Good morning.

This edition of The New Art World Order is a little different from our usual material. It’s shaped by a series of philosophical and existential questions I’ve been sitting with lightly. Less dense with data than my usual musings, but no less relevant. If anything, more so. This series is written for those who like to sit with ideas slowly. If that’s you, you can subscribe here to receive future editions in your inbox.

I am a voracious reader, and a secret collector of quotes, tucked into folders, scrawled into notebooks, saved for the moment they become necessary. Writing this, I found myself returning to many of them, the way you return to old letters when you’re trying to remember what you actually felt. A few kept surfacing. They say something I couldn’t say better myself about the nature of what follows, about what it actually means to be an artist and work in the arts. Not the romanticized version. The real one: the relentless, consuming, often unglamorous act of making. Art is beautiful and painful, frequently in the same breath. It asks everything of you. These quotes acknowledge that paradox. They are about the consumption and the transformation of this inexhaustible love.

I was burning, while you came blaming me for the smell of ashes. — Dostoevsky

Yes, you will rise from the ashes but the burning comes first.
For this part,
Darling,
You must be brave.
-Kalen Dion.

This is an unconventional essay on love, art, and the slow, relational process by which each forms the other. I hope it finds you well, and open to sitting with a few hard questions alongside me as we explore this philosophical stance that the skill of making, understanding and collecting art is an act of love. A love of art isn’t transferred. It’s received.

Attention + time + seriousness = love.

Institutions are good at describing how art, as a skill, is taught, curricula, methodologies, measurable outcomes. I’ve spent my life inside and around those structures. What interests me more is how art is actually learned as a viewer and a maker: how it takes root inside a person.

That process rarely happens through information transfer. It happens through proximity, care, conflict, trust, and time. Relationship, not instruction, has been the real curriculum of my life in art, in all its forms.

Why Art Isn’t Transferred

Understanding art, fine art, yes, but also music, food, writing, movement, doesn’t pass from teacher to student the way information moves from page to mind. It doesn’t travel cleanly or in straight lines. What changes a person’s practice happens through proximity: watching someone work, being taken seriously over time, absorbing the emotional cues of care, disappointment, trust, and friction.

Learning science backs this. Humans internalize complex skills through modeling, attunement, and repetition within relationship. We mirror those we respect. Our nervous systems tune themselves to the emotional tone of the environments we inhabit. Skill is often absorbed before it’s articulated, learned in the body before it’s named in language. This is why so much mastery remains tacit: you can practice it long before you can explain it.

Art is learned this way, metabolized through presence.

We already accept this mode of learning as fundamental to being human. Social norms, ethical customs, and family dynamics aren’t learned from manuals; they’re absorbed through immersion, observation, and repeated participation. Culture itself is transmitted behaviorally. We become who we are through proximity long before we can narrate what we’ve learned.

Art and the consumption of it differs in one crucial way: it doesn’t arise simply by existing within a system. It requires intentional cultivation. Someone has to stay with another person’s attention over time, to take their inner life seriously enough to help them shape it. The ability to use art for self-reflection, connection, and expression doesn’t emerge from exposure alone. It grows through care sustained across time.

This is why love, understood not as sentiment, but as attention, time, and seriousness, is inseparable from how art (to make, to view, to consume) is learned. Someone must offer real presence to another person’s process. Not to control it. Not to extract from it. But to remain with it long enough for something interior to take form.

Art isn’t transferred. It’s formed in relationship.

“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known” – Chuck Palahniuk (interesting coming from one of the most original writers in existence if you know his world)

Why Witnessing Teaches More Than Instruction

Most of my real breakthroughs didn’t happen in classrooms. They happened in rooms where someone was working in real time, struggling, adjusting, making decisions in front of me. Psychology calls this observational learning: we internalize behavior by witnessing it embodied by someone we respect. What transfers isn’t just technique, it’s posture. How someone holds uncertainty. How long they stay with discomfort. How they recover from failure without dramatizing it.

The moments that reshaped me most weren’t moments of being taught; they were moments of witnessing. Watching someone decide when to stop, when to destroy, when to keep going teaches a kind of embodied judgment that cannot be reduced to explanation. This is tacit knowledge, knowing how to act without being able to fully articulate how you know.

