Marin Kosut: On Manifestos, Why America Hates Artists, Banning Success From Her Vocabulary, and Her New Book ‘Art Monster’

“A book is an accumulation of the self over time,” Marin Kosut writes in the final pages of Art Monster (Columbia University Press, 2024). A shape-shifting hybrid of a scholarly text, conversation, manifesto, and love letter, Art Monster is a book that gestures continually toward its own evolution. Kosut writes in a tone that feels alive and dynamic on the page, unafraid to let her work transform as she is writing it. Through a series of chapters that range in form and topic, Kosut explores the collision of the fantasy of an artist’s life in New York with the reality—money, gentrification, the scarcity of time. 

“To seek an art career for deep fulfillment and self-actualization opens precarity’s door wider,” Kosut writes. Indeed, for those who find themselves on the edges of the mainstream corporate art bubble, the vocation is a constant balancing act—and the stakes are existentially high. Pulling from personal experience in the art world as well as years of interviews with other artists, Kosut shines an illuminating light on the many paradoxes to be found within the pursuit of art in New York, and how the relentless desire to create can often override all else. Though Art Monster holds no simple solutions for those on a creative path, the book serves as a heartening reminder that the journey itself is also a work of art. 

I was delighted to chat with Kosut over Zoom about revision, frustration, and the gallery she founded in the shell of an abandoned pay phone.

Abigail Oswald: I really appreciated your allusions to your own revision process throughout Art Monster, giving various nods to the reader commentary and feedback you received while you were writing. I thought of a sculpture—we’re reading the final version, but we’re also getting a glimpse at the little bits that got chiseled away, the journey that led you there. How do you feel like the book you set out to write compares to the one you wrote?

Marin Kosut: So when I signed the contract originally with Columbia, my proposal was for this very serious, proper, academic book about the lives of artists in New York. It would have interviews with fifty people, lots of theory, each section would be wrapped up, and there’d be footnotes and it would be okayed by the American Sociological Association arts subgroup. 

I wrote that book, and it was 90,000 words, and it was so stilted and boring. And of course it was a “shitty first draft,” or first five drafts. But I was reading it and I was so resistant to it and just thinking, I don’t want to read this, why would anybody else want to read this? So I just decided to scrap it. Take out all the theoretical sections, kill the scholarly darlings, “notwithstanding,” you know, whatever!—because I was so used to it. Prior to this book, I’d written scholarly and academic articles and books because, I’m now realizing, I had to get tenured so I can pay my bills. So I wrote the book and then I’m like, wait, I’m tenured and I work at a college whose motto is “think wide open,” and whose mission is to enable conversations between the liberal arts, performing arts, and the social sciences.

So I blew it up. I wanted to write about working artists’ lives without academic jargon, and how alienating and precarious the life of an artist can be. And I think that coming in with that kind of distant scholarly objectivity and formulaic writing just doesn’t go there. I wanted to be a little street-level, on the ground. The book was like me going up a cliff, or up a chart—I’m doing it, I’m doing it, I’m almost done—and then I get to the top and instead of submitting it, I just throw it off the cliff. That’s the way I would describe it. I just started chopping it up. 

This took place over years because I got my contract in 2017. So I started chopping around 2020. The pandemic hit and then all bets were off, I think, for all of us, and every aspect of society, right? Just the stopping of daily life, the stopping of work in New York City. There was so much time for reflection. I think that also added to me being like, it’s a mess and I feel a mess. And what I’m describing is really messy. So I’m just gonna lean into it. 

The more I put into the book, the more I got excited about writing the book, and the more I felt like, I think people are either gonna really like this or really hate it. And that excited me. 

AO: You write about the formative experience of reading Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto for the first time, and your own manifestos also pop up in the pages of Art Monster. What are your thoughts on the manifesto as a form, and how does that energy tie in with your writing?

MK: Manifestos, to me, they have a sense of urgency. They’re constructed or emerge from an emotional state and they aren’t a slave to form. They can take any form. Nobody is gonna sit and tell you, well, wait, that’s not the right way to write a manifesto. So there’s this openness.

Zoe Leonard’s “I want a president” was so inspiring. I love the repetition. “I want a president.” “I want,” “I want.” That just speaks to desire, and desire is unhinged. And manifestos can be kind of an anchor of unhinging and derangement. That’s why I like manifestos, because I feel like they’re a form of writing that is just unbound. And like I was mentioning earlier, since the pandemic has started, and with the economic and political state of the United States and the world, I find myself feeling increasingly deranged. I think that’s why manifestos are comforting and also just fun. They’re fucking fun! And it is empowering to be disturbed or confused, maddened and saddened in all those ways. I feel like manifestos are good for that. 

AO: You write about your personal experiences directing Pay Fauxn, an art gallery cradled in the shell of an abandoned pay phone, as well as co-founding the gallery Group Club Association with your partner, Andre. What did you take away from your time in those roles? How did they contribute to the journey of writing Art Monster?

