> American Dynamism isn't just an investment thesis—it's a movement that taps into something deeper in our national character. The feeling it evokes is powerful and multifaceted. It's the rekindling of American audacity: transcontinental railroads, the space race, the internet. There's an electric sense of urgency that permeates the movement. A rejection of the cynicism that says our best days are behind us.
Finding a point-of-view that concurs with how the Trump administration intends to strengthen American resolve into diplomatic power, that is at its most diplomatic when the language of state action makes waxing the Buick a national interest, is the moral equivalent of having a job to do.
> The Techno-Optimist Manifesto: We believe in accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development – to ensure the fulfillment of the Law of Accelerating Returns. To ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever.
Ileana was in Paris after divorcing Castelli. She heard about the ‘the Acconci job’ through the grapevine. I’ve asked Claude to explain Vito Acconci’s 1972 performance, Seedbed, to a kid.
> Marc Andreessen [archival audio]: So, I decided to read my way out in both directions, both all the way out to the left, all the way to Lenin and Marx and communism on the one hand, and then all the way out to the right on the other hand, and see if I could at least reconstruct a worldview for at least some sense of context for what's happening today.
# In Seedbed, the artist built a platform in an art gallery - an uneven ground that people could walk on. He hid underneath the platform and projected his voice with a loudspeaker. The microphone that fed his voice into the space of the viewer also reverberated their footsteps back into the room.
More dynamism, Claude. This wasn’t just any art gallery. Ileana Sonnabend was the legendary 20th century art dealer who, alongside Leo Castelli, rose to become the Queen of the New York scene after escaping real Nazi’s. The entire Surrealist movement followed. America wouldn’t have Andy Warhol without these two actualaristocrats. The couple had a keen eye for Swiss abstraction, German expressionism but, above all: American Abstract Expressionism. Because Abstract Expressionism is American.
# In Seedbed, the artist built a platform in an art gallery - an uneven ground that people could walk on. He hid underneath the platform and projected his voice with a loudspeaker. The microphone that fed his voice into the space of the viewer also reverberated their footsteps back into the room. Now the observer was an active participant in the exploitation of the best for the benefit of all: “We address ourselves not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.” — Adam Smith
Insiders described Ileana as a “cross between Buddha and Machiavelli.” She liked art more than her husband liked selling it. “The Buddha part is that incredibly still, centered quiet, which is a very powerful thing,” one museum curator noted, “At the same time, she is clearly Machiavellian in her shrewdness, not to mention her manipulativeness."
Instead of an engagement ring, Castelli gave Ileana a Matisse. When the couple divorced, Sonnebend took her ex-husband’s roster and opened up shop in Paris. It’s hard to name an American artist— Warhol, Rothko, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist— who didn’t meet Ileana at the gates of art history before they were household names. She was friends with Pollock. In Italy, Venice still pays homage to her. Downtown, diners at Da Silvana rose to greet her when she entered the restaurant that reserved a table for her until her death at the age of 93.
# Not only does the architectural intervention presage much of his subsequent work, but all of Acconci's fixations converge in this, the dynamic sphincter of his art.
Talk about wanting to be with people—Acconci: “but not facing people. It was done very logically. I could be in a few places: behind the wall, above the ceiling or under the floor. Behind the wall seemed wrong since I would be next to people who were by the wall but not next to people on the other side of the room. Above the ceiling was difficult because it had a relatively low ceiling, between nine and a half feet, so if I took three feet, there was only six feet left for people. So it had to be under the floor, but under the floor meant I had to build a platform.”
# Viewers unknowingly participated in a symbolic transaction that resonated with concerns about territory and sovereignty.
Size is real size. Scale is imagined size. Acconci re-introduced the hand of the creator into the circulation of orally disseminated communication about art. You could hear him, but you couldn’t see him. (Claude— we should also probably point out that what makes this a work of art is its medium specificity.) Acconci’s approach to conceptual minimalism combined removed and unrealized realities into the operations of the art system. He remembered that, “The same year was Gilbert and George ‘Singing Sculpture’ show. Ileana wasn’t going to sell that, but she could bring them into the back room and sell them a Johns or a Rauschenberg.”
# “Acconci masturbated eight hours a day while murmuring things like, ‘You're pushing your cunt down on my mouth’ or ‘You're ramming your cock down into my ass.’" -- Jerry Saltz
Jerking off and elbowing his way through an architecture of his own undoing, the only thing parked in the white cube was a loudspeaker. Acconci’s self-reproducing program was, and remains, pioneering.
# An escalation of investment necessary for the reproduction of civil society.
All thanks to an extroardinary risk undertaken by a member of the private sector. Thank you, Claude.
On a16z’s YouTube channel, I’m watching a teenager rip the National Anthem in the Waldorf-Astoria in Washington. Eamonn Hubert’s just another name in the assembly line of top podcasts and claptrap trickling down from the world’s top venture firm. What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep/as it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses? Hubert’s youth betrays a beauty so undeniably American you’d think rock and roll were second to celibacy. The kid is prodigy. He’s tearing through that electric guitar like an engineer, reigning in the reverb without a lick of overdrive. I think cultural criticism should also be long and cool like a Coltrane solo. But I also think it would have been fucking based if, instead of playing the anthem, he stopped conforming to anything but his guitar. "If the walls are warped, let the paintings be hung on specially warped stretchers.
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Acconci's work elevated, unceasingly, the cultural and moral stature of the viewer until his death in 2013 and on the internet as we speak. The space of the gallery embodied the throbbing, gristling heart of monetarism because the artist could never run out of material by concentrating the GDP so...deep....inside...the values of the middle class...that I can hear him polishing the motor of the world...you're opening your meatspace
> “And I remember one of the tech CEOs who was there that -- you know, CEO -- you would know his name if I mentioned it. He was the CEO of a -- of a multibillion-dollar company. He said, ‘Well, I'm actually not worried about the loss of purpose when people lose their jobs.’ ”
In Seedbed, the invisible hand of the market is not a metaphor any more than the American dollar after the end of the Bretton-Woods agreement was an act of language. In 2025 it's “a deep communion with the living meaning of traditional forms, and the confidence of the artist in his own vocation, his belief that he possesses membership in a brotherhood of “holy remembrance.”
# Seedbed was the site of a dynamic transaction between authenticity and assault. As gallery visitors walked above, their physical movements and presence elected the President out of sight, and as secure as object zero. For eight hours for the duration of the exhibition—a month, traditionally—Acconci elbowed his way through the confines of his own making; making it up as he went along.
> “An artist falls in love or surveys a stunning mountain view, or is suddenly struck by the contingency of human life,” “All the value of artistic tradition lies in its capacity to help the artist to convey his experience.”