We’re [living through] an era of de-legitimized institutions and a lot of mistrust in mainstream publications and media. If, in a few years, young people want to compete with legacy institutions for editorial legitimacy, it’ll require young artists who have dedication and values to organize.

Josh Citarella is an artist, internet researcher, and the founder of Do Not Research, an online- and IRL-based publishing platform for young artists across mediums to make critical work engaging with contemporary culture. A former teacher at the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design, Citarella left his institutional positions behind to pursue his interests in the high-low tensions between fine art and internet art full-time with content streams across Substack, Twitch, and Patreon. Citarella sits down with editor-in-chief Tess Pollok to discuss the creation of Do Not Research, artistic life in the late capitalist economy, and the young artists who inspire him.

TESS POLLOK: Have you seen Take Your Pills, the Adderall documentary on Netflix? I think you would like it. I think all art about Adderall, including the movie Limitless, just indirectly makes Adderall seem so awesome. Take Your Pills totally tries and fails to be a cautionary tale, it’s, like, “Did you know that every great jazz musician from the Harlem Renaissance was on meth?” And you go, “Wow, I’m going to take this every day!”

JOSHUA CITARELLA: All artists used to be alcoholics and drug addicts. Athletes, too. Anyone great. Wade Boggs famously drank 70 drinks on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. Now it’s all performance-debilitating drugs. I don’t know. That’s a piece of baseball history for you, if you want it.

POLLOK: Well, thank you for that. Wade Boggs. I’ll Google him. What are you up to these days?

CITARELLA: Primarily putting content out on my Substack and Patreon. That’s my week-to-week grind. In the first week of December, we’re opening up the next round of submissions for Do Not Research, so there’ll be essays, videos, artworks, and all kinds of multimedia works available through all that. In the background of that, I’m working on a book and a film and I’m also helping run a gallery, so I’m keeping up with my art practice.

POLLOK: Are you happy being the king of the gig economy?

CITARELLA: (Laughs) I think this is a necessary but difficult time that we’re going through as artists. In the future, more artists will travel the path that I’m on, but right now I’m taking a more non-traditional approach. But, no, it’s not comfortable. It’s precarious, but at least I can say what I think. A lot of artists aren’t able to do that without severe career penalties. It’s good to be busy. I’d do less if any of those things paid better.

POLLOK: I’m glad you brought up Do Not Research! I would strongly encourage our readers who are artists to submit their work to the Do Not Research open call. How did you get started with that project? Where did the idea come from?

CITARELLA: It’s an unusual project. When I started the podcast in 2020 it was in the back of my mind that 90% of podcasts don’t make it past three episodes, and of the remaining 10%, an additional 90% of those don’t get past episode 20. Eventually, my stream, my newsletter, my Substack will end and I’ll move on to something else. So the question became, how do we get a strong signal out online and build a community? Do you just let people collect in a Reddit or Discord that dissipates immediately after, or do you try to build something meaningful and influential? My thought was that in our current period of institutional decline it would be a worthwhile project to collect all the people who have heard that signal and connect with the core values of these ideas. Disproportionately, these people are creatives: writers, filmmakers, artists in the traditional sense, shitposters, meme-makers. I wanted to gather all of this creative potential together and re-bundle these works into a new cultural organization that functions as a community, publication, and the host of IRL events. We’re seeing a lot of mistrust in mainstream publications right now, especially with people being fired from their editorial and curatorial positions; we’re in an era of de-legitimized institutions, something you probably understand as a new magazine. There’s a lot of space right now for new voices. If, in a few years, we distrust our mainstream media sources, it’s going to require young artists who have dedication and values to organize content structures that can compete on the grounds of editorial legitimacy with institutions like Artforum and Frieze. The long term hope here is to build an institution.

POLLOK: It’s a running theme of our profile series that the mainstream media is savagely alienating and out of touch. Taylor Lorenz and I were laughing so much about when the New York Times endorsed Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar for president.

CITARELLA: Taylor is a friend and she’s been on the podcast. I admire her work. If you think of legacy institutions as the Titanic, I think everyone has to make different choices about whether they’re going to jump on the life raft or try and repair the ship.

POLLOK: How did you find yourself first getting interested in online culture?

CITARELLA: I was born in 1987, so I’m 36 now. I grew up online. I was a gamer in a rural area where I couldn’t walk to friends’ houses, so I spent a lot of time on the internet after school and my generation was one of the early adopters of Facebook and MySpace and a lot of the other early Web2 social media platforms. I was broadly categorized under the “post-internet” artist label after becoming a regular contributor to The Jogging Tumblr, so I’ve been in the internet or post-internet art space now for most of my adult creative life. In the past few years, I’ve taken a pivot away from legacy institutions–I used to teach at the School of Visual Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design and I left those positions to become a content creator full time. So now I run my Patreon and Substack, I have a Twitch livestream, and I still sell my work, I just don’t do i t within the conventional gallery system anymore.

POLLOK: How is life treating you as an artist outside the conventional system?

The excess of journalism, art, and podcasts online has the overall effect of devaluing the creative economy–look at what journalists were paid from the ‘70s to the ‘90s and there’s an enormous slump, and that’s even more true when you look at the progression into the social media era.

CITARELLA: I treat writing, researching, and publishing as my day job. That’s worked a lot better for me than trying to sell discrete rarified art objects to rich people who kind of don’t like me and whose ideas I frequently disagree with. It’s funny, a few years ago they did a profile on me in Artsy in advance of the Armory show and they called me “the ultimate precarious freelancer.” I’m definitely a permanent precariat.

