To Grouse and Kvech 1: We Are the World

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/09/27

 Alexis Rockman (b. 1962, New York City) is a leading painter of the Anthropocene, known for richly researched images that reimagine natural history through ecology and genetics. A School of Visual Arts graduate, he combines fieldwork with studio invention, sometimes using soil and organic materials for his “field drawings.” Museum highlights include A Fable for Tomorrow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He contributed concept art to Ang Lee’s Life of Pi. Signature projects—Manifest Destiny, The Great Lakes Cycle, and Oceanus—stage dramas of adaptation, collapse, and resilience, marrying scientific attention to detail with a storyteller’s moral sense of consequence and scale.

In this interview with Scott Douglas Jacobsen, Rockman reflects on UN climate diplomacy, his skepticism about political will, and the contraction of the art world. He contrasts art’s precarious economics with its enduring symbolic value, engages with AI’s creative disruptions, and emphasizes how cycles of expansion and collapse shape both global politics and the contemporary art industry.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, welcome to round one of To Grouse and Kvetch, formerly titled—what was it? To Bitch and To Moan? One proposal was…

Alexis Rockman: Whining and Complaining? Yeah, I don’t whine and complain. Bitching and Moaning? 

Jacobsen: That’s right. Today, our source is United Nations News, dated September 16. UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged world leaders to “get serious — and deliver,” as they began arriving in New York for High-Level Week at the 80th session of the UN General Assembly. He’s been around for a while. He’s been active in politics for decades—Portugal’s prime minister in the 1990s and later UN High Commissioner for Refugees—so these kinds of calls have been made before by leaders like Ban Ki-moon and Kofi Annan. Is this a routine you’ve seen before?

Rockman: Yes, and it’s also routine to get stuck in traffic when you’re in the city.

Jacobsen: How much of this diplomacy works, and how much does it not?

Rockman: You’re asking me? Yes. Let’s just say I’ve never been more skeptical—that’s my answer. The issues—what are the issues? Where is climate change in all this? These things feel petty in comparison, as far as I’m concerned.

Jacobsen: Why do you think climate change has taken a back seat?

Rockman: I think it’s extremely—well, to quote the uncharismatic leader Al Gore… I can’t even remember the name of his movie. An Inconvenient Truth–and the sequel An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. There’s no will. 

Jacobsen: Do you think part of this has to do with the United States—relative to other nations—experiencing some decline, while also making conscious geopolitical moves to withdraw from parts of the international stage?

Rockman: How about it’s withdrawing from the Age of Reason? Sure, that’s fair. That doesn’t help, but I don’t see much happening elsewhere either. Let’s just say it’s an insult added to disaster.

Jacobsen: In his opening messages around High-Level Week, the Secretary-General flagged peace and security, climate, responsible innovation and tech governance, gender equality, development financing, and UN reform among the priorities for this session. We also keep hearing about restructuring pressures tied to funding shortfalls—major players reducing or delaying contributions. This was mentioned outside of chambers when I was at the United Nations in Geneva, covering some events in the Summer. What are your impressions of those priorities actually advancing in a meaningful way when the wealthiest states are stepping back from multilateral institutions? Reduced funding, restructuring—and yet the same recurring goals year after year.

Rockman: What do you want me to say?

Jacobsen: We are all one.

Rockman: We are the world.

Jacobsen: I can pull up the Deepak Chopra quote generator.

Rockman: Scott, I don’t know, man. I might not be the right person for a pithy conversation about this stuff. I really am just… Let’s just say there’s a level of futility when it comes to even having conversations about this. Having to face children and tell them how bleak it is is no walk in the park. Let’s just put it that way.

Jacobsen: Now, arguments are made about the central role of music in activism. In the 1990s and 2000s, they were huge on “We Are the World” type of music. Michael Jackson had his whole thing. He had his other issues, but he had that public thing. These were sort of heartwarming efforts, let’s say. People had this image of a Care Bear version of art and activism, where you just shoot care out of your heart and things magically improve. What’s the state of art and activism now?

Rockman: Well, I don’t really know, because I don’t really see that much activism in the art industry at this point. One thing you might not be aware of is that, for the last couple of months, there’s been a sense of dread and terror in the art industry, because the perception is nobody’s able to sell anything. This is, of course, a generalization, but there’s a feeling of contraction. Galleries are closing. Artists and professional acquaintances of mine are complaining that it’s tough to keep the lights on. There’s a real sense of terror.

On the other hand, I’ve spoken to people who think that’s just a myth—an “if it bleeds, it leads” type of scenario being pushed by what’s left of the art press. And that would be natural: natural ebbs and flows. Each gallery has its own explanation for why it closed.

