Diane Solway

TE

Where are you from and how did you arrive at culture?

DS

I grew up in Toronto, which was—forgive me, Canada—something of a cultural backwater at the time. It’s become a very international, cosmopolitan city. My mother taught English literature part-time at York University, whether the Southern Gothic novel or Canadian fiction, so I was exposed early on to great writers. There were always books in the house and every book was available to me. Even as a kid, there were no rules about what I could read. I often wanted to read what my mother was reading because I was interested in being able to talk to her about it.

TE

What were you reading?

DS

I was introduced to Canadian fiction at a time when Canadian writers were not acknowledged anywhere but Canada. That meant I was reading Margaret Atwood and also Mordecai Richler, Robertson Davies and the poetry of Leonard Cohen, too.

TE

What was your exposure to other areas of art as a young person?

DS

I grew up with this idea that Canada was small and that nobody was really paying attention to us. My mother particularly loved ballet, so she took me a lot, mostly to seethe National Ballet of Canada, but also the Royal Ballet when they came through. (Canada was then part of the Commonwealth.) There was one time when the company came and Nureyev danced. I remember my mother’s—and the audience’s—reaction and understood that there was something very special about this dancer. I came to understand later that it was as much a response to his sexual charisma as to his dancing. But that initial rush in the audience got me interested in him when I was a kid, so I started taking ballet and reading everything about it, never thinking in a hundred years that I would go on to write his biography.

My great aunt Sylvia was also a huge influence on me. She was a small person, and had led the most interesting life. In the 1940s, she wanted to study photography in New York and unusual for the time, her father agreed to send her. While there, she spent all her time in jazz clubs in Harlem and befriended Duke Ellington, Lena Horne, Cab Calloway, and many amazing musicians. Paul Robeson was a close friend of hers. When she moved back to Toronto, she joined the Communist Party for a while. When her friends would come through town, they stayed with her or they would invite her to their shows. I remember hanging out with the Mills Brothers in their hotel suite and meeting Lena Horne in her dressing room. Sylvia was a great character, a really good children’s photographer, and was particularly interested in Black culture. I’m talking into the ’70s and ’80s. She wanted me to appreciate all of these different art forms and styles. She gave me her collection of Billie Holiday records. She was always talking about Alvin Ailey’s dance company.

TE

When did you come to contribute to the cultural scene yourself?

DS

I went to the University of Toronto where I became the dance critic of the school newspaper, partly because I figured I could get free tickets. I really wanted to see things, but I couldn’t afford it. I realized that if I was writing, I would be able to see more. I also had a summer job over several summers as a sportswriter for the Toronto Sun where each day I’d go and report on a different sports event. Then, I got into the graduate journalism school at Columbia. Like a lot of my classmates, I knew it was unlikely that we were going to get jobs in New York right away. So I thought, since I don’t know how long I get to stay, I’m going to see everything. I’m going to do everything. Eventually, I understood that I was never going to live anywhere else. When I graduated from Columbia, I pitched a story to the New York Times about growing older in the corps de ballet, about dancers who reached the pinnacle, but not the pinnacle of the pinnacle. The New York Times wanted the story, and it landed on the cover of the Arts and Leisure section. That was my first story in the U.S. and it launched me on a dance path for a while, even though that was never my only interest. I was always keeping up with other areas of the arts.

TE

The range of your interests and of your coverage over the years is incredible, from Nureyev and Merce Cunningham to Frank Ocean and Cardi B. What compels you to write about art and artists?

