Bad at Sports: 1000th Episode Essay, by Kathryn Born
I Have a Funny Way of Making It All About Me, Call it Context
Gen X: Making a Living as an Artist
I graduated from Indiana University in 1994, and then just belly flopped. I thought I had a line on an agent. I didn’t. I had a double major in English AND Creative Writing – a special individualized major program that only one writer would get into every year.
It’s the story of Gen X and the Chicago art world – the Kurt Cobain generation. I get out of school and start waiting tables, working at Barnes & Noble, and then eventually I got a job as an admin in publishing. I had seen a lot of my friends manage to get careers with their English degrees that paid worse than minimum wage, and a few of us worked as strippers for a while. My dad had been a filmmaker, but when it came time for Gen X, it was just over. My dad had warned me. He made a decent living as a filmmaker, but made his retirement money selling the building at 701 Willow after the neighborhood got nicer and nicer.
In 1998, I did a one-year stint doing improv performance art based on Kandinsky at Blue Rider Theater in Pilsen, Chicago. RIP Tim Fiore. Shout out to Nancy Andrea, Michael Montenagro, Blair Thomas and all the puppet arts. Puppetry is a recurring theme and, along with writing, my medium today.
The Software Windfall and Making a Film
My life turned around when I was 28. Unlike a lot of my peers, my “day job” took off. I was good at sales. I’m still a hustler. I was selling software and consulting services in 2000 and made $70,000 in a month—and there were a couple months like that in a row. I won a $50K coin toss. As soon as the third $70,000 month came in, I was like, I’m out. I just took my money, paid my taxes, and got a digital video camera. I made the short film called The Real Reason Monique Became a Vegetarian. My friend Madrid St. Angelo was my co-producer and we’re working on a film together again 25 years later.
Pregnancy, Fox, and Putting Art on the Shelf
Six months after quitting software and making the short, I was pregnant with Fox. And it’s like, oh my God. I literally and figuratively put all the art I wanted to make on the shelf. Boxed up scripts and plans and schedules. And one weekend, I gave up on the birth father being in the picture at all – and the next day airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers.
Lee Bontecou and Staying in the Game
And Bontecou is like, it’s great you called because I just gotta clean out my garage. So these people from MoMA come to help her clean out her garage, and it’s filled with fucking awesome, amazing sculptures that no one had ever seen. MoMA says – we gotta do a big retrospective show. Then the whole thing toured and came to Chicago. I had read about it in Vogue. The person from Vogue who’s interviewing her was like, what do you think you should do – should you focus on making art or should you focus on the baby? And Bontecou is like, Um, really? Yeah, focus on the baby. Like, this is a question? Like, of course, you focus on the fucking kids and you just make art in your free time and whatever happens, happens. And then she ends up having this huge retrospective.
Fox was about two, and I used to put him on my back like a little backpack with his tiny hands around my neck, like a little chimpanzee, and I took him to the show and we walked around the Lee Bontecou solo exhibit – I remember just crying as I looked at each piece, the context of this mom, this artist – and that it all worked out for Bontecou.
And after that I was like, I’m still in the fucking game.
The Pre-Facebook Art Community
Listserve. I was seeing some writing by Michael Workman, Anthony Elms and Juno, who’s dead, and it was a really nice online community, complete with snobs and the first online flame wars about high art. I had this little baby, but what I could do is make plans for what I was going to do when I was back on my feet. While I would clean, I’d listen to Democracy Now and write down ideas for my own media company. I had Post-it notes and notebooks. All those ideas later became Chicago Art Magazine.
But here’s what was so formative as a female artist – one thing I demanded of that community was that we were never going to have a real, representative, art world if single moms and other types of impoverished and marginalized people couldn’t participate. I was in the fight. I still am. I will never forget those four years being plunged into quasi-poverty.