Jacobsen: There are two lines of questioning there. One, why is the art press contracting?

Rockman: To the art press—well, the art press is press in general, and journalism, as you know, is hanging on by a thread, if at all. For most of my career, if you had a show up, you’d count the Fridays, because that was the day the New York Times would run reviews. You’d ask yourself, “How many Fridays do I have left before I’m not getting a review?” Those things really mattered. Now, with my last couple of shows, I couldn’t even tell you if I cared whether the Times reviewed them. That used to be the holy grail—along with the Village Voice when Roberta Smith, Peter Schjeldahl, and Jerry Saltz were writing, and later New York Magazine. But now it’s all social media.

Jacobsen: What about historical periods when there have been more protracted ebbs and flows? When expansions were quite expansive and contractions were quite contractive.

Rockman: Well, Scott, you can go back. First of all, the 1970s were, from my perspective, a very bleak moment—unless you were a minimalist sculptor or a conceptual artist not making objects. There wasn’t a lot of money around to buy art. Then, with Reagan and the lowering of interest rates, the art market exploded, and suddenly people wanted to buy paintings and things they could hang on their walls. It was about status, and that was great for artists. That’s where I started my career in 1984–85, when if you couldn’t make a living as an artist, there was something wrong with you. Then, of course, the stock market crash in 1987 happened. That didn’t really affect me for some reason. After that came 9/11, which was a contraction. Then, in 2008, with the housing crisis, there was another contraction—and that one I suffered through. But the 1987 crash and 9/11 didn’t really affect me much. Now, the problem, Scott, is that there’s really no clear explanation other than Trump and the uncertainty about what’s going to happen in the world. The stock market’s doing fine, but there are a lot of worries and unknowns. And I don’t need to tell you—when I’m doing a show in Paris, I don’tknow how tariffs will affect that. I haven’t had that discussion, but I’m sure it can’t be good.

Jacobsen: I mean, what about the press that’s still being done on art? What are the contours of that? Has the style of commentary changed? Has the quality of commentary changed?

Rockman: They don’t even read it. I don’t pay attention. I just don’t. And that’s how much things have changed.

Jacobsen: Are there any aspects of art that you look forward to?

Rockman: Oh, I love doing a show in New York. Don’t get me wrong—I love what I do. I’m just observing how things have changed. And I’m not even grieving over it. It’s just an observation. I mean, I do love journalism. And my wife is a writer and has been a journalist. I think journalism has basically kept the West—speaking truth to power is the mechanism that prevents democracies and states from becoming totalitarian. Or at least it used to.

Jacobsen: Have you done any collaborations with artists in other regions of the world that are war-torn? Would you be open to this?

Rockman: Sure, I’d be open to it.

Jacobsen: Have you done any war-based art?

Rockman: War on biodiversity. A bucket of war. But all joking aside, yes, I have.

Jacobsen: For instance, in Afghanistan, they’ve had a series of earthquakes. It’s a highly repressive society currently, since the U.S. withdrawal under Biden. When you see tragedies like this in the news, and you connect them to environmental themes, you also have civilian casualties.

Rockman: Earthquakes have nothing to do with what I’m talking about. That’s just a natural disaster. It has nothing to do with humans.

Jacobsen: Right, right. That’s fair.

Rockman: I mean, it’s a tragedy, and I feel bad for everyone involved, including pets, livestock, and so on. Of course.

Jacobsen: What about tropical landscapes? Have you done any art around that?

Rockman: Of course.

Jacobsen: Climate change?

Rockman: Absolutely.

Jacobsen: Anything Indonesian?

Rockman: I’ve never been to Indonesia, but I’ve done work on Central and South America, as well as Africa, including Madagascar.

Jacobsen: Yes, there have been climate initiatives around Indonesia. It’s particularly known for rich peatlands and biodiversity… According to UN News, billions continue to breathe polluted air that causes more than 4.5 million premature deaths every year, according to UN climate experts. Lorenzo Labrador, a scientific officer at the World Meteorological Organization, said, “Air quality respects no boundaries. The smoke and pollution from the wildfires in this breakaway season in the Iberian Peninsula have already been detected over Western Europe. They can travel throughout the rest of the European continent.”

Rockman: Yeah, absolutely. How much help? My wife was in Provence in France this Summer. Fires changed the whole landscape. I think they were from Portugal.

Jacobsen: Are you talking about the ash or the actual fire that stretched up to there?

Rockman: Smoke.

Jacobsen: Yes, we get a lot more of those in British Columbia now.

Rockman: No—the forest fires in Canada, the smoke coming down, that was here like two weeks ago. No boundaries. Stand on your side of the fence.