DS

There are two obsessions that have guided my career. I am fascinated by the act of becoming the person you envision yourself to be. Most of the artists I’ve written about saw themselves early on in a way that few others saw them, and then they had to figure out how to actualize that understanding of themselves. In the case of Rudolf Nureyev becoming a dancer, everything was against him. His father, a former Red Army officer, was strongly against him becoming a dancer and beat him whenever he found out his son had snuck off to class. Here’s this skinny, scraggly kid who has an idea of himself as a great dancer, from the age of six, and managed against considerable odds to become one. I’m also fascinated by artists and creators who push to innovate, who refuse to follow the accepted path. Everywhere I’ve worked, I’ve been interested in people who are unorthodox and who impact contemporary culture in singular ways. Thinking about the various people that I put forward as subjects in the places I’ve worked, I’m always looking at things and then asking: where’s culture headed and who are the prime movers?

TE

Your book, Nureyev: His Life (1998), took years to write and complete and involved extensive archival research and over 200 interviews in many parts of the world. How did you arrive at the idea of writing a biography early in your career?

DS

I was writing my first biography when I was approached about doing Nureyev’s biography. The first one had come about after I’d written a piece for the New York Times about a star Joffrey Ballet dancer and choreographer named Edward Stierle, who had just died of AIDS at the age of 23, the same week the Joffrey premiered two ballets he had created about dying and loss at Lincoln Center. When the story ran, a publisher got in touch to ask me if I saw a book in it. I saw an opportunity to write about a dancer, yes, but also about the impact of AIDS on the arts and how the death of an artist ricochets through a community. Once that book was in the works, Nureyev died. A friend at William Morrow, another publisher, called me and encouraged me to submit a proposal for his biography. I put together a proposal that was very ambitious. I got four publishers for it, one in the UK, one in the US, one in Germany, and one in Russia. That became a mammoth project.

TE

Why?

DS

For one, Nureyev had fully-realized lives in about seven different countries. For another, he spent the first 23 years of his life in the Soviet Union. I needed to describe to a contemporary audience what his life was like in each of those places. And I had to track down all of the people he had known, not just in the dance world, but in every world imaginable. He knew everybody in ’60s London, for example. Marianne Faithfull told me that she and Mick Jagger would go to watch Nureyev dance. She said that Jagger loved the way Nureyev moved.

I also realized that in order for people to understand the story of Nureyev, I would have to explain culturally what was going on more broadly. I had planned to start the book on his date of birth and work chronologically. But I quickly realized that in order to start in 1938, I had to go back many, many decades and study Russian history. I found professors at different universities to be my guides and to fact check my interpretations of documents. I knew that if I wanted this book to last, anybody coming to it would need to have a context for why it was so monumental that Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union in 1961, at the height of the Cold War. Or how his defiant nature propelled him. Or why he became a sensation in the West. It’s not simple to illustrate someone’s cultural impact.

TE

Can you tell me about going to Russia for research?

DS

I began researching there mostly in 1993 and 1994 just as Russia was opening up. This was pre-internet so any information I needed, I had to go and get myself. I really can't stress how important that is—going straight to the source. I do wish that I could have had Zoom meetings with people instead of having to fly all over to see them. But at the same time, meeting in person immersed me in the moments in history that people were remembering. And I was getting information that wasn’t available anywhere else.

I went to the town where Nureyev grew up, Ufa, in the eastern part of the country. At first, people were afraid to talk to me because they had grown up during a time when any kind of questioning was tantamount to the kind of KGB surveillance that could land you in jail. Many had never traveled outside of Russia. But as a result, their memories of him were frozen in time because they had no access to the news from abroad until very recently. Nureyev had been stricken from all files once he defected. He was declared a traitor. So many of the people I interviewed, including one of his sisters, were speaking about him to an outsider for the first time.

