One episode begins with sputtering phonemes. Another plays back organized cries of dissent from the 2019 Hong Kong protests. In a third, virtuosic jazz guitarist Pat Metheny plays a few bars from a sweet, nylon-string track before the music fades and becomes a soundbed over which Ross Simonini, artist, writer, and host of the podcast, begins an aural investigation into the musician’s lifelong engagement with sound. Episode after episode, Simonini chases a similar depth with a sly and often behind-the-curtain approach, splicing interviews and disparate worlds of sound together to create ArtReview’s formally experimental podcast, Subject, Object, Verb.
In 2014, author Ursula K. Le Guin gave a short talk about how to live in the anthropocene, arguing that humans should approach nature with more subjectivity and empathy. Instead of cold taxonomy and thoughtless industry, Le Guin reflected on what it would mean to collapse distance between person and plant, and classify flora, fauna, and fungi as “kinfolk.”
