Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast A Live tour of a Berlin Art Gallery. Exploring Modernism, German Expressionism, Fascism and Muesli, while wearing swimming shorts and hiking boots About this episode This week I'm in Berlin, walking through the Neue Nationalgalerie. A tour of German expressionist paintings and 20th century history This week I'm in Berlin, walking through the Neue Nationalgalerie. A tour of German expressionist paintings and 20th century history. Thumbnail image is Potsdamer Platz by Ludwig Kirchner Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 10,658 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:30 Blindboy Boatclub? Greetings, you jangly Anthony's, and welcome to the Blind by Podcast.
1:36 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm recording this one live from the streets of Berlin.
1:43 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a fucking heatwave over here, and I didn't prepare for it. Hold on, I'm trying to avoid some children.
1:51 Blindboy Boatclub? If you're a first time listener, maybe consider going back to an earlier podcast. If you're a regular listener, you know the crack.
2:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Things might sound a little bit different this week because I'm recording this week's podcast live from the streets of Berlin. Well, not live. Well, I suppose it is live. There'll be very little editing.
2:13 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm walking around Berlin because I did two gigs here at the weekend. Now it's Sunday. So on my day off, fuck it, let's try and record a podcast. I'm gonna take you to an art museum.
2:28 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a heatwave here. I didn't plan for a fucking heatwave. I hadn't brought the right clothes, so what's happened is, is I'm wearing swimming shorts and then outdoor boots. Swimming shorts and outdoor boots, which
2:48 Blindboy Boatclub? I look like I look like an ex-priest who was defrocked for masturbating in a cinema. That's how I'm dressed. Very fucking strange stuff, even here in Berlin, where you can wear what you want. I look odd. I look like an Australian sex offender. Apparently, actually, the process of being defrocked as a Catholic priest. I need to look into it more, but apparently you get thrown down a flight of stairs. I'm actually approaching a flight of stairs now. I'm outside a gaff called the Nij National Gallery, which is an art museum in Berlin with some modernist paintings inside there.
3:31 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm gonna take you in and we'll look at a couple of paintings and chat about them. It's actually Father's Day today, which is I didn't, I didn't know it was gonna be fucking Father's Day when I booked this tour months ago. But here you are, it's Father's Day and I'm away from my two little children, which that's not nice.
3:55 Blindboy Boatclub? The hotel that I'm staying in has an aggressively brilliant breakfast selection.
4:01 Blindboy Boatclub? The Germans are very serious about breakfasts.
4:05 Blindboy Boatclub? I've never seen a more welcoming musley selection in my life. Three or four different types of musleys, among which is Barter Musley, one of my favourite fucking musleys. It's the original overnight aughts. I've only ever found it in Australian hotels for some reason. But they've got Barter Musley and then they have another section which is a build your own fucking musley selection. All constituent elements of musley laid out in separate bowls and it's your job to just go nuts. So that's what I did. Built an astounding bowl of musley. Chia seeds, sunflower seeds.
4:46 Blindboy Boatclub? Pecans, fucking pecans. Who's putting pecans on me? Me. I'm putting pecans on musley. Oats, few Rice Krispies to be boiled and two different types of yogurts. Delicious bowl of musley that I built myself. And I was so proud of this fucking bowl of musley, right? So proud of it. I'm like, I wanna build this identical bowl of musley tomorrow. That's what I'm gonna do. Tomorrow morning, I'm making this bowl of musley again. So I took a fucking photograph of it and then I went, that's not enough. That's not enough. I'm not gonna remember. So not only did I take a photograph of it, I said, I'm gonna put this bowl of musley on my phone as the screensaver, just for the day. So I did.
5:32 Blindboy Boatclub? Normally the screensaver on my phone is a photograph of my two little kids. That's usually, I love opening my phone up every time and I'm staring at my two little kids. I love that. But today, I'm like, no, we're gonna need to do this musley thing so I can remember the recipe for tomorrow. So this morning I was in a shop. This is the most mental thing I've done on this tour so far.
5:58 Blindboy Boatclub? I was in a shop, dressed the way I am, and there was a woman in front of me, and she had in her arms a little two-year-old girl.
6:08 Blindboy Boatclub? And when you're away from your kids,
6:13 Blindboy Boatclub? all other kids are brilliant because they become, they become little versions of your own kids. I love, I love being around children. If I'm in a fucking restaurant, lads, if I'm in a restaurant and I see a family and they have two tiny little kids, I go out of my way to sit near them. Now mainly what that is, is A, I don't mind the sound of kids. Two, I know that that family who has the kids, they're fucking terrified. They're terrified that one of their kids is gonna flick a spoon of bolognese at a stranger. So I sit next to them so that if a spoon of bolognese from their little toddler should fly in the air, that it hits me. I wanna be hit by that bolognese. And I then want to say to those parents,
6:57 Blindboy Boatclub? "Don't worry about it. I know what that's like. Shower me with bolognese. It's alright." So this morning, anyway, I'm in a fucking queue for a shop, and there's a little wo- there's a woman in front of me, holding a little two-year-old. And I see the little child, and then I get, my heart starts fluttering. And I'm just going, "Oh, look at the little baby. Isn't she gorgeous?", thinking of my own two at home.
7:22 Blindboy Boatclub? So I start smiling at the baby, you know, and waving. Then the woman turns around and there's just a man dressed like a defrocked priest on his own, waving at her child. And in the society we live in, unfortunately, you have to be kind of suspicious.
7:39 Blindboy Boatclub? When a stranger is smiling at your child, you have to kind of go, "Is that a good smile or not a good smile? I don't know. This is the society we live in."
7:48 Blindboy Boatclub? So she turned to me,
7:51 Blindboy Boatclub? and there was a bit of suspicion in her eyes. She wasn't sure. It's a dude there standing on his own. It's a man by himself, and she's gone into protection mode. So then I say to myself, "Do you know what? I'm gonna ease her worries. I know what she's thinking. I understand why she'd be worried. I'm a man standing by himself, smiling at her child. Of course she should be worried." So I, now, bear in mind, I don't speak fucking German. I don't think she speaks English. So I couldn't just say to her, "Don't worry, I'm a father, I've got two of my own, don't worry." Couldn't do that. So I said, "I'll whip out my phone, I'll take my phone out and I'll show her, "Look at my screensaver, look at the front of my phone, it's two toddlers, don't worry."
