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Love Thy Network: Friendship, Gossip, and Public Discourse — Available Now!
With all the connections we’ve made at Montez Press Radio over the years, we know good friends are impossible to quantify and just as hard to define. For all the day-ones, ride-or-dies, and chosen families, we also have fair weather friends, friends with benefits, and friends who are just there for the free beer after the show. In the informal economy of the culture industry, friendship becomes a site of transaction and our world can sometimes feel like chess without a chessboard. And that’s okay. It might sound cynical to suggest that good friendships often hinge on exchange, but we know that wisdom can be traded for opportunity, a shoulder to cry on for a dinner to laugh over, a wink for something best obtained in the bathroom. So long as no one is overly preoccupied with accounting, exchange is foundational to our most valued friendships.
Whether your friend has a responsibility to come to your next show is a question as timeless as whether art has the social responsibility to do anything but be good art. In the late 20th century, when art collapsed into life and its priorities shifted away from the unique object, culture adopted the position that contemporary art is a place of discourse, a site where the exchange of ideas turns the world as it is into a world of possibilities. But today, as we confront political and social crises online and off, art can feel trapped between self-indulgent abstraction and moralizing didacticism. The goal of art and its discourses shouldn’t be to prove, or even come to agreements, but to stir new ways of thinking, to encourage us to be curious and perpetually in conversation.
As a platform established for dialogue about art (and sharing playlists with crushes), Montez Press Radio believes that the nuances of our friendships are vital to consider if we are to achieve a shared and polyvocal future (that includes good art). Our friends are our livelihoods and our support systems, our inspiration and encouragement, our muses and our competitors. So for MPR’s first Series installment—a new strand of curated radio broadcasts—we’ve invited friends, new and old, to think through the intimate and professional, the exclusive and cooperative, the transactional and parasocial, the facts and the tea, to consider what it means to belong: to a scene, to a network, to a community, to a public.
Featuring:
<3 Isabelle Graw, art historian, critic, and founder of Texte Zur Kunst, on the transactional and sometimes complicated nature of friendship in competitive social [removed];
<3 Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, and Uday Metha, a scholar of political philosophy, on the intersection of friendship and [removed];
<3 Artists Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda with a sound piece on wallas, or “crowd murmur.”
<3 Artist and writer Dena Yago on the Blue Man Group’s metamorphosis from an experimental art collective to a global entertainment brand.
<3 Ada O’Higgins and Keegan Brady on gossip as the language of our lives, from the 17th century Parisian salons to NYC now.
<3 Travis Diehl, Quinn Slobodian, Diva Corp, Alex Greenberger, Alisha Mascarenhas, and Dakota Higgins on risk-taking in art in an era of doxxing and [removed];
<3 Belgian project space and event series Iv (In vitro*) featuring Bear Bones Lay Low, Farida Amadou, Lawrence McGuire, and Lukas De Clerck.
<3 Mariana Castillo Deball and publisher, artist, and curator Martha Hellion on Hellion’s early life and training as an architect, her friendship with artist Ulises Carrión, and a life full of improvisation, paper making, and amity.
<3 MoT+++ collective, A Sông, and Cù Rú on collectivity and the symbiotic relationship between artistic expression and the non-art aspects of life in contemporary Vietnam.
<3 Svetlana Kitto, Ken Tisa, and Danny Dawson on the significance of Knobkerry, the store run by designer Sara Penn, as a social space for a network of Black intellectuals, musicians, and artists, and a broader subset of cultural and subcultural figures passing through New York.
<3 Celina Huynh and Dan Q. Dao on Paris by Night’s legacy on the Vietnamese Diaspora.
<3 Live performance from and conversation with Sophie Sleigh-Johnson on her new book Code: Damp – An Esoteric Guide to British [removed];
<3 Vivienne Griffin and Adele Bertei on bonds formed through counter-culture.
<3 Tắm Đêm (Night Swim), an interdisciplinary poetry project, presents a sound piece produced from a collective writing exercise conducted on a fishing boat on the Saigon River.
<3 Child of the Church: The Long Last Day with Lucia della Paolera, Gobby, Justine Lugli, Tommy Martinez, Timothy Rusterholz, and Esther Sibiude perform a live set of study music for those solitary readers communing with their books in the Yale Law Library on the last day of spring semester classes.
<3 Ms Sharon Le Grand and Kurtis Lincoln, two of East London’s most notorious club rats, on the music that has soundtracked their tomfoolery over the years.
<3 Emily Pope and Rene Matić on Idols Lovers Mother’s Friends, Matićs latest solo show with Arcadia Missa.
<3 Researcher and art historian Uriel Vides Bautista on the history of cinema cruising—its codes, publics, and spaces—as well as other spaces of encounters throughout Mexico City, from public baths to [removed];
<3 Multimedia cabaret Chakala Nius with a performance that unfolds as a news and entertainment program in a dystopian future of global collapse, when the planet has already experienced the sixth extinction event: that of humans.
<3 Hermanas, the 10+ member CDMX-based band, perform music off their most recent album, La Ruta de la Amistad, live from Casa Gomorra.
<3 DJ sets from Phat Paris, Smoothie Boiz, Vanh An, Tizone, Do Do and Chi Min, members of the sexiest Vietnamese party collectives, bring us together to dance.
…with more to be added in the coming weeks!
→ Listen to Love Thy Network for free here
→ View the schedule for upcoming live events here
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Love,
Montez Press Radio
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