In 1992, New York’s New School established the Vera List Center for Art and Politics with the intent of providing new resources and venues for artists and scholars to plumb contemporary art’s increasing entanglement with politics. As the AIDS epidemic ravaged New York’s arts community, the city emerged as a political flashpoint for the activism and identity politics that would define artistic practice in the 1990s. In the ensuing decades, the Center’s progressive agenda, grounded by its host institution’s lefty reputation, has flourished. Its credibility has been bolstered by its participation in Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), a program that ensures fair compensation for creative labor. W.A.G.E.-certified arts organizations agree to pay exhibiting artists fees calculated according to their own operating fees. However, the New School is currently struggling to resolve a sixty-million-dollar operating deficit, and recent “restructuring” efforts led to the widely unpopular layoff of nineteen full-time faculty members and sixty-eight staff members, the majority of whom worked in the humanities departments.
But the Vera List Center (VLC) has nonetheless continued to provide robust and rigorous programming. In 2004, the Center’s inaugurated their “Focus” themes, each of which structures the nonprofit’s research and public programming for the span of two years. Past VLC Focus themes read like indices of the biennia they’re tethered to—from the blithe Obama aughts (2005–06’s “Considering Forgiveness”) to the fascist turn (2015–17’s “Post Democracy”). Eriola Pira, VLC’s curator and programs director since 2019, organized the current Focus, titled “Matter of Intelligence” (MoI)—perhaps its most sweeping and abstract to date. I will admit my initial skepticism towards this theme. Isn’t “intelligence” a bit too broad, both for an academic lecture series and for the era of OpenAI within which it sits? Underscoring the vast ambit of the program’s scope, an accompanying digital archive presents an ever-expanding collection of textual and visual materials that Pira and assistants have indexed on the online archiving software Are.na, which provides a platform for free and paying users to organize images, text, links, and files.
Presumably, the “Matter of Intelligence” archive is meant to be used by the public that the Center serves. It’s openly accessible, and navigable once you make sense of the software’s rhizomatic structure—scanned texts and online resources are collated by somewhat vague headings like “Ecological Intelligence,” “Planetary Intelligence,” and “Know, Knowing, Knowledge,” and interlinked to accommodate subject overlap. But who is it actually for? At the midpoint of the two-year program, six seminars have taken place: “Paying Mind: On the Uses and Abuses of the Intellectual,” “Of Matter” (an examination of the material properties of knowledge), “Cosmic Intelligence: Water.Moves.Us” (a children’s session exploring how water supports life), “After the Native Informant,” “Gossip Work,” and “Artists, Scholars, and Spies.” On the digital archive, these seminars are represented with their own headings and populated with relevant content files called “blocks,” some of which were discussed during the lectures themselves. However, the seminars do not stream neatly into the archive.
Over the year and a half that the “Matter of Intelligence” Are.na channel has been active, numerous users unaffiliated with the New School (among them artists, activists, and researchers) have added blocks under these headings. But the database’s sprawling format presents a challenge to anyone hoping to get a clear, contextualized read on a given subject rather than simply traveling down the rabbit hole of past users’ search histories. I went looking for a video link to a past seminar, got lost in the rhizome, and wound up on YouTube, streaming a presentation by artist Amelia Winger-Bearskin that ties ethical coding strategy to Indigenous epistemology. I eventually discovered that the video was entirely unaffiliated with VLC’s current Focus but rather documentation of a 2022 presentation hosted by Ignota Books as part of its “Worlding” event series. My usual (read: deeply inefficient) strategy of reading every available text on an assigned subject clearly doesn’t work in the rhizome.
Pira anticipated this disorientation. In the mission statement she penned for MoI, Pira explains that she doesn’t conceive of the program’s Are.na channel as a tidy archive of resolved inquiries, but rather as a “visible record of thinking-in-progress.”1 She explains: “The act of hoarding ideas here may seem overwhelming, even directionless. Perhaps that is the point: to confront the paradox of intelligence today, where abundance and disorder are inseparable, and meaning emerges only through active engagement.” This ethos implicitly rebukes the casual viewer, distinguishing the channel’s strategy from social media platforms and their endless churn of short-form videos and “tl;dr” summaries. To string together meaning, one must spend a sustained amount of time on the channel, building connections between materials as you go. Nevertheless, as I did go, I was confused. I stumbled several times, via different block headings, upon the same full 134-page scan of Edward Said’s 1994 essay collection Representations of the Intellectual. What was its particular relevance here? What might it offer the “Matter of Intelligence” user?
The MoI channel favors unabridged texts and other materials, with content uploaded to headings in toto. Readers are consequently left suspended in an ocean of text without anywhere to moor. Feeding the contents of this channel through a large language model seemed equally useless, since it would be particularly difficult to verify whether the model’s gloss was accurate. I wanted guidance from actual educators who could orient me to the channel’s documents—to explain, for example, Said’s account of how intellectuals operated in the mid-nineties, and what we might take from his insights thirty years on. I wanted a seminar. Fortunately, the fifth MoI seminar, titled “Gossip Work,” focused on this central tension: how do you discern whose interpretation to trust?