8:35 Blindboy Boatclub? So I did it. There's not two toddlers on my phone. It's pointing at a bowl of fucking Muesli.
8:45 Blindboy Boatclub? So there's this woman in the shop going, "Why is this man smiling at my child?" And I'm trying to make the situation better by showing her, showing her perfect Muesli? Showing her this magnificent bowl of fucking Muesli? So she looked very, very confused anyway and they left. So that's the maddest thing I've done so far on this fucking trip.
9:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Strange old place here, Berlin.
9:11 Blindboy Boatclub? Um.
9:14 Blindboy Boatclub? You really can't talk about Palestine. You really cannot.
9:20 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a, a group of people here called the Olim Five. I'm whispering, I'm fucking whispering. Group of people here called the Olim Five, which were activists. One of them is from Dublin, his name is Daniel Tatlow. And they've been arrested, they've been arrested for, like the Palestine Action People, over in London.
9:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Arrested for vandalizing the military industrial complex, the fucking companies that are making drones, that are doing a genocide. So they went in and vandalized some equipment and now they're being tried as part of a criminal organization and are facing incredibly serious sentences. And the German government are making an example out of them. You don't hear about it back in Ireland, I heard about it when I came here, even though one of them is, is an Irish citizen. Bet you know him back home, even fucking knows about that. The United Nations has called out Germany, saying chill the fuck out. Think there's fifteen hundred people arrested for protesting. Last night, at my own gig and the night before, where I have
10:29 Blindboy Boatclub? an audience of my podcast listeners, when I brought up the subject of Palestine. The quietness in the audience, people were terrified. You can't fucking talk about it over here. Because of the collective guilt. I think they view... Like, here's the thing, right? The United Nations has said, "This is a genocide." And if you look at the United Nations Convention on Genocide, it puts a responsibility on nations to stop a genocide when it's fucking happening. So, that's what makes this so legally and morally problematic is...
11:11 Blindboy Boatclub? If a group of people decide, "Well, the UN is caught in a genocide, so I'm gonna go into the factory and break some shit." Are you not then adhering to the United Nations Genocide Convention, where it says there's a responsibility to stop a genocide? And instead you have the UK and Germany going, "You're criminals." Or the UK calling them fucking terrorists. Sort of a mad vibe here, fucking mad vibe. And proof of that is, I'm walking around a public space, talking into a fucking microphone, and when I say Palestine, I'm whispering it. And that's dark, because at least I could walk around Limerick roaring it.
11:56 Blindboy Boatclub? So what I wanted to do this week is to take ye into an art gallery, look at a couple of paintings, speak about them, see what the crack is. I know a thing or two about art. I've got a master's degree in fine art. I was a college lecturer for a year, teaching fine art, back in 2017, before the podcast. Art is something I... Visual art is something I love and adore, because art's not necessarily about whether the art is good or bad. It's cultural production, so you can look at fucking paintings and it tells you something about society. And that's what it's about, really.
12:39 Blindboy Boatclub? And I like to democratize art and democratize art galleries, because art galleries are a load of fucking bollocks. We have this idea that art, paintings, modernist art in particular, is highly impenetrable, highly intellectual. And people treat art galleries like religious fucking spaces.
13:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, I don't take my children to art galleries because,
13:10 Blindboy Boatclub? first off, you take little tiny kids to an art gallery and they go nuts, they wanna touch everything. And then you have to go, "Don't touch it, don't touch it." And instill a fear in them. Because the thing they want to touch, the painting, the beautiful thing they're looking at, costs millions and millions and millions. And you have to go to your kids and go, "Don't touch it." And then the children go, "Why, why, why is the art so important?" And then you can't answer them. You can't tell them why that particular work is worth millions, but you definitely can't touch it. Art galleries are very solemn places. People walk around in silence.
13:49 Blindboy Boatclub? Terrified, you know, staring at absolutely bizarre pieces of work.
13:57 Blindboy Boatclub? And they stare at it in silence, in terror. In case someone else figures out that we, we don't understand the art. So we have to go around the place rubbing our fucking chins. It's a religious space. It's a space that's...
14:12 Blindboy Boatclub? There are spaces that are dominated by solemnity. A lot of them exist purely to serve as capitalism. Why are these paintings worth millions and millions and millions and millions? Is that their actual worth? Yes, they're very important. Yes, they're one of a kind. But the millions and millions and millions thing? It's money laundering. It's a way for very rich people to purchase paintings and hoard wealth into them. They're investments. I mean, if a Picasso is worth one hundred and sixty, two hundred million quid, ten years' time, it could be worth three hundred million. It's an investment. It's what it is. So it's for the ultra, ultra wealthy to invest their money. And then it's up for public display for the rest of us.
14:58 Blindboy Boatclub? But just because something's worth three hundred million quid doesn't mean it's an incredible piece of art. Also, it's a way for the ultra wealthy to...
15:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Anyone can buy a Ferrari. Anyone with money can go and purchase a Ferrari. But in order to purchase the right piece of modernist art, that's an expression of education and taste. So it's a way for amongst the ultra wealthy. For some people to go, well, I'm actually cultured and educated and I come from real money. I come from generational wealth because I know what a medigliani is. I know what a Picasso is. But that person over there, he just knows what a Ferrari is because he's no money. So the art world operates like that too. Germany as well is very unique when it comes to to modern art and the development of modernism.
15:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Late 19th century, early 20th century.
15:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Germany was a centre of artistic expression. You had the fucking, the Bauhaus, the Dada movement, that would have been Austria too. You had expressionism.
16:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Modernism, I've said it before, right, but modernism. The late industrial revolution thing. Think I might have mentioned a little bit of it last week. It's when art is was confronted with technology. That's what the fuck modernism, I'm saying this in the simplest terms possible. When you hear modernism and then later post-modernism.
16:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Modernism is present in everything. Music, painting, fucking writing. James Joyce is the classic writing modernist. Visual arts, paintings, some of the shit that we're going to be looking at. Painters were confronted with the new technology of photography and film. Film came in around 1913. So you have this art form where people are drawing and painting on 2D surfaces. And all of a sudden you've got machines that can take a photograph. And this created a sense of anxiety where painters had to respond and basically go. I'm gonna paint what a camera can't. I'm gonna paint what a camera can't. So from that you get impressionism. And then you get expressionism.
