Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Sep 07, 2023, 06:28AM

Everything’s Vetted

A 2013 IndieWire interview with documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite vs. a 2021 Cool Hunting interview with Julie Mehretu.

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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?

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