Brooklyn-based artist, activist, comedian and advertising creative director Jeff Greenspan talks about:
The contradictions between his artmaking and his day job in advertising, and how he rationalizes biting the hand that feeds, among other seeming hypocrisies, including whether he’s using himself to promote the issues, or the issues to promote himself; his social/activist projects, including “hipster traps,” “Tourist Lanes,” “The World’s Most Exclusive Website” and “The Statue Experiment,” and how calling himself an artist is still relatively new for him; how to make a YouTube video that gets 1,000,000 views; his and frequent collaborator Andrew Tider’s epic Edward Snowden sculpture project, in which they commissioned and then placed a large bust of Snowden in a Brooklyn public park, and the rollercoaster life it took on —it was a project that cost them thousands of dollars each and ran the risk of arrest and potential harm to those who were assisting in the rogue installation; and the nuanced realities of working in advertising and particularly branding, and his and Tider’s recent project pitched to Virgin Atlantic airlines.