17:19 Blindboy Boatclub? Express expressionism. I'm being really simple with this shit, very, very simple. But what is expressionism in painting?
17:28 Blindboy Boatclub? If an expressionist was to paint a tree, they're not necessarily interested in painting the best tree that looks like a tree. They're trying to paint the feeling of what it is to look at a tree, or the feeling of what it is to remember a tree, to express. That's what expressionism is. Look up a painter called Mondrian, Pi- Mondrian. Look at his paintings of trees and how those paintings change over ten years. He begins in an expressionistic style, then he moves to cubism, removing detail, removing representation, until by 1921, fully abstract, just painting squares. German Expressionism painters would have been fucking Kandinsky.
18:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Who else have we got? Otto Dix was another one, George Groves, Paul Klee. These were German. Now, German expressionism became abstract expressionism later, from about the 1940s onwards, but we're not getting into that yet. Early 20th century, so I mean before World War II, before the Nazis. Germany was a centre of expressionist painters. This new way of painting, shit paintings, alright? I'm conscious that I'm speaking to a lay audience here, alright? The type of paintings that you would walk into a gallery and look at and say, "That shit, my two-year-old could do that. That's a piece of shit, that is. Why is that worth millions of euro? That's a, that's a bag of dog shit, that is."
18:58 Blindboy Boatclub? And that's fair enough.
19:01 Blindboy Boatclub? That's fair enough. If you walk into a gallery and you look at an early German Expressionism painting and think it's a bag of dog shit, your opinion is valid. But, thing is, visually, yeah, it is a bag of dog shit. That's not the point. It was about being radical. It was about taking an art form that has existed, painting that has existed for hundreds of hundreds of years, and going, "I have the freedom to be shit."
19:29 Blindboy Boatclub? Maybe this painting here isn't about representation. We've got cameras now. Go and get a camera if you want a perfect photograph of a fucking tree. I'm trying to paint what a tree feels like. And we're just gonna have to deal with that. That's what expressionism is. A lot of these painters were Jewish. That became a problem then when Hitler comes to power. When the fucking Nazis came to power in 1933, Hitler and the Nazis decided that modernist art, German expressionism,
19:58 Blindboy Boatclub? was degenerate. Degenerate art. It was a sign of a failing society, a sign of mental illness. It was, a lot of these artists were Jewish as well. It was antisemitic, it was racist because modernist painters were inspired by African American jazz music. The Nazis came in and said, this is degenerate art. The Nazis viewed society.
20:23 Blindboy Boatclub? And this again does tie into my breakfast discourse. The Germans are very serious about health food and there's a reason for that. That goes back to the late 1800s, right? There was a movement in Germany around 1900 called Lieben's Reform. Muesli was invented during this period by Maximilian Bercher. Remember the Bercher Muesli I mentioned earlier? A lot of things we take for granted today. Muesli bars, granola, herbal teas, fucking organic food, nuts and seeds. Goes back to the German Lieben's Reform movement of the late 1800s. The purification of the human body. Nothing wrong with that, but the Nazis fucking jumped in it. They loved that. A lot of health food movements start in Germany and this is why today you can see
21:07 Blindboy Boatclub? how easily far-right ideas get absorbed by wellness influencers. The Germans viewed society as a human body.
21:19 Blindboy Boatclub? They had what they called the Blood and Soil Movement. That Eastern Europe was basically German territory. And this was about German soil and German blood. And you could expel the Slavic people that lived there and replace, they colonized them with German people. And this is the Blood and Soil Movement. And you must purify the body. Purify the body and keep it clean. And anything that isn't pure is gonna dirty that body. And they looked at society that way too. And that was used as justification for genocide, for eradicating who? Jewish people, disabled people, Roma people, whoever they didn't like.
22:03 Blindboy Boatclub? These people were degenerate. And it is our responsibility to exterminate these people because our society is a body. And just like you take medicine or antibiotics, that's what we're doing. We're cleansing the body, the society, the way that we would cleanse our bodies. So they had an exhibition in thirty-four, thirty-three called the Degenerate Art Exhibition. And a lot of the paintings I'm gonna be looking at here today in this gallery, I think a few of them are actually in that Degenerate Art Exhibition. So the Nazis, they put on this huge exhibition and got all the German Expressionism painters, Modernist art, Cubists.
22:45 Blindboy Boatclub? And they said, this art is degenerate. These paintings of trees that don't look like trees. These paintings of people that are warped and distorted. These paintings that look like the work of toddlers. They are the work, they're the work of adults with the brains of toddlers. This is degenerate art by degenerate people. And this art here is a stain on our society that must be eradicated.
23:18 Blindboy Boatclub? Really what they're talking about, they're trying to get rid of critical thinking. They're trying to get rid of critical thinking. And this is where the intellectual side of abstract art and abstract painting comes in.
23:32 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a lot of thinking behind these paintings. A lot of creativity. I'm simplifying it by saying I'm gonna do what a camera can't. But these people were reading philosophy. These people were critiquing society. These people were trying to hold a lens up to society, in particular after World War One. Another driving force of modernism was World War One, right? Humanity had never seen industrial scale murder like that.
24:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Before World War One, battlefields were, there was a couple of guns, there was horses, there was knives, there was swords. But there wasn't gas, there wasn't bombs being dropped from planes. There wasn't machine guns that could take a hundred people down in under a minute. That was very new, that was World War One. And the world was confronted with that level of technological death very rapidly. And the modernists were also responding to that. In particular, the Dada, the Dada movement, which would have started in, I think it was Austria, Vienna.
24:42 Blindboy Boatclub? So, when the fucking Nazis were like, here is our degenerate art exhibition. This is all the art that's banned. This is all the degenerate art of the degenerates. And this is gonna ruin society. Really what they're shutting down is critical thinking. That's what it's about. We're shutting down the intellectuals, we're shutting down the Jewish artists that are doing this. And it wasn't just an exhibition. A lot of those artists were teachers in institutions, they all got fired, a lot of them fucked off to America, Paris, places like that.