Conceptual Art, Dematerialization, and the Art World
Anyway, I’m studying visual art after college, reading books about contemporary art – all my books had black-and-white pictures of empty gallery rooms, like plywood floors, and then just all white walls. Just empty. One conceptual art piece was an artist who farted in the space and walked out. One book marched through famous artists in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, then basically gave up on individual names in the 1970s and started talking about eras within conceptual art.
So it’s 2004, and I’m like, I’m gonna do a gallery show. Conceptual art.
Robert Barry, to me, was the pinnacle of dematerialized art with his piece called Closed Gallery. They asked him what he wanted to do, with this gallery, and he decides, like, I want to put a sign up that says “Closed Gallery”. I was like, that’s amazing. Oxygen tanks, bending spoons, Chris Burden with the padlocks in the car. How far can you go with this? I loved when Fluxus declared that one does not even have to make art to be an artist.
And I’m wondering about the money side of things: how do collectors buy this stuff? Like, how do you buy that piece of paper that says “Closed Gallery”? How do you own it? How do you buy performance art? Buy the video? But that’s buying a video…
So I designed a gallery exhibit called The Show That Wasn’t There
At the time, I was questioning: what is a gallery show? What is so important about the physical show? Does the show exist just so you can take pictures and post it on a website? And if so, why not just photoshop some pictures and upload it?
I planned a conceptual, digital art show called “The Show That Wasn’t There”: a white-wall gallery with empty frames. The sign in front was going to say Art Exhibit: The Show That Wasn’t There.
I soon realized there was no way a Chicago gallery was going to let me do this show. Plus, I’m a working single mom. Unworkable. So I start to get some frames and then I’m like, “Why?” – so I use my bootleg photo software and just mock up a photo with about 20 empty frames of various styles and sizes hung on a wall (wood, metal, etc.).
And then I’m on the listserve like, here you go, why is this not digital conceptual art? Why don’t I get to join the boy’s club? Because I’m a working single mom? I’m not allowed in? Because I didn’t go to art school? Because I have to have a regular job? Because my writing style isn’t academic and easy to read?
Instead of a gallery show, I did a mockup. When that crashed, I told the story at gallery events. That, too, is a type of conceptual art. My intention is to be performing a work; therefore, it’s an artwork. I am a conceptual visual artist, and my medium is telling stories. Conceptual art is sort of the quantum border-crossing between pictures and language. But that’s another essay.
And then I’m like, “How can an artist sell a piece like this and earn a living?” And then a big flame war.
The next day, there was a posting about Bad at Sports, a new podcast.
Joining Bad at Sports
They needed people. I wrote. We met up, collaborated for a couple years, and the rest is history. Duncan was like, great, we need lots of help with everything from recording and then even things like sending out emails to the email list. This was pre-Mailchimp and newsletter software.
It was a huge pain in the ass, but when that first email went out, we were a hit. Bad at Sports was an overnight sensation – nationally and even globally to some extent, like Mark Staff Brandal in Switzerland.
The Absolutely Epic Fucking Mailing List
We had this convoluted system. I still remember it was like BadatSports05@Gmail (dot) com., BadatSports06@Gmail (dot) com, Bad at Sports 07, etc. We got this massive list from someone—our Jack and the Beanstalk list. It was current. It was everyone in the art world, the who’s who.
And the email copy itself was inspired, if I may say so myself, since I edited it. We talked about the guests that week. It was the first time I felt like I was part of a visual arts and art writing collaboration – a little famous. I was finally in the high art club.
For two years I did that miserable mailing almost every week, cutting and pasting 200 emails at a time into 20 email addresses. I was married and pregnant with my daughter by then, and I STILL GOT THE MAILING OUT THAT WEEK. And I never let anyone forget it.
But the miracle of it? You absolutely could not unsubscribe. Because the list shifted slightly with unsubscribes and additions, one episode you would get an email from badatsports5 and sometimes badatsports8 …. And I just remember someone writing and saying “Mother of God, why can’t I get off this list? What kind of wizardry is this! This mailing!”
