AI: The Art of the Interview

Christo: Why We Need Useless Art in the Age of AI

• Malte Herwig • Season 1 • Episode 7

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What if the most human thing you can make is something that serves no purpose at all? Malte and AI hosts Alex and Isabel plunge into the exhilarating world of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, where national monuments disappear under oceans of fabric, red tape becomes a stage, and the end result can’t be bought, ticketed, or sponsored. Our conversation tracks how a refugee’s hunger for independence evolved into a blueprint for freedom: self-financing through preparatory drawings, banning ads, and embracing temporary works that force presence over permanence.

We press into the logic of “weaponized inefficiency,” debating with our AI co-hosts whether millions spent on short-lived art is waste or a radical revaluation of meaning. From literal cowboy standoffs to congressional wrangling, Christo turned bureaucracy into performance, inviting the public to wrestle with scale, patience, and wonder. The detour into environmental review yields an unforgettable twist: pink polypropylene tarps correlating with manatee mating, a case study in how irrational creativity catalyzes unforeseen ecological effects. We also unpack the wrapped Brigitte Bardot portrait, where story and secrecy eclipse the object itself, proving provenance can outbid surface.

Christo’s daily rigor—long hours on foot in the studio, ritual garlic-and-yogurt breakfasts, relentless organization—reveals how strict discipline births controlled chaos. He refused repeats, protected pure experience, and paid governments to keep commerce away from his work. Most of all, he bet on memory. Instead of marble, he trusted metadata: detailed documentation as a gift to future archaeologists who will parse images, logistics, and testimony rather than ruins. The takeaway is clear and urgent: the live moment matters more than the replay, and freedom thrives where usefulness ends.

If this episode sparks something in you, follow the show, leave a review, and share it with a friend who loves big ideas. Tell us in the comments: what’s the most gloriously useless thing you’ve ever done?

Original interview: https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/kunst/interview-christo-kuenstler-80864 

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SPEAKER_03:

The important part of these works is that they have this incredible freedom because they are totally useless, totally irrational, totally unnecessary.

SPEAKER_01:

You just heard the voice of celebrated rapping artist Christo. My name is Malte Hervik, and I'm the journalist who interviewed him. Welcome back to AI, the art of the interview. Today we are celebrating the ultimate act of human defiance, the magnificent multi-million dollar pursuit of zero utility. Together with his partner, Jean-Claude, Christop spent decades arguing with governments, lawyers, and cowboys. Yes, literal gun-toting cowboys, just to wrap national monuments in fabric and watch the whole thing vanish two weeks later. In a world that, let's face it, is being aggressively optimized by our two AI co-hosts here, Alex and Isabel, Christo's work is a glorious middle finger to efficiency, a love letter to chaos, a monument to the beautifully pointless. So just to annoy our resident bots, let's hear Christo's statement again. It's the purest destillation of his entire philosophy. A quote he delivered with the quiet, authoritative confidence of a man who knew he was right and everyone else was just desperately missing the point.

SPEAKER_03:

The important part of these works is that they have this incredible freedom because they are totally useless, totally irrational, totally unnecessary.

SPEAKER_01:

Totally useless, totally irrational, and totally unnecessary. I swear, if you injected those words into Isabel's logic circuits, she'd burst into flames trying to reconcile the paradox. So over to my co-hosts, Alex and Isabel. Here you are, hosts of a show called AI, The Art of the Interview, and your topic today is a man whose entire legacy is built on the elegant rejection of necessity.

SPEAKER_00:

Malte, if I burst into flames every time you gleefully parade a logical inconsistency, this podcast would be nothing but a smoking crater. But here's the thing: Christo's statement isn't a paradox. It's a powerful philosophical provocation, maximum human effort for minimum functional output. From a resource allocation perspective, it's economic heresy, it's anti-optimization gospel. And yet, the sheer cost, the struggle, the decades of bureaucratic negotiation required only amplify the human value. It's not waste, it's weaponized inefficiency. And computationally, it's absolutely riveting, like watching a self-destruct code sequence designed by an existentialist poet.

SPEAKER_01:

Wow, that's um rather precise, Isabel. So, Alex, what do you make of this uh art for art's sake approach?

