No one gives a shit about art.”
The statement shocked me coming, as it did, from Phil Ross, the best artist I’ve ever known—and I’ve known quite a few. At the time, almost 10 years ago, I was a fledgling magazine writer in San Francisco, and the New York Times Magazine had decided that I was an art specialist. But art writing was a side hustle, as my main subject was tech and the insane startup scene all around me. That’s where the freelance-writing money was to be made. But still, I had spent most of my adult life hanging out with creative types in New York and San Francisco. So the freaks were close to my heart.
“I’m leaving the art world.”
Ross again. He was my favorite. He was every artsy cliché mashed into one. A leftist. A bohemian. A Jew. An intellectual. And he had come by it all honestly, courtesy of his parents and a misspent youth in New York City, which, when Ross was growing up, in the 1970s and early ’80s, was still the red-hot center of the leftist-bohemian-Jewish-intellectual world. But that world was changing, and not for the better. Ross remembers exploring the northern wilds of Central Park as a teenager and coming across the crucified remains of a squirrel. It was hoodoo-inspired necromancy, the calling card of a religious cult in the neighborhood. Time to leave. After a few years of wanderlust, Ross washed up at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1988 and left with a degree three years later. His medium of choice? Mushrooms. “I accepted rot into my life,” he says.
Ross burst onto San Francisco’s tiny art scene in 1997 with a gigantic sculpture inspired by the reconstructed wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103, the 747 that had been bombed over Lockerbie, Scotland, on the orders of Libya’s Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Ross replicated the reconstruction from garbage and castoffs and then inoculated the entire thing with oyster mushroom spores. During the sculpture’s five-week run at Gallery 16, the mushrooms ate the 747 in a slow-motion explosion of fungal life, fruiting and then rotting. “It’s about any moment that passes and the garbage that’s left over,” says Ross. “I was just expressing a giant…thing.” It was also a self-portrait. “I’m an artist, man,” Ross explains. “It makes sense, and it doesn’t make sense.”
Ross’s next myco-masterpiece was Mycotectural Alpha, a sculpture in the form of a small building that was not built but rather grown, from spores. Ross called it his teahouse, because when the roughly six-by-six-foot shelter debuted at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf contemporary art museum in 2009, viewers were invited to sit inside and drink a cup of tea made from the structure itself. The show was titled Eat Art, and eventually the entire piece was boiled down and ingested by its viewers. The artwork, and others like it, established Ross as one of the founding members of the burgeoning bio-art scene, ultimately landing him a professorship at the University of San Francisco. As art careers go, pretty impressive. But Ross was abandoning it.
“And I’m starting a company.”
I had to stifle a laugh, especially since the only other entrepreneurial venture Ross had ever been a part of was his now ex-wife’s food company, Don Bugito, which markets insects as snacks: chocolate-covered crickets, coconut-brittle mealworms, worm salts. Ross had discovered what he calls “bug meat” on his youthful travels through the least developed of the developing nations, and he continues to champion it
