Meet Timmy Black | Arts Podcaster

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

Hi Timmy, we’d love for you to start things off by telling us something about your industry that we and others not in the industry might be unaware of?
Folks think that being an arts podcaster is all about glamorous gallery openings, rubbing elbows with Hollywood starlets, gaining access to the salons of the smart set, being invited to exclusive parties on fancy hotel rooftops, traveling to places like Paris, Rome, London, Beijing, and Riyadh to interview wealthy collectors, and finding the secret locations of sordid artists’ loft parties in derelict warehouses where the coins of common trade are wild dissipation and rampant promiscuity. The truth is that it is more than that, (though not that much more than that).

It’s a job for the rugged, ragged adventurer type who doesn’t mind being accused of being a lazy sycophant. The easiest part of job is sitting in front of a microphone and yammering about all the insipid and redundant art one is obliged to look at.

What should our readers know about your business?
Timmy Black Presents: The Lives of Contemporary Artists has become the “must-hear” fixture within the Los Angeles creative community. I’m available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud and all the other platforms out there. Most of my episodes go viral and as a result, I’m very popular in New York, Miami, Chicago, Tel-Aviv, and Sofia. It wasn’t easy getting started because frankly, I don’t have any formal training in the arts. The funny thing is, neither do most people in the arts community so fairly early in my career I realized the value of hyperbole. I mean, who doesn’t love superlatives? Nobody cares if you’re sincere, as long as you lard your descriptions with flattery.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I always take friends from out-of-town to the main branch of the L.A Public Library. Putting aside the fact that architecturaly, the building is beautiful, it’s important for me to dispel the notion that Angelenos are uncultured, empty-headed philistines who spend all their idle hours at spas and yoga retreats. Since we’re downtown, I usually bring my pals to lunch at El Hero on Figueroa Street. They have the best carne molida in the city. When it gets dark, a nice walk through the Arts District where abject poverty and conspicuous consumption disfigure the neighborhood into a dystopian house of Marxist mirrors. always throws people off their game.

After that brutal rite of initiation, my guests typically beg for the more benign attractions like the Pacific Ocean, Universal City Walk, Hollywood Boulevard and Cantor’s. Sadly, I simply can’t accommodate them. I have a few go-to itineraries that, although a bit unconventional, never fail to reveal the soul of the city in unanticipated ways. For example, I have the Yum Yum Donut tour where I take my victims to nearly every shop in town. Not that many people know this but Yum Yum has both a breakfast and a lunch menu and their coffee rivals their Dunkin’ competitors. Using the coordinates of these disparate landmarks, Los Angeles gracefully reveals itself in its breathtaking miscellany.

For special visitors, those who come from overseas, I have the “what’s your language” tour. This one too revolves around food. We typically start with croissants and espressos at Paris Baguette on 7th Street. We walk that off by hiking over to Full Moon House on North Hill Street for some deep fried squid with spicy salt. Hank’s Bar on South Grand for tea time gets us in a Bukowski frame of mind and if we’re still standing, we take an Uber to Soriana in South Central for their Madghout Lamb.

And, of course, no visit to Los Angeles is complete without a trip to Leonora Diwas’ Dead Poets Hard Wear showroom. She has the most stylish t-shirts I’ve ever seen, my favorites being Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud and Aimé Césaire.

The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
I’m so glad you’re asking this question! It’s so rare that I am given an opportunity to sing the praises of those who have been instrumental to my improbable success. First off, there’s the late Micah Carpentier. I met him about thirty-five years ago when I was visiting Cuba of a Fulbright Scholarship. I was there, ostensibly, to complete my masters thesis on Contradanza, but what I ended up doing was drinking copious amounts of rum and getting my pocket picked by feral street urchins. One night while sprawled out on a damp stoop on Calle Empedrado, Carpentier found me and offered to take me to his apartment to get cleaned up. Believe it or not, I had no idea who he was. That was the beginning of my brief but intimate friendship with the great master of the Caribbean avant-garde. (Sadly, Micah was killed the following year).

Next, I have to give “bravo et chapeau” to the French provocateur Currado Malaspina. He was the first artist I featured on my podcast (see episode #1), and I’ll never forget his generosity. Currado has this unique way of embellishing the truth, making even the the most absurd exaggeration seem plausible. You could say that Malaspina prodded me toward what they call in Graduate School “the aesthetics of disinformation.”

And finally, there’s the beautiful and seductive Dahlia Danton. She may not be Los Angeles’ most gifted artist but she’s surely the most charismatic. We dated for three glorious years until she dumped me for that truculent though talented painter David Schoffman.

Website: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/timmy-black

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

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7159211967843332096/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100060832822377

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRI8sBnOVSlNIq8Nbu63BRQ

Other: https://open.spotify.com/show/3PT2zFA44Swivs130ISLMD