Notas del episodio
In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Dave Eggers — bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, and The Every, co-founder of 826 Valencia, and now the author of Contrapposto, a novel that pulls readers through every angle of the art world — for a conversation that is at once a deep literary discussion and a sweeping indictment of everything wrong with how America treats its artists.
Dave traces the roots of Contrapposto back to his own early art education in the Chicagoland area, where he was a painting major before practicality intervened, and forward to his own practice of making art — drawings, paintings, prints — to fund ScholarMatch and the nonprofits at 849 Valencia. He talks about Cricket and Olympia, the novel's two protagonists, and the feral self-reliance of 70s and 80s kids who grew up free-range by default. He dissects the cannibalistic culture of art school MFA programs, explains why he believes the apprenticeship model should replace the $100,000-a-year degree, and introduces Art and Water — his new Pier 29 art school built on the idea that master artists and students should share space without money being exchanged.
He also calls ChatGPT a hundred percent plagiarism, explains why letting AI write for you means leaving the human race, shares why he hasn't had a smartphone in years, and reflects on how The Circle — which predicted surveillance capitalism, corporate overreach, and the erosion of democracy — got it mostly right and somehow still underestimated things.