Showing

Babak Radboy

It's always decent to wrap your head around something entirely different. As a writer, I'm typically working the style beat - of late though, I've been fortunate to grab a couple artist profile assignments from Theme. Last week I shot the breeze with an artist called Babak Radboy, over in Seward Park for a forthcoming issue of Theme. Radboy works on a magazine himself, Bidoun. His angle on art and the art world itself is heavily conceptual, to put it lightly - he made a few nice observations that I didn't really catch completely till I transcribed my recording. That type of thing. Since my word count for the assignment is on the short side, I may have to run the interview in full here. You'll get a kick out of it.

Here's an excerpt from the interview that I can pull out now:

"I was invited to do the Younger Than Jesus show at The New Museum. I didn’t know it was going to positioned as this whole thing of packaging youth culture as some sort of vibrant form - and I don’t think youth culture is vibrant, I don’t think there are counter cultures at this point in history. But anyway, what I did was I went and took the catalog from the show the year before, scanned in the installations, digitally omitted the artwork, so that I could insert my work into The New Museum. The thing that I heard was that I wasn’t necessarily going to be in the show, but everyone who submitted would be in the catalog. So I had this strategy of creating this image that I was in the show anyway."