25:14 Blindboy Boatclub? And then they put on another exhibition, which I can't say it in German, but it means the great German art exhibition. And this was all the art that the Nazi government was like, this is good German art. It's all boring as fuck. Remember Hitler didn't get into art college, lads? Remember that? Hitler did not get into art college. You can see his paintings, very technically proficient drawings of buildings, but it was academic, technical work. Nothing was being said in his work. There was no curiosity, there was no ideas, there was no passion, this was not... There was no desire for artistic expression. He was rejected. Country had skin in the game here.
25:56 Blindboy Boatclub? So when the Nazis put on this big, great German art exhibition, all propaganda art. It's... Here is the best drawing of a horse you've ever seen. Here are great portraits of great men. Here are some paintings of white, blue-eyed German people living in the countryside. We can all agree that these paintings are as good as photographs. It was a demonstration of skill. Demonstration of skill, not a lot of thinking. What does this painting mean? It doesn't mean anything.
26:35 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a painting of a healthy German family who are abiding by Nazi values and working on the land. That's what the painting is. What about that painting of a horse? It's a brilliant drawing and painting of a horse, okay? And that there is a portrait of a great man. And isn't it so skilled? And that was the art that the Nazis were promoting. You see, you're seeing all this shit being echoed now by the Trump fucking regime.
27:07 Blindboy Boatclub? On Twitter, on the Twitter accounts of like the fucking White House, they're using AI to they're using AI to repeat the visual aesthetics of Nazi propaganda art and make it about America.
27:26 Blindboy Boatclub? America had similar propaganda too. There was a painter in America called Norman Rockwell. And he used to just paint Americans sitting down eating giant dinners. And that was their propaganda. Here in America, you can buy as much food as you want. Isn't it great?
27:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Before I take you into the main space of the Nye National Gallery, I think we'll have a little Ocarina pause. I don't have my, I didn't bring my Ocarina with me, but what I do have is an instrument that's called a Jew's harp. This was given to me last night at my gig as a gift by a member of the audience. And this is, you put it in your mouth and you'd know the sound when you hear it. It's called a Jew's harp. Now, I'm becoming increasingly aware that I'm standing outside a National Gallery, so public space. I'm wearing swimming shorts and outdoor hiking boots. I look like a fucking lunatic.
28:25 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm ranting to myself, you know, my microphone isn't, might not be too evident, so I'm ranting to myself about the Holocaust modernism, Muesli and Palestine. So if I am being watched by the German Secret Service or whatever, you know, they can listen to you now with lasers. To the officer that's watching me right now, if you do want to have a hop off my head with a sniper rifle, you know, I'd do the same thing. I'd forgive you. I understand where you're coming from. But if you are listening to me with lasers, I'm just making a podcast. I'm just an autistic man with a podcast, right? And I'm playing a Jew's harp. Now, it's sheer fucking coincidence. Someone gave it to me last night.
29:09 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't even think these instruments have anything to do with Jewish people whatsoever. It's just a name that these instruments have. So when I'm gonna play this, you'll hear some fucking adverts for bullshit, all right? This is, this is me.
29:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Father's Day.
29:27 Blindboy Boatclub? A lot of people looking at me now. Father's Day, 2026.
29:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Sitting outside the Nijon National Gallery in Berlin, talking to myself.
29:41 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm playing the Joes harp. That's what I'm doing with my fucking life.
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31:59 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
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34:07 Blindboy Boatclub? You know that instrument, don't you?
34:12 Blindboy Boatclub? You know it to hear it.
34:20 Blindboy Boatclub? They tell you no one stares in Berlin. They do. They do. Right, we'll plug the Patreon. And support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is why I never miss a week. So that's Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. If you'd like to support this podcast directly.
35:03 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm gonna fly through the gigs because I can barely fucking remember them. But 5th of July, very shortly, Sheffield City Hall at the Crashtwares Festival. Go to the blind by podcast dot ie for any of these fucking gigs. Big English tour in October 2026. What have we got in there? London, Glasgow, Coventry, Brighton, then April 27, Australia, New Zealand, Sydney Opera House, Parth, Melbourne, Auckland. Go to my Instagram, blind by podcast. No. Blind, what the fuck is my Instagram? Blind by Boat Club with a blue tick. The Blind by Podcast. See all you want there. And I'll share some of the fucking paintings I'm gonna be speaking about in this episode too.
35:46 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm entering the gallery now.
35:51 Blindboy Boatclub? That's the sound of a revolving door. I'm immediately confronted by a space that looks a bit like a hangar. I hope I don't get into fucking trouble now walking around with a microphone dressed like an Australian sex tourist.
36:06 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm gonna go downstairs to the steps now to try and, um...
36:17 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't have a stereo microphone this week. I'm sure you can still hear the kerfuffle of people wandering around.
36:26 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm about to enter the main exhibition space now, so this is modern art, paintings. The interesting thing about this particular museum is
36:37 Blindboy Boatclub? it's about the conflict between propaganda art and what's considered non-propaganda art, and that's the bit that I have the issue with. You gotta remember, the exhibition starts 1945 to 2000. Speaking about there is Cold War, post- World War II Berlin, where you had it divided between east and west with a fucking wall down the middle. West Berlin represented the West, and then East Berlin, that was Soviet, that was under the control of the Soviet Union, Russia. So, what that is, it's the Cold War, the Cold War, and
37:20 Blindboy Boatclub? East Berlin is portrayed as being highly repressed, and then West Berlin is portrayed as being completely free. And this shows the art of both sides. So when I walk into the exhibition, now I gotta be honest with you, I fucking love these paintings, alright, but what the first thing that's being shown on the left side is abstract expressionist paintings. Now, abstract expressionism is that expressionism that I mentioned at the start, that German expressionism that'd be 1910, 1920. Abstract expressionism is when taking it a step farther.
38:05 Blindboy Boatclub? This is your classic abstract painting that you're talking about. A painting on a wall that's just, it looks like some paint thrown on a canvas. Or just a square, that's what I'm staring at. These paintings are worth millions. Right now, I'm looking at a Mark Rothko. A Mark Rothko painting. That's just a lot of orange on a canvas. You know, pretty much. At the time, when Rothko would have painted this, this would have been completely revolutionary. It would have shocked the art world. 1970. And Rothko was... I think Rothko was German Jewish, I could be wrong, but he painted in New York.
