Adam Abdalla doesn’t waste time.
Within minutes of swinging onto a stool at Whiskey Tavern, he begins detailing his ever-unfurling hero’s journey, from smoking PCP in East River Park as a lone kid with shallow pockets to building one of the most formidable arts and culture PR firms in New York.
Cultural Counsel, launched in 2015, counts A24, New Art Dealer’s Alliance (NADA), and Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD among its impressive list of clients, spanning the worlds of art, architecture, design, entertainment, philanthropy, and tech. Ever drawn to industry cross-sections, and particularly the cross-section of art and sport, Abdalla recently launched GAME TIME, a sports and culture conference series that debuted earlier this month at Pérez Art Museum Miami.
In the world of sport, Abdalla’s longtime obsession is professional wrestling, which, he explains, parallels the world of art, media, and PR with its elements of storytelling, iconography, branding, and performance. His professional ventures in wrestling are likely the best examples of his commitment to blending high and low culture: In 2027, Abdalla will co-curate “House Show: Power, Spectacle, and Pro Wrestling,” “the first expansive American museum exhibition to explore the relationship between contemporary art and professional wrestling” at the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg.
A former booker for Jersey Championship Wrestling, Abdalla has since launched PRODUCE, a professional wrestling brand that will celebrate its first show at Pioneer Works in June. PRODUCE is itself an offshoot of Abdalla’s zine series, Orange Crush: The Journal of Art & Wrestling.
If that ain’t enough, Abdalla is also the producer of two new documentaries (Francesco Saviano’s On The Line and Mark Pellington’s This is Buzz), and is the producer and star of Patron Scam, a new investigative documentary series by Brazen on Abdalla’s own experience with AI data fraud.
Clearly there’s a lot of ground to cover here.
Over several hours, between NYC’s favored Chinatown watering holes Whiskey Tavern and The River, Abdalla and I discussed his come-up in the world of PR, the value of lateral thinking in art and business, how Cultural Counsel was partly borne out of spite, and the gorgeous audacity of doing shit yourself.
Tell me about how you got your start in PR.
Adam Abdalla: In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, and I started going down doing relief work. I was still in school at Purchase [College] up in Westchester. The first time I went as a volunteer, and the second time I went as kind of a team leader. I recruited a lot of my friends who were artists in the visual arts program there. Being there was a very tragic and also eerie time. I was basically going in and deconstructing homes that were destroyed by the hurricane and trying to salvage historic building materials so people could rebuild the rest of the city. The nonprofit we were working with, The Green Project, was basically if the Salvation Army met Home Depot. People could go back and purchase quality building materials for pennies on the dollar, so they could rebuild after the storm. But, ironically, [The Green Project’s] space was also destroyed by the storm.
When I got there, I discovered this large storage facility that they had. This was in the Ninth Ward, in the St. Roch neighborhood. I went to their board of directors, and I was like, “What are you guys doing with this space?” They were like, “Nothing.” And I was like, “Well, if my friends and I live in this space and renovate it, would you be willing to let us program it and turn it into a community gallery and concert venue?” They said, “Yeah,” and we did. So I lived in that warehouse for three or four months. I was coughing up green shit by the end of it, but we got it done. But I’m not an artist. I’ve always been somebody who has acted as an advocate for artists. At that point, they were just my friends, you know? So I did the fundraising for the project. I wrote the press release. I was interviewed for NPR. I placed stories in Interior Design. But I was 20, so I didn’t know it was a job. I wasn’t getting paid. It was kind of a quasi-volunteer gig. We got a stipend from the nonprofit for food and stuff like that, but I don’t come from money so I was like, “I need to get a fucking job.” And I went back to New York.
I had a temp job first, doing data entry for a bank or something. It lasted a week and a half. Then I went on Craigslist and found a job as a receptionist at a PR firm specializing in art, architecture, and design. At the time, I was like, “Is that even a job? Can you promote art for a living?” It wasn’t a popularized profession. There were probably like three or four people who did it back then. So, I got a job as the front desk clerk at Susan Grant Lewin Associates. I would sit in front of the boardroom, so I would hear every client meeting. I would hear every journalist meeting. I kind of learned the profession that way. Then, in 2008, the financial market crash happened, so all of the middle management at my company got laid off. And they were like, “Well, you’re smart. Can you place some stories?” And they gave me a client. Pretty soon thereafter, I got invited to go to Art Basel Miami Beach and represented the agency there. I stayed there for two, almost three years. At the time, Nadine Johnson poached me when I was 24 to leave Susan and go work for her, and basically oversee her budding art and culture practice.