In Moscow, I managed to get into the Communist Party archives where portraits of Lenin and Stalin were still on the walls. It is phenomenal to be able to say that because the archives are closed again. While I was there with my Russian translator, I was looking for very specific dates when the Central Committee would have met to discuss the actions that led to Nureyev’s historic defection. Nureyev was on tour with the Kirov Ballet in Paris in 1961, and he was the star of the tour, showing the supremacy of Soviet culture in the minds of the Soviet government. But he wasn’t staying with his KGB minders as he was supposed to. He kept running off at night with the Parisians he was meeting. Nureyev wanted to know about everything he had been forbidden access to. Since his name was stricken from official files, I couldn’t search by name in the archive; I had to look for key dates. When I found the reports I was looking for, it was one of those eureka moments. I thought, “oh my god, we’re on to something!” I wanted to copy the documents and take them home. But at the archive, everything was nyet, nyet, nyet, not so fast. I was told before my trip that chocolates worked wonders in Russia. So I had brought a big box of Godiva chocolates and I suggested to the woman who headed the archive that I could leave those for her if she liked. She became immediately interested and then cautioned me, “but there’ll be a fee.” I thought that would be the end of it. But it was $473.

TE

How did this experience in the archive impact the way that you approached your research across your career? I am wondering about your approach to writing a profile that may be more investigative and thorough?

DS

I always want to bring my subjects to life, but I never think I should describe only their version of events. Or to ask them only about the project they are promoting. I think it’s lazy when writers don’t delve further than the subject and one or two others who are their advocates. I love reporting and finding new angles on a story. And interview subjects get much more animated and forthcoming if you show that you’ve gone beyond the usual fare and are genuinely interested in their sensibility, not only in the things they make. I always ask subjects what they’re reading or the last thing they saw that made them excited. Or about how they grew up.

TE

How do you explain how Nureyev was exceptional and why he became such a sensation? It seems nearly impossible now to imagine that a ballet dancer could be at the heart of the zeitgeist.

DS

Nureyev wasn’t just a dancer, he was a global pop star. Through sheer force of will, he remade his body and his life. To the rest of the world,the Soviet Union existed behind an iron curtain that could not be pierced. And here, Nureyev did just that when he defected at a Paris airport in 1961. It made him a sensation overnight. The story headlined every major newspaper. But remember, this was also the beginning of the sexual revolution and his feral androgyny was catnip to all genders.Coming out of the 1950s, the ballet world was so conservative. Suddenly, Nureyev comes charging out onstage with this animal intensity and unleashed sexual energy and just completely electrified audiences. He asserted the importance of the male dancer. The great ballerina Margot Fonteyn was 54 to his 23 when they started their partnership; the pair became a phenomenon for the next decade. At the same time, pop culture itself was being broadcast widely through television. All these art forms were becoming much more democratic. Audiences could see Nureyev on television. He appeared on Ed Sullivan, the hugely influential weekly entertainment show. He was the first ballet dancer ever on the Muppets, performing Swine Lake with Miss Piggy. He was a regular at nightclubs, like the New York disco Sybils that was run by the then-wife of actor Richard Burton. He grew his hair long before the Beatles. He was friends with Princess Margaret and Jackie O and Warhol. He was always going to museums wherever he was dancing or to see experimental films. He loved fashion. He wanted to learn everything, he was voracious. And he made sure to meet the people who were making this different work he wanted to try.

One of the reasons it was so interesting to write his biography is because in writing about him, I could also write about the culture that he influenced and catalyzed. I wanted to speak to a wider audience, not only to dance insiders. Through him, as a titanic figure of the 20th century, I could talk about Cold War cultural politics, the ’60s in London, the sexual revolution, the golden age of ballet, the birth of modern media, the rise of celebrity culture and global stardom.

TE

In the process of writing the biography, did you ever doubt the relevance of Nureyev’s story or did you already understand, when he passed, that his legacy was greater than dance? In retrospect, it’s clear to see how he represented a new kind of cultural and celebrity personality, but that can be harder to discern in the moment.

DS

He died in January 1993 and I went to his funeral, which was held at the Paris Opéra at the top of the grand staircase. In the moment, I wasn’t alone in understanding his cultural importance and personality. And when the book was published he was still well known. But now when I mention the name “Nureyev” to anyone under 40, they have no idea who I’m talking about. Some think I mean Mikhail Baryshnikov, who is probably better known for Sex and the City than for his own remarkable dance career. His legacy was greater than the dance world, but the competition for attention now is so extreme and his kind of personality isn’t supported by social media. And ballet doesn’t have the lustre it once did. But I have no doubt that another generation will rediscover him.

