Taller Together

In the art world, authenticity has never been a purely scholarly question. It sits at the intersection of expertise, market value, institutional authority, and reputation. Decisions about who or what gets believed can reshape careers, collections, and histories. Into this already complex system, artificial intelligence has entered as both a promise and a disruption. Speaking with Tamzin Lovell on...

Christine Dixie lives and works in Makhanda, the Eastern Cape town renamed in 2018 after the Xhosa warrior and prophet Makhanda ka Nxele, who led an 1819 attack on the British garrison at what was then Grahamstown. Two years after that battle, around four thousand British settlers were shipped into the Zuurveld to act, in the words of colonial planners, as "a human barrier" between the Cape and th...

Art crime is usually sold to the public as a scene: a broken case, a night guard, a motorbike, a painting gone from a wall. Noah Charney's account of the field is less cinematic and more unsettling. The crime is not always the removal. Often it is the prior condition that made removal possible: weak records, diffused authority, untested expertise, a discreet market, and an institution that trusts...

In fine art transport, the work is often judged by how little it disturbs the room. A crate arrives. A painting is unpacked. A sculpture is placed. The client sees calm, not the route planning, condition checks, customs details, insurance sensitivities, or the compressed decisions made on site. Jamie Turner's point is that this calm is not a mood. It is a product. As Managing Director of Castrum G...

Hermione Allsopp’s sculpture begins where ownership thins out. Charity shops, discarded furniture, worn household fittings: these are the materials she returns to, not because they are quaint or sentimental but because they have already absorbed use. They have been sat on, polished, stored, moved, neglected, kept for too long, and then given away. In conversation with Tamzin Lovell, Allsopp descri...

In conversation with Tamzin Lovell for Armature Magazine's Taller Together, Gilbert Balinda treats architecture as a public language of trust. Balinda, whose practice describes him as a Rwandan-Belgian architect and the founder and lead architect of Gilbert Balinda Architects, is less interested in spectacle than in what a building asks of its visitors: awe, caution, belonging, and distance. The c...

Museums already know how to protect objects. They monitor light, temperature & movement and keep insurance and valuations current. But the day-to-day record of what an artwork is, where it is, what can be done to it, and who can touch it increasingly lives inside software the institution does not own and cannot fully inspect. In a Taller Together conversation hosted by Tamzin Lovell, EscrowSur...

Art theft gets sold as theatre. Velvet ropes, lasers, a billionaire in a white suit. Arthur Brand talks about the parts that do not photograph well. Phone numbers. Missing inventory records. And the small window of time it takes to cross a gallery, hit a case, grab an object, and be out the door. Brand is a Dutch art detective. Speaking with Tamzin Lovell on Taller Together , he describes the work...

The conversation between Tamzin Lovell and Salma Uche-Okeke keeps returning to a simple, uncomfortable fact: an artist’s work doesn’t automatically survive the artist. It survives when somebody builds the conditions for it to survive.

Heidi Erdmann speaks about the art world as a set of systems rather than a cast of personalities. In this episode, the conversation returns to the quiet labour that determines what survives: classification, storage, description, access, and the authority of whoever writes the first record. The result is a practical guide to legacy-building that refuses glamour and still feels urgent.

The episode is full of details, but five themes are especially useful if you are trying to build a practice or support one. Let the work choose the medium, not the other way round. Time, space, and support systems are part of the practice. Bravery and clear intent matter more than perfect rules for new media. Build small platforms instead of waiting for permission. Biographies can cure the myth of...

A poetic origin, not a tagline: Taller Together is named after Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The Concert,” capturing the feeling of returning from art “a little taller.” A podcast for the infrastructure of culture: It centres the professionals who keep institutions running—across museums, galleries, foundations, universities, and corporate and bank collections. A corrective to the “serene” illusion:...