Deez Interviews: Meet @artdrunk, the art influencer writing super accessible Insta captions, shaping the industry’s content game, and juggling a LOT of receipts

Happy Friday, Deezers! We’re diving into the art media world a bit today with an interview with Gary Yeh, who grew a popular art Instagram account into a one-man media company. How??? By staying true to his passion, avoiding “fluffy art speak,” and more:

The interviewee: Gary Yeh (follow @artdrunk here!)

The gig: Founder of artdrunk.art

You started ArtDrunk as an Insta account when you were in college. How did the idea first come to you?

I’ve always wanted to collect art, and an important part of that process is educating yourself by seeing as much as possible. ArtDrunk started as a visual diary to keep track of art that I liked on a platform that all my friends used. Barely any thought was given to it beyond that — few pictures were ones I had taken myself and even fewer had captions. 

In four years, you've expanded ArtDrunk into a media company, and you were dubbed as an official ~art influencer~ last fall by artnet. At what point did you realize this could be more than a hobby?

I had never intended ArtDrunk to expand beyond Instagram. For the first few years, I was just enjoying it as my foot in the art world when I had no other connections to it. That changed when I was offered a small gig to interview an artist for my Instagram – a turning point in how I viewed what ArtDrunk could be. I felt an urge to build it bigger, to establish a brand in contemporary art that millennials could relate to and, in doing so, setting my own career path pursuing my passion. 

Your captions on the ArtDrunk Instagram are so great and remarkably approachable. How long does it take you to write one? 

A large part of the accessibility came out of being bored as an art history major writing with overly academic language. Instead of spending hours researching an artist to understand his or her work, I just wanted to write about how I felt – the emotional response to art that I think gets sidelined too often.

Accessibility grew more deliberate over time the more I read other publications. Well-respected art magazines use fluffy “art speak” that perpetuates the elitist perception of art. I barely understood the language, so how could I ever expect my non-art friends to care? I wanted to prove that you don’t need to know a thing about an artwork or necessarily have the right words to describe it – you just need your own opinion to start any conversation about art. 

I am extraordinarily slow at writing, overthinking sentences and getting distracted when I get the slightest hint of writer’s block. If I get lucky, some captions can be whipped together in 15-20 minutes. Others can take days of looking and relooking at an artwork to find what it is I want to say.

Besides featuring artists on your newsletter and documenting art around the world, part of your business is also working closely with art institutes and other cultural orgs to help them step up their engagement or content creation. How did this side of ArtDrunk take shape?

Content for ArtDrunk is expensive to create, especially when I’m not yet reaping advertising dollars, so I needed a source of revenue to sustain ArtDrunk in the meantime. Working with institutions became a way for me to refine my skills in creating content (especially videos) while getting paid to do so. 

On the surface, I was just happy I didn’t have to reach into my savings on day one of quitting my job. But on a deeper level, I also realized working with institutions fully aligned with my mission. It’s putting the ego aside to recognize that even though I’m building ArtDrunk, I’m trying to build a culture around appreciating art, which is only possible by collaborating with those that have long established themselves in this field. 

Finally, for all the hand-wringing over ~influencer culture~, there's been a lot more discourse on just how much work it all really takes to, say, run an Instagram account with more than 90K followers, AKA, to basically run your own business. Given that, I'm so curious: what's a "typical" day of work like for you?

Contemporary art is a uniquely international industry – with art fairs and exhibitions literally opening up weekly in every corner of the world. I spend a significant amount of time traveling to see art and “networking” (hanging out with my friends who work at galleries). 

When I catch a moment for myself, the rest of my time is dedicated to editing photos and videos, writing captions, pitching business, emails, etc. I watch a lot of YouTube and Netflix as well, but I swear it’s real work in search of content ideas! Oh, and so much time is spent managing receipts and expenses. No one tells you that when you’re about to start a company.

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Don’t forget to follow @artdrunk on Insta, and maybe go finally check out that gallery this weekend yea???