Meet Michael Kaufmann | Creative Consultant & Artist Manager

We had the good fortune of connecting with Michael Kaufmann and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Michael, we’d love to hear more about your end-goal, professionally.
The end goal is evaporation. I seek to repeatedly challenge myself to be more and want less, to detether myself from attachments, while still loving and providing and being present for my family, which includes the artists I manage. The end goals is also more questions than answers. Life should be this constant cycle of learning and unlearning. It is in certainty that dogma and rigidness arrive, and at its worse enacts violence and wages war. Uncertainty, brought about by this process of unlearning, allows for a receptive and open spirt to consider things as they come and in the present.

I am fortunate enough to have lived a LOT of life in the less than five decades of my life. I am content, and my aspirations are fulfilled. I believe this is what makes me a great manager. I am able to support the vision and aspirations of the artists I support in a management capacity. Their goals and desires become my own, and I feel fulfilled if they feel fulfilled. Part of this process is helping them understand what is it they want to accomplish and leave behind. It is really rewarding when I am able to work with an artist and move them from what they need to do, to what they want to do. To move from hustle, to career, to legacy.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
Trained as an artist, and reared on the notion of the blurring of art and life (thank you Allan Kaprow), I believe that my artistic practice is the daily process of my acted out humanity. I joke that my medium is bureaucracy, and over the years I have found that my passion and purpose is taking an artist-trained approach to business. This has allowed me to find a continuity in what might be otherwise be perceived as a fairly disparate portfolio: curating and managing a public hospital art program, building two unconventional museums, managing an Oscar and BAFTA nominated band of composers, continuing a 25+ year collaboration in a noise band, providing spatial identity and activation consulting, writing an oddball time-travel novella.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
My favorite spots in the city do not necessarily make for great visitor destinations. I love parking lots that have given way to nature’s unstoppable force as it breaks through the asphalt and attempts to regenerate the pastoral. I love empty storefronts and their convicting reflections of our ghostly selves hovering amongst the futility of vacant consumption. I love forgotten spaces that have volume, that are sites of temporarily invested interest, that sing their own sort of energy as if a snapshot of all that is, was, and will be. I love ruins in reverse (thank you Robert Smithson). I love the triumph of repurposed landmarks. I love the waxed, greasy, scraped railings and benches and planters where skateboarders have found their own way to navigate what can be unforgiving legislated and municipal infrastructure. But specifically in my city, I love Healer, an all-ages music and arts venue that makes Meow Wolf look blue-chip. I love Companion, a living room gallery that is so utterly and unapologetically about the art and artist it exhibits a rare kind of bravery. I don’t get out much locally, but I happy to know there are other bold and committed art spaces such as Hoy Polloy and Storage Space. When it comes to food, the pandemic was unkind, but I am grateful for the rich and diverse culinary ecology of the stipmall maze that is the International Marketplace. I am proud of the work of PATTERN, Gang Gang, and Exhibit Columbus to the near south of us.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My family, my wife and two beautiful sons. They deserve the biggest shout-out. They are my gravity, my anchor, my purpose, and my joy. But I am also incredibly grateful for all of the weird wonderful art, music, and film I was exposed to at a young age.

Website: thisismeru.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/___therefore____/

Other: https://punksyndrome.com/

Image Credits
[Photo of Michael Kaufmann by Polina Osherov] [Photo of Holland Andrews, by Ariel Crocker] [MERU Logo, designed by Daniel Sparkes] [Photo of Museum of Psychphonics, by Tad Fruits] [Photo of Therefore Sound Installation] [Photo of Son Lux, by Jes Nijjer]