Can Podcasts Be Art?: Dispatch from the Red Scare x Harper’s Event

Image courtesy of Giulia Melucci

There’s an art to talking for hours without saying much. Only the sexiest nihilists can get away with such a con. Last week, Anna Khachiyan and Dasha Nekrasova, the vaping luminaries behind the Red Scare podcast, joined forces with Harper’s Magazine to interview art critic Dean Kissick about his recent essay “The Painted Protest” at the SVA Theatre in Chelsea. It’s a searing diatribe about the state of the art world, claiming that during the last decade, art has lost the sauce due to the rise of identity politics. Woke has gone too far.

The piece opens with the author’s mother losing her legs while on the way to an exhibition that largely featured queer and non-white artists at London’s Barbican Art Gallery. “You’re laughing and my mother lost her legs?” Leah Abrams and Heather Akumiah recently joked on their own podcast, Limousine. Marginalized artists are now the dominant represented group, Kissick argues, therefore how can they be radical? Worse, they’re using old forms like textiles and pottery. It’s not the wild art scene of the post-internet age. During the talk, the Red Scare girls said the art world has also become sexless, devoid of erotic potential. Fair enough. “It’s cause there’s no straight white male artists anymore,” Nekrasova said. 

While drinking canned Negronis and ambling through disjointed bullet points, the panelists struggled to find any shared chemistry. Only Khachiyan, dressed in a charcoal gray pantsuit, seemed interested in keeping the conversation on track. Harper’s publisher John R. MacArthur intervened on stage a few times to try and push the conversation forward. On little cards given to the audience, the magazine offered year-long subscriptions for $16.97.