Is the world getting better or is it on the verge of collapse? Stefan Sagmeister emphatically believes that things are looking up and in the art exhibition "Now Is Better" showcases a bold new way to convince the world that he's right. He takes actual paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries, disassembles them and creates new works by juxtaposing them with data visualizations of just how much things have improved since the good old days. Some works chart the incredible decline over the centuries and deaths on the battlefield from famine and from extreme weather events, while others show how much cheaper food and lighting have become in real terms. One piece documents the explosion in the number of guitars per person on the planet, an indicator of growth in leisure and entertainment, while another charts the persistent belief that crime is always rising despite its well-documented decline. A heralded graphic designer who has designed album covers for Jay-Z, The Rolling Stones, and Lou Reed. He's won two Grammy Awards, including one for his design of the Talking Heads boxset "Once In a Lifetime." Born in Austria in 1962, he's called New York City home since the 1990s, and he draws on sources such as "Our World in Data," Human Progress and the work of Steven Pinker, who has written the foreword to an art book of the "Now Is Better" series that's due out later this year in a wide ranging conversation. Sagmeister tells me why it's so important to acknowledge and defend material progress. Why art and commerce are not enemies and what he loves about the new world he's adopted as his homeland and how that ties in to the "Now is Better" project. Stefan Sagmeister, Thanks for talking to Reason. Wonderful. Thank you so much. So give me the elevator pitch on the "Now Is Better" show. Well, it's basically comes out of my interest in long term thinking because I discovered that there are really two ways to look at the world. One is from a very short term perspective. What is happening right now, which is basically what all media looks at it. And if you do that, almost by definition, everything looks bad because things that are going bad go bad quickly. Scandals, catastrophes and so on. While many things that develop well that develop positively, do so very slowly and don't really work in our short news cycle. But that's really what the show is about, to look at the world from a long term perspective. 20 years, 50 years, 200 years. I think we have a couple of pieces that are 500 years and there, if you take that point of view, many, many things look very positive. Was there a moment where you were like, Aha, this is this is what my work is going to be for the next few years? There was. Well, I was lucky enough to get one of those residencies at the American Academy in Rome. And one evening I was sitting next to a lawyer who was the husband of one of the residents artists, and he told me that what we see in Poland, in Hungary and Brazil at the time really means the end of modern democracy. He was a highly educated person, and I looked it up. I went back to the studio that night and quickly Googled it. What's the story of this modern democracy? When did it start? And if you went back 200 years, there really was only one in the United States. I went back a hundred years after World War I. There were, I think, 18. And now we have just a good 80, I think 87 democracies that the U.N. says they are democracies. So it turned out that this smart man had really no idea of the road that he lives in. But I discussed it with other people and was immediately surprised how much pushback I would get because, you know, specifically there were certain people and in this case it was mostly on the political left who somehow want to believe that things are going down, that there is some sort of an investment in that. What do you think that is? I think if you're an activist, it might be easier to get people over to your cause if you can tell them how bad things are. And I think there's a truth to that. Many of us being so overwhelmed by all the negative news that we get on a daily basis, give up and say, Oh, this is so terrible, we can do anything anyway. One of the paintings that you have is titled "Richer and Poorer," and it shows in 2020, 9% of the global population was living in poverty compared to in 1990. 35% of the global population was living in poverty. But then you ask how many people believe poverty has gotten worse and 55% of people believe that poverty has gotten worse over the past 30 years. Only 12% believe that it's gotten better, which it has. So are people misinformed or do they want to believe that they're living in a bad period? I think it's a mix. I think it's a it's a mix of I don't believe that the media is. Inherently evil or. Or is trying to mislead people? No, They believe what they're saying. They believe what they're saying. And they know specifically now in the last 20 years since we have clickable links. They know what people like. The media gives us what we like, and we all prefer negative news over positive news. I am just like everybody else. I also do prefer negativity and I actually think to create pieces that are positive is somewhat more challenging because they by themselves tend to be less interesting. The vast majority of pieces, when they have anything to do with commentary of life, social commentary, anything will be critical or negative. One