Jacobsen: A lot of the art you do is on a 2D surface. How do you convey—or how would you convey—a lack of borders around air pollution on such a canvas? I don’t know, because I’m just curious. It’s inherently a bounded frame.

Rockman: That’s not really a painting issue, that type of thing. You have to make that choice. It has to go off the edge of the rectangle somewhere.

Jacobsen: I spent the weekend with a friend in Vancouver. I was doing a little trip to visit small colleagues at a horse farm and so on, from the Model United Nations. One colleague and I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery, and we saw one piece—a totem pole. The difference about this totem pole was that it was actually made out of golf bags. The commentary was around a few First Nations bands who had leased their land for golf courses. That’s funny. I thought it was great. I forgot the artist’s name off the top of my head. They’re about 50. When you think of conveying an idea about the environment, do you deliberate whether to stick to a 2D surface or to do sculpting or sculpture?

Rockman: I’ve never done that. I spent a couple of years doing 3D-ish work in the 1990s, but I’m pretty happy with the limitations of painting.

Jacobsen: Has anyone taken 2D surfaces—such as paintings—and arranged them in clever ways to convey a point?

Rockman: Of course. That’s an age-old story, from having gold leaf on frescoes to Rauschenberg sticking a chair or a mattress on a canvas. That’s been around for millennia.

Jacobsen: So, Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization, and the Global Atmosphere Watch (GAW) program noted: “When we see that countries, regions, or cities are taking measures to fight against bad air quality, it works.” He continued: “Despite recent improvements, air quality remains a significant public health concern.” This actually goes back to your point about will. According to leading experts, when countries work at it, it makes an impact. If they don’t, it doesn’t. And if it’s getting worse, then we’re not working at it. He also pointed out that the problem is that technology needs to reach more people.

Rockman: What technology is that?

Jacobsen: That’s a good question. Cleaner cooking technology, for example, according to Martina Otto. So yes, that’sactually a good point. If we want climate-change attenuation efforts to succeed, newer technologies reaching a wider range of people is going to be a big necessity. And the more affluent nations need to reduce their overall carbon footprint. The problem is that, even with more efficient technology year on year, our carbon footprint continues to rise because our so-called “needs” rise proportionally.

Rockman: You know, AI—thank God for AI.

Jacobsen: That’s right. There’s an interesting cross-section there: the massive datasets of copyrighted and non-copyrighted material used to train these neural networks, and then the enormous water and energy costs of running these gargantuan, gigawatt-scale data centers to maximize compute. 

Rockman: Count me in. 

Jacobsen: And we’ve done a little commentary on AI before. You made a really subtle point in an obvious way: at first glance, it looks good because it resembles something you’ve seen before—because it is, in fact, everything you’ve seen before. But you didn’t think that was really a threat to the art industry as a whole.

Rockman: My feelings about that and my behaviour around it have changed since May. I’ve actually been using it quite often for various things. I’m more frightened of it than I was. It’s better than I thought it would be, and it’s worse than I thought it would be. I’ve learned a lot about what it can and can’t do. From my perspective, 90% of what it generates is complete nonsense—you give it a prompt with a reference, and it’s like someone from Mars came up with something that makes no sense. But about 5% of the time, maybe 8%, it produces something that resembles something useful. And then 1–2% of the time, it’s absolutely amazing. It really helped me with a couple of projects since I spoke to you. I never would have been able to solve the problem without it. I just locked in—I stumbled onto this one image.

Jacobsen: That error rate—false positives versus true positives in terms of what you’re aiming for—basically requires the models to better align with our cultural and cognitive sensibilities about what feels like correct physics. That’ll improve that 8%.

Rockman: Oh yeah, yeah. It’s going to get so much better. I don’t know what it’s going to do to me personally as a professional artist, but I think it’s revolutionary, to say the least. I’ve been watching YouTube talks from various experts predicting 90% unemployment in Western populations. And the implications of that? That’s truly unknown territory.

Jacobsen: What other commentaries have you heard from artists on this?

Rockman: Some are like, “Forget that. I hate that stuff. I’m never going there.” And others use it all the time.

Jacobsen: Sounds like it was over wine.

Rockman: Yeah—W-H-I-N-E. Some people do, some people don’t. My wife, who’s a writer and an artist, doesn’t. She has none of it.

Jacobsen: You consistently state it goes back to economics. When you stipulate it’s back to economics, and you’retalking about 90% unemployment as a hypothetical, what does this mean for the art industry, particularly in terms of making a livelihood?

Rockman: Which industry?

Jacobsen: The art industry—particularly those who are vulnerable because they create pieces that may not have strict economic viability. For example, political activists who do their art.

