Ruby Thelot isn’t giving away the sauce for free.
NYU Professor, designer and prolific purveyor of 'The Sauce', Ruby Thelot, talks to me about memory, taste, the death of the critic, and what it all means.
I won’t lie - talking to Ruby Thelot can be an intimidating experience. At not even 30, Thelot—NYU professor, artist, and, to me, cult of personality—speaks with gravitas. Still, it’s not unearned. Precise and intellectually elegant, Thelot has quickly become one of most intriguing cultural observers of the internet.
Grappling with themes of memory, culture and digitally mediated life, Thelot’s multidisciplinary practice teases apart our understanding of ‘being online’ in a way that simultaneously feels revelatory yet concise. His 2023 piece ‘The Crisis of Legibility’, for example, provided an insightful breakdown on the half life of screen-generated culture, while just recently, his new essay ‘Indie Sleaze Did Not Take Place’ detailed how our nostalgia can be so effortlessly co-opted by commerce.
Thelot, however, isn’t content just being an observer. He also wants to show us how we can do better - which is why he’s developing a Taste Course or in his words a ‘hate course’. In a conversation that took place in July, Thelot sat down with me to talk about his fixation with memory, how cultural artefacts have become ‘pure sign’, and why people should stop giving away the sauce for free.
EL: Thank you for joining me. You describe your work as stemming from an ‘obsession with memory’. Where does the obsession stem from?
RT: The obsession from memory stems from a fear of loss. I think if I saw a psychologist, they’d probably say that’s very clear. And what I’m losing? I’m losing touch-points, things that make the internet feel familiar. I like to collect a lot of things, I have an art collection for example, and it’s a way for me to anchor the always fluid, nature of the real into rarefied ‘things’ I can carry around with me. Same with books, I want to keep stories and knowledge around me.
It’s also fundamentally an obsession with time. I am ageing as many people are, and as I see time pass me by, I can’t help but want to arrest it in these objects, in my work, in performances and so forth.
EL: Interesting your preference for the physical over the digital. Do you see artefacts in the digital space as being as permanent as a physical object?
RT: In the words of David Rudnick, we all have biases and in a wonderful episode of his podcast, Independence, called ‘Primacism’, he describes that separation between physical and digital prime. I straddle the two but I definitely have a physical prime bias. It’s hard to determine why, but it probably has something to do with my Jesuit education. At school, we had a hard copy of Diderot’s ‘Encyclopedie’. We held physical things very very dearly. I also have this fascination with history. I studied Latin for five years and, well, how did we retrieve the texts? It was all physical objects. And so I think that definitely inspired a lot of my fascination with the physical. When we took trips to Rome and Greece and I finally got to see the artefacts that I had been studying for so long, they were all physical and it influenced me a lot.
EL: That being said, you’ve also built up a career telling the story of being online. How do you reconcile the two?
RT: I spent a big part of my life archiving the internet and writing about it, and that’s also a big part of me. While I may have been going to Rome or Greece, I was also spending a lot of time playing video games and building memories online. There’s this tension between remembering the friends I made playing games like MapleStory, and the feeling of those relationships being fickle, and then the impermanence of a place like Pompeii.
EL: In a recent panel with Reggie James, you discuss the phenomenon of optimising the use of physical spaces for digital clout using Tube Girl as an example. How has our relationship with the physical changed when so often, we now experience the physical world for the purpose of online display?.
RT: Objects have become pure sign. When you see an influencer with a designer good, it’s often fake. The reason why they can get away with it is because the presentation of the good is virtual. It’s in a picture so it’s very difficult to identify with the untrained eye the detail that reveals whether it’s authentic or fake. A Chanel bag, for example, is now not valued for its function or as a work of craftsmanship. It has become pure sign. Objects have become fungible in a way they were not previously, because the mode of flexing it, has changed. It’s an overall trend I am observing. Outfits for instance are often not worn for going outside but for dressing in front of a screen.
EL: And how does this affect our relationship with authenticity?
RT: The big thing for me, and this is something I talk about in my article ‘Everything is Default Fake’ is that when everything is, as the title claims, now ‘default fake’, you gotta pull up. I’m not doing no fit pics, no instagram. If you’re really putting that s*** on, come to the house and let me see it. I want to touch the fabric, I want to hold it; if it’s furniture, I want to sit on the chair.
EL: There is an ongoing conversation about privacy becoming a luxury, and an overall turn inwards within subcultural groups. When knowledge sharing becomes less accelerated due to this closing of the ranks, how does this affect the dissemination of cultural knowledge?
RT: My friend Raihan makes a funny joke about with copy pasta that goes:
‘You say “could you get me this food?” but man, I don’t think you’re really hungry like that. I’m not going to tell you where this food is from because I don’t really think you’re hungry. You just kind of saw the food and now you want the food and want to eat the food, but I don’t think you’re really hungry like that”
I think these private spaces we’re discussing provide a way for people to express their personal identity in a way that is a bit more gated from the encroachment of the commons. When it’s so easy for somebody like Shein or Fashion Nova to spin up an essentially identical copy of a garment that Dua Lipa might wear from a niche designer, there’s something that’s lost when an image is posted and a supply chain can dupe a product so quickly.
EL: You’re teaching a course on Taste. Why now?
RT: Our modern world has us living in a culture that is polluted with positivity and I want to give people the ability to say “this is bad and I want it to stop”. Nowadays, everything has to be improved and optimised but I think at certain times, some things need to just not happen. I want people to be able to verbalise their critiques. Not just “oh that s*** was mid dog or I f*** with it”. No. If it’s a chair for example, I want to say why something is poorly designed.
It’s also a reaction to the market. We live in a time where a lot happens through collaborations and it’s hard to take a stand and say you don’t like something because it may affect your livelihood. For example, if you say you don’t like the new Gucci collection, it implies the possibility that in the future, Gucci may not invite you to their show because you’ve been negative.
And that's part of the cultural economy, right? We want to be in these rooms. We want to be in these rooms, affiliated with these institutions and so to speak against them becomes a danger for those potential future affiliations. Part of this ‘positive economy’ is an abstention. You're not gonna talk about something straight up; it’s the avoidance of anything negative because you want to link and build with all these [companies]. As a result, The role of critique and the ability to give and receive criticism have been lost.
I consider the class a ‘hate class’ as much as it is a ‘taste’ class. I’m not providing the guidelines of what is tasteful but I am providing an overview of references - mostly the Western canon since we have only four weeks - to better analyse the things you see as cultural artefacts around you.
EL: Overall, what’s your view on the current state of criticism as an act?
RT: I think people have forgotten that being a critic and a creator are two different jobs. I see a lot in music when somebody’s favourite artist gets panned and they say things like “who the f*** is Larry Fitzmauricee?” or “You don’t even know how to make music”. It’s a direct descendant of the sort of identity driven conversations we’ve had in the last 10 years where people’s ability to speak on things was related to their identities, and similarly people’s ability to be critics was related to their abilities. There’s a sense that if you can’t make rock music, you can’t critique a rock musician and I don’t think that’s necessarily correct.
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Ruby’s Taste
You’ll have to ask Ruby himself.
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"If I were an artist, wouldn’t it be truly dreadful if nothing were said about what I did? Don’t things live not just by direct experience of them but by rumour, discussion, argument, and fantasy?" - Adrian Searle