Today’s guest is Kevin Esherick, a Brooklyn-based conceptual artist and writer, and the editor and creator of this publication (full disclosure: this is me, I’m writing this).
Stat sheet
💼 Occupation: Artist and writer
🏠 Neighborhood: Williamsburg
🌎 Origin: Silver Spring, MD / DMV
💪 Notable work: Material || Artist Bingo || TMI
So how’d you end up here, doing this interview?
I came up with the idea for TMI after being struck by how often throughout history we see small pockets of creatives making outsized dents in the world. Jack Kerouac roomed with Alan Ginsburg, who together ushered in the Beat Generation, who hung out with Ken Kesey and Warhol and the Factory crew, who heralded the rise of Basquiat, who lived with Keith Haring, etc. Vienna 1900, with Freud and Klimt and Schiele and Rilke and so many more. Even our most singular, idiosyncratic artists have arisen out of a collective social milieu, an interpersonal creative agar. I wanted to know how these social scenes come together, how they rise to prominence, and where they exist now. TMI is a self-conscious performative exploration of this phenomenon, seeking to find, and through this finding construct, the artistic wellsprings of our current cultural climate.
Cut to the chase. What actually is TMI and how does it work?
TMI is an interview newsletter exploring the social architecture of New York’s creative subcultures. I have on guests from my broader social scene and ask them questions about themselves, their social worlds, and what they’re into right now. Each guest gets their own custom-made TMI trading card, which when scanned in person gives you an NFT of their card. The resulting network of token holders forms a digital representation of the real-life interconnected mycelial structure underpinning New York’s subcultures of the present moment. It turns trading social currency into an artform. I chose to do this first one with myself to explain what TMI is, why it exists, and how it works, and to test out the interview format and questions. It may also be conceived of as the following:
Interview Magazine meets Pokémon Go meets crypto/NFTs
Parasocial social club
Tokenization of the New York subcultural social graph
Mimetic desire machine
Autoethnographic network art installation
Autographed (cryptographically signed) rookie trading cards from contemporary culture’s rising creative class
But anywho, on to our regularly scheduled interview programming!
Let’s check in with where your head is at right now. What tabs do you currently have open on your phone?
Nature sounds. I sleep with this on every night so this tab is always open. Part of my anti-insomnia stack.
A piece arguing that political decentralization was critical to prosperity in the Middle Ages or Renaissance. Not exactly sure which since I haven’t read it yet.
A friend’s writing that I’ve been meaning to check out.
Google search for “goth etymology.” Curious how the Visigoths and Ostrogoths ended up with that suffix and how they came to inform an architectural style (i.e. gothic) and the naming of goth subculture.
List of presidents wikipedia page. My girlfriend asked me a presidential trivia question recently (who was the 11th president? do you know?) and I decided it would be cool to memorize the presidents. I was never much of a history buff as a kid so I’m doing some compensatory learning in my adult life.
AI and the automation of work, an article a friend sent me, written by a writer he likes for having neither fully techno-optimist nor outright doomer takes on AI.
Google search for “you’re electric blue lyrics”. If you know the song, lmk. Got this line stuck in my head and can’t remember who it is. Think it’s a female fairly well known pop singer. That’s the penumbra of its image that looms in my head.
Dutch gable roofs. Listening to the Alexander Hamilton biography as part of the aforementioned quest for deepening historical knowledge. These were referenced and I was unfamiliar and I like architecture so I wanted to be able to spot them. Apparently there are a lot of them in Albany since it was a Dutch settlement?
Ping pong place I got from a QR code. Just opened up and I walked past it last night picking up food in Williamsburg. I like ping pong. It’s probably been a year since I’ve played, and was a year before that. I’m okay.
How about the Platonic form of Kevin—what people, places, or activities make you feel most yourself?
Playing soccer. Caffeine + nicotine. That’s not really an activity (nor person nor place) and is kinda pathetic sounding, but we’ll call it “Consuming caffeine + nicotine” to make it an activity, and it’s not habitual so it’s slightly less pathetic than it sounds. Writing. Pondering. Bodies of water. Reverent, infrequent use of psilocybin. Being with my childhood friends.
What do you do in your spare time?
I have really no delineation between work and life, and I like it that way, so “spare time” is a weird concept for me. I spend basically every moment possible working on art, writing, and research. Then I have mandatory (by my own mandate) health-focused time, mostly centered around meditating and working out (soccer, lifting, climbing, running). Pretty much any of my time that doesn’t fall into one of these buckets is spent with my girlfriend and/or friends. Chatting, exploring, watching sports, the occasional chess match. I also listen to tons of music and audiobooks while doing largely mindless tasks (walking, cooking/eating, exercising, certain kinds of design work).
What makes you forget about checking your phone?
Great conversation. Sports. Playing them obviously, but watching too if they’re compelling enough. I’ve found that this takes people by surprise given the whole artist/writer person. Writing code actually can keep me from looking at my phone for hours. Music and audiobooks, with the unfortunate conundrum that their use is usually mediated by a phone.
