I went on TV...
...or whatever passes for it these days
I’m going to relaunch by Substack. Instead of behind the scenes looks at my published work, I’m going to do deeper dives into icebergs of ideas that you don’t see in the finished thing. The first idea is probably boring, I’m not famous enough to do it, and I don’t take photos when I travel, so there won’t be any visual aids for my luminous descriptions of, say, swimming in the wine-dark Aegean in early October, so I deleted the few posts I already wrote in that mould.
Then again, some things need a behind the scenes look – my first ever appearance on any kind of televised media, for instance.
Here I am in Standard Time, the talk show hosted by cultural journal network Eurozine, talking about ‘Cancel Culture’. The other guests are writer and cultural manager Maja Vouk and Johan Hartle, the Rector of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
It’s a nostalgia trip, since I briefly worked as an editor at Eurozine in 2019; first had the idea of writing about contemporary art after seeing a Cindy Sherman exhibition at Sprüth Magers in London with Johan Hartle in 2012; wrote my first ever piece about contemporary art, a review of a show about Viennese actionism, published in Frieze, in the Academy library four years later.
I’m not on set with them because I flew to London the day before they filmed. You see me in the little office space next to my bedroom in my parents’ house in glamorous Hampshire, backed up by some of the books that haven’t yet made it to live in Vienna with me. This explains why Maya and Johan are dressed up and I’m not. We also had some technical difficulties and I missed some portions of the conversation.
I’m not going to watch myself, so I’ll have to rely on other peoples’ feedback to tell me whether I’m any good or not, and I can’t remember precisely what I said. I think I talk about Czech painter Alphonse Mucha, since I was writing my piece about him at the time, launch my idea of ‘moral kitsch’, and they very kindly include a clip of my piece about Limerick at the end. I can do deep dive Substack posts about all three.
How did I do?