu/academics/school-of-visual-arts/ Mary Berry (Great British Bake Off) Prue Leith Great British Bake Off Hobby Lobby Michaels Play-Doh Fun Factory https://shop.hasbro.com/en-us/product/play-doh-fun-factory/ (representative product link) Far Side (Gary Larson) Let Me Google That For You (LMGTFY) /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/39280065

Bad at Sports: Episode 921 – Lori Waxman 12/03/2025

Bad at Sports: Episode 921 – Lori Waxman Recorded live at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago / CAB Tailgate In this live MCA tailgate episode, the Bad at Sports crew — Duncan MacKenzie, Ryan Peter Miller, Brian Andrews, and Jesse Malmed — sit down with Chicago Tribune and Hyperallergic critic Lori Waxman to dig into the past, present, and uncertain future of art criticism. Lori Waxman speaks candidly about being one of the last remaining “paper critics” in the Midwest, the strange privilege and responsibility of writing for a general audience, and the realities of practicing criticism in a media ecosystem that has largely abandoned it. The conversation moves between the lightly chaotic and the deeply reflective: the team discusses accountability, gatekeeping, democratization, descriptive vs. evaluative criticism, and the uneasy role of critics in shaping a city’s cultural memory. A major portion of the episode is devoted to Waxman’s long-running performance project “The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic,” which she describes as part-service, part-performance, part-publishing experiment — one that temporarily gives a community something most cities no longer have: a local critic writing about local work. From describing her process of writing in public (fully clothed), to fielding questions about dead artists, visibility, taste, and how critics navigate their own spreadsheets, Waxman opens up her practice with humor and clarity. The episode also includes reflections on Chicago’s art ecology, journalism’s collapse, how artists use reviews, and what it means to keep going when the platforms keep disappearing. Names Dropped — With Links Lori Waxman 🔗 https://loriwaxman.com/ Duncan MacKenzie 🔗 https://badatsports.com/author/duncan/ Brian Andrews 🔗 Ryan Peter Miller 🔗 Jesse Malmed 🔗 https://jessemalmed.net/ Dan Attoe (artist) 🔗 https://www.danattoe.com/ Jerry Gogosian (Instagram art-world persona) 🔗 https://www.instagram.com/jerrygogosian/ Tali Halperin (artist/curator; Chicago-based) 🔗 https://tlihlprn.com/ (closest authoritative source) Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) 🔗 Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) 🔗 Masthead Brewing / Mast Brewing 🔗 https://mastheadbrewingco.com/ Chicago Tribune — Arts 🔗 https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/visual-arts/ Hyperallergic 🔗 Other People’s Pixels (artist website hosting) 🔗 https://www.otherpeoplespixels.com/ Documenta 🔗 WLPN-LP 105.5 FM Lumpen Radio 🔗 Bad at Sports 🔗 The 60 WRD/Min Art Critic 🔗 https://60wrdmin.org/ Mavis Beacon (reference to “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing”) 🔗 /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/39259780

