THE Q&A: NIC RAD, ARTIST

Nic Rad PeopleMatter At the intersection of art and social media is what, exactly? Not much, or at least nothing terribly interesting. That is, until Nic Rad, a Brooklyn-based artist and rabble-rouser, launched his PeopleMatter project. This involves him painting a series of 99 portraits of journalists, media personalities, bloggers and "infolebrities", and then giving them away for free through his gallery show at Chelsea's Rare Gallery (which recently closed).

Rad's subjects include Keith Olberman, Umberto Eco and Tavi Gevinson, a 'tween fashion blogger, with plenty of wild cards in the mix. Everyone, actually, is a wild card of sorts. "My work is about the media," Rad has written. "It's good subject matter, never boring, always a fight. I'm more of an addict than expert. But an addict is a kind of expert, no?"

Well, that's contentious. But in Rad's case, the answer is yes. Combining visual smarts with self-promotional wizardry is the way of the future where art is concerned. Rad was kind enough to answer More Intelligent Life's questions about painting, social media and social media as a subject of painting

More Intelligent Life: Hi Nic. Tell us about the seeds of your idea.

Nic Rad: After my first show of paintings about war and baseball I got pretty depressed and took a job at a PR firm. Everything we worked on was going to be the "greatest thing ever". During my time there I thought a lot about the difference between timely and timeless. I quit the job to have the energy for this PeopleMatter project—but the two worlds are related in a lot of ways.

The difference between the PR and art industries is an inverse relationship to individuality. One crushes it, the other worships. As a public-relations man I was missing a soul. As a painter I was missing subject matter. Not having a soul is a generally understandable in polite society. But being an artist without subject matter is really unforgivable. The public-relations job helped me find a subject: social media and blog culture.

I started to look at the computer screen as my studio window. I was looking into the abyss for something solid. The Media became my Mount Saint Victoire. I wanted to walk around it and consider it from many points of view and deal with the changing conditions. I had the idea to make a "portrait of an industry landscape"—the 99 heads are features of that landscape.

It seemed right to paint an entire industry because I think we share a crisis of individuality and relevance. I'm vain enough to think that my crisis is shared by a whole industry. But really, I think it is!

MIL: You talk about being involved in 'zine culture and the world of alt comics as a youth. Your current work illuminates how the internet, at its best, can mimic and expand on these subcultures in the way that it allows renegade art-making of all kinds to flourish. How do you see this connection? Can the internet encourage similar creative impulses as 'zines and alt comics once did (and still do)?

NR: With 'zines I only have my little cache of things I stumbled onto and loved. I got to live 1968's Haight-Ashbury through R.Crumb, and Zap comics, but in Cleveland in 1998. Also, finding Raymond Pettibon was life-altering. And Anders Nilsen. I like the Paper Rad work a lot. Amy Sillman is currently making some great 'zine-ish stuff.

But to be honest, my 'zine love is pretty ahistorical—I take them how I find them, without a lot of context. What I like is the experience of novelty of some pictures and stories from an alien place. I get to visit undisturbed. And I get to touch them, which is a big part of the value.

The crux of internet creativity and mash-up culture is that you can't hold it or have the symbolism of possession—which I am in favour of. When you acquire a book or a painting you are not the owner of the ideas, but you become a shareholder in the work's communal value. This relationship adds more substance to the content. I don't see that with links; and with remixes there is a difference between altering and contributing. Performance is a really wonderful alternative to this type of ownership problem—but the performative value of blogs is pretty low. And I fell in love with bloggers.

With digital writing and visualizations there is tremendous creativity divorced from physical form. I like physical form. It's pleasurable. Computers care less about pleasure. I am currently pro-humanity and anti-numbers. It's my most unsustainable position!

The internet encourages a lot of sharing, but some of these needles look pretty dirty to me. Facebook has basically become a designer drug to get private citizens to loosen up around marketers. Twitter is a bit of nicotine. Tumblr, if used correctly, is pretty close to a hallucinogenic. Foursquare is basically beer-pong.

It's hard to say what implications any of that has. I plan to stay ambivalent. Christopher Hedges says something like "We are a society hallucinating on the celluloid shadows of celebrity culture." But I don't know C. Hedges. You'd have to stare at a lot of "bad culture" to have such a fully formed opinion. And I don't think you can take an honest look without opening yourself up to fall in love with the humanity of your own vices. Just my take.

MIL: Who influences you, art-wise?

NR: Art-wise I've got a lot of fathers and mothers and I'm not really on speaking terms with all of them. I think about Gerhard Richter a lot. Aesthetically I like Alice Neel, Otto Dix and Barnaby Furnas. James Jean makes really pretty and haunting pictures. Chris Ware is a towering genius.

My grad school, the New York Academy of Art, was started in part by Andy Warhol and Tom Wolfe, but with the goal of training students classically. Eric Fischl, Vincent Desidaro, Richard Prince and Jenny Saville hung around and taught there. So there's that.

MIL: And who influences you thought-wise?

NR: Lewis Hyde messed me up for awhile. I "re-branded" 99 copies of his book "The Gift," and gave it away before this project. Most recently I have been thinking a lot about Lawrence Lessig and intellectual property. His Change Congress project also interests me because I feel an enormous ball of ambivalence welling up in my gut on the interpersonal economics of power. It's well beyond my understanding. Almost mystical! It feels like subject matter. Or an aneurysm.

There are also some great people out here in Brooklyn that sit in the shadows and talk a lot of nonsense and also say a lot of really beautiful things. Some of them have bangs and some have moustaches but it's good stuff I'm telling you. Oh and I like n+1 and Borges.

Lastly, I pretty sincerely believe that James Franco is the most important artist of my generation. That's a long conversation.

MIL: Is your laptop covered in paint?

NR: I really commend those designers at Mac for building with endlessly cleanable materials. It's as though they don't want you messing with their overall brand aesthetic.

~ MOLLY YOUNG