TE

What was the critical reception of your biography like?

DS

The critical reception was really good. Most people felt that the research was unparalleled and that the book brought together all these threads and people in his life for the first time, particularly the full story of his life in Russia and of his defection at the age of 23. I was really happy with the response. Obviously, there were some reviews that had quibbles. Many reviews, particularly in the UK, but not only, were written by people who had spent much of their careers writing about him. They didn’t review the book, they talked about themselves and when they saw him dance. That was frustrating because they didn’t address the book, but I understood why. Everybody who knew him wanted to own the story of Nureyev.

TE

What did you do after the book project was complete?

DS

I found it thrilling to emerge from that isolation of writing, from a period of incredibly focused attention on one subject. It took me five years. I did not really take a vacation. My son was born two days after I handed the book in. So I had this very odd experience of writing about Nureyev’s death while I was preparing for the birth of my first child. A few years later, my daughter was born.I decided that I still wanted to be involved in culture in different ways, not only as a writer.

I was invited to teach at Columbia in 2002. I took over the arts and culture course at the graduate Journalism school and redid the curriculum, requiring students to get out and see things. I created a syllabus based on what I wished I had exposure to when I was a student there. Typically, professors would bring in star journalists to talk about how they got the story that made them famous or how they approached their work. My sense was that anybody in a cultural journalism class needed to be meeting the top practitioners in the arts, not only reading pieces by the best writers. I brought in guest speakers almost every week. I tried to bring in the most innovative people I could think of as a way to introduce my students to the new ideas they would be writing about when they graduated.I wanted them to learn how to ask these creators informed questions. Russell Simmons came to talk about the rise of hip hop. Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori spoke about their new musical Caroline, or Change. I invited Philip Seymour Hoffman, who had just transformed himself into Truman Capote for the film Capote.And the show runner of the MTV hit show The Real World, because reality TV was taking off. And a British comedian named John Oliver, who had just joined the Daily Show.

I also continued writing for the Times. I had always wondered what would happen to the great single-choreographer companies like Merce Cunningham and Paul Taylor when the founder was no longer around to lead them. This was something of a taboo subject, though Cunningham was then 87 and Taylor 76. As I discovered, the notorious court battle over Martha Graham's legacy in 2002 had led Cunningham and Taylor to consider for the first time who controlled the rights to their life’s work. No one I interviewed for the piece, including Cunningham and Taylor, had ever spoken publicly about their succession plans. By forcing the issue out in the open, the story spurred other artists and their companies to consider whether their own legacies were at risk.

TE

How did sensitivity for emergent and unorthodox artists inform the choices you made as an editor at W Magazine?

DS

I went to W in 2007. The stories that I wanted to do didn’t necessarily feature celebrities. I’ve never been interested in celebrities just because they’re celebrities. A lot of the people that I was suggesting for the magazine were people who were just under the radar or well-known in their field, but not outside of it.

TE

Who did you identify early?

DS

Justin Trudeau!... Selena Gomez in 2010, as the face of the new multiplatform, social-media savvy celebrity. She was then a teen star about to make the perilous pivot to grownup projects. The week I followed her around NYC, she was turning 18 and promoting her first fashion collab, a new movie and record, and chatting directly to fans via Facebook and Twitter, something few celebrities were doing at the time.

