With that being said, I’m going to outline the three core principles that all strong compositions maintain (in terms of an image). This is what I have seen after critically analyzing hundreds of thousands of pieces of art over my lifetime.

Alignment

Literally, just keep things straight. If you’ve ever looked at a piece and something about it feels ‘off’ but you can’t pinpoint why, chances are it’s because it’s not straight enough. In practice, this looks like turning on the grid view on the viewfinder of an iPhone camera and seeing where the natural lines of what you are trying to capture fall. Then, adjusting the positioning of either yourself or the camera accordingly. Another way you can use the grid as a guide is by turning on grid lines when designing a graphic in Photoshop or sketching a rough grid in pencil on a canvas before painting. It’s not that every line has to be perfectly straight, but if you were to place a grid over any image, a painting, a photo, or a graphic, you would be able to see where the structure underneath becomes visible. There will be proportional balance across the frame. To the untrained eye, this goes completely unnoticed, but to the master, this is second nature.

Here, the grid is used to center the cross in the middle, and it shows the balance of the density of the background characters on each side.

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Editor’s Note: I wanted to go deeper on the story of Jeff Koons because I constantly hear his name thrown around in a way that sounds like everybody hates him. As I started to look into it, I realized that our financial and political correspondent, Rameen, was the perfect man for the job. This is the heavily edited version. Not sure if the rough draft he sent me could have been published on the internet. - Everett

What’s up, art purveyors? I’m here to spell out for you why Jeff Koons is who he is and why most of the creatives out there hate the guy. To me (FYI, a lot of this piece is going to be my opinions applied to society, so fair warning), a lot of it has to do with the fact that Koons is essentially a modern bastardization of what I consider art. While I do believe art as a whole is something that’s fluid and constantly changing, what it has become recently is just too many standard deviations away from where I’d want it to be.

Don’t get my words twisted now, I love how you can track art history from the Roman Era, through the Gothic, all along the Renaissance, into Impressionism, and to the Contemporary art we see today. (That’s with me skipping through countless other periods and styles of art that are amazing and glazeable in their own right). The fact that I can go and see what someone who ate porridge and died of the black plague caught in the neighborhood brothel saw as art is pretty incredible.

Shit, you can even track the evolution of art by looking at a singular artist’s progression. Let’s take Picasso, he starts painting portraits that look pretty normal, and slowly descends into art that is essentially a POV of someone with undiagnosed schizophrenia. That rocks, and it’s interesting. It keeps you coming back for more. Picasso’s been dead for 70 years, and I’m still here mentally masturbating to the composition of his shapes during his cubism arc.

All this nostalgiamaxxing makes you think about the modern state of the art world. This takes me down a train of thought I don’t really enjoy. Ask me about art history, and my brain immediately goes to the immortal work of the masters, immersive nature scapes from Monet, the melty and brainfucky shit from Dali. Ask me about the state of modern art, though, and my brain goes to $100M+ auctions, incestuous art dealings, money laundering, and access restricted by expensive museum tickets.

This is where Jeff Koons is important. I mean, he’s one of the most famous contemporary artists. If you ask someone about him, they don’t go on some diatribe about the efficacies of his work or that he is a master of his craft. Instead, just start talking about how much his stuff sells for and how much bread he’s stacked. Which probably isn’t great, but he definitely has his glazers. Some beauty is in the eye of the beholder type shit.

Regardless of what you think about Big Jeff, in my opinion, he’s a microcosm of the current capitalistmaxxing culture of the art world, and because of that, I think it’s important to understand how he came to be.

I’m not a Freudian, so I don’t really care about his childhood or whether or not he wanted to crack his mom, but one thing I found interesting was that Koons seemed to always be a hustler. He grew up selling gift wrap and candy door to door, and even would go and sell Coke (beverage, not the fun powder) on the local golf course to old money heads who’d be playing. This hustler mindset seemed to have been imprinted into the fleshy wrinkles of his brain’s lobes because he brought it up years later when asked about the commercial nature of his work.

His affinity for sales has always seemed to go hand in hand with his love for art. This trend has followed him through every phase of his life. After graduating from art school, he started working at the MoMA as a front desk intern. Allegedly, he was really good at this. Not in the sense that he was the best at greeting people or somehow the Lebron James of handing people tickets. Instead, it was to the point that everyone from this era of his life said that he was a savant at peddling the museum’s products to people who were coming in.