My first client was Dasha Zhukova at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. That was kind of how I got started in the business. I was just pursuing shit I was passionate about and helping people that I liked and then figuring out a way to get paid doing it, which has kind of been the story of what I’ve done ever since.
Right, so it was a matter of aligning yourself with people who were genuinely interesting to you and riding the momentum forward, discovering what you were good at.
AA: Yeah, exactly. I also talked to a lot of interesting people in the business at the time who gave me good advice and taught me about the hierarchy of galleries, how the art market works, and how the fair system works. I read a lot of books about PR, punk, marketing, and conversational art history, like Anthony Haden-Guest’s True Colors or [Sarah Thornton’s] Seven Days in the Art World, things that really taught me the anthropology and the social elements of the art world and how they connect to the market.
When I started at Nadine’s, I had one client in the art world. When I left, about five years later, I had about 35 clients and 10 people working for me. I established one of the larger arts and culture divisions at an integrated PR firm in New York. But I’m also somebody who didn’t grow up with much. I’ve lived by myself since I was 15. There came a point where I got tired of supplicating billionaires. I wanted to do things that were more serious in terms of working with artists directly, with curatorial organizations, funders, and private entities that were interested in investing in the arts long term. So I was like, “I think it’s time for me to leave and do my own thing.” My plan was to be a solo practitioner for a little while. I wasn’t planning to start an agency right away. I never really had a chance to have a vacation in my entire life at that point.
How old were you at this point?
AA: I was 29. One day, I gave Nadine my notice. I was going to stay for three weeks. About a week later, I got an email from her. She said, “Don’t come to the office today. Come to my lawyer’s office. We have some things to talk about.” And I was like, “Fuck you. I’m not going to your lawyer’s office by myself.” And then I found a lawyer and was like, “Talk to my fucking lawyer. I’m out of here.” So I felt obligated at that point to plant a flag in the ground and say, “You know what, I am starting an agency.” Because I didn’t know what she was going to say about me in the marketplace to my clients. I came up with the name Cultural Counsel. It was either that or Prestige Worldwide, you know? That was taken, so I did Cultural Counsel. She sued me shortly thereafter. Because after I left, all my old clients would continue to email my old email address saying, “We want to work with you.” And when they’d actually get in touch with me, I’d be like, “That’s great, but if you want to work with me, you have to get permission from my former employer. Because I technically am under a non-solicitation, non-compete for the next year.” I went out and found new clients to work with during that time. But she didn’t like the fact that people wanted to work with me even though I wasn’t soliciting them, so she filed a pretty frivolous and detailed lawsuit against me, which, as a 29-year-old without a job on your own—that’s fucking terrifying.
But also, my attitude in life has been pretty confrontational. Like, you want to bring it to me? I’ll fucking bring it to you. Let’s go. So, I started my own agency with two or three other employees, including Marcella Zimmerman, who is now the founder of Digital Counsel. Marcella worked with me at Nadine. She came with me Jerry Maguire-style when I left. Eventually, my former clients became dissatisfied with the fact that I wasn’t there to service their accounts, but also because of this frivolous lawsuit. [Nadine] was putting all these things in the lawsuit that were untrue about clients that she was still servicing, saying they wanted to work with me as a way to sue me. I had to go to clients that were currently working with her to depose them, being like, “Your publicist is lying about you in this lawsuit to get revenge on me.”
Eventually, we reached a settlement agreement where I gave her a cut of a percentage of the accounts who wanted to come work with me for the duration of my non-compete. And then, at the end of one year, I had been able to establish my own independent client base, and a lot of my old clients then came and joined the agency as well. So we were able to grow pretty quickly, and that’s how we began to get a market share.
That was almost 11 years ago now. I’ve been doing this for almost 20 years now, and it’s the only thing, until recently, I’ve ever done.
What were those early days of Cultural Counsel like?