MK: I think those sections make the book more interesting in the sense that I talk about the “white cube” and how difficult it is to breach the walled boundaries of the mainstream corporate art world. The notion of agency is in the book—failure and agency. And I think co-founding those spaces and co-curating those spaces and writing about them is a way to give voice or narrate that alternative to the mainstream white cube art gallery world. 

To me, it’s fascinating. Even from an outsider perspective, you know, someone that’s like, what? Wait, people with MFAs that work 40 hours a week and have a painting practice are starting a gallery in their apartment bathroom and people go to it? It can seem pretty bonkers—and it is. When Andre and I first started GCA, I was just like, wait… can we do this? Are people gonna think we’re ridiculous? It’s really energizing and exciting when you’re conceptualizing it and putting it together, but then you put the press release together, you put the stuff on the wall, and then the night before and the day before you’re like, what have I done?

So it takes a bit of courage to not get in the space of, like, this is ridiculous. Who am I to say this is art? To say this is a gallery? But then also, on the other hand, why the fuck can’t I? And I’m gonna! And if you don’t like my gallery at a pay phone or in a basement, well, please invite me to your gallery. I would like to come to it.

AO: I’m curious to hear your opinion on the word “success.” It’s such a messy, subjective concept, so maybe we could scale the question down to a more personal level. What does artistic success look like for you?

MK: So if you’re raised in the United States, we have been socialized to believe that success comes with our relationship to the market. If we’re making something that people are buying, they’re buying the thing we are selling – that kind of standard definition of success. And I think that’s just this devil on my shoulder, and on the shoulder of a lot of people—even though you can consciously reject it, which I do. But I want people to read what I write and I want to be able to make a living and pay bills. But the fact is that I have a full-time job, and most people that are writers or poets or painters have a full-time job unless they’re supported by their families. 

So success is really thorny. I will say, in this house that I live in with my painter partner, we’re not allowed to say it. I’m not kidding. I’ll say, like, “Oh, they’re really successful now,” talking about a friend of ours or someone I know that just sold all their paintings at a gallery in Chelsea, and then my partner Andre will be like, “Don’t say that word. I don’t wanna hear that word,” because it’s just so toxic in many ways. 

But trying to redefine what you think—like, what is a successful day for me? And thinking really micro-level. So a successful day for me would be that I get to wake up whenever I want and then write all day and there’s no laundry to do, no one ever buzzes the bell, and I’m just in my own head and being an art monster. That’s an amazing day. But I guess at a certain point as a writer, you have these great days and they accumulate all of this writing and then you’re like, okay, well, it’s not just for me. I have to somehow get it out into the world. So that’s that next level of it. But I think it was Kate Zambreno that said, “When I don’t write, I don’t feel I deserve the day,” and that really resonated with me in terms of thinking of success just in my own little room here in my own life. 

AO: I think there’s an idea that floats around that the internet made New York less “necessary,” or at the very least made the art world and life as an artist more accessible. What are your thoughts on online community?

MK: Well, in general, social media—this is gonna sound trite—is not good for art and artists. I think that’s obvious, and I’m not gonna get too deep into that. But this notion of like, now we’re connected and we have virtual communities and we can hang out together online, so we don’t need to be in New York at a particular neighborhood to be in an artist community… 

Online communities work. I think they can be grounding and offer opportunities for people to collaborate, right? To feel like you’re amongst your peers, like you have people, you’re hanging out. In the mornings, I usually write from 8 to 10 on Zoom. The writer Chelsea Hodson has this Morning Writing Club. So I do that and I do feel like, oh, this is great. Even if it’s a black Zoom square, I’m like, oh, there’s Abby, there’s Frank. It’s just a name, but that does give me a sense of being a little less isolated and floating like a satellite in space. 

So that, but in terms of the algorithm and Instagram and the rise of this normalization that we are a brand, and beyond making the work, the poem, the painting, we have to think about our identities and selling an authentic identity or leaning into an ironic identity. I think all of the labor of social media is antithetical to making great art, to being alone, to being quiet. I’m gonna have to start posting shit on Instagram and thinking about what am I comfortable with in putting forth an identity. I hate it. It’s ridiculous and it works for people and I have friends that figured out their shtick, but I’m not a comedian and I’m not an actress and I would rather be reading nineteenth-century Russian literature.

AO: You spoke with a lot of artists in the New York arts community for this book! To get meta for a moment, I’d love to hear more about your interview process.

MK: I started interviewing people and taking notes a long time ago—like 2012, maybe. I was living in Bushwick and during that time period there were a lot of artists starting nonprofit spaces. This guy that lived in our neighborhood, Steve, started a gallery in his basement called Orgy Park. And I remember going like, what, Steve’s got a gallery, let’s go over there! And I just started taking notes—just like, I’m gonna write about this someday. I think I named it a few years later, like, I’m writing a book about the 99% of artists in New York.