Koons, at this point, was still in the trenches, navigating the seven circles of hell that come with trying to make it as an artist in the modern age. After 2 years of working at the MoMA, he was like, “fuck this shit, I’m tired of being poor,” and went and got his broker’s license to sell commodities on Wall Street. I’m guessing his thought process was something like “I’m poor and the art I wanna make costs money. Everyone is printing money from the sky on Wall Street. I’m good at selling things to people, so let me do that.”

From what it seems, he was good at this. At least I think he was. The specifics of his career aren’t super verifiable because his own accounts contradict each other, and there weren’t robust record-keeping processes at the companies he worked for because everyone was doing mounds of pure [insert powdered substance] and cracking strippers in the office as they sold cotton futures to unsuspecting housewives in Toledo. Koons is a sales super chad, so he was probably good at this too.

Regardless of the particulars of his career on Wall Street, it was able to fund him creating Rabbit, which eventually sold for $91 M in 2019 to an “anonymous buyer” (probably some Saudi oil baron). For whatever reason, people really liked the chrome bunny, and Koons used this attention to force his way into the spotlight of Ileana Sonnabend, the same art dealer who repped Andy Warhol.

Now that Koons had the stamp of approval from Sonnabend, it was just a matter of time before he was able to capitalize on her clout to framemogg everyone. His next collection, Banality, which is basically just a rip-off of Hummel figurines, was next.

This one went bonkers. Everyone was glazing it, and most of the discussion wasn’t “This art is so interesting, holy shit he’s so talented” but rather “Wow, this is so kitsch” or “Wow, I wonder if he got Michael Jackson’s permission to portray him as a porcelain figure holding his monkey bubbles,” (he didn’t). Nevertheless, this is what solidified Koons as a top dog in the contemporary art game and got him to the point where you could say, “Yeah, this guy made it.”

The mainstream success of Banality is interesting to look at, too. People point heavily to its marketing campaign as one of the main contributors. It was basically just pictures of him doing peculiar activities and photos of him with some huzz. The ads obviously have some connection to the actual collection, but not really. Imagine if Dali promoted The Persistence of Memory by putting himself on a billboard flexing with an AP like Shedeur Sanders. It worked, and now Koons was certified as a star in the art world.

After this, he started living like Derek Zoolander for real. He started dropping new collections; his Celebration series (the balloon animals) is a direct comparison to Zoolander’s renowned Blue Steel look in terms of their respective magnum opuses (opi?). He went on to become one of the most prolific and successful artists ever. He has sold over a billion dollars at auction, which is just crazy numbers for someone who put basketballs in a saline solution. Yes, he made an entire collection, Total Equilibrium, where he mixed saline and water, and then put basketballs in it. Sold them for $2-15mm each (lmao). The dude made a sculpture of a lobster and put it in the Palace of Versailles.

He married an adult matress actress, as well, which is a great story. Basically, he was flipping through a euro smut magazine (he deadass says he was doing this as research for a new collection) and locked eyes with the image of a huzz named Cicciolina. He straight up called the magazine after and rizzed her up. They ended up getting married. Genuinely pretty rockstar.

They were married for a few years. He even made a whole collection of sculptures (Made in Heaven) and paintings that were just depicting him fornicating with her. He said this was his “baroque” collection. I don’t think I would personally define it as baroque. It’s literally just photos of them making love, but to each their own.

The story between him and his questionably famous wife ends exactly as you would predict, too. He files for divorce, she steals his son and absconds back to Italy. He doesn’t get to have a relationship with his kid, and she ends up becoming an Italian politician (obviously). Luckily for Koons, he and his son, Little Ludwig, reconciled years later and even dropped NFT projects at the same time. Of course, they both independently had the idea to create NFT projects. Scheming for money seems to run in this guy’s genes.

Koons has six other kids, too, so he’s obviously been fornicating pretty steadily for a while. Five are with his current wife, but there is one from his earlier years that he ended up putting up for adoption. I get it. He and his baby mama were both barely adults and straddling the poverty line. Interestingly enough, he credits this as a big motivator for becoming successful.

This is so good. It’s like top 1% deadbeat dad behavior. I could see Future saying something like this before going into the studio and dropping a bar about pouring up a 4. “ Yeah man, I didn’t really want to make $400Ms off art, I just did it to reconnect with my long lost daughter”. Like bro, adoption records exist.

