Antonio Murado, a New York City-based painter originally from Spain, talks about:

His background in Spain, including several years in the Madrid art scene, before moving to NYC, which he began with a Spanish grant; the commissions that he’s done- how they function as competitions, and then if he gets one, a collaboration with the client, rather than the sort of top-down dynamic that came across in his depiction in Hannah Wohl’s ‘Bound by Creativity;’ the importance of the art agent in setting up a commission; how competing for a commission is like an actor casting for a role; how the sales of his work rise and fall, not only by year but by month, which means there’s no stability;  and his time in the studio (around 65-70 hours/week)- how he spends his days there, and how he takes an old-school craftsman approach, from sizing canvas with rabbit-skin glue to building his own stretchers.

In the final episode with Hannah Wohl (Bound by Creativity), we talk about: her experiences with mega-collector couple Sherry and Joel Mallin, who have an impressive collection and are known as being philanthropic in their approach to helping artists, including having some of them live in their homes; a purchase the Mallins made that entailed their flying from New York to London just so they could see the (six-figure) work they were considering in person before committing fully to the purchase, and how people’s reactions to this anecdote are something of a Rorschach test for where they’re coming from; the issues of inequality that being around collectors inevitably brings up; her brief history of being a (modest) art collector herself; and finally, in comparing contemporary art with the arts at large (the culinary arts, musicians, actors, etc.), she describes the ‘radical uncertainty’ that goes along with it, how the artists and the art world make decisions within this uncertainty, and the narratives that artists bound themselves within.