Gabriela Cowperthwaite: The general public needs to feel like it has skin in the game to really care.
Julie Mehretu: They’re all over. It’s taken a really long time.
Cowperthwaite: They have to learn to shake down their food.
Mehretu: Yeah. Take a photo that day.
Cowperthwaite: Everything’s vetted.
•••
Mehretu: I’ll never forget where I was when I got the phone call.
Cowperthwaite: You can’t open yourself up that way.
Mehretu: Now you do.
Cowperthwaite: Yeah, I did.
Mehretu: My generation came out after that.
•••
Cowperthwaite: It really is the power of marketing or spin that lets you hold onto that strange little fact about the ponytail that has since been disproven.
Mehretu: And hopefully, you’ll have a visceral, physical reaction or a response to the painting that’s somewhat transformative.
Cowperthwaite: It’s the first thing you heard, so you stick with it, and that’s the story you regurgitate.
Mehretu: Just the possibilities of radical imaginative thought, and that we can imagine collective other worlds.
Cowperthwaite: I don’t know. Is that safe?