Xavior held court at a corner table and showed a small crowd his work on Raise Rise, an effect invented and made famous back in the 1990s by legendary magician Ray Kosby. In this trick, the spectator’s card is placed toward the bottom of the deck, protruding halfway (or out-jogged, in magic parlance). The card then magically rises up and up the

In any art form, people have been equally fascinated not only with the skill of a practitioner but also the lifestyle embodied by the artist. For me, great writers come to mind: Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway. People loved these authors not just for their books, but for the way in which

“The one thing that I have come to realize, as I’ve gotten to know everyone better,” I said, “is that everyone carries a little bit of deception around with them their entire lives.”

They want the magician to be more human than ever before, and they want to see the people with whom the magician chooses to surround himself as he accomplishes the show’s goals. In a word: authenticity.

With television bottlenecking magic’s visibility to the public, the art form seemed to be tumbling down to one of its lowest common denominators: flashy, headline-grabbing, one-off illusions only seen on a screen, the concepts for which were approved by bigwig executives focused more on ratings than the quality of the magic being created. Most

Magic is about experience. It’s an art form that pokes at the brain and tugs at the heart. The spectator isn’t privy to the moves; they aren’t looking for them.

They locked in a deal with Netflix for an eight-episode series titled Death by Magic, which documents DMC as he travels to a series of cities, performing street magic related to that city’s history. He also re-creates a stunt of some kind that has, in the past, killed someone in that place—utilizing magic, obviously, to escape the stunt

“How a trick unfolds is the key to a memorable experience,” he said. “Remember, you’re taking them on a journey, you’re telling them a story, you’re sharing a piece of yourself with them.”

Virginia Heffernan puts forward in her book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art. “Instagram images have become units of speech, building blocks in a visual vocabulary that functions like a colonial patois, where old-school darkroom photography is the native tongue and digitalization is the imperial language.”