AA: We started in the gallery at NeueHouse, which is kind of the place where they serve food and stuff. But we were actually doing work; most people who are acting at a co-working space are actually just networking and fucking off on their phone. So after about six months, they got sick of us working so much. One of our clients at the time that Marcella actually had helped bring on was Red Bull, because Red Bull Studios was kind of an experimental art space in Chelsea on 18th Street at that point. It no longer exists, but they were doing really cool shit and really cool shows. And I was like, “Well, I’m willing to give you guys a discount on your retainer if you can trade that for office space.” So they gave us an island in Red Bull’s corporate headquarters where we had eight seats on 18th Street.
By year three or four, my good friend Jack Heller, a film producer, had an office on Maiden Lane in the Financial District. We shared it because his production company was pretty small. I had ten to twelve people who worked there until COVID, basically.
Night Gallery was one of the first clients that I signed at Cultural Counsel. I met with Mieke and Davida [Nemeroff] at the HMS Bounty, and then did studio visits with artists like Awol Erizku. I helped get them gallery exhibitions in other cities and things like that. We had high hopes for expanding nationally early on. And about a month in, COVID hit. L.A. was a fucking ghost town. A lot of the institutions and businesses that I had contracts with became insolvent pretty soon thereafter. So it really just became a hideaway for our staff during COVID if they wanted to be in L.A., essentially. They kept it for a couple of years, but we never opened an office there. We lost about 50% of our business. I didn’t lay anybody off during COVID. I cut a few people’s hours. But at the end of the day, I was like, “We’ve done really well the last couple of years, doing things kind of DIY on a budget. So I’m going to try to maintain as many people as possible.” I started thinking: How do we support the people, the businesses, the institutions, and the artists that allow us to exist? I called my friend Deana Haggag, who at the time was the President of the United States Artists, which is a nationwide philanthropy that gives grants to artists. We were in the midst of planning a retreat for our fellows at the time. And I was like, “Deana, we’re not going to use that money anymore for a retreat. No one’s retreating anywhere except for their homes. What can we do to give back? Can we re-grant that money? So many people are losing speaking gigs, teaching gigs, exhibitions.” And she’s like, “Well, I’ve been talking to some people, and we’re trying to get a little coalition together.”
Deanna organized the directors of seven mid-sized granting organizations. I, along with my team, including Hunter [Braithwaite] and Marcella at the time, came up with a strategy for PR and marketing around an idea called Artist Relief. We came up with a path of how to actually do it from a public communication standpoint, and we were the first ones who were basically ready to go to major foundations and ask for funds to re-grant to artists across all disciplines. We raised about $10 million in a month for re-granting, then a subsequent $15 million in the three months thereafter. We were able to disperse about 5000 $5,000 grants based on economic need to artists around the country. That was probably one of the more meaningful projects I’ve worked on in my career because it was during the George Floyd protests, a time where people were uncertain, were scared. There was a lot of concern not only for the financial wellbeing of artists, but mental health, wellness. But for us, you know, we did it on spec. I didn’t do it for money.
Part of this funding had to go to overhead because it was from serious foundations. But it also opened up relationships with basically every major philanthropist in the field who then knew us as somebody who was able to juggle a lot of different points of view to a common end. So we started working with the Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation. Hunter and I helped launch Disability Futures, which was the first cohort for disabled practitioners in the arts. We helped launch the first fellowship for writers from Puerto Rico via Mellon, the first Latinx art fund in the United States. And we still work with a number of these clients today, like the Rainin Foundation in San Francisco. We collaborate with the Knight Foundation on plenty of things. And it really helped set the tone for a different type of business, one where we were thought partners with an area of the arts that typically wasn’t keen on public relations.
When I started in the mid-2000s, there was an overarching feeling that it was gauche to do PR if you were a gallery. But by 2020, every gallery and museum had PR onboard. At that point, philanthropy still hadn’t really thought about it in such a way. They were like, “What’s the point of us promoting this?” But if you’re not communicating the value of what that means, then often the value of that money is just the money. If you’re able to contextualize who that money is coming from, why, etc., then it’s more meaningful. If you get a MacArthur grant, you’re a genius, right? And so using that as an example of talking to a lot of people, we were able to help imbue meaning into a lot of these grants and philanthropies beyond between funder and recipient and other grant makers.
That’s one of the things that’s really impressive about what you’ve managed to do, to bridge these communication gaps between different industries and parties with interests that may not immediately align on the surface.