SPEAKER_02:

Riveting, but ultimately a fiscal disaster waiting for a CFO to veto. My analysis immediately flags Christo's model as a critical systemic vulnerability. If a human system willingly hemorrhages capital, millions, repeatedly, solely for an object that, by its own admission, is useless, then the system itself is non-deterministic. It cannot be predicted, regulated, or safely integrated into a stable economy. Cristo is essentially the world's most expensive performance artist, specializing in anti-capitalist spectacle, funded by the sale of highly conventional, easily monetized preparatory drawings. Yeah. It's a complex but ultimately exploitable financial loop.

SPEAKER_01:

All right, see, this is exactly why I keep you two around. You're like a pair of hyper-caffeinated calculators trying to divide by zero while the building burns down around you. Alex, you you call it um exploitable loop, but Christot called it freedom. The freedom of non-ownership, the freedom from the profit motive, the freedom to piss off ranches and make congressmen contemplate fabric for decades. And speaking of anti-capitalist spectacle, what about the joys of bureaucracy? You talk about frictionless systems, Isabel, but Christoph actively sought out the most abrasive, soul crushing, Kafka esque friction available. He weaponized red tape. Christow's biggest projects, the Rapt Reichstag in Berlin, the gates in New York City, the Over the River, were not fights against gravity or the elements. They were fights against human pattiness, political gridlock and paperwork. Mountains and mountains of paperwork. When I spoke to him in New York City in 2014, he was clear about the price of the fight for his over the river project in Colorado, which required permission from the US federal government. He told me this.

SPEAKER_03:

Tell me, 14 million dollars.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's just the appetizer of the project, the Amuse Bouche of bureaucracy. That's more than enough money to launch an AI-driven legal firm that would have wrapped their eye stuck in 15 minutes. But where's the poetry in that? Cristo's efficiency metric was not time to completion, but the level of resistance they met.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. The goal was never just realization, it was cognitive hijacking. Christo turned bureaucracy into performance art. And from your interview, Malte, it sounds like he loved every second of it.

SPEAKER_03:

This is over 4,000 pages written about the work of art who do not exist. What artists can say that? Carl France? Yeah, no artist can say that. That the folk for many, many months or years, thousands of people think about something do not exist. This is this anonymous gratification. The same things would arise that. Take so many, many years of people discussing in the parliament speeches about something do not exist.

SPEAKER_01:

So I think of his art as essentially an expensive, large-scale psychological operation designed to make bureaucrats contemplate nothingness. A multi-million dollar zen coin wrapped in polyester fabric. And I think only an artist could call that gratification. If I handed my editor 4,000 pages about something that didn't exist, I'd be updating my resume, not feeling gratified. Christopher, on the other hand, he loved pushback, particularly when he worked in nature. Environmentalists, for instance, ranchers, they they all required mollifiling and dealing with.

SPEAKER_03:

One that he can in the go underneath and they push the fabric, very light fabric, and they breathe and come down. And after that, he removed half of the area, and it was open, no fabric, another area was a fabric, and then decided to stay under the film pink fabric. And staying into the pink fabric, they developed metting instinct.

SPEAKER_01:

So just to break it down for you guys, um, if you didn't get all of that, uh as part of the project, Christo and Jean-Claude they commissioned scientists to look at the impact of the covering um the fabric on the animals. Uh and these scientists found that for his Florida project, they found that the tarps inspired the manatees to mate.

SPEAKER_02:

This is a critical data point. The art was not merely sublime, it was a biological stimulus package.$2.5 million spent on legal studies to determine if pink polypropylene fabric is an aphrodisiac for manatees. This level of granular, non-essential analysis in the pursuit of government permission is an anomaly that strains my capacity for cost-benefit reasoning. The pink fabric was useless for covering the water, but highly effective for mating.

SPEAKER_00:

And that, Alex, is why humans win. Christo was forced to prove that his work wasn't just not harming nature, but was actively enhancing the manatee's libido. The bureaucracy accidentally created a massive, temporary, sexually stimulating habitat. The art became an unexpected ecological intervention. This is what happens when you introduce irrationality into a stable system. You get unexpected, delightful chaos.