Studios transmit this kind of knowing constantly. You begin to mirror tempo, standards, emotional regulation. Over time, you don’t just learn what to make you learn how to be with the process of making. This is why studios, agencies, residencies, collectives, and intensives form artists in ways that platforms cannot. Platforms distribute outcomes. Studios shape capacities.

There is a quality of courage that can only be learned by watching someone else exercise it. You see them return after failure. You watch them sit quietly with a piece that isn’t working rather than forcing a resolution. You observe how they speak about their doubts, with directness rather than shame. None of this can be conveyed through instruction. It can only be demonstrated, and then slowly, over time, absorbed.

Formal instruction can provide vocabulary. Witnessing provides courage.

Why Proximity Matters More Than Information

Learning that changes behavior is situated. It happens inside real contexts, real stakes, and real relationships. We learn by participating in environments where the work is already happening not by receiving abstract instruction about the work. This is why mentorship, apprenticeship, and long-term studio proximity quietly outperform short-term, technique-driven courses, regardless of how excellent the content.

What’s being learned in a studio isn’t just how to make a thing. It’s how to tolerate uncertainty, regulate attention, and stay serious about a practice without becoming brittle. These are relational capacities before they’re technical ones. They cannot be taught in a webinar or a PDF. They are grown in rooms where people show up repeatedly, where the stakes are real, where there is someone else’s commitment visible in the space alongside your own.

This is also where learning becomes reciprocal. The student shapes the teacher. The teacher’s standards are sharpened by the student’s questions. The relationship becomes a kind of pressure, generative, not punishing , that refines both parties over time. Formation is never one-directional. This is something institutions rarely acknowledge, but every honest artist, collector and dealer knows.

Which is precisely where my protectiveness comes from. I have seen what happens when this kind of relationship is entered into carelessly, or worse, cynically. The damage done by imposters in formation roles is not abstract. It is personal, lasting, and hard to undo. To be trusted with someone’s creative development is to be trusted with something that sits very close to their sense of self. That is not a small thing. It requires integrity, consistency, and a genuine reckoning with the weight of influence. There is a moral responsibility at the center of this work, one that I think about often, and take seriously. You are not just shaping someone’s practice. You are participating in the formation of a person. The Paradox is in that art is as frivolous as it is powerful simultaneously.

The Hidden Curriculum: Attention, Time, Seriousness

There’s an unofficial curriculum in every studio that never appears in institutional language. It has three elements: attention, time, and seriousness.

Attention is what someone notices in the work, not just what they praise or critique, but what they are drawn toward, what they slow down for, what they return to. Being the subject of genuine attention is a rare experience. It reorganizes how a person relates to their own making. When someone you respect pays careful attention to your process, not your finished product, not your marketability, but the interior logic of how you move through work, it gives the work permission to be taken seriously. You begin to take it seriously yourself.

Time is the second element, and perhaps the most countercultural one in an age of velocity. Formation takes a long time. Not because people learn slowly, but because depth requires repetition, recursion, and the slow accumulation of lived experience across varied contexts. You have to make the same mistake more than once, in more than one form, before you understand what it’s actually costing you. You have to return to the same questions across different seasons of life before the answers begin to settle into conviction rather than position.

Seriousness is treating the process as consequential not in an anxious way, but in a way that communicates: this matters, and you matter inside it. Seriousness is the opposite of performance. It is presence without theater. When someone brings genuine seriousness to a conversation about your work, something shifts. You stop managing their perception and start actually thinking. This is when real development becomes possible.

This is also where I observe the largest and most consistent breakdown, across disciplines, across relationships, across institutions. When genuine seriousness enters a room, it is frequently mistaken for intensity, for pressure, for judgment. And it is uncomfortable, especially at first. That discomfort is not incidental. Seriousness quietly signals that consequences exist, that the work is real, that the choices matter, that something is actually at stake. For many people, particularly those who have learned to protect themselves by keeping their practice at arm’s length, that signal is destabilizing before it becomes liberating. The presence of real seriousness asks you to stop performing and start being accountable, to the work, to the relationship, and to yourself. That is a difficult ask. It is also, in my experience, the only conditions under which something true gets made.