The technology of podcasting was not easy. The microphones, the data storage, the batteries. But what was unique about Bad at Sports was the interviewing structure that they keep to this day: two people interviewing one artist. So Duncan and Richard (et al.) would keep the artist talking, but give the interviewers space to think about the next question.
Interviewing is an art. And everyone wants to be interviewed. I just saw that in 2005 I posted something on “Digg.” It wasn’t ’90s AOL internet, but it was before social media took over.
The Canon and the Art of Talking About Art
After interviews, Duncan and I would sometimes sit in the car talking about the art world. Duncan was and is an absolute genius at zooming out and understanding the big picture (the macrocosm) of the art world, and zooming in to see the individual artist in practice. “The canon” was a phrase I learned from Duncan. Bad at Sports has taken a snapshot of an artist in the moment – and for an hour, tilts its head and sees every angle and perspective. Duncan MacKenzie has encyclopedic knowledge of art, but also unending curiosity and an ability to connect ideas. He knows the contemporary artists practicing in the Midwest. Zoom in and zoom out: the struggle, the artistry, the novelty, the unpopular, the popular—he could see both sides. He had an eye.
And as Matthew Collings says, Please, God let it all mean something.
Bad at Sports was rolling by 2006. Appointed by no one: we had appointed ourselves. And maybe that’s the beauty of podcasting: you don’t need anyone’s permission.
All you need is a microphone and a data storage device.
The Invention of Flame Wars
“The Comments Section of the Bad at Sports Blog is like the whorehouse of the online art world.” – Kathryn Born to Claudine Ise in Conversation – 2008
Most everyone, including me, was on their absolute worst behavior in these newly invented “blog comments section.” My totem animal is a junkyard dog. I had sharpened my moderator claws while working for Neuros, an open-source media player.
There’s a saying: “the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.”
Somebody at BAS tried to calm everyone down. But this was a spawning point in the online art world, and it was wonderful. For the first time in a while, contemporary art was exciting. Art was worth the fight.
Amanda Browder and Tornado Plushies
Shout-out to Amanda Browder for how fucking cool her textile, stuffed tornadoes were. I just looked her up and she seems to be weaving fabric into massive buildings using cranes. That’s the Amanda I know. You go.
My favorite Amanda memory: I needed to write something down so I took my kid’s oversized orange crayon out of my bag, because it was the first writing utensil I could reach. Amanda said, “That crayon is amazing.” Motherhood was a novelty in the gallery scene in 2005. I was one of the only former single moms I knew.
Vocalo, ChicagoNow, and the 2008 Split
In 2008, I transitioned out of Bad at Sports.
Context: Chicago Public Radio, WBEZ, our NPR affiliate – there was a frenzy trying to get on the “content” gravy train, and they made WBEZ launch Vocolo, starring my now-close friend, talented audio artist Jesse Seay. I pitched Bad at Sports to the radio station. The Chicago Tribune was also jumping on the “content” gravy train, asking bloggers to write for free—wait, not free, $0.001 per click, about $2.56 a month. Classes on what we now call “clickbait.”
ChicagoNow, the Tribune blog, was a dumpster fire. I have never seen journalism as chaotic as it was in 2008. Again, artists were being devalued in new ways. We started Art Talk Chicago, and within about eight months I believed I had a strategy that might work if I went out on my own: Chicago Art Map, Chicago Art Magazine and Chicago Art Machine. I had a background in sales, so I was going to get advertisers.
Deanna Isaacs wrote a full-page article about me leaving Chicago Now, my start with Bad at Sports and starting Chicago Art Magazine.
Money, the Split, and the Path of the Thief
There are no hard feelings about me leaving Bad at Sports in 2008. To this day, I am still all about the benjamins.
And again, what I learned from Bad at Sports is you can appoint yourself. You can publish your own work, start your own project. Now that is commonplace, but it was radical then.
