CORRESPONDENT REPORT: How an Art World Burnout and Clown Collaborator Went Political
Mieke Marple shares her journey navigating the art world and how she accidentally found a new way to matter
I asked my friend Mieke Marple to share this piece about the path that led her to Team Dan Greaney USA. Every now and then you’ll hear from a variety of voices. Thank you for reading and please share if you liked it.
From fine art to political social media, I’ve learned in my life that laughter isn’t just medicine, it’s an entire survival strategy.
I was born in 1986 in Silicon Valley, where I grew up watching reruns of The Simpsons with my family every night while eating dinner. At age 22, I graduated with a BA in Fine Art from UCLA.
After school, I stopped making art and committed myself to art dealing, partnering with Davida Nemeroff in 2011 on the then-experimental, artist-run space Night Gallery.
Night Gallery quickly took off and, within a span of five years, we were featured in the NYT, invited to prestigious art fairs including Frieze London and Art Basel Hong Kong, and attracting A-list collectors while ringing up millions in sales.
By the time I turned 30, I realized that, despite the gallery’s apparent success, I was unhappy—unhappy enough, and without the necessary coping mechanisms, to leave in the most dramatic of fashions.
In 2016, I returned to art-making. Once again, as in my childhood, I saw art as a tool for expression and healing—not merely as a luxury commodity, which had been my view of art before quitting Night Gallery.
Still, I struggled to reconcile my art dealing experiences with my new role as artist. Where would my ambition come from, if—having been so thoroughly disillusioned by the art world—I no longer sought its validation?
From 2016-2024, I worked on a memoir about my time as an art dealer. In the fall of 2024, my literary agent submitted my art dealing memoir to many publishers, but it was not picked up. The memoir, which I still love, was heavy for me to write. After working on it for eight years, I was emotionally burnt out. Around this time, I started a painting series about social media collaborating with comedians and clowns called “Live, Laugh, Lube.”
As the world around me darkened with Trump returning for a second term, I had the epiphany—thanks to my young daughter and an inspiring 12-step sponsor—that I needed more comedy in my life.
Making art about pain, while focusing on all that is wrong with the world, is not sustainable—not without laughter.
Long time Simpsons writer, Dan Greaney, who had been one of Night Gallery’s first collectors and one of the few connections I maintained after my leave, was one of my first “Live, Laugh, Lube” collaborators.
Our friendship, which had been superficial at best when I’d been an art dealer, deepened when I shared early drafts of my memoir with him.
“There’s a good story in here somewhere,” he had said, words that coming out of another mouth might have sounded snarky, but, coming from Dan, made me laugh and feel encouraged.
Over the next eight years, our friendship evolved into something solid and long-lasting as we celebrated personal milestones and bounced creative ideas off one another. When I decided to start working with funny people (the basis of my “Live, Laugh, Lube” project), Dan was my first choice. Shortly after our collaboration, Dan hired me to help him with social media production—despite having little to no experience in the field and only a modest online following myself.
The rest, I suppose, is history (or prophecy).
Dan has grand plans, which I’m not yet at liberty to discuss, but I can say that working with him has been much more than just another freelance gig. Never before have I made content so explicitly political. Or worked on videos, intended for a general audience, that respond to what is happening in the world with such an impeccable balance of gravity and levity.
That Dan orchestrates these videos without too much mean spiritedness is nothing short of a divine gift.
Dan has shown me another way to make art.
An art that exists outside elite galleries, gatekeeping tastemakers (unless, of course, you count the algorithm), or trend-following collectors. And just like that, I feel my motivation returning. A motivation driven not by validation or accomplishment, but by the desire to stir and move others.
Make them laugh.
Make them think.
Make them want to put down their phones and do something.
Mieke Marple is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. Marple has exhibited internationally, including in "Techno-Healing" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, and "Elan Vital" at MOCA Westport. She has been written about by The New York Times, W Magazine, The Guardian, Fortune, and Autre, among other publications. She has written for The Huffington Post, LA Review of Books, and McSweeney’s, among others. Through various charity art auctions, she has helped raise over a million and a half dollars for Planned Parenthood LA and a quarter million for prison abolitionist organization Critical Resistance. She received a B.A. in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2008 and was co-owner of Night Gallery, 2011-2016. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Crypto Art, Seattle NFT Museum, and McEvoy Family Collection.
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Excellent. Make them think 👍😊