COLLECTORS WHO GET IT

Collector: Justice Hager

Metalabel Collection Size: 15 and counting

Latest Collect: Alta – A Human Atlas of a City of Angels

THE STORY

A multifaceted creator in their own right, Justice Hagar’s journey encompasses both artistic production and curation. Although recent professional focus has been on storytelling, their background in various creative disciplines informs a unique perspective on what it means to support other artists both through their collection and their methodological way of spending time with creative work.

KEY INSIGHTS

• The validation of creative work extends beyond monetary compensation, though we can’t ignore how financial recognition remains a significant marker of value in our current economic system

• Curation and collection serve as means of preserving access to works that might otherwise disappear with time

• Randomness and chance operations, as embodied in card decks and score-based art, offer valuable creative tools and frameworks

• Systematic engagement with creative works, such as reading an author's complete bibliography, provides deeper understanding and appreciation

IN JUSTICE'S WORDS

"Most of the artistic labor that will ever happen will be completely uncompensated, right? That's just the reality. I think a lot of people just don't think about creating those pathways [for compensation]... anything that creates more pathways for that to be easier and more accessible is exciting."

CONTINUE FOR FULL INTERVIEW

(this interview has been edited for length and clarity)

Strengthening direct pathways to support artists

METALABEL: What is your relationship to creative work and what feels meaningful about supporting it?

I am a person who's produced creative work, but I haven't been doing much for a while because I have not been in a space where my professional life allowed the time. I’ve been working over the last couple of years doing a lot of communications work, so that energy has gone to a lot of writing and some graphic design.

That said, I've done any number of things over the years from sculpture, writing, and visual art to digital art, drawing, and designing websites. I was also a theater minor. You name it, I've probably done some version of it. I also had a curatorial practice as well for a number of years, so I have that appreciative lens on the work of others.

It’s one of the most validating things when you are paid for that work in some way. I feel reach is really valuable too—knowing that people are receiving your work and valuing it in some way. Money is just one of those ways. 

The feeling that the highest reach you can have is making money off something is likely a reflection on how messed up we define everything in terms of economy within our society, but I'll put that question on a shelf because we do live in that world. We can try to reshape it, but we live in it currently.

METALABEL: Would you call yourself a collector? 

I certainly never thought to. In terms of consulting and consuming cultural products like purchasing things that have physical permanence, I acquire things. I’ll purchase a movie on the Apple store because that's the way that I can access it.

Other times I try to hold onto things. For example, I try to only buy books that I want to always have or are somewhat harder to access so that I can access them at any time.That's what extends my participation in Metalabel in particular.

If I can just check something out from the library—a book of Plato's writing, for example—I'm never going to not be able to find that. It's public domain, and it's just so accessible. I don't need to collect it.

On the other hand, there are some things where only so many of them will exist, or the distribution is limited, or its availability will vary as it could go out of print, so it just makes sense to hold on to it. Sometimes things just disappear into the passage of time. I want to keep these things so that they will continue to exist, even though I may not look at them very often. 

I keep them around because otherwise they're not going to be accessible to me in the future. Maybe that's related to that curatorial impulse to want to have a collection of things that are somewhat special in a way. 

METALABEL: Are there specific energies you look for in the things you decide to own?

I do have a predilection towards decks of cards in various capacities. I have a small collection that people have released over the years, including one from Metalabel. One deck is called the Creative Whack Pack. It's a deck of prompts meant to help people with creative blocks and stuff. I like randomness, and I think chance is like a really interesting thing to work with because it's just so easy to tap into the information contained in it randomly.

I also have an interest in score based art. I have a small collection of scores that I've collected over the years, including Do It: The Compendium by Hans Ulrich Obrist. He put out a book of all the scores from this ongoing project, and people would perform the scores. It was a very small run and not very many people even knew about it. There's an online version now where people can submit their own and it’s meant to be open-ended like that, so that's part of the reason that I collected it.

METALABEL: What is on rotation for you right now? What are things that you’ve spent time with recently? 

I have a reading practice where I have a list of authors and systematically go through and read everything by that author.

I've been in a very long streak of reading this British fiction author Deborah Levy. I usually alternate between fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, although I've not been very good about reading poetry, so I've also been reading Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, which has been slow and challenging, part of me thinks due to the clunky translation so i’ve been working on that for a while. 

Translation is an interesting beast in and of itself — sometimes this is the poet, poet in me, maybe who gets down to the sentence level. I think in translation is sometimes people just try to be as literal as possible and they're just not. As attentive to the quality of the language, which can matter. I mean, a really good writer, you know, it doesn't have to be, I mean, there's different kinds of good writers, right? There can be a good writer. Who's really good because at the pros level, they're just like writing really amazing pros. And then there's really good at the conceptual level and they're not always the same.

[So between Fanon and Levy’s work,] I've been [thinking a lot about] responses by colonized people to colonization, and how to avoid reproducing colonization.[in the wake of what I see as] a new kind of national bourgeois class, it is an interesting thing to think about at this time. 

METALABEL: It’s exciting to hear about how you’re engaging with creative work in a really heartfelt and intentional way. It’s a great reminder that we don't need to have a philanthropy-driven perspective to care about art and artists.

Most of the artistic labor that will ever happen will be completely uncompensated, right? That's just the reality. I think a lot of people just don't think about creating those pathways [for compensation]. I've noticed that a lot of times you go to somebody's website and you think “Oh, this is really good. I kind of really liked their aesthetic. I like what they're doing here” but there's nothing that you can do to find some way to compensate them for their work, or be able to keep it in my life. So anything [like Metalabel] that creates more pathways for that to be easier and more accessible is exciting. 

One of the things that got me interested in Metalabel in the first place was the possibility for collectives to have contract-like agreements for releases where everything is just set up and the money is automatically distributed to different collaborators as sales happen in real time.

Otherwise, it’s a very messy thing if one person is the point of payment: they have this additional work of distributing it—which maybe they do or maybe they don't do in time—and then they have to take responsibility for the funds which affects them from a tax perspective. There are all kinds of ways this gets complicated. 

I appreciate [Metalabel’s] recognition of the need for multiple people to be involved in transactions, while still maintaining that frictionless point for the buyer, which is also really important.

I work in fundraising, and you lose most people when you introduce friction. They're like, “Oh, this is, I'll do this later,” and then they don't. Often things that are worthwhile have multiple contributors. If I want to put something together with a group of people, it's just good to know there’s a way to do that.