Art Insiders New York Podcast hosted by Anders Holst – Détails, épisodes et analyse

JB Miller is the visionary leader and CEO of Empire Entertainment and Emmy Awards-winning executive producer. He is a legend in the events industry for creating completely immersive experiences on a global scale.   

In this interview, JB talks about what signifies the “experiential events industry”, seen as a merger between the events and meeting industry and the entertainment industry, that opens wide opportunities for a producer to create cutting edge events for clients to fulfill thoughtful, creative, and strategic goals

What are the key resources necessary to create events that will attract people’s attention, change the mindset and behavior of a key audiences, help launch new products, create new markets, and move the needle on an objective, in a major way?    

He tells us about various projects where the producer is likened to an alchemist at work. The producer, or perhaps rather the “experiencer”, is a person who is “genre agnostic”, and can move swiftly between various types of gatherings, clients, and locales. One project, in particular, illustrates how producing a multimillion-dollar project in front of a global audience, can become a scary high-wire act.  

JB Miller was recognized as “Producer of the Year” by BizBash’s Reader’s Choice Awards and has been regularly identified as one of the “Top People in the U.S. Event Industry”. In 2023 Miller was awarded the “Collaborate America” award for outstanding achievement as a collaborator, convener, and connector.

Photo credit: Caroline Dorn.

Helen Toomer is the director of Photofairs New York, which held its inaugural edition at the Javits Center this past September. The mission is to “present the state-of-the-art view of visual culture, … to explore the diverse and rapidly evolving landscape of image-making, from intersections with digital art and film, to the medium’s next frontiers, … including virtual reality, augmented reality, and AI-driven art.”

In this interview, Helen talks about her excitement for a photo fair that exists in the space between the traditional archetype of photo exhibitions and the typical art fair; a photo fair that celebrates the incredibly vast and diverse medium of photography. On this episode of the podcast, we talk about photography as an art form, and how visual communication is very much at the core of how we interact with each other today.

Helen dives into the effects of the democratization of photography with the dawn of the smart phone and even gives a valuable recommendation to those of us who are passionate about photography.

Helen has previously directed the IFPDA Fine Art Print Fair, PULSE Contemporary Art Fairs, and Collective Design Fair. She co-founded Stoneleaf Retreat, an artist residency and creative space, Art Mamas Alliance, to support dialogue on motherhood among creative professionals, as well as Upstate Art Weekend, an annual celebration of the cultural vibrancy of Upstate New York.

Helen Toomer, 2023 © Casey Kelbaugh, courtesy of PHOTOFAIRS New York

Award-winning photographer Mark Seliger was Rolling Stone’s Chief Photographer from 1992-2002, where he shot over 175 covers. From 2002-2012, he was on contract with Condé Nast where he shot regularly for Vanity Fair and GQ.

We talk about Mark’s latest book “The City That Finally Sleeps", where during the pandemic, “he took to the desolate streets, camera in hand and often in the quietest hours … these hauntingly beautiful portraits of New York’s streets and cityscapes grip the viewer in varying balances of beauty, sorrow, wonder and quiet concern.” All the proceeds from the sale of the book goes to New York Cares in their covid-19 relief efforts.

We also talk about Mark’s creative process as a photographer, as well as a singer and songwriter. The song "1,000 Kisses" in the interview is performed by Mark Seliger’s country and western band Rusty Truck.

Mark Seliger is the recipient of such esteemed awards as the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award. The Lucie Award, The Clio Grand Prix, Cannes Lions Grand Prix to mention a few.

Bella Neyman and JB Jones are the co-founders of NYC Jewelry Week, an annual event dedicated to promoting and celebrating the world of jewelry, from the window shopper to the avid collector.

NYC Jewelry Week is about creating an intimate emotional connection with jewelry; giving consumers a way to get to know artists, learn the history and explore all the stories that bring unique pieces to life. 

This year’s event is free and open to the public and will take place November 15-21, under the theme “The Power of Jewelry.” The power to seduce, inspire, and communicate. Not only as an object and an adornment for the body, but how objects make you feel, like an adornment for the soul.

On this episode, Bella and JB talk about this year’s program with around 80 events over multiple platforms. Among them, exciting collaborations with The Museum of Arts and Design, Bergdorf Goodman, The Art Salon + Design, 1stDibs, and 92Y, just to mention a few.

They also give us some breaking news!  The launch of a ground- breaking new Virtual Booth concept that will connect jewelry artists and consumers around the world and a new app that maps New York's jewelry retailers, hand-selected by the two founders.

Kyle Bergman is the founder and director of ADFF, the Architecture & Design Film Festival, which is the world’s largest film festival devoted to the creative spirit of architecture and design. 