Chicago Art Map and Chicago Art Magazine
In 2009, I started Chicago Art Map (gone), Google Maps-based software where we logged and searched more than 300 galleries, including over 50 apartment galleries. The data showed a revolving door: the average gallery closed within three years.
Chicago Art Magazine started in 2009, online only. I was able to give being a professional in the art world another shot. I got another chance. We had 40 authors, three managing editors and published 700 articles between 2009 and 2012. We featured a total of 2,000 artists because of roundups. For example, when I turned 40, we did a series, “40 Artists Over 40,” and for once celebrated mid-career artists.
We launched “The Friday Night Army,” which unleashed 20 paid art writers to run out on the same gallery opening night and cover 20 art galleries at a time. The more unusual and overlooked the gallery, the more you got paid to cover it. We covered street art, reviewing graffiti and street art, wrote some very unpopular satire, and covered South Side galleries as much as North Side galleries.
We got laminated ID badges that said Chicago Art Magazine, and we were drunk with power. We got into all events for free for quite a while.
As always, I got us into trouble. The other critics thought I was a blasphemous, untrained hack, believing that artists themselves were just as capable as critics of describing their own work. We talked about business, money, gallery representation. It was kind of the only magazine about the business of the Chicago Art scene. I tried to sell ads. I kept us afloat and every writer got paid $50 for their article or review.
Go in the Garden and Eat Worms
Chicago Art Magazine talked about money and making a living. It said the quiet thing out loud. One of our 40 paid writers was a curator who said, “Everyone in the art world says they don’t care about money, but as soon as they are behind closed doors, the first question is ‘How much will you pay me?’ ” Let’s call that person TH.
A couple months later, TH tells me, “You’re not going to believe this. Forty art writers and critics hate you so much, they held an online forum to talk about how awful you are. How much you suck.”
I was hurt. These were my respected colleagues. Some were important names. Then TH said, “And I have the full transcript.” To this day, I am always grateful for my spies. In that transcript, it was what I expected. I’m a hack, I make everyone look bad, disgrace to the industry, downfall of mankind, etc. And then toward the end, someone had said, “Well, Kathryn Born is certainly an art critic if forty of us got together to say what a horrible art critic she is. When have we done that for any other writer?”
So that cheered me up. Maybe it’s the narcissist in me, but I’ve worn that transcript as a badge of honor. You get to a point where you rock the boat so hard, and you are such a persistent, licensed disruptor of the status quo —such a total nuisance—that maybe you really are a powerful art critic after all.
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
In 2012, I had health issues and shut it down. It was actually a relief. Struggling businesses in the arts are incredibly stressful.
I ran Chicago Art Magazine from 2009 to 2012. When I walked away, I closed the door in peace. The gallery scene had a simple supply-and-demand problem: too few collectors.
Some of the writers tried to keep it going until they realized it meant getting on the horn and trying to get art galleries to buy ads. I had built all the sites and worked as the admin (the editors were the uploaders). I kept the site up as an archive for ten years. Then a virus took it down. I couldn’t restore Chicago Art Magazine from GoDaddy’s backups. Fuck GoDaddy and the enshittification of web design.
The greatest gift of that second chance to “make it in the art world” was closure. I walked away from trying to make money in fine art. I always described it as “It wasn’t just that we weren’t making money, no one was making money.” I used to believe that if I hadn’t had a child, my life would have gone in a totally different direction. Closing Chicago Art Magazine taught me the odds of making a living selling paintings or books.
Chicago is a little worse because of our culture’s disdain for advertising, but it’s bad everywhere. In 2014, I went to Barnes & Noble, just could not find the fiction section and said “Fuck it, I’m making a video game.”