There are many artists I wrote about early — Theaster Gates, Njideka Akulini Crosby, Nicole Eisenman, Henry Taylor, Cy Gavin, and Peter Doig, who wasn’t emergent, but had never agreed to a full profile over several days in Trinidad. And then Virgil Abloh. I started to look at him in 2015 though I have to give credit to my son. When you have kids, they’re constantly talking about what’s emerging. He said to me, you should be looking at someone named Virgil Abloh. Virgil was then talking about his interest in the Renaissance and suddenly, my son, who I had been taking to museums his whole life, got really interested in Caravaggio. I thought, “okay, something’s happening here.” This guy is selling streetwear and getting kids to look at Caravaggio.Through researching Virgil, I learned about all he did for Kanye and then wondered if other huge talents like Beyonce or Rihanna worked with creative directors, a term that wasn’t widely used. It turned out they did.

TE

You then wrote an essay for W Magazine called “The Secret to Being a Modern Pop Star? A Creative Director Pulling the Strings,” which was so prescient in 2016.

DS

It was fascinating to work on the story because none of these people were known. We were suddenly seeing this new role, a person who was crafting image and visual assets as well as maintaining an ongoing stream of ideas and references for their clients. I loved doing that piece, but it was a hard sell.

TE

Because it’s so abstract?

DS

Because these creative directors were behind the scenes. It’s easy to say, let’s do a story on Kanye or Rihanna. It’s harder to say, let’s do a story on Kanye’s creative director, especially before the term ‘creative director’ was commonplace.

TE

Are there any other stories you are proud of?

DS

A long interview with Frank Ocean because he doesn’t do interviews and yet once he agreed, he was so open and unhurried when we met at a downtown hotel in 2019. He rode his bike there. Zero fuss. He was funny too. Another artist who goes his own way.

Riccardo Tisci is a story I’m proud of. I wrote about him when he first arrived at Givenchy in 2010. I was interested in him but also in his fascinating tight circle, which included Courtney Love, the model Lea T, one of the first transgender models on a couture runway, and Marina Abramovic, who was then at MoMA performing her marathon “The Artist is Present” so I watched the afternoon Ricardo sat opposite her. He was a world maker at that time so it felt like I was capturing a zeitgeist moment.

Most of the time, I looked for stories that were beginning to unfold, far from being ready for a publicist. That way, I could get the jump before anyone else knew about them. I loved producing the story about the Underground Museum, which in 2016 was an under-the-radar cultural center in LA devoted to Black excellence that had the kind of cultural cachet that was the envy of much grander institutions. It was started by the late Noah Davis, then a little-known painter, and his wife, the artist Karon Davis, who curated exhibitions of leading artists and drew top Black creatives to screen their films and preview their music at community events. I asked the artist Deana Lawson, who had shown there, to photograph the key players behind it, who included members of Davis’s family and Henry Taylor. I was excited that the piece drew national attention to the Underground. In fact, when I arrived at Chanel, one of our first partnerships was with the UM.

I was also proud of the eventual profile I wrote of Virgil. There was a lot of resistance when I pitched him. People said, he’s just streetwear, he’s not really Fashion. And I just pushed until I got the go-ahead, in part because Edward Enninful, W’s fashion director at the time, was enthusiastic. And then a year later, Virgil was named menswear designer at Louis Vuitton.

When I met with him in Chicago, I wanted to understand why he didn’t see any siloes or borders. He was able to go full throttle into anything that interested him. He broadened the idea of a creator. He democratized it. You can be a superstar in a bunch of different domains at once. And I remember early on when we started talking, I gave him a little bit of advice about the art world because that was something he wanted to move into. He said to me, I want to do X, Y, and Z. And I said, ‘oh, you can’t just go right there, there are steps.’ And he just said, ‘no, but I can.’ And I loved learning that I was wrong. He changed the way I think about things. If you have a good idea and a vision, there’s always room for you.

TE

In this way there are parallels between Nureyev and Virgil. Both were 360 characters who redefined what it meant to be famous across genres and disciplines.