AA: Yeah, and I think something that goes over the head of people who work in the agency world a lot, especially in marketing and PR, is that they’re habitually trained to wait for someone to come and pay them for their great ideas that they have not demonstrated in that context. And sometimes you just have to fucking do it yourself. Artist Relief—I was doing it because it was the right thing to do. And if I wanted a job on the other fucking end of this thing, then there needed to be a continued dialogue with the people who were invested. So there wasn’t just a relief plan, there was a recovery plan after. That really led to a boom in our growth, and how we essentially grew to be a 30-35 person agency over time. I think that has helped in terms of the type of clientele that we continue to work with, [or] who consider us to be one of if not the best in our specific genre of PR. I think that was a really pivotal moment in our history.
Meanwhile, during COVID, I also had a lot of extra time at home to focus on side projects and nerdy shit. I’ve always been a big fan of professional wrestling. I did a zine for three years called Orange Crush, where I kind of illustrated the cross-section of professional wrestling and contemporary art and aspects of pop culture. And I started putting it together in late 2019 with the idea that this could be a great live event, a merchandise object for independent DIY shows. I got it done in February 2020. I had planned to sell it at WrestleMania that year, and COVID hit, so WrestleMania didn’t happen. It became strictly a thing that was digitally marketed. I interviewed people like Raymond Pettibon, who’s a big wrestling fan. He just had a show at 52 Walker called “52W Hardway,” where he brought professional wrestling into the gallery earlier this year, and he showed all the works that I had highlighted in my publication in 2021. Matthew Barney I interviewed about bodybuilding. Rosalyn Drexler, who was a pioneering women’s professional wrestler in the 1950s, and then became a famous pop artist, was profiled in our magazine. So anybody who had this intersectional interest of high and low that fit—I put into this zine.
At the time, it was available at Printed Matter. I had a European distribution deal for independent books. I did three annual journals of it. After that, COVID ended. I still continued with the project. I started to dip my toes more into the wrestling world. I owned Jersey Championship Wrestling, which is an actual wrestling promotion. I promoted shows for five years, from 2021 until about a couple months ago. And then I also became a licensed promoter in the state of New York. So I’m an actual fight promoter in New York.
What is it about wrestling that interests you?
AA: I was kind of raised by TV, and had a lot of time to myself as an only child. When we went to the video store in Sunset Park, I gravitated towards the visuals, the iconography, the branding of these wrestling tapes of the time. For a young boy, it’s kind of like human action figures that you’re watching, right? And then you have action figures at home where you can replicate it. So you can do your own world-building, storytelling, storylines. And you can see it play out in real life on TV every week. Also, it didn’t take breaks. There were no off-seasons. It was on 52 weeks a year. It just kind of stuck. If you become enough of a nerd about subculture, people consider you to be an expert at a certain point.
Then my interest started to veer. I started to meet a lot of cool people in the scene that also had crossover with the punk scene, which I grew up with in New York City in the mid-2000s. I used to go to ABC No Rio and go see Leftöver Crack play at Tompkins Square Park. I’d drink 40s and smoke PCP in fucking East River Park when I was 15. So I was used to being part of a scene as a kid who took care of himself a lot. And then there was a lot of overlap with the wrestling scene. A lot of photographers were punk rock or metal rock photographers that would come and shoot the shows.
One of them was my friend Nick Karp. We actually did a book during COVID called Death in COVID. I commissioned and paid for it. And then Nick went around the country and went to all these Deathmatch wrestling shows—performative wrestling where they incorporate things like barbed wire, glass, gusset plates, like a lot of blood on blood situations during COVID. In certain places, like New Jersey, they would do drive-in shows where you would sit in your car and the wrestlers would wrestle each other in the ring. But in places like Indiana, where they were anti-mask, they just did normal shows. So we did a zine showing this dichotomy within the culture itself. This is a different part of America you’re not thinking about. The zine sold out now. A lot of people who didn’t get the literary reference of the name were like, “You know people are dying from this, right?” I was, like, “Yeah, I fucking know people are dying.” So I got a little bit of heat from it. But then Nick and I became friends. We were going to go to this place in Mexico City about 45 minutes out of town called Zona 23, which is a junkyard where they do death match wrestling, and it’s fucking lawless. We were going to do a book on that, and it just never happened because of COVID.