They did eventually reconnect though and by all accounts, he has a good relationship with Shannon, but I just thought that was so funny and unnecessary to say.

Regarding his creative process, Koons creates all his art in warehouses in Manhattan. Well, I guess it’s more accurate to say that he “oversees the creation of his art” in warehouses in Manhattan. He seems to be following the mold of Andy Warhol, but instead of transients creating the art in return for lodging and substances, it’s art graduates trying to make it, getting paid with W-2s and health plans.

Koons maintains that even though he isn’t the one physically creating the sculptures or even the one who is actually putting the brush to canvas, it is still 100% his art, and none of the credit belongs to the underlings he employs.

He’s been compared to Willy Wonka in this sense. The vision is his, but he has a wonderful little community of helpers to actualize what he’s concocting in his brilliant mind. That tracks. What doesn’t seem super Wonka-esque is the fact that he laid off half his staff in 2017, and they received zero (0) severance pay. He also fired his night staff right around the time that they were planning on unionizing.

It’s almost like Willy Wonka grew a pair of ovaries in his factory and proceeded to have a love child with Jeff Bezos. That’s Jeff Koons. A remarkable combination of ruthless capitalism gene-spliced with contemporary art. I’d bet money that Koons would have been a traditional finance chad if his dad hadn’t been an interior decorator. He quite literally did everything else a portfolio manager at a hedge fund would do: he married a woman with a questionable career path, neglected his kids, made a metric ton of cash, and even hung out with Jeffrey Epstein!

Yes, he actually went to a dinner at Epstein’s infamous New York townhouse in 2013. That’s not all, though! Epstein then went and visited Koons’s factory in Chelsea sometime afterwards. It’s unclear if this was before or after Koons performed his best Henry Ford impersonation in union busting, but it was 100% after Big Stein’s conviction of soliciting underage women and subsequently being registered as a PDF file.

This all culminates in the recurring theme that I saw all throughout the research for this piece. Although there were times I found myself pleasantly moved by some of his work, most of the time I was just thinking about the fact that this guy didn’t seem like an artist. To me, he’s a businessman who figured out how to win at the game of art.

This is why Koons is the perfect encapsulation of what Contemporary Art has become. He may not be the most technically gifted artist, but he cracked the code. He understood what he needed to do to get eyes on his work. Not the art purveyors and enjoyers, but the heads of galleries and art dealers. They don’t care about art in a purist sense; they care about making money. Koons understood how to create his own ascension, and subsequently, money spread on his haters.

In today’s artosphere (not sure if this is a word, just doing a play off manosphere), Koons gets hated on from an overwhelming amount of people who describe his art as “kitsch” (it is, in my opinion). His critics say he is using art as a money grab (there’s definitely some of that going on), and that he’s a narcissistic prick (I hate the way narcissist is thrown around, so not sure about this one). My favorite critique of him comes from Robert Hughes.

Got his ass. If someone said this to me, I don’t know what I would do. I genuinely think the only way to come out on top is to steal his wife.

Now, even though I agree with a lot of these criticisms, I don’t think Koons is the one to blame. He just figured out how to take advantage of the system. The architects of the system are the ones who should have a lynch mob after them. The “prestigious” galleries, auction houses chasing the next record sale, the tasteless billionaires who are trying to clean their money. These are the ones to blame for the current state of the art world.

If you are an up and coming artist in today’s world, you are stuck in an extremely unfortunate catch-22. Becoming a successful artist in the present age is almost impossible.

You can’t get by anymore solely on the quality of your work. If you can’t optimize the algorithm to get more than 1,000 likes on TikTok, you’re going to have to sit on the sidelines and watch as Ashley Longshore paints a mound of [insert substance] on a Louis Vuitton bag.

It forces artists to focus on how to become great marketers. Which inevitably takes away from the quality of their work. So long are the days that a prominent family like the Medicis could comb the world for any child who knew how to draw shadows and put them in art camp to make masterpieces that stand the test of time. Now you get so-called “painters” split-testing Instagram reels showcasing their atrocious rendition of a Marlboro ad from the 80s, on a canvas they end up selling for $10k to a hypebeast that is going to place it right next to his KAWS sculpture in his Brickell high-rise.

