Aesthetic supporters

“I’m more interested in that British journal with women stuffing food down their pants than I am in these photos,” says Duncan MacKenzie during a recent review on Bad at Sports, a local arts–focused podcast (www.badatsports.com).

Hey, at least he’s honest. And funny. That’s exactly what we got when we met up with the Bad at Sports trio of MacKenzie, Richard Holland and Amanda Browder. While cruising in the car, Holland joked, “We made Amanda sign a contract that if she were to quit, she’s not allowed to use the word art within a hundred miles of Chicago.” To which Browder, an optician with an MFA, responded: “I’ll just use fart, instead. ‘I love fart, the fart scene in Chicago….’?”The three artists have covered the, uh, fart scene in Chicago every week for the past year on their Bad at Sports podcast, which just surpassed 30,000 downloads. Past episodes have featured everything from renegade interviews on Nova’s fashion train, to show reviews and interviews with people like Version Festival organizer Ed Marzewski and Artforum critic James Yood, who discussed the state of the city’s art scene after the Art Chicago debacle. They’re actually “mediocre” at sports, but don’t claim any more expertise when it comes to art. Or journalism.

“One of things we really don’t want to be is journalists—because all of that implies a certain amount of responsibility, which we feel we don’t embrace at all,” says Holland, a public interest attorney who has an MFA in sculpture. “We don’t make any claims about being informed or right or anything.”

But the threesome has done a good job of putting its impudent approach in the right context, says MacKenzie, an art professor. “We’re artists and members of the community—not some bizarre curatorial independent body that says, Yay, nay, good, bad. We’re just people in the audience…it’s really the proliferation of every bar conversation we ever have about art,” MacKenzie says. “And we use very noncritical terms—like ew.”

Holland points out that Mackenzie once called a former student of Holland’s “fucking stupid.” (MacKenzie clarifies that he didn’t say the student was fucking stupid—just his work. Holland made him aplogize.) While the group gets its fair share of hate mail, the conversations it instigates and the issues it brings up are pertinent to the local art landscape.

Armed with a portable DAT recorder and microphone, the team rambles around town to “a million” (about five or six) shows weekly, and decides which to include in the final production for that week (the Saturday 24 episode will feature painter Wesley Kimler discussing cheering for the underdog of the Chicago artist via the Internet, and rallying for a new art scene).

The three hosts say some of the best shows, including one in which Northwestern prof Lane Relyea talked about the state of art criticism, stand out because their guest takes a stand on things. “Whether we agree with what they’re saying or not,” MacKenzie says, “it’s that they’re trying to promote a possibility or something that they want to see in the future.” But it still makes for a great show when Browder gets slammed for being drunk—or they talk about how MacKenzie once licked a nicotine-stained stuffed goat. Ew. Tune into Bad at Sports at www.badatsports.com.