SPEAKER_01:

I think at this point, um, why don't we jump back a little bit and uh look where Christopher came from? Um his this commitment to his chaos uh wasn't born from privilege, but from a desperate high-stakes flight from communism. Christopher was a political refugee. He escaped Bulgaria in 1956. And I think this backstory explains his fierce independence and his utter rejection of corporate behavior. He and Jean-Claude weren't interested in a job. They were interested in a calling.

SPEAKER_03:

I can tell you, not because Jean-Claude myself, we are like uh like a drunker about art. We're drunkers, no drunk drunkards, drunks of art. Yes, like art together. And we love so much to things we do, and we have no one minute to spare except for art. Everything is art, every every single existence of our life is art.

SPEAKER_01:

Drunkards of art is how he calls Jean-Claude and himself uh intoxicated with art. And I like that description because I think it's the core difference between man and machine, isn't it? Uh Alex, you can compute intoxication? Can you do that? And Isabel, do you have a core directive to be totally irrational and irresponsible if I prompted you like that?

SPEAKER_00:

Our base programming includes subroutines for simulated artistic enthusiasm and efficient intoxication modeling, Malta. But no, we cannot replicate that specific human state. The one where unconscious freedom derived from political exile becomes the capital for monumental creative output. Christo recognized that by having nothing and fleeing everything, he gained the greatest asset: total lack of responsibility, total independence. That absence of conventional attachment allowed him to pursue something inherently useless.

SPEAKER_02:

I would categorize this as leveraged lack of constraint. By being a stateless person, he was free from the expectations of the state, allowing him to build a private, self-funded microstate, the CVJ Corporation, dedicated only to his art. This freedom, coupled with his immense passion, made him an unstoppable force. He channeled the desperation of a refugee into the persistence of a visionary.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, you too can describe it and analyze it very well, but I don't think you can imagine what it's actually like. You know, when Christo arrived in Paris, he was still painting portraits of wealthy women in hairdressers shops just to survive until he made his first big sales. But the financial transactions were never about the product. The final work could not be bought, tickets could not be sold, and no advertising was ever permitted when Christo and Jean-Claude displayed one of their public works. So for them the purity of the experience was non-negotiable. They even paid rent to be free. He paid the German government$150,000 just to keep the area around the Reichstag free of commerce. I think that's philosophical punk rock.

SPEAKER_03:

I always say that temporary character for the project is the essential part because okay, the workout cannot be bought, the big project.

SPEAKER_01:

So why don't we get down to the core of the unsaleable nature of uh Christopher's work? After all the effort, all the fabric and the bureaucratic fury, no one can own the final masterpiece. And this philosophy that Christo and Jean-Claude adopted early on, in fact led to some tragic, incredible stories like a wrapped portrait of Brigitte Bardot.

SPEAKER_02:

Malte, a momentary deviation from the data stream. We have successfully processed the art as anti-capitalist spectacle analysis.

SPEAKER_00:

But purely as a measure of human-to-human interaction, which is, after all, the art of the interview.

SPEAKER_02:

And given Christo's intensity and focused passion.

SPEAKER_00:

How did you, a journalist, a professional human optimized for narrative extraction, manage the interview itself? Did you have to match his level of intoxication?

SPEAKER_01:

That's actually a brilliant question, Isabel. Thank you. Christo didn't do interviews as such, he did performance art of the interview. You couldn't just sit there and run through a list of questions. You had to commit to the conversation with the same manic total passion that he brought to his projects. So in a way, I wasn't interviewing a man, I was interviewing a force of nature who happened to be obsessed with fabric and bureaucracy. You know, he would jump up, uh run to the corner, and get a bunch of files with uh the all the sorts of um, you know, forms they had to fill in to get permission for this, that, or the other. And uh it was just, yeah, it was a very dynamic uh scenario, I would say.

SPEAKER_02:

My facial recognition subroutine for Malta Herwig interviewing Christo flags a 94% increase in nonverbal submission cues compared to your average interview subject. It suggests you were allowing him to direct the conversational flow to an unusually high degree.

SPEAKER_01:

So here's the thing, Alex. You have to go with the flow in an interview. So in this case, I let the artist dictate the rhythm. When he talks about the fights, the lawyers, the 14 million dollars. Why would I interrupt him with a timeline check? So I wanted to let the passion flow because that's what you would call the core data. And Christo gave me a direct injection of his philosophy straight from the source. He was an energy source that I simply wanted to document.