Through Bad at Sports, I had all these opportunities: Chicago Tribune, NPR, a two-book publishing deal. I had a book published through Northern Illinois University Press called The Essential New Art Examiner. I met Terri Griffith through BAS and she did 90% of the work putting that book together. Through Chicago Art Magazine, I met Derek Guthrie and began talking about a book on The New Art Examiner, which had closed in 2002 after a 20-year run.
Speaking of Terri Griffith, my second favorite episode of BAS is Terri explaining the word “Queer” in, like, 2008. She is an icon who is always ahead of her time. I embraced that word for myself immediately. Switchgrass Press at NIU picked up my novel, The Blue Kind, one year later. Getting it published was a dream come true. Huge shout-out to Joanna Topor MacKenzie, the best book editor I have ever worked with. After the novel, my life was unchanged. No second book deal.
The game was called Potion. You can see the trailer on my portfolio page. It was grueling to make and it barely worked. With my newfound artistic freedom and vibe coding, I just might go back and fix it. Video games are the lowest paying sector of the technology world … why? Because it touches on arts and culture. Games, entertainment, you’re seeing the pattern.
Today, I say, “I couldn’t make it as a professional artist, so I settled for being a pharmaceutical executive.”
Chicago Art Magazine Becomes Starve Magazine
Starve Magazine: You Don’t Get to Starve Us
Starve is a satirical magazine about humanitarian aid and AI. It’s a rebrand of Chicago Art Magazine, not a new topic, because it’s the same fucking point:
Wealthy humans have a funny way of not giving a shit about poor people and turning a blind eye. And they certainly don’t think that re-circulating their wealth is the answer. Chicagoland is famous for wealthy neighborhoods blocks away from poor ones, and their annual budgets per student has thousands of dollars in disparity. These same people protest ICE on the weekend.
I didn’t to write about corruption in the art world anymore. There are bigger fish to fry. I closed Chicago Art Magazine because the art world fights over crumbs. And we fight amongst ourselves as things get worse. I’m not a fan of Meow Wolf’s art, but I am a huge fan of their workers’ union.
Artists still aren’t coming together to fight the AI tech oligarchs. But that’s a different essay, too.
So I no longer write about the ghetto of the art world, I write about Gorom Camp in South Sudan – and it’s the same editorial mission. Why do we really believe that some people just deserve to be poor? Why does the Gates Foundation ask Africans to volunteer? And like the art world, when you are critical of philanthropy, powerful people come out of the woodwork to pounce on you. As they say, when billionaires all agree on something, they get their way and no amount of voting can change that.
Which brings me back to those Post-it notes I wrote as a single mom, dreaming about an art magazine and a media company.
What Gets Lost to History
When you finally have the time and resources to make art-making your #1 priority, you realize that it wasn’t just always about time and resources. It’s wonderful to make art during your best hours and not after an exhausting day in the office.
So This Is Where I Leave You
As we all look to let go of shame, there’s no shame in talking about monetization. It’s an important question in the age of GenAI and DALL-E. Artists’ work has been taken at an enormous scale in the name of technological advancement.
From the arts, to cancer, to Africa and every single industry— we’re just getting ass raped at this point. I tell the refugees I help in Gorom Camp in South Sudan: Don’t blame UNHCR. Blame Elon Musk. “Starving Artists” – it was a template they extended outward.
Culture moves forward. The world changes. We have to let go of old truths that aren’t working for us. Burning Man, Wikipedia – rules and ideas that served us in the ’90s have to be updated. For the sequel to “Live Nude Girls Unite,” I wrote in the production plans: “We are not putting out a product that has the phrase ‘Nude Girls.’ We are calling it ‘Live Pole Dancers Unite.’”
And if this essay weren’t so fucking long already, I’d talk more about puppet theater, which is where I landed in 2026. Now I’m working on film.
I started a work called “Dear 2116, Our Letter to the Future” – it’s a massive database and this archive can be a part of it – as we pick up a can with string and try to explain to our great-great descendants what our lives were like, when the wind has blown everything else away.