Tom Sachs promised a "fun cult"

May 8, 2023 8:28 AM

The space where this all plays out feels charming, a little Wes Anderson–y. . . and everyone is conspicuously attractive. Known to the younger generation as a mentor to youtuber Casey Neistat, Tom Sachs has been a working artist in NYC since 1990. After posting a bizarre ad for a personal assistant, which prompted a more detailed look at some questionable studio practices.

[unpaywalled]

Owen Zoyt dropped out of NYU in 2021 to join the studio; he had been applying to work there every year since he was 15. “It’s really, really lovely to feel like you’re part of something and working in a very tightly knit group in a really fast-paced environment to achieve some really fantastical goal,” he says. (Most of the former Sachs employees we spoke to asked for anonymity; many cited nondisclosure agreements, and others said they feared retaliation.)

When you start working at Tom Sachs’s studio, you’re given manuals, and they’re substantially more detailed than Ten Bullets. In one, after suggestions on how to properly approach Sachs about his lunch, there’s advice for “Avoiding Things That Make Tom Mad,” which begins with a metered verse: “Tom will sometimes scream / Tom will sometimes brood / Though dire life may seem / Happiness lies in reading Tom’s moods.” Sachs’s spokesperson says this manual was a joke. Recent employees say they took it seriously.

posted by mecran01 (23 comments total)

Oh, and Hyperallergic weighs in.
posted by mecran01 at 8:31 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bring Sachs snacks like Ibérico ham if he’s signing artwork.

To be fair to cult leaders, the acorn-fed stuff is delicious.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:12 AM on May 8, 2023

I know people in the art world who have worked in artists studios, and I have visited artist compounds, and on the whole they are discomfiting and exploitative environments. Even I, as a visitor and not an employee, was instantly put to work and treated as a minion. It made me more angry than I can reasonably express here, but suffice it to say that I will never be visiting an artist's compound ever again.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:14 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

[previously]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:21 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I don't think it's the "artist's studio" aspect that makes this bad, I think it's the "narcissistic goblin" that makes it bad.
posted by seanmpuckett at 9:26 AM on May 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm saying that "artists with studios" and "narcissistic goblins" overlap heavily.
posted by grumpybear69 at 9:35 AM on May 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

The problem with Tom,” says the artist Stuart Semple, “is he runs his studio like an artwork. It is wild and it’s crazy, but it’s also brilliant.

No, he's just an asshole. Lot's of brilliant people are nice, too. He, apparently, isn't one of them.
posted by doctor_negative at 9:46 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm also not convinced of the brilliance part but art's subjective like that.
posted by Slackermagee at 9:47 AM on May 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

"rape room" taken at face value is a crime. "rape room" as a joke is some 2002 junior high school-er edgelord bullshit. At best he's wildly uncreative and hackneyed, which is what his spokesperson is claiming here. What a goon.
posted by Philipschall at 9:51 AM on May 8, 2023

Everyone must place all items at parallel or 90-degree angles
lolololol

continues:
They are to walk quietly, as if in a monastery. Employees have to maintain a healthy diet-and-exercise regimen, avoid “personal inventiveness,” and respond to commands with the words I understand or I don’t understand.

less lol. more wtf or just, fu!
posted by Glinn at 9:58 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's long past time for the following concept to gain cultural currency and be used at every opportunity:

There never has been a brilliant asshole who stopped being brilliant when people made them stop being an asshole.
posted by tclark at 10:05 AM on May 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

At its root, this is about wealth inequality (and, indirectly, about Big Art as a tax dodge). If you want to make art professionally or succeed in some other way in the art world, you need connections, and that means sucking up to people with money. If the economic landscape were flatter, you might still meet assholes like this guy but you could easily say, "well, I'll just work a little harder, I have enough money to support myself as an artist and I have a network of other friends with enough money, we'll do our own thing and we'll succeed without this creep". And of course, if the economic landscape were flatter, he and his wife wouldn't be able to hire all these people anyway.


But there's all these mediocre, boring art stars with all this money because the super rich treat art as an investment vehicle and as a result they can treat people this way. When you realize that most of these kids are probably from rich backgrounds already, you can see how deep the wealth disparity runs.

Not that there are no poor people who are abusers, etc, but since the whole thing about this guy is that he's rich because he sells his art at high prices, making it impossible to be that rich and smashing up the international investment-art racket would cut this whole thing right out.
posted by Frowner at 10:13 AM on May 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

Everyone must place all items at parallel or 90-degree angles

I believe this is a reference to knolling. As in "Always be knolling."
posted by gwint at 10:16 AM on May 8, 2023

I don't know much more about Tom Sachs than that he'd been working with Nike on various sneaker projects.

Nike says he's not doing that any more.
posted by box at 10:21 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I do not give two shits about the NYC scene so I do not know anything about this dude outside of what these articles describe, but I gotta say, this description of his studio environment sure as fuck rhymes with my memories of working at Spumco when it was an open secret that John K was fucking an underage woman he lured out to Hollywood with promises of love and Cartoon Stardom. But it was okay! He was a Bad Boy who was Shaking Up The Industry and Saving Animation with his Edginess!

So I am just going to say fuck this dude on general principles, wow.
posted by egypturnash at 10:22 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

The swastika on the first aid kit pretty much told me all I needed to know.
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 10:23 AM on May 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I screwed up some links in the original post. Here is the full text of the job ad via Filthydreams.org
posted by mecran01 at 10:28 AM on May 8, 2023

Casey's brother Van also seems to be a "student" of Sachs as Van's entire esthetic seems to be a carbon copy of Sachs'.
posted by stltony at 10:40 AM on May 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also I would honestly not be surprised if the “rape room” is called that because this is where Bad Boy Cult Leader got pushy enough with a cute young employee that accusations of rape only never came out because it was made very clear that he has several orders of magnitude more lawyer money than anyone working under him, and wouldn’t you rather just take this money to leave NYC and go back to wherever you came from? And that everyone in the studio knows about this but nobody is willing to endanger their toehold in the NYC art scene.
posted by egypturnash at 10:44 AM on May 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Related: Casey Neistat fires an intern
posted by mecran01 at 10:48 AM on May 8, 2023

Ah, here is the pdf of the job ad. Sorry about that.
posted by mecran01 at 10:50 AM on May 8, 2023

From the Filthydreams.org post comments:

I recognized the tone of this instantly – sent shivers down my spine. But I am enormously heartened to see so many former employees chiming in here – the worst part was leaving the job after the other people who worked there were so used to enabling that they never even acknowledged how deeply messed up that place was, even after objectively really disturbing events.

Also:

I have PTSD and nightmares from working for Sachs and co. Some of the worst abuses came from his underlings who claimed to do his bidding. They are ruthless in the treatment of employees.

This enforcement of abuse by fellow studio employees morphs this from horrorshow job exploitation to horrorshow cult abuse.
posted by spamandkimchi at 10:52 AM on May 8, 2023

All of this and I still haven't seen any of the art? Even google image search is mostly pictures of him smirking and the Nikes. What does his art look like?
posted by kittensofthenight at 10:53 AM on May 8, 2023