Bad at Sports Episode: 920 Tony Lewis 11/19/2025

Bad at Sports Episode: 920 Tony Lewis Recorded live at the CAB6 × MCA Tailgate This episode was recorded as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB6) activation on the plaza of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where Bad at Sports staged a series of open-air interviews, community dialogues, and tailgate-style broadcasts. Artists, architects, students, and the public intersected in a shared social space designed for porous conversation. Episode 920 features Tony Lewis, whose practice has shaped Chicago’s contemporary drawing discourse for more than a decade. In this conversation, Tony Lewis joins Bad at Sports for an unscripted outdoor interview on the MCA plaza during the Architecture Biennial. The discussion moves fluidly between Lewis’s formative years in Chicago, the evolution of his drawing practice, his relationship to language systems (notably shorthand), and the material intelligence behind works that incorporate rubber bands, graphite, or constraint mechanisms. Lewis reflects on mentorship, studio discipline, the importance of failure and patience, and the way drawing becomes a long-term conversation with materials. He speaks candidly about the Chicago art ecosystem, the emotional dimensions of his practice, and the shifting sense of scale and intimacy in his recent work — including his Louis Bag series and large graphite constructions. The episode captures an artist thinking in real time about endurance, attention, vulnerability, and artistic friendship. · Drawing as a full-body practice: constraint, tension, rubber bands, architecture of line. · Language + shorthand: transcription, coded systems, linguistic compression. · Chicago as a site of artistic maturation: community, humility, seriousness. · Material intelligence: graphite as dust, weight, pressure, residue. · Patience and endurance: long timelines for developing works. · Professional evolution: moving from iconic early works to quieter, more intimate forms. · Artistic friendship and trust: collaboration, studio visits, long-running dialogues. · Shorthand Drawings / Gregg Shorthand–based works · Rubber band constructions & torn-grid drawings · Graphite floor drawings / powder dispersion works · Louis Bag series · Wall-based large graphite sheets under tension NAMES DROP-ed · Tony Lewis - https://massimodecarlo.com/artists/tony-lewis · Kevin Beasley (referenced indirectly in relation to material practice) - https://caseykaplangallery.com/artists/beasley/ · Nate Young - https://www.moniquemeloche.com/artists/36-nate-young/works/ · Theaster Gates - https://www.theastergates.com/ · Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/ · Kerry James Marshall - https://jackshainman.com/artists/kerry_james_marshall · William Pope.L - https://www.miandn.com/artists/pope-l · Rodney McMillian - https://vielmetter.com/artists/rodney-mcmillian/ · Amanda Williams - https://awstudioart.com/home.html · Rashid Johnson - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/2830-rashid-johnson/ · Charles Gaines - https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/21845-charles-gaines/ · Torkwase Dyson - https://www.torkwasedyson.com/ · Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) - https://mcachicago.org/ · Chicago Architecture Biennial (CAB) - https://chicagoarchitecturebiennial.org/ · Shane Campbell Gallery - https://www.shanecampbellgallery.com/ · School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) - Image Sarah Hudson /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/39090515

Bad at Sports Episode 919: Kohler, Throckmorton, and Grabner 10/13/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 919: Kohler, Throckmorton, and Grabner This week, Bad at Sports hits the road and heads north to Sheboygan and Kohler, Wisconsin — where art, industry, and community collide. We drop into the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency program to see how a small Midwestern town sustains one of the most ambitious intersections of art and manufacturing in the country. Michelle Grabner and Jodi Throckmorton. From toilets to terracotta, brass casting to bathroom design, Kohler has been quietly incubating radical artistic practice for decades, embedding artists in its factories while JMKAC builds a civic platform for art environments, vernacular traditions, and contemporary experimentation. We talk with artists, administrators, and community members about what makes this ecosystem work — and why Sheboygan might just be the weirdest, most wonderful art town in America. John Michael Kohler Arts Center Kohler Arts/Industry Residency Kohler Co. Name-Drop Jodi Throckmorton - https://curatorsintl.org/about/collaborators/7932-jodi-throckmorton Michelle Grabner - https://www.michellegrabner.com/ John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) — https://www.jmkac.org/ Kohler Arts/Industry Residency — https://www.jmkac.org/arts-industry/ Kohler Co. — https://www.kohlercompany.com/ Art Preserve (JMKAC’s satellite museum) — https://www.jmkac.org/art-preserve/ Arts/Industry Alumni (sampled in conversation): Beth Lipman — https://www.bethlipman.com/ | Ann Agee — https://www.annageestudio.com/ Jeffrey Clancy — https://jeffreyclancy.com/home.html Ashwini Bhat — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/ashwini-bhat-reverberating-self/ Pao Houa — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/pao-houa-her-the-imaginative-landscape/ Lily Cox-Richard — https://www.jmkac.org/exhibition/water-sprouts-and-remains-an-unfolding/ Sheboygan community — https://www.townofsheboyganwi.gov/ /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/38461350