This shift is why contemporary art is in the state it’s currently in. Years and years of the wrong behavior being reinforced and supported has made it so artists can’t focus their energy on their process. They have to become digital marketers, salesmen, and accountants. This is why you have someone like Jeff Koons, who creates pieces that don’t make people feel anything, yet he’s able to sell for millions.

We let these types of people ruin everything else in our world. Prediction markets are telling us to bet on whether Trump is gonna praise Allah, investment firms are buying up single-family homes, and insurance companies are denying care based on BS underlying conditions like ligma. The least they could do was just let us have art.

This is our selection of the strongest images from each submitted work, through Composition's sensibility. The following collection is a testament to our talented audience, whose work is in conversation with the visual themes we curate across our platform.

20 by Timofey Abel

This is Abel’s debut monograph, showcasing a blend of documentary imagery and fashion editorial styles. Inside the book are portraits of models and artists documented through transitional periods of their lives.

The presentation of the book through its marketing materials shows the edition in various settings throughout small-town and suburban America. It places the work in a different world entirely. The color presentation of these product photos creates a striking contrast to the black and white portraits presented inside, mirroring the transitions that the content inside documents.

You can purchase the photobook online at Odesa Publishing.

LODI T.V.B. by Virginia Pollastrelli

Lodi is the name of the neighborhood in Milan where Virginia resides. The series is a collection of photos of the neighborhood, viewed through Virginia’s unique perspective.

The compositions are almost disorienting. The decisions she made around what to capture paint a picture drastically different from the romanticized version of Milan most visitors carry. It opens up an interesting tension between how a place reads when you grew up there versus passing through it as a visitor.

See the rest of the series here.

Hope in the Making by Ian Schultz

Schultz traveled from New York City to Budapest to document the youth of Hungary during the historic defeat of autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orbán by a pro-democracy, anti-corruption opposition movement.

There's an energy to these photographs that puts you in the street with them. This generation grew up under a system they never thought would fall, and these photographs capture the moment it did.

You can see more of Schultz’s work on his website.

autological by Rufus Dalby

This project is from Dalby’s final portfolio of his third year at Falmouth University in the UK. It examines control both as a subject and as a methodology.

It’s clear that the aesthetics borrow from digital advertising, which is inherently designed to command attention. The work holds you at a distance. What results is a question around artificiality: when everything is composed with no imperfections, what is left that’s real?

You can see more from autological here.

HERD by William Brown

From Brown’s words, “I visited them every day, and in return they nurtured me.” Beginning as a project documenting the familiarity and tenderness amongst the collective herd of livestock in Brown’s hometown, Brown found himself developing a bond with the animals over three months.

The series captures the intimate relationship between animals and humans through the texture and treatment of the images. The decision to document this experience through black and white film deeply emphasizes the emotional connection Brown developed with these animals.

You can see more of the series on his Instagram.

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White Sand, Brown Skin by Gabriel Baytion

Taken on a trip to Boracay, Philippines, Baytion captured the island’s rhythm through its landscape and residents.

Serving as an encapsulation of the people of the island, the photographs read as a postcard sent from someone curious about a way of life much different than their own.

More from the series here.

A Step Closer to Love 3 by Jared Buschang

A painting made from acrylic paint, oil stick, and cut canvas, A Step Closer to Love 3 was developed in an artist residency in Cartagena. Originally, the painting in the top left was drying overnight when sand flies got onto the paint and created the treatment shown. Pleased with the result, Buschang took the original painting and composited it onto another painting, resulting in this piece.

The way that Buschang was able to incorporate visually different styles into one work creates a composition that reads intentional, even with such a varied range of treatments. An extremely difficult balance to strike as a fine artist. Knowing the origin, the process only emphasizes that complexity.

Take a look at more of Buschang’s work on his website and contact him for commissions via his Instagram.

Intervals by Aliya Bhorat

Made across Saudi Arabia and Oman, Intervals focuses on moments of rest and observation within spaces designed for movement and gathering.

These specific selections were photographed in Mecca, quite possibly the most significant place for this work to exist. Here, the photos lead you to question the lengths to which these subjects went to reach this destination, and the relief they must feel.

See more of the series on her Instagram.

Casa Ceaușescu by Iulia Dancila

A visual series that places women who work in Romania's red light district inside the former private residence of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania's last communist dictator.

