The co-hosts of Slate’s long-running and influential podcast discuss the “urgency” of art in a crisis and whether Meryl Streep should play Anthony Fauci.
This year was bittersweet for the culture consumer under lockdown. Some ways of experiencing art (reading, watching television, listening to podcasts) felt more necessary than ever, while the absence or degradation of others (going to the movies, or to the theater, or to a live music performance) left an agonizing void. The pandemic and subsequent crises of racial justice and democracy bled into all of it, posing new questions about meaning and merit that will linger long after the virus fades.
Few charted these changes with more deftness and good humor than Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens, critics and co-hosts of the long-running Slate podcast “Culture Gabfest.” As it has since its premiere in 2008, the show delivered a weekly (or, for a three-month stretch this summer, every two weeks) mix of brainy cultural analysis and sparkling repartee — proof that even a once-in-a-century calamity could be reckoned with if not overcome.
If you’ve ever listened to a conversation podcast about popular culture, you’re probably familiar with the “Gabfest.” One of the earliest shows of its kind, its format — in which the hosts dissect three zeitgeist-y topics collectively and then each make a personal recommendation — helped define a genre.
Recently, I spoke by video chat with Metcalf, Turner and Stevens about adapting with the times over the podcast’s more than 650 episodes, critics as inessential workers and what art does in a crisis. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How did your consumption habits change this year? Do you ordinarily have routines for getting through all the material that you have to digest in a given week?
STEPHEN METCALF We kind of exist on the far end of a pipeline that has a very ritualized flow of content coming from the major entertainment conglomerates — a big movie of the week, for example. Once that flow got disrupted, we were liberated in our format. We started doing movies that we called “comfort watches” — something from history that we thought was somehow either apposite to the pandemic or an antidote to it.
JULIA TURNER It was fun to talk about old movies and not have the sense that the culture industry was serving us 10 different things we should talk about every week. Like I had never seen “Twister,” Dana’s oft-mentioned favorite cable TV movie watch. And we sort of watched everything from “In a Lonely Place” to …
METCALF “Paddington 2.”
TURNER I think one thing that characterizes us as a culture show is that we like to try to bring some sense of historical sweep or academic framing to the way we think about culture. So it was fun to go back and look at these other older objects and ask, what did this mean? And, what does it mean that we want to watch this right now? Dana kept making us watch just sicko, torment type content.
DANA STEVENS All my comfort movies involved some kind of mass death or something.
How much culture do you engage with just for yourselves versus what’s for the podcast?
STEVENS Doing a lot of this stuff does feel like homework to us, even if it might be interesting or fun homework. Since we’ve been stuck at home, I find myself less likely to want to stuff something new into my head, because I’m never short on things to watch. In a way I dread when someone comes to me saying, “You’ve got to discover this great Swedish Vimeo series!” Someone did just recommend that to me. And it sounded amazing. But a part of me thought, that’s what I’m going to do with my spare time? More cramming of meaning and words and thoughts into my brain rather than just trying to let what’s already in there expand?
TURNER I mean, it’s such a privilege to have a job where literally anything I do culturally counts as work. [In addition to co-hosting the “Gabfest,” Turner is a deputy managing editor for The Los Angeles Times.] But I do reserve corners of my brain for culture consumption that’s harder to turn into work. We don’t do many books on the show, because it’s a lot to ask of listeners, but I’ve been leaning into either highbrow thriller mysteries or literature with strong plot elements, because I just want to be pulled into another world.
METCALF I’m kind of the opposite of Julia.
TURNER That’s our whole shtick.
METCALF I’m a human, she’s a robot.
TURNER I love the people, he’s a snob.
METCALF No, but I’m a terrific weirdo. And I’m always in danger of spinning completely off the axis of contemporary life. So doing this podcast has anchored me in what everyone is watching and talking about in ways that I’m incredibly grateful for. Because what I do now in my spare time is what I would do with all my time if I weren’t doing the podcast, which is read essay after essay on the nature and state of neoliberalism. Right now I’m reading Habermas’s 1980 lectures on the nature of modernity.
Did it ever feel strange, or uncouth, to be spending your time grappling with art, or asking other people to do the same, amid so many overlapping societal crises?Did you ever feel inessential?
TURNER I think we feel deeply inessential most of the time, so I don’t know if that was a change. A podcast is fundamentally optional listening for people who find it valuable. To me, one of the most striking things about this year, was just that it was sort of the first pan-human event. The first global event where everyone was being buffeted by the same problem at the same time and we had instantaneous communication. To the degree that art is fundamentally about reckoning with being, and the question of what does it mean to be human, it felt urgent to me. It was as relevant as it ever has been.
METCALF I completely agree. And I would just add that, from the beginning the concept animating our show was politics as culture, culture as politics; that in modern American life especially, there’s no distinction between one or the other. So yes, we’re utterly inessential, and yet culture itself and how you apprehend the culture isn’t somehow trivial. It’s how Americans order their sense of common reality. It comes as much from Kim Kardashian as it does from Joe Biden.
What’s your appetite for art about the pandemic or about 2020? Is there a gold standard for that kind of thing? Because there’s going to be a lot of it.
STEVENS I’m so not looking forward to those “Game Change”-style somber re-enactments of recent political events. I do not want to see some sort of behind-the-scenes ticktock of why Fauci was ousted from the inner circle of pandemic discussants. It’s bad enough knowing that it’s happening right now. I don’t care who puts on prostheses to look like Steven Mnuchin or something. That whole genre is just so old and tired.