With a curated selection of films, events, and panel discussions, in cities like New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Washington DC, Vancouver and on-line, ADFF creates an opportunity to entertain, engage and educate everyone who are excited about architecture and design

In this interview Kyle talks about architecture as storytelling, the striking resemblance between the art of making film and the art of making architecture. We talk about how important it is to use the film medium to expand the conversation about the role of architecture and design today.

We discuss “knowledge of design”, a separated kind of knowledge, that tells us when something is well designed or not, and this fall’s major event when ADFF and MoMA will showcase the documentary about the genius of Bruce Mau. 

Kyle also gives us some great recommendations of films we must watch and reflects on the fact that the films, that make it to the festival, often have an emotional and engaging human dimension in them 

Richard Florida is a professor at the University of Toronto and distinguished visiting fellow at New York University. He is a co-founder and editor at large of CityLab and a senior editor at The Atlantic. 

He is best known for the concept of the creative class and its implications for urban regeneration  expressed in his best-selling book “The Rise of the Creative Class”.

In this very entertaining interview Richard speaks candidly about his personal background, “a kid from Newark”, and how his childhood experiences and passion for rock’n’roll music have influenced his professional career.

We talk about the pandemic and its effects on the future of urban working life, the genius of Jane Jacobs, the Bilboa effect and the importance of intuition in his academic work. We also talk about how the Creative Class’ back to the city movement, finds a home for itself amidst a hotbed of controversial sociocultural topics: gentrification, displacement and inequity, and Richard’s vision for how to choreograph a more powerful dialogue to solve these issues.

Photo by Roshan Nebhrajani 

Paula Scher is one of the most acclaimed graphic designers in the world. She has been a principal at the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991, where she has designed identity systems, environmental graphics, packaging, and publications for a wide range of clients.

Today, we find Paula in her studio among her paintings and a collector’s item Porsche that she has hand-painted with an artistic rendering of a map of the Unites States for a special exhibition. In this interview, Paula explains her metaphor for coming up with new ideas as a “slot machine”, talks about typography as it relates to spirit and meaning, and tells inspiring stories from her design collaborations with the Public Theater, Shake Shack, MoMA, Citibank, The High Line, and Rockaway Beach.   

Paula has been the recipient of hundreds of industry honors including the National Design Award and the AIGA medal. She is an established artist exhibiting worldwide, and her designs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other institutions. A documentary on Paula and her work can be seen in the Netflix series “Abstract: The Art of Design.”

Emma Enderby is the Chief Curator at The Shed at Hudson Yards, a unique art institution with a bold vision of and for the century we are in.

In this fascinating interview, Emma talks passionately about the guiding principles that helped building the program and how “artists can tell us realities of our time; stories of the past can predict the future, so important in helping us understand the moment that we are in.” We discuss what makes good art; her personal taste in art as well as books and artists that inspire her, among them Agnes Denes and Hilma af Klint.

Commissions are at the heart of The Shed’s mission -- one prime example being their annual “Open Call,” which opens on June 3 this year. “Open Call” is a series of exhibitions and events aimed at providing invaluable support, visibility, and recognition to New York's early-career artists, working across all forms and media. This year “Open Call” received 1,500 proposals and features 27 artists. 

The Shed's remarkably innovative design is at the core of its support of artists’ visions and the work they create – from hip hop to classical music, visual art to literature, film to theatre or dance, and beyond, all under one roof. Or in this case, no roof is an option!  

Photo: Scott Rudd Events © 2018

George Smart is the founder and executive director of USModernist, which is an award-winning nonprofit educational archive for the documentation, preservation, and promotion of residential Modernist architecture.

In this free floating, fun, and inspiring conversation, we cover the philosophy and art form of Modernism, how a house “can live back at you”, the geniuses of Bjarke Ingels and Santiago Calatrava, the history of the butterfly chair and the intricate relationship between Modernism and jazz.

With 8,000 houses and nearly 3.1 million pages of 20th-century architecture magazines, USModernist is America's largest open digital archive of Modernist houses and their architects. The organization has won 16 local, state, and national awards, including the 2016 AIA Institute Honors for Collaborative and Professional Achievement, the AIA's highest award for non-architects. 

Photo by Elizabeth Galecke

Craig Dykers is one of the founding partners of the internationally renowned architectural firm Snøhetta. In this fascinating interview he tells the emotional and inspiring story of the creation of the National September 11 Museum Pavilion in New York.

He also tells the story of Snøhetta’s collaborative and creative philosophy, describing the architectural firm as “a place that nobody is from, but anyone can go to."  This, along with Craig Dyker’s renaissance personality -- architect, business leader, artist, poet, nature lover and linguist -- gives a unique and rare insight into Snøhetta’s international success.

In 2020, Snøhetta was recognized as #2 on Fast Company’s prestigious annual list of the World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies in the architecture category “for pioneering carbon-negative buildings that generate more energy than they consume.”