The choice of location is what makes this work particularly moving. Ceaușescu's regime was built on control, in particular, of the bodies of women. The women here are a direct line from that turbulent history to the present day. The residence is a space that would have been inaccessible under the past regime, and now it’s being reclaimed.

Read about the project here. See Dancila’s Instagram and her production studio for more.

Europe Through a Viewfinder by Devon Luxton

These images follow Luxton’s experience through Europe as a Floridian studying ballet professionally in Amsterdam. Serving as a personal memento before his departure, the series captures sporadic moments throughout the past four years of his studies.

The intimate nature of the images hits a personal note through their visual arrangement. Luxton’s sentimental perspective reads through in each individual shot, making this an extremely compelling time capsule that any future family would be lucky to inherit.

See the rest of the series here.

Cultura de Boteco for The Orange Brand by Victor Mayer and Ghiuliano Rolo

Inspired by the aesthetic of Brazil’s “futebol raiz,” this campaign for Brazilian skate shop The Orange Brand reflects on the visual legacy of vintage Brazilian national team jerseys through a contemporary lens.

Shot inside a traditional bar in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the backdrop carries nostalgia, in contrast to the saturated colors and styling. The result is an homage to the history of Brazil's football culture, reinterpreted for the present day.

See the full campaign here.

Alignment by John Merizalde

This narrative short film follows the protagonist, David, through his developing, complex relationship with Alina, an AI assistant. What starts as a relatively innocent dependency unravels into a consuming fixation that leads him down a path of schizophrenic levels of mania.

The clinical color grading and sharp cinematography give the film a precision that mirrors its subject matter. David's unraveling draws parallels to the current state of AI in society, where the distinction between reality and the digital world is becoming harder to hold.

You can revisit the film here. Take a look at the rest of Merizalde’s directorial work here.

Upgrade to Submit

Siblings by Joseph Brockwell

Made during Brockwell’s first semester at Savannah College of Art and Design, Siblings presents urban infrastructure as analogous to family members. Throughout the series, these inanimate objects share proximity, shape, and function in public spaces.

Made on a broken Pentax K1000, the imperfection of the process echoes the concept itself. The concept stays with you because of what it's asking you to see.

See more work from Brockwell on his Instagram.

Moneymaker by Devon Solwold

A short film that follows Stella, a 10-year-old at the center of her family's growing social media presence. On her birthday, she’s forced to participate in a staged birthday surprise that will be live-streamed to their massive audience, and the cracks start showing in real time.

Solwold extended the world of the film beyond the screen, creating fictional social media pages for the Price Family and commissioning artwork as marketing assets, including the video painting shown here by Matias Lopez.

See the short film here.

IARE by Tamar Sabashvili

An ongoing series that began with Sabashvili’s first photograph and has no intended end. The work documents everything in its path, objects worth noticing that tend to vanish without intentional curiosity. The treatment finds something worth preserving in the gray and mundane.

The extensive ongoing nature of this project is the most intriguing aspect. It will look completely different in ten years, and that’s the point.

More of her work on Sabashvili’s Instagram.

American Corruption by Nate St. Louis

Shot on a road trip across rural America in 2023, these images in this series weren't originally meant to look like this. Faulty storage drives corrupted the files after the fact, when St. Louis revisited them years later.

The resulting product is difficult to separate from the subject matter. The subjects he chose to photograph take on an entirely new meaning when viewed this way. The accident reads as commentary.

See St. Louis’ photography work here.

River/Sea by Tal Elkayam

A film composed of short videos, shot on iPhone, across the West Bank and the Mediterranean coast. The film serves as a documentary view into daily life in the area through the lens of a bystander.

Elkayam provides a unique perspective, allowing the viewer to come to their own conclusions based on what is being presented to them. It provides a magnified glimpse into how everyday life manifests from the point of view of the people who reside there.

See more of his work here.

Chicas en Verano by Magali and Micaela Cristoforo

The series captures young women in summer, not with nostalgia or warmth, but through something closer to restlessness. It examines the particular unease of being between childhood and adulthood.

The discomfort manifests in the imagery. The mental state of the subject bleeds through in the way she contorts her body, and the tension transfers to the viewer.

More of Cristoforo’s work here.

Thank you to every artist who submitted work for this first edition.

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To which I typically respond: “I don’t really have one specific place that I go to discover projects.” It then leaves the person I am talking to either confused or disappointed in the response. They are typically hoping for some magical reservoir of infinitely beautiful projects to uncover for themselves upon my verbal release of this heavily coveted information. But it’s the truth. There isn’t one place to go to find these things.