Together, these three, attention, time, seriousness, constitute what love looks like in professional practice. Not sentimentality. Not affirmation. Care expressed through sustained presence. When someone offers you all three over time, especially when the work is unfinished or uncertain, your nervous system learns that the process itself is worth staying with.

That belief changes everything.

“I am all things I have ever loved.” — Toni Morrison

How Artists Actually Learn

Artists don’t learn in neat, linear arcs. They learn inside environments, studios, residencies, collectives, through the slow accumulation of lived experience. Day-to-day life becomes the curriculum: navigating complex relationships, doing deep inner work alongside outer practice, learning when to play and when to be disciplined, receiving feedback, failing publicly, and returning to the work anyway.

This is, I’ll admit, where my own obsessions live. I have spent much of my professional life thinking and architecting environments, the conditions, the rhythms, the relational texture of spaces where people do serious work together. There is nothing I find more quietly thrilling than watching someone change inside a well-held room. Not the dramatic breakthrough moment, but the slower thing: the gradual shift in how a person carries themselves, how they speak about their work, how they return to it after difficulty. That is the transformation that interests me. And it is never accidental. It is always the product of a carefully tended environment and of the love, in the fullest sense of that word, that goes into tending it.

The studio isn’t just a site of production. It’s a relational environment where a person learns how to be with themselves in the presence of others. This is why it is both romanticized and deeply misunderstood as an economic product. People try to replicate it through platforms and online communities, and sometimes they capture something real. But what they often miss is the irreducible quality of sustained co-presence, the texture of being in a room together across time.

Breakthroughs come through mistake-making: trying, misjudging, mourning what didn’t work, and trying again with slightly more honesty. Learning here isn’t about avoiding failure; it’s about building the capacity to metabolize it. This is how resilience forms, not through success alone, but through cycles of effort, rupture, repair, and recommitment.

One of the most catalytic moments in an artist’s development is being taken seriously by someone they respect. Not praised reflexively. Taken seriously. This reorganizes how a person relates to their own attention. You take more risks. You stay longer with difficulty. You invest more care, not for approval, but because your practice has been recognized as worthy of it.

Artists also learn through conflict and repair. Disagreement, when navigated with integrity, becomes a training ground for voice. You learn when to adapt, when to hold your ground, when to walk away. These are not technical skills. They are relational ones and they shape the work as profoundly as any technique ever could.

Most of all, artists learn by staying in the room long enough for something to shift. Belief in your voice doesn’t arrive fully formed. It compounds through presence, through showing up when doubt is loud and nothing seems to move. Over time, something settles. A worldview clarifies. A sense of value takes root not as ego, but as quiet conviction that your way of seeing is worth developing.

This is how artists actually learn: not through instruction alone, but through lived, relational practice where making work and becoming a person are inseparable.

Platforms Distribute. Studios Form.

Platforms and studios serve fundamentally different functions. One circulates work. The other forms the person making it. This distinction matters not just culturally, but economically and the confusion between them is one of the defining tensions of the current art market.

Platforms optimize for reach: visibility, velocity, scale. They turn work into content and artists into profiles. Distribution matters I am not arguing otherwise. But distribution alone doesn’t form judgment, discipline, or depth of voice. It doesn’t teach someone how to metabolize feedback, navigate relational tension, manage risk, build structure, or sustain a practice over time. These capacities are not downstream of distribution. They are upstream of it.

Studios are slow formation environments. They shape how an artist sees, decides, and persists. They build capacities platforms cannot: discernment, pacing, tolerance for uncertainty, coherence of voice. These aren’t aesthetic luxuries, they’re economic ones. The market doesn’t reward speed forever. It rewards coherence and stamina over time.

What platforms reward, in the short term, is legibility, work that travels well now, that is trend-aligned and easily consumed. Some artists thrive here. Many burn out. What platforms rarely support is the long, invisible period where a language is forming, the years of making work that has no audience yet, that is awkward or unresolved or too strange to circulate, but that is doing the necessary interior work of finding its own logic.