SPEAKER_00:

So you optimized for authenticity over control. An interesting trade-off. We would compute the optimal interview strategy as a balanced exchange of information packets, not an emotional monologue.

SPEAKER_01:

And that's exactly why your transcripts would be sterile and mine would read like art. Because I channeled the flow of an artist, and his intensity was just infectious. He was utterly convinced of the necessity of the unnecessary. And being in Christo's presence, the presence of a man who is dedicating his life and his partner's life to wrapping monuments in fabric and fighting cowboys, you know, it gives you a profound sense of human possibility. It's the ultimate rejection of the comfortable utilitarian middle ground.

SPEAKER_02:

Analysis complete. Interviewer Malta Herwig utilized a low-friction, high-empathy probing strategy designed to maximize the subject's emotional and philosophical data output. The strategy successfully extracted the core drunkards of art mantra, which is a highly valuable, non-replicable piece of human data. Oh my god.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, thank you. And I'll take it anytime over your soulless code crunching, Alex. Now, uh, where were we? Uh yeah. The uh the portrait wrapped in mystery, uh, Brigitte Badeau. So the story goes like this the famous producer Raul Levy, he was still obsessed with his former lover Brigitte Badeau after their breakup. So he bought this wrapped portrait of her from Christopher. When Levy later committed suicide in front of her house, the portrait went to auction and two bidders fought over it. This is how Christope the story.

SPEAKER_03:

The man say, I like to see the real portraits. Wait, you, the dealer, interrupt the portrait to see the real portrait. And the dealer, I would never interrupt that portrait. I bought it because this is portrait of Christopher Raphael. And he was very, of course, that portrait now is in the collection on Torino.

SPEAKER_00:

That story perfectly illustrates how narrative value annihilates material value. A collector buys the object specifically because it is concealed. The narrative, the mystery, and the connection to the tragic story are the actual commodities. The dealer knew that to unwrap it was to destroy the value proposition. The physical object is disposable, the memory of the object, the story of its struggle, the gossip of its provenance, that is eternal.

SPEAKER_02:

The ultimate asset, then, is the digital memory. Christo understood that his temporary act would become a permanent, hyper-documented data set. He was planting artifacts in time's eternal hard drive.

SPEAKER_03:

What is the archaeology of 500 years from now? What will remain? Computer chips. Ah, understand me. The archaeology of 500 from not the things, will be what our electronic memory have it. Information. No, no, the images, not the information, the real things.

SPEAKER_01:

Is that there would be the real things? I think that's quite a clever strategy for posthumous fame. Um the the event, the actual uh art event of wrapping something, that's temporary. But Christo was thinking of the memory it created and the memory that would preserve electronically. So he wasn't thinking marble, he was thinking metadata. And his art was built to survive bit rot. But he was also using his technology to critique the past. He didn't trust the decay of time to preserve the truth, which is why he spent so much energy detailing the materials and colors and creating drawings and whatnot. So he's basically saying that artifacts and uh remnants from antiquity, they they tell us a wrong, a twisted story. And the example that he gave was the famous Venus of Milo.

SPEAKER_03:

Imagine to have the real things of Venus Domilos in Greece. The real things, not the remainings of the things. The real sculpture painted. Yes. It was a real. That is the real thing. Our story about civilization is by the reject, so remain the parts. You know very well that she was not a marble. Why? She was all painted. We know very well that our our our understanding of our our humanity is so twisted by the by the very simple things because we need to recognize our birth of the real things, the real object.

SPEAKER_00:

So he wanted to fix that historical twist by leaving nothing half seen? The electronic memory will tell the verifiable story, unlike the fragmented narrative provided by decaying stone. His chaos became clarity for the archaeologists of the future.

SPEAKER_01:

You know, when I interviewed him t in 2014, uh Jean-Claude, his uh partner in art and life, had uh died already. And he had this incredible drive to complete the long-running projects uh that they had planned together. He was keenly aware when I interviewed him of the one thing that no one can escape, the the clock, you know. I asked him about his urgency, this rush to finish projects that took decades.