My process consists of a myriad of strategies, most of which are a bit too complex to explain verbally upon first impression of meeting someone. With that being said, in this article, I am going to outline the strategies I use to consistently find beautiful projects to feature on Composition.

My hope is that you can use these strategies in your own practice to increase your internal Reference Bank. This isn’t something I have ever heard anyone articulate, but the concept is simple. Have you ever met someone who seems to have a near encyclopedic level of knowledge around a certain subject? For example, I have one friend who is a music producer, shoutout Vik. He can hear specific samples from tracks and tell me where each originated, what effects have been overlaid, and how it was incorporated into the production. In some cases, he can even tell me exactly what artist or song the sample came from.

Vik didn’t build his knowledge base by passively listening on shuffle. He intentionally consumed music in a way that led him to seek out the history and context behind everything he listened to. Over time, that accumulation became something almost encyclopedic. His understanding of music as a whole deepened, allowing him to identify these unique structures that only a producer can explain, because he studied it.

That’s what a Reference Bank is. It’s the mental archive you build when you don’t just look at something compelling and keep scrolling. It develops when you stop, research it, understand where it came from, and file it away. The deeper your bank, the more your own creative instincts have to draw from.

Developing your internal Reference Bank will help you find inspiration for your own creative process. Whether you aim to use the projects saved in your mental archive as direct references in your own artistic practice or merely to increase your own cultural and visual awareness, this process will be useful to you.

The strategies below are the ones I actually use, starting with the first change I made, which shifted how I consume everything I see. Using this process, I've found over 2,200 projects to feature on Composition over the past six years.

Curate Your Algorithm

This is probably the most useful part of my process. It is not something I would have recommended even 3-4 years ago, but now the algorithms on social apps have shifted to the “For You” feed, opposed to a “Following” feed. This new format allows for the surfacing and discovery of unseen content specifically to your tastes. This, obviously, can be a good and a bad thing. With the current sentiment online, it seems as if creators have a real problem with this. Personally, I see it as an opportunity to discover projects that I otherwise would not have seen if this weren’t the case.

So how do you do this tactically?

Start by approaching consumption on these platforms in a more intentional way than you would have before. In practice, this looks like:

• Like and save anything that you see that provokes you visually.

  • Single photos that are composed well.

  • Well-designed or compiled carousels.

  • High-quality and well-produced videos or reels that captivate you.

• Create collections of saved posts you can revisit for reference.

  • Some examples of collections I created and use for reference:

    • Fine Art

      • Comprised of paintings, sculptures, and installations, I find particularly compelling

    • Photography

      • Single photos or carousels of particularly strong photo work

    • Design

      • Graphics from brands or companies that I think are well designed

    • Clothes

      • Lookbooks and product shots of pieces that I would wear or want to buy

    • Interiors

      • Extremely well-designed and decorated spaces that have elements I could incorporate into my home

    • Objects

      • Various useful objects that are well-designed and fit my personal tastes

      • Examples in my folder: Coffee Maker, Water Bottle, Computer Mouse, Film Camera, Sunscreen, etc.

    • Furniture/Home Goods

      • Elevated furniture pieces and home goods that would fit the aesthetic of my home

      • Examples in my folder: Lounge Chair, Incense Tray, Sofa, Medicine Cabinet, Towels

    • Art Direction

      • Campaigns, product shots, video series, and reels from companies that are tastefully executed

    • Cities

      • Restaurants, stores, cafes, architecture, museums, galleries and other spaces I either plan to visit or have visited in the cities I go to often

      • Examples of city collections I have created: Miami, New York, Mexico City, LA, Tokyo, Berlin

All of these folders exist across my Instagram, TikTok, and X profiles to make the process familiar to me, no matter the platform I am consuming on.

If you begin to utilize these strategies, over time, you will find that the algorithms get much better at serving you content that they know you will like. A save is now weighted much more highly in the algorithm’s eyes than a like, so creating collections you can come back to reference will speed up this process much more than only liking content that you are visually interested in.

How to Go Deeper

Let’s say you have enacted the strategies I just described, and you begin to see some of the work that is catching your attention visually, but you want to understand more about the concept or project. These are the tactics I use to find that information.

