Mission & purpose

The jump ball between the loose grip and the tight grip is settling, and it's settling towards the tight grip, towards the transcendent. I don't see another mechanism strong enough to prevent everyone from going crazy. Our referees are gone. They've gone insane themselves and are spattered with blood and entrails and running around the streets... See more

Ever since the Second World War ended, we have spent decades holding everything with a loose grip. Loose-grip conviction is comfortable and it allows us to participate in every conversation, to be perfectly hedged in every order of life. It allows you to keep one foot in the market and one foot in the critique of the market and never commit to... See more

It's not that there's just one jump ball. We’re not just confused about equities pricing. It's that there are hundreds of them simultaneously across every domain that matters. Markets, geopolitics, technology, UFOs, institutional trust, the basic shared project of what the West is about. A singular narrative can settle one of them. A secular story... See more

So when did taste arrive?

It arrived when we eliminated the transcendent and the patron left the room.

If you pressed me, I would date it to somewhere in the eighteenth century. Roughly the emergence of the modern art market. The park ave armory exhibition, the Parisian Salon, the rise of the collector as a social type — all representations of the... See more

He, of course, was not choosing from a menu of generated options. He was creating the conditions under which something none of them could have imagined alone could emerge. The word is not taste. The word he might have used was provocation . The word, if you want to be precise about it, is patronage in its original form: capital and labor and the... See more

The negotiation between these two was the generative act. The patron's capital and ambition, the painter's skill and stubbornness. They were locked in a generative argument about what the thing should be, and what emerged was a product of that argument — not of anyone's judgment, but of their shared labor.

Patronage was anything but taste. Patronage was a relationship between capital and artistic labor so intimate that the two were functionally a single body. The patron did not select from finished works on a wall, allocating neat sums of money to purchase them. The patron animated the work before it existed.

The taste thesis, at its deepest and most simple structure, reverses this order. It places man at the end of the chain of creation, evaluating what has already been generated, rather than at the beginning, participating in the generation itself. It makes man what he has been slowly becoming for a century: a critic of creation rather than a... See more

The things that survive are the things that can still make a person get on a plane. Everything else is scrolling. Scrolling is moving your thumbs a few inches in reverence to no center at all.