38:48 Blindboy Boatclub? And these are American abstract expressionist paintings. Who else have we got here? Pierre Soonage. Again, he was French, but I believe he was painting out of New York. And do we have a Kandinsky here? Willy Baurmeister. So these paintings are presented as not propaganda. Now, on the other side of the exhibition, we have some paintings from East German artists. Socialist realism. So these artists would have been painting within, within East Berlin.
39:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Within the Soviet system. Within a system where expression was very dangerous, you could have gotten arrested. So they might have been state-sponsored artists. And their paintings would be paintings of workers. Workers working for society. It is propaganda art. I'm looking at a painting here from Horst Strempel. And the painting is called Discussions of the Plan from 1949. And it's, it's not photorealistic, but it's, it's a bunch of men gathered around some plans. And they're clearly designing a factory or something like that.
40:15 Blindboy Boatclub? There's women in the background, but this is a piece of propaganda art. The messaging is, you support the state. It's a good idea to support the state and it's very important that you work. Soviet messaging. So this is classed as propaganda art. Fair enough.
40:32 Blindboy Boatclub? The American abstract expressionism, that we're going back to, the blobs on the canvas, that's also propaganda. That American abstract expressionism that was coming out of New York, we now know, was hugely funded by the CIA. The artists themselves might have been communists, they might have been socialists, they might have not known that they were being funded by the CIA. But this is what, the CIA was funding the CCF, the something, something fucking fund, what's the name of the guns? The Congress for Cultural Freedom.
41:13 Blindboy Boatclub? And what the Congress for Cultural Freedom was, is, they organised, it was the cultural export, it was the exportation of American cultural expression during the Cold War. So they would organise art exhibitions, they would fund literary journals, conferences, concerts, lectures. Jazz music was a big thing, I think Louis Armstrong, when he was in France, was being funded by the CIA and he didn't even know that that was happening. But this American abstract expressionist work is also propaganda, it's the propaganda of capitalism. What I mean by that is, why are the CIA funding giant blobs on a canvas?
41:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Why is that so important? Because you can read these paintings as the limitlessness of capitalism. Really, so, most people, when they look at these abstract expressionist paintings, are gonna go, "That's a lot of shit." Look at this, look at me in a gallery, I can't say that out loud, in case I commit blasphemy. Ninety-nine percent of people are gonna walk in here, right, and look at paint strokes on a canvas, and they're gonna say, "What a lot of fucking bollocks, a two-year-old could do that, what a lot of shit."
42:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Thing is, the messaging is, isn't America so great that you can paint like a two-year-old and become a multimillionaire? That's the messaging. That is the freedom of the American dream. It's not degenerate. It's free-market capitalism. Have a go at whatever the fuck you want. Jackson Pollock, very important American abstract expressionist painter. Pollock used to just drink all day and then fuck paint, that canvases in bottles, he'd get washed up liquid bottles full of paint and fuck them at the canvas and put it up and call it art. And then this was, these exhibitions were being funded by the CIA.
43:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Before the nineteen, Jackson Pollock, by the way, was a communist. Before the CCF, who were receiving money from the CIA, before the culture, what, I can't remember the fucking name of the CCF. This is a phone call podcast, lads, I'm not checking notes in the middle of this. Before the CCF, the House of Un-American Activities, which was a government panel to identify communists in the United States, they used to think that Jackson Pollock was a communist and they used to think that his abstract paintings, right, of dots and scribbles and splatters were actually secret maps that were communicating with the Soviets about
44:07 Blindboy Boatclub? where the nuclear bombs were. And then they flipped and 10 years later, all of a sudden, they're funding him. So the argument that I'm making here in this museum, it's all propaganda. Every bit of it, all of these artworks are propaganda. The East Berlin Soviet art is very explicit, deliberate propaganda, very deliberate. The state sponsorship is out there in the open. Fucking paint about the workers, paint about the state. Whatever you paint, it must support the Soviet dream and that is explicit and if you don't do it, you get fucked off to the Gulag. So those rules are black and white.
44:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Same shit's happening there in the fucking US.
44:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Except it's less explicit. The artists do not know that they are actually painting and spreading the propaganda of the capitalist state.
45:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Now we're moving into a bit of post-modernism here. I'm looking at the work of Robert Rauschenberg.
45:22 Blindboy Boatclub? This fucking thing here.
45:25 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a barn door, lads. It's a barn door. With some tile of paper on it. And a lot of paint.
45:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, I'm not... There's no value judgment here. I'm not here going, "This is a piece of shit, whatever." This had cultural importance at the time, but... I'm just being honest with you. I'm in a gallery and I'm looking at an old barn door that has splatters of paint on it.
45:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And this piece of work is so important that it's the only piece of work that's surrounded by glass. Because it's so fragile and because it's so valuable, I would say...
46:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, that Rauschenberg. Twenty million, twenty-five million, not a bother.
46:11 Blindboy Boatclub? That's known as a ready-made.
46:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Ready-made was a type of art that...
46:19 Blindboy Boatclub? It's about asking questions about what art can be. Making a piece of art out of whatever shit you find around you. Then we walk up a little bit now and we're looking at some more Soviet East Berlin art.
46:34 Blindboy Boatclub? And...
46:38 Blindboy Boatclub? This painting is from 1982. It's a painting of cosmonauts. Cosmonauts were Russian astronauts.
46:49 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, if you dragged anyone into this gallery and said, "What do you think of that painting?", most people would go, "That's a very good painting, it's highly skilled." You know, it's a well-painted painting of a bunch of happy astronauts. This is state propaganda.
47:06 Blindboy Boatclub? It's, the messaging behind this is that it's, it's very important that we get to the moon, that there's power behind the, the actions of getting to the moon. It's boring. You know, it's boring. I'm not here saying that I don't give a fuck about a piece of art where it's just a really, really good drawing of someone.
47:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Here's a head of Karl Marx here. Again, propaganda.
47:30 Blindboy Boatclub? But my thing is, I'm not gonna walk in here and just call any piece of, I'm not gonna say, "That's propaganda and that's not." It's all propaganda.
47:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Standing beside two paintings.