DS

When Nureyev defected in 1961, he wanted to learn from the best. He wanted to know about art and began collecting it. He wanted to know about design so he hired Renzo Mongiardino, one of the greatest interior designers, to decorate his fabulous homes.He wanted to learn modern dance so he worked with Martha Graham. He wanted to act in films and played Valentino for Ken Russell. Not well, but that’s another story. He immersed himself in all of these different disciplines. Virgil’s talent was different. He wasn’t single-focused on one discipline for most of his career; he was more of a magpie, borrowing from different disciplines as he dj’d contemporary culture via music, fashion, architecture, and design. He also made space for many others to succeed with him. He didn’t have to be the only star. And he had social media as a tool to amplify the simultaneity of all the exciting projects he was working on.

TE

What else did you work on while you were at W magazine that marked your career?

DS

I was at W for 12 years. When I arrived, the editor was Patrick McCarthy and the creative director was Dennis Freedman, who pioneered bringing in artists and photographers who didn’t do fashion photography- like Juergen Teller, Maurizio Cattelan, Philip Lorca di Corcia. These were great photographers, great artists who came into the magazine world and reinvented what fashion photography could look like. Then Stefano Tonchi became editor and soon after I became Culture and Features Director. At that point the contemporary art world was exploding. I wanted to create more access points to the art world and began to think about how to draw a broader audience to the work of important artists. Since W preferred to show celebrities on the cover, I wanted to make the cover a vehicle for the artist, not the other way around. I also hoped that audiences who were not part of the art world would feel that contemporary art and culture was relevant to their lives.

One of the cover stories I’m proudest of was nearly impossible to pull off. For our 2011 Art Issue, I asked Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei to create his first new work since being released from government custody, a case that had drawn global attention. Ai was still under house arrest and suggested over a Skype call to make a work about authority based on his recent experience in prison. We were planning to shoot at Rikers Island in a disused building and when I saw that he able to speak to us, I asked him, ‘Do you want to direct the shoot?’ It was risky but he was down to do it.So with Ai on my laptop via Skype, W orchestrated a series of dramatic images- with a model as his stand-in.Another great Art Issue featured Jessica Chastain as a figure painted into a canvas by George Condo. George made the set, the dresses, and improvised as the shoot went on. In 2017, for her first fashion shoot, Anne Imhof directed her muse Eliza Douglas. For another cover story, Gigi Hadid and Kendall Jenner entered the alternate digital world of Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. They appeared as strange pets in an original work. One year I persuaded Yoko Ono to recreate Cut Piece, her most famous performance piece. She was about to have a huge retrospective at MoMA. For the W story, Ono directed a model standing in for her. It was a way to pay due to Ono and also to get a completely new audience engaged in her work. Many more people are going to read stories and see posts about culture than are ever going to see or experience the thing itself, so what you choose and the way you present it is incredibly important.

TE

You make an interesting point about the reach of a magazine. It’s easy to say that readership is down, circulation is down. What you are saying is also true, that the scale of a W Magazine on a platform like Instagram shouldn’t be underestimated. What do you see as the function of a magazine or a media publication these days?

DS

I think it’s changed. You’re creating access and you’re introducing your audience to people and places you think they should be looking at because you’re an arbiter. For so long, magazines or newspapers were arbiters. Their readers relied on them to tell them what they should pay attention to and why. Now, there are so many more platforms and arbiters. We’re all arbiters. With so many voices, magazines and traditional media don’t have sole tastemaking power anymore. There’s too much competition. But they stillinfluence those who subscribe to their platforms. And images are still powerful tools.

TE

What platforms were you looking at then? And now? What publications or people are important arbiters in your life?

DS

I used to load up on magazines every time I flew; now I rarely buy them. But I still love a great visual story if the photographer has an interesting point of view. I still read New York Magazine, T, the FT, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times pretty regularly and get good updates of what’s happening, especially visually, from Instagram because I follow a wide swath of people from different realms. I like the art and fashion trades for news and a number of writers on Substack. But in terms of the most important arbiters in my life, it’s people whose taste I respect, people who cast a critical eye or are creators themselves.