TURNER I think I probably have a bigger appetite for it than Dana. Because if you think about the set of art that was made about the financial crisis, and a bunch of films we ended up talking about, from “Margin Call” to “The Big Short,” people will make dopey re-enactments, and they’ll make big-deal fancy Hollywood things, and there will also be smart little indie slices of it. I’m sure some of it will be fascinating and profound.
We’re all in the middle of going through something wild and incomprehensible, and art has such an important role to play, I think, in helping us process that. We don’t know yet what young artist will find purchase on it in some way. What legends and lions will come up with some fascinating new thing to say. But I don’t think it all has to be Meryl Streep as Anthony Fauci, or Julianne Moore is Sarah Palin.
The year you guys started, 2008, is basically prehistory for podcasts. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry or community over that time?
TURNER Well, people know what we do now. I think for a while people were like, “You have a what? OK.” So it’s gone from being an unknown to, “I know what that is,” to a little bit of an eye roll, like, “Oh, of course you have a podcast. Who doesn’t?”
But the medium is so exciting now and flexible and full of people doing really interesting things, with documentary, with fiction, with short form, with history. I think at the beginning, podcasting felt like another radio station, and now it feels like a whole genre and universe unto itself.
Has your experience of the show, or your relationship to it, changed at all?
METCALF I would say for me, it took a long time to find what the right voice was. I started out with this kind of “radio voice” that was preposterous, like a character on a sitcom. And then you try to just kind of speak as yourself, but that’s too informal. So it’s just finding this register that’s somewhere in between. Of course the master of this is Ira Glass, right? He just sounds like he rolled out of bed but also as if he has this entirely synthetically created, informal persona that he’s in complete control of. I think I finally got it right about a year and a half ago.
STEVENS Steve, I like your on-air persona so much more than Ira Glass’s manufactured offhandedness. I’d rather hear you any day.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
In a case that has sent shockwaves through the Vancouver Island art community, a local art dealer has been charged with one count of fraud over $5,000. Calvin Lucyshyn, the former operator of the now-closed Winchester Galleries in Oak Bay, faces the charge after police seized hundreds of artworks, valued in the tens of millions of dollars, from various storage sites in the Greater Victoria area.
Alleged Fraud Scheme
Police allege that Lucyshyn had been taking valuable art from members of the public under the guise of appraising or consigning the pieces for sale, only to cut off all communication with the owners. This investigation began in April 2022, when police received a complaint from an individual who had provided four paintings to Lucyshyn, including three works by renowned British Columbia artist Emily Carr, and had not received any updates on their sale.
Further investigation by the Saanich Police Department revealed that this was not an isolated incident. Detectives found other alleged victims who had similar experiences with Winchester Galleries, leading police to execute search warrants at three separate storage locations across Greater Victoria.
Massive Seizure of Artworks
In what has become one of the largest art fraud investigations in recent Canadian history, authorities seized approximately 1,100 pieces of art, including more than 600 pieces from a storage site in Saanich, over 300 in Langford, and more than 100 in Oak Bay. Some of the more valuable pieces, according to police, were estimated to be worth $85,000 each.
Lucyshyn was arrested on April 21, 2022, but was later released from custody. In May 2024, a fraud charge was formally laid against him.
Artwork Returned, but Some Remain Unclaimed
In a statement released on Monday, the Saanich Police Department confirmed that 1,050 of the seized artworks have been returned to their rightful owners. However, several pieces remain unclaimed, and police continue their efforts to track down the owners of these works.
Court Proceedings Ongoing
The criminal charge against Lucyshyn has not yet been tested in court, and he has publicly stated his intention to defend himself against any pending allegations. His next court appearance is scheduled for September 10, 2024.
Impact on the Local Art Community
The news of Lucyshyn’s alleged fraud has deeply affected Vancouver Island’s art community, particularly collectors, galleries, and artists who may have been impacted by the gallery’s operations. With high-value pieces from artists like Emily Carr involved, the case underscores the vulnerabilities that can exist in art transactions.
For many art collectors, the investigation has raised concerns about the potential for fraud in the art world, particularly when it comes to dealing with private galleries and dealers. The seizure of such a vast collection of artworks has also led to questions about the management and oversight of valuable art pieces, as well as the importance of transparency and trust in the industry.
As the case continues to unfold in court, it will likely serve as a cautionary tale for collectors and galleries alike, highlighting the need for due diligence in the sale and appraisal of high-value artworks.
While much of the seized artwork has been returned, the full scale of the alleged fraud is still being unraveled. Lucyshyn’s upcoming court appearances will be closely watched, not only by the legal community but also by the wider art world, as it navigates the fallout from one of Canada’s most significant art fraud cases in recent memory.
Art collectors and individuals who believe they may have been affected by this case are encouraged to contact the Saanich Police Department to inquire about any unclaimed pieces. Additionally, the case serves as a reminder for anyone involved in high-value art transactions to work with reputable dealers and to keep thorough documentation of all transactions.
As with any investment, whether in art or other ventures, it is crucial to be cautious and informed. Art fraud can devastate personal collections and finances, but by taking steps to verify authenticity, provenance, and the reputation of dealers, collectors can help safeguard their valuable pieces.
