Matthew Krouse's 'mid-career retrospective of a no career'

Earlier this year, Adam Broomberg, a Johannesburg-born artist living in Berlin, phoned Matthew Krouse, a former actor turned writer and editor, with a request. It didn’t involve Yiddish translation work.  “People seem to think I am Isaac Bashevis Singer, which I’m not,” says Krouse, who was born into a Jewish family from Germiston in 1961. He grew up speaking Yiddish with his mother and has previously helped Broomberg with translations. “I won’t ever win a Nobel prize for writing in Yiddish,” he insists in reference to the Polish-American writer’s 1978 accolade.  Broomberg revealed his reason for calling Krouse in increments. He started out by asking if he knew about Clubhouse, the social-media app used to host audio chats. Krouse, a man of uncommon creative accomplishments in performance and publishing, responded no. Nonplussed, Broomberg recruited him into a chat about nonfungible tokens (NFTs), cryptographic units of data used to verify the uniqueness of ephemeral digital and video art. Krouse uses piquant language to describe this new-fangled technology. Nevertheless, and in deference to Broomberg, whose artistic career he promoted during a three-year stint working at the Goodman Gallery, Krouse agreed to play along. After the Clubhouse hangout, during a private chitchat, Broomberg…
Read More