POLLOK: What made you want to leave the fine art world? Not that you’ve entirely left, because you’ve mentioned you maintain a regular presence and still do gallery shows. But I’m interested in your trajectory and what caused you to pursue writing about the online over a fine arts career in a more traditional context.

CITARELLA: I just found that there were more important cultural conversations being had in the online space by people who were not professional artists, in many cases these people were just anonymous shitposters. It seemed, to me, like the fulfillment of all the theories I had heard about in the capital-a fine arts world: a space where images could be democratized, individuals could own the means of production, and create works that were tremendously culturally influential. It took three years of the president posting memes for Artforum to write a single article about it. To me, that was totally insufficient and it drove a huge wedge through my thinking to realize that our current institutions are untethered from the culture that they purport to represent.

POLLOK: Do you feel like the art market is oversaturated with online people? This is something of a devil’s advocate question. I think there’s two sides to every coin and, yes, access to the internet can democratize the art world, but it can also erode our collective memory and subject us to a totally overstimulating amount of content.

CITARELLA: I think you’re a little bit right about that. We have to be sober about the abundance of content online. The excess of journalism, art, and podcasts online has the overall effect of devaluing the creative economy–look at what journalists were paid from the ‘70s to the ‘90s and there’s an enormous slump, and that’s even more true when you look at the progression into the social media era. What people compete for now is clout, editorial legitimacy, and cultural affiliation, which are all things that are not related to the economic market. In terms of that situation, I would say institutions have done this to themselves. Many institutions are well-resourced but they refuse to pay more than $150 or $200 an article and as a result they lose their talented writers and, over time, their editorial legitimacy. If you’re working in an economy where the only options are $100 or a $25 honorarium, neither of which are enough to cover rent, the margins of pay become immaterial. You work another job to make ends meet and you aspire to other goals.

POLLOK: Your thinking about the creative economy is like if Brad Troemel and Taylor Lorenz had a baby. This actually fascinates me because I interview people who live in Hudson all the time and doesn’t Brad live there, too? A lot of people have left New York City because of the economic conditions you’re describing. But it turns into a bigger issue, economically, because then every city turns into Austin and Portland-there’s a lot to unpack there. I don’t know if these are unhealthy migrations. Maybe there’s no need for an interview because all of this is an ouroboros. Do we need concentrations of capital to stay focused?

CITARELLA: In many ways this was the dream of post-internet art, to imagine a decentralized network of galleries that could be connected without access to capital, institutions, and resources. But I’ve lived in New York a long time and I’ve experienced other migrations in the past. People move to Detroit, Oakland, upstate. As their projects gain traction, they inevitably have to return to New York for major sales or meetings, and what usually ends up happening is they open a smaller space in New York once they secure the resources and funding to do it. The pure concentration of resources in New York has only increased since then, so I don’t think there’s going to be a breaking point with that.

POLLOK: The density of the creative output here combined with how much money there is–I don’t see an end to it, either.

CITARELLA: There’s something else going on here with the canon of the previous generation having accumulated so much value, speaking purely in terms of the price of those artworks, to the point that young artists being given opportunities today need to directly or indirectly valorize that canon. Today organizations commission artists who have something formally or conceptually in common with their predecessors because it indirectly accumulates value for them. The reality of art is that museums are where they are, geographically, and so are the wealthy people who collect art. So unless there’s massive redistribution and wealth reorganization in society, you’re not going to see a boom of regional organizations or magazines in the near future, unfortunately.

POLLOK: Does anyone working today inspire you?

CITARELLA: Yes, many. The entire process of Do Not Research is me trusting my editorial vision and not feeling indebted to the canon, not feeling the need to stage everything on the shoulders of giants. Sometimes it’s important to respond to the unique time in which you exist. Dana Greenleaf makes extraordinary films, among them are Areyouwinningson? and God Mode, which Do Not Research helped to produce. Additionally, I would say Tomi Faison just had a killer show in Brooklyn that looked exceptional. Her work is impressive and I’ve followed it for years now. Filip Kostic is an incredible artist, he was successful even before Do Not Research but has published quite a bit on our blog and we just celebrated the launch of his new book at Dunkunsthalle. He made this thing, it’s called a PC bed, it’s the most dystopian device I can imagine-you lie in bed surrounded by these curved monitors and you sip your Bang Energy in this little pod and the CPU is underneath the bed. He live streamed the process of being extremely online within that environment for 24 hours, which I think is an incredible feat. It’s a David Blaine-esque endurance test. Without going on too long, Harris Rosenblum is a really strong Do Not Research standout who recently had his first solo exhibition–I think you did something with Harris?

POLLOK: We had a poster of his shit in our fourth issue. I love him. “Requiem for Hatsune Miku.” He’s just exceptional. And Filip’s PC bed is really funny, like Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Did you see that?

CITARELLA: I’ve only seen pieces of it.

POLLOK: Well, they have pods in that–CPU/GPU pods, a fucked up computer bed, just like Filip did. Although those were actors, and it sounds like Filip did it for real, so I guess he deserves credit for that.

CITARELLA: Sometimes the person who’s the butt of the joke, especially in art, is yourself. You’re like, “wait, I actually have to do this? This is terrible.” That’s art.

Joshua Citarella is an artist, podcaster, and writer. He is the founder of Do Not Research, an online multimedia collective dedicated to showcasing artistic voices outside of the mainstream.

Tess Pollok is a writer and the editor-in-chief of Animal Blood.