Finally I was, like, “You know what? Let’s make up for lost time.” So, in 2023, the death match promotion that I was most closely affiliated with, called Game Changer Wrestling, became the first American independent wrestling promotion to run their own show at this famous building in Japan called Korakuen Hall. I hired Nick to collaborate with me on a Moriyama-style hardcover photo book, showing not only action shots in the ring, but these kind of everyday, independent wrestlers in America—for a lot of them, it’s not their full-time job. They may be main eventing in front of a thousand people on Saturday and Sunday, and then working at Kroger from fucking Monday to Friday. So for them, it was a culture clash going to Japan. And we followed them. Nine months later, when GCW went back to Japan a second time, I curated a show in Shibuya in Tokyo of those photos. So, kind of bringing things full circle.
So I’ve kind of carved out this niche in art and sport. But it’s not the first time that I’ve worked collaboratively with an artist, as a curator in this Andy Kaufman, Bob Zmuda way. Because in 2014, I was approached by my friend Rashid Johnson. He’s the most famous artist in the world. Whenever he talks to me, I’m always like, “I hope you’re going to ask me to do the PR for fucking Hauser and Wirth or the Guggenheim or whatever.” But he’s like, “I got this friend who’s an artist, but he’s also an art dealer, so he doesn’t know how to show his work or how to do it.” It was Joel Mesler, who at the time owned Untitled Gallery. Joel is a really funny character in the art world, somebody who’s considered to be a real wheeler dealer, eccentric. He’s like, “I want to show my work, but if I show my own work in my own gallery, my artists are going to hate me.” So I did this booth under the name of Cultural Counsel at NADA in 2015, and I had Joel create [hundreds of] these little notebook sketch drawings that we would sell for 15 bucks. We would sell the drawings off the wall as a performance for us. And it hit. It was PR for curating a show by an art dealer at an art fair, this meta thing.
I’m not new to discovering somebody and showing their work. But it was through an interrogation of the system and exposing the hypocrisy within it in terms of how people really like to cast labels upon people who do specific jobs and really implore them to stay in their lane.
Which you’ve actively bucked all along.
AA: Yeah, well I’ve never made a dollar in my life that I haven’t earned my fucking self. And I’ve never done anything that’s truly unethical either. Even Hunter [Braithwaite] and I in 2015, we had Cultural Counsel and [published] Affidavit. It was a time [when] a lot of critics and writers and essayists did not have a forum to write about whatever they wanted. It was very controlled by the market, page counts, advertising. And I’m like, “Well, I have a curatorial purview.” Hunter at the time had both a curatorial and experimental purview. Marcella had worked at VICE previously producing campaigns for Madonna, Pepsi, and shit like that. Native editorial had become a thing at that time with a lot of publications monetizing. I was like, “Native editorial for a PR firm that promotes the art is just letting writers do whatever the fuck they want.” And that’s what we did.
So I set aside a little bit of money, and every two weeks I would pay major artists, writers, and curators a thousand bucks and be like, “Write whatever you want, just make sure it’s at least a thousand words and I’ll publish it.” That became Affidavit. I got emails from people in the industry, including the editor-in-chief of Art in America at the time, Lindsay Pollack, who thought it was so unethical that a PR firm would publish editorial. Essentially, it was breaking all the laws between church and state. So I’d always done whatever the fuck I wanted because I wanted to figure out more inroads to collaborate with people I wanted to work with who couldn’t necessarily afford to hire me. So I wanted to hire them to just do what they want. And maybe there would be an opportunity for us to work together later on. That naturally occurred. I wasn’t selling space to clients to promote their shit. It was client agnostic. It was Gary Indiana writing for us. Or Andrea Long Chu. Adrian Matejka. Poets. Writers, essayists, artists, and curators. So I always had a history of pushing the line between high and low—putting wrestling in a museum.
As someone who’s been in the PR game for almost 20 years, what have you observed? How have you had to adapt?
AA: At a time when there’s limited forums for things to be taken into account with rigor or a lot of consideration just as a matter of finance and space, I’m working with clients to figure out new systems of dissemination and different ways to fund cultural production, and then re-market it to the relevant audiences. Because right now we don’t live in the same world we lived in in 2007. We’re living in a world where news is fed to you based on what your opinions already are. Whether you see a story in The New York Times often depends on whether or not your friend sent it to you and wants you to see it. So, for me, a big part of the job right now is not just inheriting people’s ideas, but actually helping them bring things to life that have a relevance to a larger public.