Bad at Sports Episode 918: Amanda Ross-Ho 10/09/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 917: Two Palms and Alex Slattery 10/06/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 917: Two Palms and Alex Slattery This week, we print big or go home. Bad at Sports cast their eyes to New York from the safe confines of the Chicago Architectural Biennial booth at EXPO 2025 to talk with the legendary Two Palms studio in the guise of Alex Slattery. If you’ve ever stood slack-jawed in front of a monoprint the size of a small car or a woodblock cut so large it needed its own logistics plan, chances are Two Palms was behind it. Since the 1990s, David Lasry and company have been redefining what printmaking can be—working with artists like Carroll Dunham, Elizabeth Peyton, Mel Bochner, Cecily Brown, Terry Winters, Chris Ofili, Dana Schutz, Richard Prince, Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, and yes, even channeling the ghost of Andy Warhol. From delicate gestures to total madness with ink and paper, the studio’s collaborations are as unpredictable as they are radical. We talk risk, scale, failure, and discovery—the alchemy of artist–printer collaborations that make Two Palms a force in contemporary art. Along the way we wander through stories of impossible woodblocks, ink disasters turned into triumphs, and why printmaking might just be the most punk medium of them all. So pour a glass, sharpen your barens, and get ready to nerd out about the future of prints. Two Palms Name-Drop Carroll Dunham — https://www.presenhuber.com/artists/carroll-dunham#tab:slideshow Elizabeth Peyton — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/elizabeth-peyton Mel Bochner — http://www.melbochner.net/ Cecily Brown — https://gagosian.com/artists/cecily-brown/ Terry Winters —https://www.terrywinters.org/ Chris Ofili — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/chris-ofili/survey Dana Schutz — https://www.davidzwirner.com/artists/dana-schutz Richard Prince — http://www.richardprince.com/ Chuck Close — https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/chuck-close/ Jeff Koons — https://www.jeffkoons.com/ Two Palms — https://www.twopalms.us/ Marilyn Minter — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/marilyn-minter Stanley Whitney — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/stanley-whitney Ana Benaroya — https://www.twopalms.us/featured-works/ana-benaroya David Paul Lasry — Alex Slattery — EXPO CHICAGO - Chicago Architectural Biennial 6 - Institutions that love these prints: Whitney Museum of American Art — https://whitney.org/ MoMA — https://www.moma.org/ The Met — https://www.metmuseum.org/ /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/38461120

Bad at Sports Episode 916: Alex Ross and two fan boys 09/26/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 915 – Kenny Schachter and Bianca Bova: From Autodidact to Art World Outsider 09/20/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 915 – Kenny Schachter and Bianca Bova: From Autodidact to Art World Outsider In Part Two of our late-night conversation, Bad at Sports digs deeper into the remarkable trajectory of Kenny Schachter. From law school dropout to autodidact philosopher, from Sotheby’s bidder to artist and teacher, Schachter traces the unlikely path that brought him into the heart of the art world — a place he insists remains strangely conservative despite all its pretenses of progress. The discussion moves between personal history and systemic critique. Schachter recounts the role of art in surviving trauma, loss, and addiction, and why surrounding himself with works by others has been both solace and education. He reflects on the stubborn conservatism of the market, celebrity crossovers from Johnny Depp to Julian Schnabel, and the tension between wanting freedom and the systems that resist it. For Schachter, art is both a lifeline and a way to comment on the world’s chaos — a practice rooted in generosity, curiosity, and contradiction. This episode captures him at his most reflective and most biting, moving from humor to vulnerability and back again. Highlights • Schachter’s first encounters with Twombly, Rauschenberg, and Frankenthaler at the National Gallery. • The shock of Andy Warhol’s estate sale in 1988. • Dealer-to-dealer hustling as an unlikely entry into art. • Why “there are no rules” is his best definition of being an artist. • The paradox of an art world that markets rebellion but runs on tradition. Names Dropped Andy Warhol I.M. Pei, https://www.pcf-p.com/about/i-m-pei/ Chase Manhattan Bank, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/about/art-collection Christie’s, https://www.christies.com/en Sotheby’s, https://www.sothebys.com/en/ Phillips Auction House, https://www.phillips.com/ Patrick Drahi, https://www.artnews.com/art-collectors/top-200-profiles/patrick-drahi/ Leonard Lauder, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/leonard-lauder-sothebys-klimt-matisse-1234751922/ The Pritzker family, https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/pritzker-art-collection-sothebys-breuer-1234751864/ Elaine Wynn, https://www.christies.com/en/events/the-collection-of-elaine-wynn Wyatt Kline, https://unframed.lacma.org/2014/01/28/contemporary-friends-acquire-ten-new-works-by-artists-from-around-the-world Alex Burns, Felix Reuter (Ryder), https://felixreuter.bandcamp.com/ Guerrilla Girls, https://www.guerrillagirls.com/ Old Friends Gallery, https://www.oldfriendsgallery.com/ David Letterman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Letterman The Suburban, http://www.thesuburban.org/ /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/38285595