I streamed “Gossip Work” on April 27. It was moderated by New School assistant professor Alhena Katsof and featured presentations by philosopher Karen Adkins, graphic designer Deborah Khodanovich, and artist and curator Lua Vollaard, each of whose work centers on alternative modes of information transfer. I’d flagged the talk because the premise sounded both gender-subversive and unusually colloquial, its implied chattiness at odds with the rigorous theory that the Center is known for. In her introduction, Katsof traced the etymology of “gossip” from its middle-English origin in a word meaning “friend,” noting how it took on gender connotations in the sixteenth century to refer to “women engaging in idle talk and chatter.” Its meaning shifted again in the nineteenth to “trifling talk” or “groundless rumor.”
Adkins, a professor of philosophy at Regis University in Denver, Colorado, is the author of Gossip, Epistemology, and Power: Knowledge Underground, which argues for gossip’s legitimacy in the epistemological field. Her presentation proposed a reframing of gossip as a tool of resistance, employed by those whose political recourse was otherwise limited. Gossip per se has no mendacity, she states; it simply “separates wheat from chaff” to determine what is credible while still allowing speakers to be playful with their ideas. Adkins cited gossip’s use in revolutions in Haiti and India and how it has allowed African American communities to self-protect from the Ku Klux Klan, AIDS, and other threats from a hostile society. She observed that the very etymology Katsof had mapped demonstrates gossip’s radical origins: while “friend” or “confidante” is its closest practical approximation, the word itself derives from the Middle English “god sibling.” Just as present-day godparents can assume legal custody of a minor, a “godsib” in the Middle Ages could serve as a legal advocate if their ward was deemed legally unfit to represent herself in court.
Khodanovich’s and Vollaard’s practices create visuals that map how alternate discourses circulate. Khodanovich created a three-part book titled Gossip, which compiles images of groups of women gathered to produce textiles (throughout the 1800s, quilting, knitting, and sewing bees were among the few sanctioned group activities available to women). The graphic designer set Gossip in an eponymous typeface of her own creation, adapted from the font that Johannes Gutenberg developed for his groundbreaking Bible. The font’s use of the pixel grid ties its structure back to textile patterns, which are also commonly devised from standardized units. Vollaard cocreated the meme account Art Goss, which tackled hypocrisy and sexism in the Dutch contemporary art world while it was active between 2020 and 2023.
The seminar’s subsequent Q and A, and its Zoom chat in the sidebar, inevitably mulled over #MeToo and Moira Donegan’s crowdsourced Google document “Shitty Media Men.” As the discussion revealed, from the 1500s to today, the intelligence that women share with each other frequently centers on men: which men are safe, which are not. The conversation circled back multiple times to Silvia Federici’s 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, in which the Marxist feminist scholar describes how the political shift to capitalism made adultery, childbirth out of wedlock, and infanticide capital crimes, and in so doing exponentially raised the stakes of sex. Women have always used gossip to determine who to trust, especially when the consequences of that trust have the power to radically alter the course of their lives. Of course, the insularity of whisper networks presents its own dilemmas. Adkins cited an essay responding to “Shitty Media Men” by Jenna Wortham, who observed that as a Black woman journalist she had never been given access to the shared document, even as it was disseminated amongst her friends and peers. “What was revealed in that attempt at democratizing,” Adkins observed, “was that gossip networks are built on trust, and they replicate social segregation.”
When gossip fails as a democratizing force, it’s because it was never intended to play that role. Gossip requires a network of confidantes; the intimacy it presupposes necessarily excludes. It isn’t meant to provide unfettered access to information; its true purpose is to help people with limited access extend and make sense of the information they’re privy to, just as the context that the speakers provided during “Gossip Work” helped me navigate its accompanying Are.na subchannel. Khodanovich had posted a link to an excerpt of Mladen Dolar’s book Rumors, published on e-flux Notes in 2024, which underscores the very dualism that affords gossip its revolutionary and clandestine power. “The point is not so much to redeem gossip from its bad reputation as to display and scrutinize its dual or rather multiple nature,” Dolar argues, as well as its “utter ambiguity, its complexity against the almost univocal moral reprehension and condemnation that accompanied it throughout various traditions.”2
In one sense, “Gossip Work” demonstrated the most effective sort of education. In lieu of “top down” pedagogical instruction, the seminar and its speakers functioned as guides, allowing attendees to make the connections that shape the contours of our own interpretations of the data. Particularly in a context within which all facts are suspect, word of mouth might provide the assurance a community needs—or simply the best it can get.
As a direct result of the current US administration’s alternatingly antagonistic and opportunistic approach to truth, all officially sanctioned sources of information in this country—whether from news media outlets, the Oval Office, or the CDC—are currently met with, by turns, extreme skepticism or indifference by the American public, making information vetted from a trusted source invaluable. On May 15, two weeks after the “Gossip Work” seminar, Vulture published a feature chronicling how marketing agencies engineer campaigns to shape the cultural narrative by “astroturfing,” or embedding opinions and product placements within real and fake user accounts to gin up interest and manipulate public opinion.3 This cynical strategy is as easily applied to policy as to the next Geese album. An astroturfed political landscape is arguably already in sight.
The presenters of “Gossip Work” proposed an alternate means of navigating a reality that is shaped by willful manipulation of fact. According to their shared point of view, when we gossip, we are not simply idle but instead are doing something, and doing is significantly more hopeful than acquiescing. While “Gossip Work” sometimes drew more heavily from the ambiguous theoretical framings of academia than from lived experience, “Matter of Intelligence” ultimately amounts to a good-faith effort to share and test ideas. Its project is optimistic, grounded in the belief that ideas are worth testing—and that facts, like people, are worth protecting.