It started with my wrestling practice and then in 2025, things happened. David Zwirner did the Raymond Pettibon show at 52 Hardway about professional wrestling and put a ring in the gallery. Choke Hole did performances at Times Square Arts and Pioneer Works, which is kind of a drag show under the pastiche of wrestling. So the New York Times wrote a trend story about the cross-section of professional wrestling and art. I was partially credited and profiled as the “art/wrestling kingpin and clearinghouse.” That changed the way people perceived me a little bit. Like, this guy’s actually curating museum shows now, not just hardcore business. He’s in a stunt.
When you’re in PR, you have unmitigated access to the truth. You know what people really are like. You know how the system really works. You know how to kind of think about hacks within that system. You can think about gray market economies, gray market information economies, gray market events, and understanding what is ethical and what isn’t. I got the bug of just wanting to make more shit happen, do more things.
I started doing things like helping negotiate exhibitions for artists, building their careers through the guise of PR, curating exhibitions through the guise of PR, doing conferences that I would ideate from the ground up. And next week, on the occasion of the largest American museum show about art and sports, I’m launching Game Time, which is the first ever museum-driven cross-disciplinary conference about art, sports, and media, which is March 19th and 20th. I’m also producing two feature documentaries that are coming out in the next six months. One is a boxing documentary called On the Line by a director named Francesco Saviano, which followed three boxers over the course of ten years from a gym in Long Island. It’s been sitting on the shelf for quite a while because people who program film festivals, for example, are quick to dismiss sports documentaries because they’re not necessarily as artsy as they would like. It’s maybe a little too raw of a depiction of things. I fell in love with this movie because to me, it was like Hoop Dreams. And it’s a really tragic story.
I went to the Cannes Film Festival originally with the intention of exploring where things were in terms of cutting-edge exhibition technology instead of a rehearsal section. And ultimately, when I got there, I was like, “I’m in Cannes, so I’m going to go watch 20 to 25 movies by serious auteurs in concert or in succession.” And it opened up different parts of my brain, including thinking about how the film industry worked and how archaic it was compared to the work that I had to do as an arts publicist. When you’re a film publicist and a movie gets a bad review, they don’t blame the publicists. They just send the bad reviews to their clients and say, negative, positive, whatever. If you’re an art publicist, you send a bad review to a fucking gallery that you helped facilitate the images for, they’re like, “What the fuck is this? Why did you do this?” I think that speaks a little bit to the insecurity of the art world and a little bit of the lack of willingness to take responsibility for your own creative output. But also, there’s a truth to it.
You could help contextualize a movie better before you show it to someone so they understand what they’re walking into, or invite the right person to see it who would appreciate what you’re doing. And then I began to realize that a lot of these decisions that were being made about messaging, about campaigns, about ways to roll things out in non-traditional venues weren’t being made at the agency level. They were being made at the studio level. So, it actually didn’t make sense for me to expand my PR practice into film. It made sense for me to become a producer, actually, because my ideas were about how to contextualize these films with a greater cultural conversation, art historical canon, and also how to find an audience within subcultures that were direct. When [David Lynch] was alive, he had projects that couldn’t get fucking funded by Netflix, while having millions of fans. So, I started thinking about, “Okay, how do you apply this type of methodology to things like exhibitions? How do you bring curb appeal to the high brow, to the high-middle brow, even?” Because high-middle brow ain’t on fucking TV anymore.
I’ve started to interrogate and explore how my experience as somebody who just likes to juice shit and do it, and erase these lines between high and low, can apply to things like the film industry to the future of exhibitions. And in this scenario, when we talk about Game Time, the thing I’m doing next week in Miami, we’re at a time where banks and corporations don’t want to touch the art world after the fallout of October 7th, 2023. This is something I probably shouldn’t say, but it’s the truth. It became so transparent how quickly the art world could be manipulated and that people could divest from institutions if they didn’t like what the artists were saying. Right? The idea of the art world as a marketplace became instantly something politicized. And I think a lot of people used to be able to go and be a piece of shit or do business for the sake of just pure profitability five days a week. But then they washed their hands of it through philanthropy the other two days of the week by sitting on a museum board and being happy just to help something fulfill its mission. However, things changed. That’s no longer the case. People now work five days a week, so on the other two days a week within their hobbies they can push their agenda down people’s throats.