TE

After your tenure at W Magazine, you became editor-in-chief of Surface. What was that like? How were the experiences different?

DS

The person who bought W also owned Surface. So when W was purchased, Sara Moonves became the editor-in-chief of W. I was appointed the editor-in-chief of Surface, which was a design publication that needed a huge revamp. To look at everything through the lens of design was a thrilling opportunity because design is at the heart of everything. I brought in great writers and photographers on a small budget and assembled my own team, bringing Dennis Freedman back to work with me. The first issue featured a lot of innovators. We put Khalil Joseph on the cover. He is a filmmaker who created films for Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar as well as Black News, a work that is a news network. We had stories about the most exciting florist in Tokyo, the rising artist Nicholas Party and speaker design guru Devon Turnball of Ojas. And then we did the second issue, and just as it went out, the pandemic hit. The owner of the magazine used that as an excuse to halt everything.

TE

What did you do?

DS

I transitioned to Chanel shortly afterward. I was advising the head of Arts and Culture on this completely new division at the company. I was working so much that I was hired full time as Head of Arts and Culture Programs. From the bottom up, I developed the programs, defined their reason for being, their brand and visual identity, and launched them.We created the Chanel Culture Fund, bespoke partnerships with leading museums around the world. We created Chanel Connects, a podcast series that pairs guests to talk about what’s next in culture. I cast the first two seasons, edited the scripts, and interviewed several of the guests, including Emerald Fennell and Gillian Flynn on the subject of unlikable women heroines. We created the Chanel Next Prize, a huge monetary award and mentorship program for 10 selected artists around the globe in different disciplines and brought all the awardees together for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2022.

TE

What was it like to work for a European fashion house and corporation versus at a magazine?

DS

I was working with colleagues all over the world, which is one of the things I absolutely loved. I loved having that global perspective because it gave me this real understanding of how culture is talked about in different places. In America, we may take for granted ideas that in other places are considered avant-garde. Or vice versa. I was interested in shaping how to create greater access to contemporary culture in different places, and in exploring how to advance the work of major museums through strategic programs and partnerships. Who were the cultural figures advancing new ideas in those different places? Obviously, at Chanel, the resources were much more vast than those at a magazine in an industry in decline. It was great having colleagues who had expertise across different areas and regions, and seeing just the beauty of that machine when it all clicked into place. When wecreated something it went out into the world at the highest level. I had never had the experience to work across so many departments and geographies at once.

TE

What are you doing now?

DS

I decided that I really wanted to work for myself and bring together all of the different interests and skills I developed through my career and the broad network of people that I know. Last year I created my own business that’s focused on storytelling, brand identity,programming and partnerships for luxury brands, galleries, cultural institutions, artists, and creative collectives. I work with all different kinds of companies to try to help them define who they are, how to create a distinctive profile in the crowded cultural sphere, where they should be looking in terms of places to have an impact, how to think about programming so that it is reaching the audiences that they want to reach.

TE

Why is it so hard for companies to participate in culture in meaningful ways?

DS

I don’t think they know where to look or how to evaluate the players. From being a writer, biographer, producer, biographer, editor in chief and arts strategist at a renown luxury brand, a biographer, I have a lot of experience with the kinds of storytelling that appeal to various sectors ofthe public, the media, institutional partners and TK.. My experiences have given me this perspective that I guess few people have, and which is valuable to all these places because they know only their own space. Or they are drawn to the wrong marquee events without a longer term strategy.

TE

What do you make of this current moment in culture?

DS

My worry is that culture is under threat by authoritarianism. I don’t just mean in the US. I mean global culture. Resources have always been slim, but there’s so much more pressure now to conform to a specific point of view.There are fewer kinds of stories that can be told. Artists will always be artists, but I think there’s going to be a lot less risk taking at all levels. That’s something that concerns me a lot.