Wind it back. What’s your favorite memory from the past year?
A weekend marked by staying up whole nights becoming more than friends with my now girlfriend.
Now fast forward. What are you most looking forward to in the next month?
Notre Dame football. We are sooooooOoOoOoOo back. Also this party at LoVid’s out on Long Island.
Time to get weird. What’s the weirdest thing you believe?
I believe Bigfoot is real. Not a singular entity—whole species of ‘em, roaming the forests of North America. But also this gets at something that may be an oddity of mine, in that I believe probabilistically. I think we all do implicitly to some extent, but it manifests pretty explicitly in the way I think about things. I’d assign something like a 50% chance to the existence of Bigfoot, which is so much higher than most people’s belief that it’s a worthy response to this question.
Back to normie questions. What’s your dream job?
Writing and making art—basically what I’m doing now. Or professional soccer player. Maybe neuroscientist or philosopher. Or guru/cult leader. I want to be many things.
What work of yours are you most proud of?
Material and Artist Bingo. There’s layers and layers of richness embedded in both of those projects that will take a long time to be fully appreciated. Same goes for TMI, but given its contingency on third-party complicity we’ll have to see how it plays out.
What are two goals, one personal and one professional, that you have for the next year? For your lifetime?
Again the personal/professional delineation thing confounds the matter a bit, but I’ll try:
Personal goal for the next year: be able to consistently enter jhana in my meditation practice (basically, states of unwavering concentration that enable access to deep and abiding pleasure and, ultimately, peace).
Professional goal for the next year: publish a substantial work of writing. Like a real physical thing.
Personal goal for my lifetime: ego death
Professional goal for my lifetime: create great works that make people cry, both from melancholy and joy
Last few questions, focused on mapping your socio-creative world. Who are your creative inspirations?
Historically I revere the output to impact ratio of Duchamp. The fervor of Van Gogh. The brilliance and spirit of DFW. The inspiration and poetry of Rilke and Kerouac. I aspire to Kerouac’s manic jazz soul.
How about among people you know or are friends with?
Jonathan Chomko is doing some of my favorite work in art right now, crypto or otherwise. SHL0MS (I am SHL0MS). Christian Esherick (my younger brother). Matthew Gasda, the playwright behind Dimes Square. TMI is going to become largely an index of these figures, so stay tuned.
What creative scenes or movements are you most excited about right now?
Cryptoart. Like the conceptually rich and boundary-pushing stuff. Of course I’m biased but I think the most important and interesting work in contemporary art is being done here. What’s next in art always initially exists outside of the acceptance of traditional institutions. Also the downtown scene in New York, whatever that means exactly. I’m trying to determine if there’s meaningful creative output being produced here. Forever Mag is doing some cool stuff and I think could be characterized as a part of that scene.
Who’s the next big thing?
Anyone who gets featured on TMI.
If you could have a sleepover with anyone in the world, who would it be?
Nathan Fielder.
Send the last pic in your camera roll, no context.
Wow! Okay, who should we have on next?
Well, I already know who it’s gonna be, so I’ll just go ahead and say it: the internet’s provocateur laureate, Quasimatt, is coming up next.
Kevin’s List
Five recs for right now
🎧 Zach Bryan. My favorite writer in music right now. Kerouac’s melodious heir. I DMed him a Rilke passage once and he screenshotted and tweeted it but didn’t respond or tag me or anything. Didn’t even like the message. I was lucky to have stumbled upon it in my feed. I remain a bit salty. But damn he’s good. And I take consolation in the claim that I introduced him to Rilke. Maybe I’ll have him on here some day.
📺 How to with John Wilson. I’m working on an essay about New York and it almost feels superfluous. John Wilson has created the video essay for New York through this show, in arguably a more apt medium for our time.
✍️ Authority and American Usage by David Foster Wallace. Possibly my favorite writer of all time. His essays are such a sweet blend of minute detail of human lives and sweeping philosophical, political, or sociological musing. His tone strikes a balance of being informed and authoritative without being arrogant or over-assertive. His language is intricate and chock full of SAT words, but somehow manages to impart on the reader the feeling that he is doing this out of a sense of play rather than to demonstrate his own intellect. He has his excesses, but their fruits are well worth it. This essay is among his best.
⚽️ Messi mania. As a lifelong soccer player and fan, I’m enjoying the enthusiasm for the game growing in the States from Messi’s arrival. He’s been on a tear for Inter Miami and the narrative drama of it all has been unreal. Miami were the worst team in the MLS when he joined, and they haven’t lost a game since. Goals as time expires, tournaments won, new stars born. His hockey assist to his own goal (not an own-goal) here is one of the best passes I’ve seen in my entire life.
🥙 Oasis Falafel & Shawarma on Bedford. Best quick, cheap bite I’ve come across in Brooklyn so far. $7.50 (if you pay cash) for a sizable shawarma sandwich.
Want more? Go follow me on Twitter. To collect my TMI trading card, find me IRL and ask to scan.