Some people I interviewed in their studios and other people at cafes. It started out in the beginning with the tape recorder and I’d have a list of questions, like you’re doing now, and then over time I got looser and more off the cuff—especially when people were coming to hang out when we would do shows. I’d be like, I’m gonna ask you questions for a book, and we’re probably drinking, you know, and then I’d just write in my phone, always writing in my phone.

Because it was proper scholarship in the beginning, I do have transcripts and transcripts and a ton of material. I don’t know where they are right now or if they’re on my computer that died. But I had what they would call in sociology and anthropology “data saturation,” ‘cause I feel like people were kind of saying the same thing and I had too much. And so in the final version of the book, I just whittled it down to people that I called characters, and what you see in quotes is what people actually said. But I may have possibly cut and pasted some conversations. It’s creative nonfiction.

AO: On a semi-related note, I’m curious whether there’s anything about this book that you want to be asked.

MK: Well maybe there’s a question that I figured someone would ask me but they haven’t asked me yet. And that is: why do you think artists are so hated in the United States in general? Why is there so much animosity towards them? I could answer that question.

AO: Let’s do it.

MK: They make something that doesn’t have any apparent use value, you know, in this kind of functional way. Like if you make shoes, you can wear shoes. What is the function of a poem? What is the function of a painting? So I think this goes back to being outside of capitalism, in that sense. 

Another thing that I think is difficult for people to grapple with is this idea that to be an artist, you have to live in your imagination and kind of construct your own world—regardless of your medium—and in some way you’re kind of locked away and you’re doing this invisible labor. There’s this idea like, if you’re not seen doing your job, then it’s not real. You know, like, buck up and live in the real world where you’re given orders, and then your job is to execute those orders. No one has told me to write this book. Nobody tells you to write your work. I just think there’s so much about the studio and the laboring of the work of making art that can elicit… maybe envy, you know. Like, oh, you have all that time and no one’s watching you. And sometimes even maybe admiration too, but also resentment. 

So I think that goes into some of the beef that people have with artists and why they can kind of feel threatened by the illegibility of some work—particularly conceptual, visual artwork. Like, what does it mean? It can trigger feelings of exclusion, I think. Poetry does that—feeling like, you know, I’m too dumb to be included in this special highbrow club. So it’s understandable, but I just think it’s very American, too. And then it just ties into, like, nobody sees you doing the work, and nobody’s paying you to do the work. So the work isn’t real. Thus suspect. 

I don’t think most people would say “I hate books.” Or “I hate paintings.” But they would say “I hate artists.” So they like the products that people make, but not the people who make them. There’s a disconnect, right?

AO: Overall, Art Monster beautifully encapsulates the simultaneous joy and frustration of trying to be an artist in New York. You detail so many great opportunities, so many moments of connection, but also the various costs and demands on an artist working in that space—it’s a lot. At the end of the day, every person’s experience of the city is going to be uniquely their own. For you, is it worth it?

MK: For me personally, yeah. I hope that comes through. I grew up in a small town outside of Niagara Falls, New York, and I always felt like a mutant there. For most of my life, I feel like I don’t know what people are talking about in other places. Like in suburbia, I just don’t know what they’re talking about. They’re speaking English and they’re talking about a mortgage or wallpaper for their baby’s room, but I’m like, what the hell? 

And so in New York, even given the precarity and the meanness of the city and its relentless pace, it’s worth it for me. Because even though there’s an exhaustion, there is this kind of energy. And I think I like being pushed and poked a lot. All the spontaneous things that can happen. Even just talking to a neighbor while walking my dog, or a loud siren. I think it just fills my head in a way that works for me. And being around the diversity of people—I’ve lived in smaller cities and more suburban areas where it’s really homogeneous in terms of race and social class. I don’t like to just be around people that are like me. 

So the city is worth it for me, personally. And I really don’t know what is gonna happen when I have to leave, because I feel like I’m not gonna be able to, as a renter, stay. I’ve just never been able to find a rent-stabilized apartment. That’s like, impossible. So just given the fact that I work at a state school, the numbers don’t add up for me. Maybe some of my frustration and anger comes in through the book, I hope, ‘cause I do feel really frustrated and maybe a little bit like, wait, I’ve been here for twenty years. I’ve been a good citizen. I’ve provided opportunity for artists. I’ve been paying my taxes. Like, can I stay? 

And the answer is no. New York doesn’t need you. 

AO: Relationship to place is so personal.

MK: Hopefully one day I’ll be like, I don’t need it anymore. I know people that are like that and they move someplace in the mountains—fresh air, it’s cheap, I can write all day—and that makes good sense.

AO: Do you feel like there’s something in your life that could happen, some change that could occur, where you might one day feel that way, too?

MK: That I would leave? No.

Marin Kosut has published fiction and nonfiction in Vol.1Brooklyn, Cabinet Magazine, Rejection Letters and elsewhere. She has co-curated shows in artist-run spaces in Brooklyn and Chinatown, and founded Pay Fauxn, a gallery in a pay phone at a Bedford-Stuyvesant bus stop. A MacDowell fellowship recipient, she works as a professor of sociology at SUNY Purchase and lives in Brooklyn.