of the series of pieces in the collection look at how much richer we are. One actually looks at global GDP and how much richer the planet is which is fascinating. One painting is "Bright Lights: Time worked for an hour of light," and in 1800 there were 6 hours of work for an hour of light. In 2000, it was 2 seconds, work for an hour of light. You have another one about 3 hours working a job. And it's amazing that not only has the amount of work you have to do for a second of light has come down, but the amount that we work is much less. How do people respond when you say, "Well, actually you're working a lot less than your your father probably, or your grandparents?" On the work front, I think there was an interesting phenomena going on right now in France, you know, where you have all these protests going on against moving the pension years up, and I think that's a direct result of this information not being part of our daily discussion. Because if everybody would be aware that we now live double the amount of time than we did 100 years ago, then it's just logical that we would have to work a little bit more before we can go into our retirement. You have a piece called "Artists, Lawyers and Doctors" and this is the number of artists, lawyers and doctors in the U.S. Artists 2.5 million. Lawyers, 1.3 million. Doctors 900,000. Is it a sign of a good society that there are more artists than doctors? It's definitely the sign of a good society that it would be able to sustain a very large group of people that has very little function. We can't do anything before we'd have shelter, before we can't breathe and eat. And so all of these other things, and specifically the artistic impetus, is only be able to even to be pursued once we have shelter. And once we have The cave paintings are of the animals that hunters caught so Exactly you can paint after you've eaten, but probably not before. And they're done in a cave once you are sheltered. Right. Right. Yeah. And you have another piece, the number of playable guitars in the world, which has increased massively. So that speaks to the idea that it's a pretty good world where a lot of people are expressing themselves creatively. That's an indicator that we're doing pretty well. Yes. The numbers of the guitars is absolutely astonishing because it went from a couple of hundreds of decades ago to tens of thousands now. So, I mean, the increase is just incredible. Going in the other direction, you have a painting that talks about the decline in the number of deaths from natural disasters, which is also something that, again, if you're I would say if you're over 40, you should have no problem realizing like when you were younger, you would hear all of these stories about, you know, hundreds of thousands of people starving to death or dying because of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or tidal waves. And you don't really hear that very much anymore. But we think the world is getting worse on that scale. Yes. Well, it's exactly what we talked about in the beginning. It's that there has never been a news report about there was no earthquake in California today. Right. So all the positive things just go unreported. But even the absolute number of people dying went down. It is a fraction of what it used to be. And that's certainly true of things like pandemics and what not. So however bad COVID was, the response was quicker and more effective than the 1918 flu epidemic. Yes, I always found it fascinating that during COVID one of the words that was used the most in the media, also in the New York Times was "unprecedented.". Right. Even though the people who wrote that nearly had the knowledge that this is not unprecedented, maybe unprecedented this year, but for sure, not unprecedented this century, Right. Where you had AIDS that killed 30 million people, you had the Spanish flu was between 50 and 100 million people and so on. You know, a number of the pieces talk about immigrants and immigration being a positive thing. You yourself are an immigrant from Austria to New York. You first came here in the late eighties. You settled here fully in the early nineties. What drew you to New York and how does that reflect in your work? Well, I came here first right after high school. It was a high school gift from my brother in law. It was in 81. So New York was, from its now perspective, in a pretty bad shape. I would say crime was incredibly high, but it was just fascinating to me. Even though I was born in a very pretty small town in Austria, I was always attracted by big places. I think it's also a lovely mix of American friendliness, which might be odd because, you know, New York is not known as a friendly