Bad at Sports Episode 914 – Kenny Schachter: Chickens, Auctions, and Foundries (Part 1) 09/19/2025

Bad at Sports Episode 914 – Kenny Schachter: Chickens, Auctions, and Foundries (Part 1) This week on Bad at Sports, Duncan MacKenzie and Ryan Peter Miller find themselves in Chicago with curator Bianca Bova and the indefatigable Kenny Schachter — artist, writer, teacher, collector, and provocateur. What begins as a conversation about Schachter’s exhibition at Old Friends Gallery — featuring chicken-assisted artworks and bronze casts forged in Slovenia — quickly expands into a meditation on the art world itself. Schachter reflects on his collaborations, his obsession with foundries, and his refusal to keep resources secret. The group debates the zero-sum mentality of the art market, why artists sabotage themselves, and how absurd projects (sometimes with actual chickens) can be the most serious acts of art-making. Equal parts candid and comedic, the conversation cuts across auctions, art fairs, and the everyday realities of teaching. Expect reflections on generosity vs. gatekeeping, the fragility of the art system, and what it means to make art that is more conceptual than commercial. Highlights • Chickens as collaborators and muses. • The foundry in Slovenia that casts Rudolf Stingel’s panels. • Why keeping fabricators secret is a sign of weakness. • Auctions as democratizing, even anarchic, art spaces. • The necessity of art in a divided and compassion-starved world. Names Dropped Kenny Scharf, https://kennyscharf.com/ Kenny Schachter, https://www.kennyschachter.art/ Bianca Bova, https://www.biancabovagallery.com/ Billy Connolly, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Connolly Rudolf Stingel, https://gagosian.com/artists/rudolf-stingel/ Tobias Rehberger, https://pedrocera.com/artists/tobias-rehberger Paul Thek, https://whitney.org/exhibitions/paul-thek Giacometti, https://www.moma.org/artists/2141-alberto-giacometti Jerry Saltz, https://nymag.com/author/jerry-saltz/ Cy Twombly, https://cytwombly.org/ Jasper Johns, https://whitney.org/artists/653 Robert Rauschenberg, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/ Joan Mitchell, https://www.joanmitchellfoundation.org/joan-mitchell Helen Frankenthaler, https://gagosian.com/artists/helen-frankenthaler/ Georgia O’Keeffe, https://www.okeeffemuseum.org/ Andy Warhol, https://www.warhol.org/ Joseph Beuys, https://walkerart.org/collections/artists/joseph-beuys Sigmar Polke, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/sigmar-polke-2213 John Cage, https://www.johncage.org/ Devendra Banhart, https://devendrabanhart.com/ Brad Pitt, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/09/19/brad-pitt-debuts-his-sculptures-in-finland Cindy Sherman, https://www.hauserwirth.com/hauser-wirth-exhibitions/cindy-sherman/ Robert Longo, https://www.robertlongo.com/ Julian Schnabel, https://www.julianschnabel.com/ Old Friends Gallery, https://www.oldfriendsgallery.com/ /episode/index/show/badatsports/id/38285100

Bad at Sports Episode 913: Shannon R. Stratton and Ox-Bow 09/15/2025

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