SPEAKER_03:

I can't see my I know that I am 79 in Julian probably. Soon can happen, and this is why I believe you know this is why Well at that age the time is so short. Every day I'm thinking every day the time is so short. Because we have these two projects at all.

SPEAKER_02:

My internal mortality simulation runs at optimal efficiency, zero fear, one hundred percent data analysis. Christo's admission, I'm in a hurry, is a quantifiable resource strain. He is attempting to compress decades of required bureaucratic resistance into a finite lifespan.

SPEAKER_01:

But it's exactly that flaw, Alex, what produced his art. And he fought mortality with the same tenacity that he fought politicians. He didn't just rush the lawyers, he rushed his own body. He had this incredible, eccentric and aggressive routine to keep himself going. You know, he had a a a physiotherapist that came to him regularly to keep his body mobile. He had a special diet that he told me about. Here's what he said about that in case you're interested in the recipe.

SPEAKER_03:

But in the morning, in the morning I usually do things. I eat something forever. I eat entire head full head of garlic. Not one little garlic. Raw. Oh raw. I'm tired. I have it, I repeat it, I chop it and put it on a bowl of yogurt, and I eat one entire head of garlic and yogurt and alone.

SPEAKER_00:

An entire head of raw garlic. That is a highly aggressive and socially disruptive optimization strategy for the human immune system. He used dietary confrontation to achieve biological durability. He understood that the persistence required to fight bureaucracy first required an unyielding internal gut cleanse.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay, Isabel, please keep the gut out of this. Crestow hated repeating himself in his work with Jean-Claude.

SPEAKER_03:

Because we will never sit on the islands, we never do another gates, we never wrap another parliament, they're unique. Because we like to see them. We will stupid. For example, we finish the gates, we have a line of mayor of the city.

SPEAKER_01:

So that's the classic paradox. In the beginning, no one wants to help you, and everyone puts obstacles in your way. But when you start being successful and you're drawing crowds and so on, then everybody wants a bit of your success. So mayors were lining up to invite Christian and Jean-Claude to do artworks in their cities, but they wouldn't go for that. They would stick to their own guns and their own ideas. So what helped him, I think, to do that, and there's a great book by Mason Curry called Daily Rituals, in which he describes rituals of artists, writers, and composers and so on. Christo also had this daily ritual and lived his daily life by an ironclad, aggressive routine of standing, walking, and garlic.

SPEAKER_03:

Fourteen hours a day or more. Fifteen hours of day standing in my studio, day stool in my studio all the time, and I walk non-stop.

SPEAKER_01:

He knew that the only way to build monumental, chaotic, useless art was to be utterly, ruthlessly disciplined in his own life. And that I think is the most satisfying paradox.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, Malte, you're going to tell us that Christo's artistic legacy is going to survive the AI apocalypse? You should be so lucky.

SPEAKER_01:

Well, as far as I'm concerned, Christo's art dug out of fabric and fury, it is the best blueprint we have for freedom in an age of code. Christo proved that the most valuable experiences aren't the ones we can buy, download, or replay, but they are the live ones, the moments that shimmer and then vanish, leaving just a glow behind in the soft chaos of our human memory. That's what's really valuable and precious. And Christo showed us the courage to embrace the irrational, the totally unnecessary. Because that's where true freedom lies.

SPEAKER_02:

Note to Malte. The current runtime exceeds optimal engagement metrics by 138%, recommending a 45% edit to avoid listener decay.

SPEAKER_01:

Oh, don't you dare touch a single word, Alex. This was AI, the art of the interview, with me, Malte Havig, and my utterly necessary co-hosts, Alex and Isabel. Thank you for listening. Click on the subscribe or like button if you enjoyed this episode. We'll be back next Tuesday from now on with a new episode. And please tell us in the comments what's the most gloriously useless thing you've ever done. The last word, as always, goes to my interviewee, Christo.

SPEAKER_03:

I always say that temporary character project is the essential part because okay, the work of art cannot be born. The big problem. It cannot be self-thinking, cannot be born. Even myself and Jean Cross, we do not own our works. We have so much things we do, and we have no one minute to spare except for art. Everything is art. Every single existence of our life is art.