Rockman: There is no economic viability. Plumbers and dentists have strict economic viability. Art has nothing to do with that. There’s no guarantee. There’s no need. The desire for art has somehow been created, much like the desire for diamonds.

Jacobsen: So then does it basically transition from an industry of the precariat to an industry of the hyper-precariat?

Rockman: Yeah. I mean, who knows what’s going to happen? No—it could also be that handmade objects, things related to intimacy, and the qualities that make humans enjoyable might be more valued than ever in this culture. I don’t know.

Jacobsen: Sort of a niche.

Rockman: It’s like rare book collectors or dealers—some of them are booming because it’s the antidote to the rest of the culture.

Jacobsen: Yes, in Vancouver, there’s a guy who does bookbinding. He’s a big bodybuilding guy. I was travelling with myfriend. He has a family line of it, from London. I asked him, “What’s the rarest or coolest thing you’ve got?” And they would get things like first editions of Shakespeare.

Or something based on a monastery document from the 8th century. And it’s like, what makes it last so long? The old pulp was delicious. Or they used animal skin. And so, yeah—that seems to be an industry that still has appeal.

Rockman: You know, like autographs.

Jacobsen: Like, why? It’s a broader conversation. What does this magical move signify—that it’s official?

Rockman: In The Wolf of Wall Street, that Matthew McConaughey monologue he improvised—he basically gives, I can’tremember the exact text, but it was about creating smoke and mirrors. Look it up on YouTube. He’s sitting there with Leonardo DiCaprio, who’s very earnest, asking, “How do you create value in this?” And McConaughey basically says it’sabout perception and illusion.

Jacobsen: Looking at Indonesia and places that are going to be climatically hit, do they produce art that comes out of that sort of hardship? Does that typically happen?

Rockman: Yes, I’m sure there’s some sort of scene in Jakarta or elsewhere, but I have no perception of it. That’s the interesting thing about this show in India that I might be doing. I looked at the gallery’s website—I don’t know any of the artists. They’re all Indian. It’s its own ecosystem. Very few artists break out of their national or regional context, though it does happen. Anish Kapoor, for example, who moved to London as a child.

Jacobsen: Are those contexts the same as they’ve always been? Or are artistic communes shifting? Is it more global than ever?

Rockman: Yes, the gallery in India is run by Peter Nagy. I’ve known him since 1985. He’s also an interesting artist. He ran a gallery in New York with his business partner, Alan Belcher. It was called Nature Morte, and it was a significant East Village gallery that focused on conceptual art. It created a context where you could be a painter and still be taken seriously in a conceptual art framework. I never did a show with them, and I didn’t even know Peter liked my work until last week. However, the idea that painting could be part of conceptual discourse was significant. Historically, they were separate—painters were thought of as “emotional”, and many conceptual artists frowned on painting.. Bringing those worlds together was always my goal. I learned a lot from being around those guys and others early in my career, when I was 23 and wanted to have my cake and eat it too. I wanted to make paintings that were cool but also smart.

Jacobsen: What age were they then?

Rockman: Around 28 or 30.

Jacobsen: And who were the people in their 60s then—the seniors in the industry?

Rockman: At that time? Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, a lot of the artists who showed with Leo Castelli or Marian Goodman, and Gerhard Richter, people like that.

Jacobsen: Did you meet any of these people?

Rockman: I met Rauschenberg. I met John once. Lichtenstein, I did not meet. Richter, I’ve never met, but I’ve met many artists of that stature—just not those specific ones.

Jacobsen: What did they complain about back in the day?

Rockman: Every artist thinks they’re underappreciated. That’s a running joke. Whenever I complain about something, my wife tells me that..

Jacobsen: So your friends, yourself, and other artists—you’re basically saying they make the same type of complaints as those artists did back then?

Rockman: I’d be hard-pressed to get someone of that stature to say something like that to me directly at the time. But I’d suspect that is the case- it’s the human condition, right?

Jacobsen: Yes, I’m just looking at what we might call the Universal Kvetching Factor of Artists.

Rockman: That’s the brand, right? Everyone feels underappreciated. I’m looking forward to the day I feel overappreciated.

Jacobsen: Any final thoughts before we go?

Rockman: What is going to happen in this country? It’s so incredibly volatile. Fascinating. I hate that term “unknown territory,” but that is really where we are.

Jacobsen: The old is new. 

Rockman: It happened before, it’ll happen again—just with a different wrinkle. Who said this? Marx? “The first time is tragedy, the second time is farce.”

Jacobsen: The line between tragedy and comedy. Thank you very much for your time. I’ll see you next week. 

Rockman: Okay, we’ll figure it out.

Jacobsen: Excellent, thank you.

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