Dave Eggers on Contrapposto, Art School, and Creativity in the Age of AI

In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Dave Eggers — bestselling author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, The Circle, and The Every, co-founder of 826 Valencia, and now the author of Contrapposto, a novel that pulls readers through every angle of the art world — for a conversation that is at once a deep literary discussion and a sweeping indictment of everything wrong with how America treats its artists.Dave traces the roots of Contrapposto back to his own early art education in the Chicagoland area, where he was a painting major before practicality intervened, and forward to his own practice of making art — drawings, paintings, prints — to fund ScholarMatch and the nonprofits at 849 Valencia. He talks about Cricket and Olympia, the novel's two protagonists, and the feral self-reliance of 70s and 80s kids who grew up free-range by default. He dissects the cannibalistic culture of art school MFA programs, explains why he believes the apprenticeship model should replace the $100,000-a-year degree, and introduces Art and Water — his new Pier 29 art school built on the idea that master artists and students should share space without money being exchanged.He also calls ChatGPT a hundred percent plagiarism, explains why letting AI write for you means leaving the human race, shares why he hasn't had a smartphone in years, and reflects on how The Circle — which predicted surveillance capitalism, corporate overreach, and the erosion of democracy — got it mostly right and somehow still underestimated things.