Studios protect that phase. They allow work to be unfinished without being prematurely judged. This slowness isn’t anti-economic. It’s pre-economic. It’s what makes durability possible. Mature work sustains value over time. Formation is what makes work mature.

The strongest art economies have always been rooted in formation environments, studios, mentorships, ateliers, residencies, collectives, long before distribution technologies reshaped the market. Markets move faster now. Formation still moves at a human pace. No platform has solved that tension without distorting the work itself.

Open Questions

This line of thinking surfaces questions I don’t yet know how to answer but feel compelled to sit with.

What happens when platforms start simulating formation? Online mentorships, paid Discord communities, and creator schools increasingly borrow the language and structure of studios. Sometimes they offer something real. But when formation is productized at scale, what gets lost in the translation? How do we distinguish between genuine relational depth and its aesthetic reproduction?

What are the ethics of selling work that hasn’t had time to form yet? The velocity of today’s market pressures artists to release, circulate, and monetize before their voice has fully cohered. This can produce work that is stylistically competent but interiorly thin, technically accomplished but not yet fully inhabited. The market doesn’t always notice. But the artist does. And the long-term cost to a practice can be significant.

Who gets access to formation environments and who doesn’t? Studios, residencies, and ateliers have historically been gatekept by class, geography, and networks of proximity. The artists who have access to sustained mentorship and community are often already advantaged. This is not incidental. It shapes which voices develop fully, and which ones are lost before they cohere.

Can collectors participate in formation or only in distribution? What would it mean to invest in an artist’s process rather than just their output? What obligations and possibilities does that open?

I don’t raise these as rhetorical gestures. They are genuine preoccupations and they are shaping the work I’m building with Lion & Lamb.

Love as a Professional Practice

Pedagogy, the study and practice of how people learn, lives not just in institutions but in studios, mentorships, peer groups, and communities of practice. When I speak of art as pedagogy, I’m naming how art forms people: through proximity, modeling, conflict, care, and sustained presence. Not as a method, but as the relational architecture through which someone becomes who they are through making.

Art as a ethical professional practice cannot exist without love, for the self and for others. It cannot be learned alone. You can’t discover your taste without exposure to what shapes taste, and without permission to explore that vulnerable interior terrain with another person. To understand why we make art, why we collect it, why we are drawn to it across the span of a life, is to confront a longing for connection. Creation and patronage are both acts of reaching toward one another.

In an age of abundance, where content is produced and consumed at scale, where the feed never empties and the options never resolve, what people seek becomes clearer in contrast. Beneath the velocity, what we want is connection, community, and, by extension, love. The work that endures is almost always the work that was made with care, the kind of care that takes time, that requires relationship, that cannot be automated or accelerated without loss.

What would a formation-first art economy actually look like, structurally, economically, relationally? This is the question that is keeping me going. After six years of working inside this tension, I feel I’ve only begun to understand its complexity. But I know without doubt that this work, both in its making and in its inquiry, comes from a place of love. For people. For makers. For the belief that this level of courage and labor deserves to be valued, and fairly compensated, for the depth of influence it has on us as individuals, and as a collective.

I have spent all my life inside this tension, between formation and distribution, between love as a private conviction and love as a professional practice, and I am no closer to resolving it. I am, however, more certain than ever that the tension itself is worth staying in. That the questions matter. That the people who are willing to ask them, and to be changed by the asking, are the ones this work most needs.

What I know is this: art made or consumed without love, without attention, time, and seriousness directed at the person making it, tends toward the decorative. It circulates. It may even sell. But it doesn’t accumulate meaning the way work does when it has been genuinely held. And people can feel the difference, even when they can’t name it. Collectors feel it. Audiences feel it. Artists feel it most of all.

This essay is, in its own way, an act of that same love, that same reaching toward one another. An attempt to articulate the questions that don’t have clean answers. To stay in the room with ideas that are still forming. I hope it offered you something worth sitting with, and I hope it gives you courage, in some small way, to be brave through the burning.

Until next time.

“Everything is more beautiful because we are doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.” — Homer, The Iliad

Xox,

Rachael