city. Exactly. But ultimately it is quite open. And I haven't done a piece of it yet, but I've just come across and I checked it and it seems to hold up. I just came across data that showed that refugees, not immigrants, refugees that have been in this country for 25 years or longer have a 30% higher income than the average American. And with immigrants, okay, I believe it. But the refugees, it's pretty astonishing that refugees in their lifetime, not in the beginning when they come here, but in their lifetime would surpass the locals. I find that to be the strongest indicator that there is an American dream, that that is a life that I've come across. And I know it has been incredibly fashionable to say that the American dream is dead. And even I feel sort of like silly sitting here are claiming otherwise. But those numbers point in that direction. Your background is as a graphic designer. Yes. Which is more functional than you know, than art. Right. True. 100%. Do you see a sharp distinction that many artists or many critics would draw between kind of commercial art or instrumental art and real art? Is that a false dichotomy? I can argue it both ways. If people ask me, "What do you call yourself?" I definitely am a designer and the work that I'm doing here, I would also see as design work simply because I would say that there is a functionality to it and which I find pleasing. But I also totally understand that many artists would not want any functionality to their pieces. That's the whole point of art, right? It's that it resists being used for some other purpose. And I would say even there would have to really say it's the whole point of contemporary art, because art by itself, if you look at, has historically, of course, also had many functions. Many of the most famous artists in the past did very functional work. You know, Michelangelo designed candlestick holders. Leonardo obviously did many, many other things. There is no such thing as pure functionality. It's all on a scale. Talk a little bit about your process for the pieces in this exhibition. Basically, you buy cheap paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries and then you put data visualizations over them. It originally started with pieces that we still had in the attic, in the house that I grew up with that came from my great great grandfather's store, who was an antique dealer in western Austria. And the stuff that didn't sell wound up still being stored still to this very day. So the first pieces really came from there. And since then, I'm by now, I think connected to about through the auction houses, all of them in Central Europe, mostly Austria. So what do you show money or what do you pay for a piece that you're going to paint over? I think they're all for sure under €4,000, which, you know, I'm kind of a beneficiary of the fact that specifically 19th century art, but also 18th century art is very much out of the fashion right now. What is the pleasure of painting over, you know, a piece from the early 19th century with a data visualization that shows how much better things have gotten? Well, we're not really painting over. We're really basically taking the piece apart. We are plucking holes into it and we are inserting the new data. So the piece, if you want, is destroyed, which I had given some thoughts about meaning, ultimately, I solved it for myself, thinking that if somebody in 200 years takes my work that they found at tiny auction houses and makes a new piece out of it, I think I would be very happy about it. But the process really is I buy these pieces at auction. By then I've already had received the photo, so I ultimately try out designs and these can be inspired by the data. They can be inspired by a color scheme, they can be inspired by form that can be inspired by a composition. They can be a reaction on the existing piece. But ultimately, by and large, I'm trying to go against the composition that is existing because that sort of seems to create the kind of tension that ultimately. Makes a good new composition. How much did you increase on average? Just make it up if you have to. You know, if the average painting that you started with cost €4,000, what was the average that you were selling it for? How much did you increase the value? I think it's probably times two or three. But of course, there's also significant cost involved in creating this. You know, like there is an incredible amount of just hours that go into that, not just myself or for my own, but there's a whole team working on this in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, there are costs in renting the space, all of that stuff. So there is that. But ultimately, I actually try to keep the price as low as it's possible that it still makes sense. Yeah, I want this to be in as many homes as possible. That's the functionality of it, because ultimately the goal and in therefore really it's embedded in the concept that these things hang on somebody's wall as a reminder that what they just read on Twitter doesn't mean it's the end of the world. You've worked with a number of very, you know, globally known recording artists like Lou Reed, like the Talking Heads, like the Rolling Stones. And you did an album cover for The Rolling Stones. Which album was that again? Bridges To Babylon. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that's like a platinum record. What what does it feel like to know that your images are going out to, you know, a million people or more? Fantastic. You know, it's also something that I love about design is that it's a pretty democratic way of working where you know, we did a Jay-Z cover where the first one was 5 million for the price of $20-25, which I don't think there is a publication in the art world that reaches those kind of numbers. I very much love the fact that design tends to live within our lives. I see myself as a communication designer more so than a graphic designer. I think the challenge specifically for somebody like me is to make these things. Interesting enough. That even though they're positive, people will be engaged. And, you know, that's the challenge.