47:46 Blindboy Boatclub? One of these, I believe, is a, is a East Berlin painting and the other one is a Francis Bacon. And the first thing that strikes me is they're both stylistically similar, but the, with all the East Europe, Eastern, East German paintings in this gallery, I could tell ya what is East and what is West. Not necessarily by the style, but by the quality of pigment. That's what's really interesting.
48:12 Blindboy Boatclub? The painters in East Berlin, they wouldn't have, wouldn't have had access to the variety and quality of paints that you'd have access to underneath capitalism. And I'd imagine that a lot of these East, East German paintings were painted with not even artist-level paints. Paints that would have been intended for, you know, painting a fucking door. Which is what I find so interesting about Robert Rauschenberg over there, who was mentioned earlier, because he is using, that was a thing with pop art, Warhol and the postmodernists. They were using house paint as a radical act, as a kind of a hipster radical act, whereas
48:54 Blindboy Boatclub? the East German and Soviet artists were using house paint because they had to. They had no choice. So now I'm in the part of the exhibition, which is by far the most interesting to me. It's the pre-World War II German Expressionism. This is...
49:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Early modernism. Artists' painting. From a perspective of genuine freedom. Genuine curiosity.
49:23 Blindboy Boatclub? They really wanna test the boundaries of, they're asking questions about what a painting can be.
49:30 Blindboy Boatclub? Karkner, Ernest Ludwig Karkner.
49:34 Blindboy Boatclub? He's got a painting here called Postdammerplatz. Like I mentioned earlier about expressionism. What makes this painting so beautiful? It's... There's two women figures, one of them's wearing a veil. It's in Postdammerplatz, which is here in Berlin. Some people are coming off a train. There's no perspective in this painting.
49:58 Blindboy Boatclub? There's no commitment to realism whatsoever. There's a lot of green, but not a lot of nature. This is a city. Faces are green, streets are green. The painter isn't trying to be realistic, he's trying to paint an emotion. And I, this, this is a painting about anxiety. The anxiety of where, where one is about to kick off. The greenness that's in people's faces is the greenness that people have before they're about to vomit. Some people are looking down at the ground, and this is pure expressionism. It is the expression of the feeling of personal and collective anxiety. And I think that's fucking brilliant, and you can walk in and you can say a two-year-old could do that, they could.
50:43 Blindboy Boatclub? It's not what it's about. That's not what it's about. This is about asking questions about a pa- about what a painting could be. And asking questions about an emotion, which is something that you feel. What does it look like?
50:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, I'm in the way of a painting that a, a guide is shouting at. The other thing too that I mentioned about modernism and expressionism in general.
51:10 Blindboy Boatclub? About modernism being a response to technology.
51:15 Blindboy Boatclub? The basic example that I give is new invention of a camera, what are we gonna do? What can we do about a camera can't?
51:23 Blindboy Boatclub? The thing with this Karkner painting, painting of a city? It's responding to
51:31 Blindboy Boatclub? the chaos of a city itself. This is shit that's hard for me and you to grasp. We've grown up around cities, we know what cities are.
51:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Big, big cities.
51:45 Blindboy Boatclub? They're an invention of the industrial revolution. You know, obviously you had cities before that, but the, the ones that we know, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands, a million people, that's an industrial revolution invention. And modernism is responding to the anxiety of that. The anxiety of how do you live in a city? How do you have mental health in a city? How do you have mindfulness and space in an environment? Where there's all that noise?
52:17 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, I'm trying to deal with it right now. Mister autism. I'm surrounded by people all around me. I'm in a room of maybe 600 people. Now, I'm calm and fine and my nervous system is dealing with it perfectly. Because I'm looking at art. I'm not here with these people. I'm there in that fucking painting in the land of thought. So I can chill out here without feeling nervous. Cause I'm in flow state, I'm passionate, I'm taking fucking art in. And I'm using imagination and curiosity to look at this painting, this Karkner painting. Which you might call the scribbles of a fucking idiot or it this it. I'm looking at degenerate art.
53:00 Blindboy Boatclub? This is a piece of art that the Nazis would have confiscated because this is degenerate. It's far from fucking degenerate.
53:08 Blindboy Boatclub? That's a painting about anxiety. Camera can't do that. Camera can't take a photo, take a, camera can take a photograph of a person who is experiencing anxiety. But it can't, camera can't take a photograph of the emotion. But a human can try to paint it.
53:27 Blindboy Boatclub? Moving on to another painting now, now this one is visually beautiful. It's a painting of a city at night time. The streets are wet, there's cars, there are lights. It's impressionistic, not expressionistic. Now, it's impressionistic because the impressionist came before the expressionists.
53:48 Blindboy Boatclub? Impressionism is, this artist is trying to get a very quick impression of what it is like to exist in a very modern, new city. With lights and movement and reflections and artificial light. So that's an impression of that. And it's contrasted with that Kerkner painting there from earlier, which is an expression of that. So this cunt letter, Ori, he's going, "I'm doing an impression of a city", whereas Kerkner's going, "I'm going for the expression, the feeling of the city".
54:21 Blindboy Boatclub? This Ori painting, it looks a bit more like a, it looks like a city, the other one doesn't.
54:30 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, moving on to a very interesting painting by a fellow called Otto Nagel. Now, this painting is from 1928. There's just two paintings, one of them's called "Homeless People", the other one is called "Boys From The Wedding". These are realistic paintings, more realistic than the other two I spoke about. They're paintings of poor people. They're, I would frame this in a type of realism, they're paintings of people with not a lot of money and the lives that they live and they have emaciated faces. These are working people. What's interesting is, if you look at, on the, on the wall, it says, "These are acquired",
55:15 Blindboy Boatclub? these paintings, even though they're from the 20s, were acquired by East Berlin. And that's interesting. It means that... These paintings, even though they're pre-East Berlin, the Soviets considered these to align with their message because they're paintings of the working-class people. So you have the expressionists, they're concerned with the feeling of alienation, an inner experience. The alienation there is, what is it that a city is doing to your mind? How is it in a city of, how is it when you're in a city of a million people, you feel more lonely than ever? Those are the questions that the expressionists were asking. And then you've got the impressionists were going, well, I'm fascinated by the sensory nature of this city.
