You Made It

By which matrix do you define success? I lived in a community of exceptionally high-performing athletes for a long time and am honored to count amongst my friends Mount Everest summit achievers, Olympic medalists, Leadville 100 top-five finishers, and back-to-back Iron Man competitors. These efforts require profound perseverance along with extreme endurance. I’ve long been interested in applying these same strategies to art—what does extreme culture look like? Is it achievable? Is it helpful? Is it comparable?

Erik Satie’s Vexations is a twenty-four-hour piano work. I first heard the piece performed in the 1990s at 2 a.m. in a Los Angeles gallery with Doug Aitken. We lay on mattresses under the stars on a warm night and listened. From 5 p.m., August 9, to 5 p.m., August 10, 2014, to commemorate the opening of the new Aspen Art Museum building, I was able to collaboratively produce Satie’s endurance piece so that over eight thousand people could also experience the work. At the end, there were fist bumps, high fives, hugs, and even tears of exhaustion and gratitude. I have always believed there is much in common between athletes and artists, sport and art.