So, one of the things that I’ve kind of come to realize is that if we want to have substantive conversation, if we want cultural production to continue in a significant way, we don’t need smart money. We need dumb money. We need people who have businesses, live events, and sports that are driven by popularity, that are driven by a common group experience, and are political on a personal level. Athletes are highly political beings, even though they are constantly being silenced by their corporate overlords.
But the idea of sports is an idea of leisure, right? And the idea of the art world as a space of leisure, as the contemporary version of the international rock star circuit, didn’t translate to the next generation, because they didn’t have that experience. Their parents didn’t have that experience. Their parents had an experience of conflict. So yeah, I’m creating a platform where you can talk about art, film, fashion, design, in the context of sports and that crossover, but it’s also a means to an end to creating more avenues of cultural production, of getting the owner and the artist, getting the curator and the director and the journalist all in the same room on even footing. These are places they normally wouldn’t be, and if they were to be there, their guard would be so fucking up, because they don’t want this person to know what they really think about X, Y, and Z. If we’re going to share this shit talking about sports on the surface, and then we get into deeper issues as we talk about it, it’s really interesting what can come out of that.
Agreed, this is incredibly important work.
AA: The other thing I’m working on—I’m starting a new promotion where I co-curate pro-wrestling shows. So half the show will be through the eyes of prospective wrestlers that can quote creatively. We’re going to do the first show at Pioneer Works in June.
What does your day-to-day look like lately?
AA: My day-to-day looks pretty fucking crazy, man. I put together this conference with six panels and film screenings and poetry readings in about six weeks. And if you see the list of people, it’s the Smithsonian, the Olympics, everybody.
The Rolodex in your head must be insane.
AA: That’s a problem, though. I need to get better at putting things on paper, but the time it takes to put things on paper after saying them is time I’m not doing the next thing.
How much are you directly involved in managing the rest of the Cultural Counsel team these days?
AA: I go to the office every day unless I’m traveling. And I’m involved with all the high-level strategies across the office.
Across all clients?
AA: Most. Unless it’s something that’s really straightforward. If it’s something that is difficult or something that I see opportunity in beyond the obvious, then I kind of really try to encourage lateral thinking around everything. I feel the death of lateral thinking is why we’re in the predicament that we’re in, both from a cultural production standpoint and also a political standpoint. There’s a lack of empathy, and it’s because people are consistently trying to tell other people to stay in their lane so they don’t understand one another. I’m trying to generate situations, essentially, where those lines are dissolved, or blurred, or challenged, at least.
It’s interesting that you don’t consider yourself an artist because this is inherently very creative.
AA: Well, even when I was a curator, I really felt compelled not to call myself a curator because I didn’t go to art school. It’s all self-taught. There’s also the weight of the title. I would say I would organize things. And now that I’m essentially creating things and producing things, I call myself a curator. I’m so humble, now that I’m doing this interview talking about every fucking thing I’ve ever done. I’m not looking for stolen valor. I just want to get shit done. I’ve learned through work that one of the best ways to get things done is to make other people think it was their idea.
Word.
AA: If I go around being like, “I’m the guy with the big idea, do my idea”—some people like that, some people hate it. But if I come to the table and be like, “I have this great idea, let’s make it seem like we came up with this idea together,” then they’re a lot more inclined to do that. So that’s kind of my approach, and what you need. Anything of scale, anything that has a cultural impact. It doesn’t exist on an island and you can’t do it yourself. You need help and you need community and you need people who have varying skills and ideas. I run my business like a business, and I’m lucky that it’s a business and you work in a similar business where the overhead is just human resource at the end of the day. It’s staff. It’s hard work. And that starts to cost a lot when you employ 30 people for a decade, at a time when the media industry is completely backward. People are paying PR companies 15K a month to go get validation from some kid who’s getting paid 40K a year about to lose their job and expect them to answer them every five seconds and do exactly what they want to do and be beholden to them. It’s like, “Why?” What you need to do is fucking generate ideas that are actually worth talking about to get them excited. So, for me, I really just want to do cool shit with my friends, but I want to get paid for it. And I think when the quality of your friends and your quality of ideas are higher, you can get paid more for it.
Awesome piece. This guy is so good for the indie wrestling scene