56:00 Blindboy Boatclub? I like it when it's raining and a car goes past and I can see the trail of those lights. I want to paint an impression of that. Now we're moving on to a painting, beautiful fucking painting. This one is mad looking. Again, this would have been, is what you'd call degenerate art. Heinrich Amson, this painting is from 1925, it's called In the Mad House. And it is an incredibly grotesque, expressionist half, half-impressionist, half-expressionist painting of
56:32 Blindboy Boatclub? a lot of shell-shocked soldiers, maybe mentally ill people in an institution. Maybe some disabled people.
56:42 Blindboy Boatclub? It's a painting that looks like, everyone looks like Shrek. It's that use of green, the use of green we saw in the Kerkner painting. A lot of lads that look like Shrek with green faces, they look like ogres. And I can't, don't know whether this is expressionistic or impressionistic or even, there's realism too. It's a very well curated fucking exhibition.
57:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Because this painting here has elements from the previous three that I spoke about. This has the painting style of impressionism. The attempt at expressing emotions or feelings. Like, here's the thing, these don't look like human beings, they look like ogres. So what's being painted here is ableism. What's being painted is the feeling of disgust and distance that human beings have about people who are sent to a madhouse. About World War One soldiers who are shell shocked. Or people with Down's Syndrome, or people who were autistic. So what's being painted here by making them ugly is society's feeling of disgust toward these people.
57:51 Blindboy Boatclub? And then the third thing, there's realism here, there's social realism.
57:57 Blindboy Boatclub? The artist is painting subjects that society would like to forget about. People who are sent to madhouses. Look at a wonderful painting here now, very, very colourful. A lot of people gathered around this painting because it's visually stunning and... What's the word to use? This would appeal to a mass audience because of the beautiful bright colours that are being used. It reminds me of the paintings of Paul Gauguin, who was a cunt. Paul Gauguin. Who, a friend of Van Gogh, just a fucking prick. He went off to Tahiti and I think he personally introduced syphilis to the indigenous population. And abused a bunch of kids as well, fucking prick.
58:37 Blindboy Boatclub? But this George Tappert painting is certainly in the style of Paul Gauguin and it's a painting of... A sex worker.
58:49 Blindboy Boatclub? It represents Berlin. The interwar. Berlin before World War One, when it was a metropolitan city. A city full of entertainment and theatre and sex work and burlesque. And vice, and a very open city. I mean, it's where you get that shit today. Every hipster in the world moves to fucking Berlin, that's not now.
59:16 Blindboy Boatclub? But the last painting on a look at in this exhibition is called Evening Over Potsdam. Painted by Latte Lassertine. Gotta point out, this is the only painting that I'm speaking about here that was painted by a woman because, as with all fucking art exhibitions, women aren't represented.
59:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Not represented today and not represented at the time for, for a woman to paint. Women were just excluded from this shit, okay? And there were women artists, but they weren't getting shown in galleries. So ingrained in this whole thing is that misogyny. You know what I mean? So we do have a painting here by a woman called Lottie Lazarstein. This is a highly realistic painting. So if you were here in this exhibition and painting isn't your thing, you're gonna stare at this for a long time and marvel at how brilliant it is. It's just a very well brilliantly executed painting, but what makes it fantastic is that this is called new objectivity. That's the, that's the movement that this is. This painting is like the writing of Ernest Hemingway.
1:00:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Yes, it's, this is a realistic painting. It's a bunch of young people. It evokes fucking the famous. Oh God, why can't I remember? I can think, I can speak about all these fucking paintings, but I can't remember one of the most famous paintings in the world. You know, the Last Supper? You know, the fucking Last Supper? Is that a Da Vinci painting?
1:00:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Is that Leonardo Da Vinci? But you know what I'm talking about, the fucking Last Supper, one of the most famous paintings in the world. Christ giving out bread to all his pals. This painting evokes that. It's a bunch of young people on a fucking balcony. The German city behind them. On the table is beer, pears, bread, a knife. There's a German shepherd there on the ground. Also, everyone looks unbelievably sad and worried. They're burdened by something grave. The thing they're burdened by is the economic collapse of Germany. The economic collapse of Germany and the rise of fascism. Something bad is about to happen and it's not fucking good. And that's what this painting is. And the beauty of it is, is it's very skillfully painted.
1:01:32 Blindboy Boatclub? It's very, it's this, it's pre-soviet, but it's very soviet. It looks like soviet realism. It has the depth of emotion that expressionism has. This is a painting about worry. This is a painting about worry. There's one girl right in the middle and she is where Jesus is.
1:01:56 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, this is deliberately evoking The Last Supper. For real, that this, I can tell by the way that the tablecloth is painted, this is evoking The Last Supper. So you have a woman in the middle, wearing a yellow tank top, with a seriously worried-looking face, and she's looking off into the distance, and something is fucking looming. And then there's a lad beside her, who's looking off into the distance. Everyone's looking in different directions. There's one lady in black, on the far left, and she's looking off into the city.
1:02:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Then, on the far right there, you've got someone pouring a bit of milk, she's the only person who's doing something, because everyone else is worried. Even the poor old German shepherd, there, on the ground. And this is a beautiful painting. I don't think this painting was as important as it was at the time. Um, 1930, so... The Nazis were a thing, but they would have been, by 1930, they would have been quite fringe, wasn't looking serious yet. The Great Depression is about to happen economically. I think this is a painting that has retrospective value. Everything that we now know has happened since, especially the outbreak of World War II, fascism and Nazism.
1:03:09 Blindboy Boatclub? You can now look back at this painting and go, "Fucking hell, this person had their finger on the pulse." Apologies for all those beeps, lads, what's happening is it's a Sunday. So there's people coming to galleries who don't usually come to galleries. And if you get too close to a painting, that, that noise goes off. So I'm now exiting the gallery.
1:03:30 Blindboy Boatclub? I hope I'm able to use that recording and it wasn't just annoyingly loud.
1:03:39 Blindboy Boatclub? There was a lot of background noise there.
1:03:43 Blindboy Boatclub? There was even a fucking tour.
1:03:47 Blindboy Boatclub? The thing is with me and being in a space where I'm
1:03:53 Blindboy Boatclub? completely locked in.
1:03:56 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not autistic when I'm in an art gallery.
1:04:00 Blindboy Boatclub? When I'm in an art gallery, I could be surrounded by, I was surrounded by a lot of people, don't give a fuck. Don't give a fuck because I'm like a laser beam. And the paintings and thinking. And I'm in my own little world.
1:04:17 Blindboy Boatclub? And I may not have noticed how much noise was there in the background, so hopefully the recording is usable. That exhibition was ideal, well, was it ideological?
1:04:30 Blindboy Boatclub? It's an exhibition.
1:04:32 Blindboy Boatclub? It's about Germany asking questions about what Germany is.
1:04:38 Blindboy Boatclub? It's fucking complicated history, whether it be the fucking World War One, whether it be the Nazis, whether it be the segregation of East and West.
1:04:50 Blindboy Boatclub? There's a lot of warnings throughout the exhibition about fascism.
1:04:55 Blindboy Boatclub? What it falls on its fucking face though is,
1:04:59 Blindboy Boatclub? ah, you've got all this shit about the horrors of what, what once was. The horrors of how did this happen? How did we become fascist? How did Hitler come to power?
1:05:12 Blindboy Boatclub? It means fuck all. It means fuck all right now. When there's an ongoing genocide, when you have the German police arresting people for protesting, when you have them framing, protesting against what the UN calls a genocide, framing that as antisemitic. The German head is stuck up its arse. And that's what that exhibition is about. I couldn't feel shit inside there. How am I supposed to rub my chin and look at the dangers of looming fascism? When it's happening right now, right now, when you have people like the Ulm Five, who are facing fucking jail
1:05:53 Blindboy Boatclub? for smashing up a couple of drones or a printer or something, don't even think they got to the drones. Just vandalism. There's a car there in front of me. If I decide to go kicking that, am I a terrorist, am I? So with this podcast, I don't know if I'll even put it out, I'm not sure.
1:06:10 Blindboy Boatclub? But I'd rather make use of my time while I'm here.
1:06:14 Blindboy Boatclub? I wanna keep it fucking experimental, I wanna keep changing things.
1:06:20 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not gonna not record the podcast in the gallery because I'm afraid it won't work.
1:06:26 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm gonna record it and see if it does work. I'm also testing a new mic. I got a new, uh, a new wireless microphone and I quite like the sound of it, even though it's not stereo. But it does a nice little job, it captures the environment.
1:06:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Not a stereo environment, but it does capture the environment. Sometimes with my other podcasts that I've done outside, where I've got a stereo signal left and right, that throws people off a bit. Very realistic sounds of cars approaching and shit in stereo can create a sense of depth.
1:07:06 Blindboy Boatclub? You don't want that because I've got people going for walks, listening in cities and then imagining that a car is about to hit them. You're not gonna get that when it's a mono. I'd love to make art documentaries. I really would enjoy that. But they don't give art documentaries to people who wear plastic bags on their heads. I've tried.
1:07:29 Blindboy Boatclub? And the reason they don't is the way that fine art needs to exist alongside solemnity.
1:07:37 Blindboy Boatclub? Very interesting bell.
1:07:40 Blindboy Boatclub? Sounds like a large metal bird.
1:07:47 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm just thinking of that Hitler eagle. Can't go roaring that cunt's name around the streets of Berlin, can you?
1:07:55 Blindboy Boatclub? I'd love to make an art documentary, but they don't give art documentaries to people who wear plastic bags on their heads. Because the thing is with fine art, which I adore, oh, is that a building full of fucking bullet holes, is it?
1:08:08 Blindboy Boatclub? Is that a building full of fucking bullet holes, look at that?
1:08:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Fuck me. I'll have to find out about that later now. I, I, I don't know where the fuck I am, I'm at the side of the Deny Museum where I just was.
1:08:22 Blindboy Boatclub? They've stopped mowing the borders between streets, they're letting everything go wild, which is great.
1:08:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, that's a building full of fucking buttered halls, someone had a grand old hop at that building. World War II shit.
1:08:37 Blindboy Boatclub? Looks like a teenager's face. Fuck me.
1:08:42 Blindboy Boatclub? It's at the side of another fucking art museum here, and this art museum is full of order paintings, Renaissance, shit like that. I didn't wanna do that this time. Have a crack at the modern art. It's more challenging, it's more challenging. Yeah, they don't give art documentaries to people who are plastic bags in their heads because fine art is very serious and very solemn.
1:09:07 Blindboy Boatclub? Which is part of the bollocks and part of the bullshit of it. I like democratizing things. I wanna walk into a gallery of expressionist paintings and speak about them in a way that anybody can understand and let you know, these have value, these are important. But, you don't need to have a fucking PhD to understand what's going on. Art is obfuscated, fine art is often obfuscated
1:09:35 Blindboy Boatclub? in unnecessarily verbose language. And it's a way to keep people out. And if you've got a painting on the wall and someone just fucked a tin of paint at a canvas,
1:09:49 Blindboy Boatclub? if you can use big enough words, you can make it feel like magic.
1:09:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And a lot of that shit exists just to support capitalism. Because, quite a lot of fine art, like I said, you're staring at investments. You're staring at the investment property of a multimillionaire. It's a way to...
1:10:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Not launder money is the wrong word, but there's a return on investment when it comes to fine art, if someone can afford that type of shit. Listen here, you droopy hole of hands. I think that's all we have time for this week. I've been promising you an art gallery tour. For eight years, I'd say, and I haven't done it. I don't know if you like this or not, but I'm going up my gut. I'd rather do something new, that challenges me, that's a bit rough around the edges, than not do it because I was scared it wouldn't succeed. Sometimes you've just got to wear the hiking boots with the swimming shorts, lads. I'll catch you next week with a hot take.
1:10:51 Blindboy Boatclub? In the meantime, rub a dog genuflect to a swan, wink at a worm, say a prayer for a badger. Dog bless.
1:11:03 Blindboy Boatclub? That woman thinks I'm blowing cases at her.
1:11:06 Blindboy Boatclub? No, I wasn't.
1:11:18 Speaker 05 Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
1:11:24 Speaker 06 Love the crown molding.
1:11:25 Speaker 05 Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
1:11:29 Speaker 06 Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet?
1:11:33 Speaker 05 No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
1:11:36 Speaker 06 No FiOS? Yeah, no thank you.
1:11:40 Speaker 05 Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye.
1:11:43 Speaker 07 Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
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