If you have the title of a project that you want to research, a standard Google search will typically surface the right information. Now, this only works if a piece is heavily covered in the press, which means the project has to already have garnered a decent amount of attention for a Google search to have an extensive amount of information and context about that project. But you don’t need me to tell you that. So naturally, the next question becomes, “How do you find more information on a project that is much less well known?” Don’t worry, I got you. I haven’t scoured the internet to find over 2,000 Instagram-worthy projects over the past six years for nothing. I will give you all of the shortcuts.

To read the full workflow: how to find the history and context behind every project + the tools I use to organize everything in my archive, become a paid subscriber.

Paid subscribers also get a guaranteed spot in our monthly community post, with priority consideration for a full feature on Composition across all socials.

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The most subversive thing an artist can do is make you forget you’re experiencing art. No placard on the wall. No white cube. No curator’s note explaining what you’re supposed to feel. Just a situation, a public space, and the slow realization that something is happening. That tradition has a lineage, from Kaprow to Yoko Ono to Chris Burden. And its latest and most unexpected entry point came last week when Drake unveiled the magnum opus of his album rollout.

On the night of April 20th, crews in orange vests were spotted unloading pallets of ice in a downtown Toronto parking lot. It did not take long for passersby and residents of the high rises above to realize what was happening, as the 6 God himself was boots on ground, sporting a Packers letterman jacket (homage to their 1967 Ice Bowl victory, obviously) overseeing the operation. It literally blew up my Twitter after every talking head in hip hop media sprayed “Iceman otw” on the timeline last week (Fantano you’re dumb and reactive buddy). So naturally, we presumed new music was on the way, until this IG story revealed an album release date frozen into this tower of ice blocks.

Now to understand why the ice structure is more than Drake planting his flag, we’ve gotta go back to 1967 and Allan Kaprow. The man who invented the term “happening,” had erected a series of large rectangular enclosures made entirely of ice blocks at public locations across California. He called it Fluids. Built with the help of volunteers and installed without instruction or explanation, the structures were simply left in place to do what ice does. There was no big reveal. The melting was the point. Kaprow’s entire philosophy was rooted in the idea that art didn’t need to be permanent to be meaningful. An idea, and the physical trace it leaves behind, is enough.

Clearly, Drake took a liking to Kaprow’s work because in 2024, his OVO burner account @plottttwistttttt posted Fluids directly. Clearly, this wasn’t a coincidence or a loose inspiration. No one’s reaching here.

Drake was studying Kaprow’s work and planning something to push the original concept further. The question worth asking is: how do you improve on Fluids? How do you take an ice structure built to simply melt and have it mean more?

Drake hired construction crews from the city to put this together. Obviously, bro’s gonna boost the local economy instead of putting his fans onto manual labor. I’m sure they received a hefty bag for their contribution. And while Drake knew the spectacle he would create and the buzz that would follow, it wasn’t designed for admiration’s sake. Creative direction being overseen by longtime Toronto collaborator Matte Babel tells you everything you need to know about the intentionality behind what you’re looking at.

Kaprow’s central tenet of a Happening was an organic connection between art and its environment. No clear line between object and audience, structure and spectator. It was not to be observed, but to be existed with. The collective whole is the entire point. And his rejection of permanence, both in the material of which he constructed Fluids and how people viewed or engaged with it, was the entire point. It exists in this moment, and then it’s gone.

In the rendition created by Drake last week, you see his aim to honor this thesis. He created the conditions for a moment, completely unscripted, and then removed himself. What I appreciate most about this attempt is what didn’t happen next, surprising as it may be for a mainstream artist nearly a year into a major studio album rollout.

Follow me here. This could have been coordinated as an idle livestream. The ice could have been left unobstructed with 24/7 security and red tape. Bro could’ve just made us watch as it gradually fades into a puddle. Maybe Pinocchio gets another cameo, as we’ve seen in previous episodes. Perhaps he creates some visuals coinciding with new sounds from the album, creating a countdown that fixates millions of eyeballs and generates endless discourse. All the while multiplying the hysteria of this long-awaited solo project and lining his pockets. That alone would’ve had media pundits throwing flowers at The Boy’s feet.

He did none of that, and I believe it to be a quintessential move in his plans and his real nod to Kaprow. Bro literally said, “Have at it, kids!” Streamers flooded the scene to check it out. They started climbing this ice fortress and aura farming. It quickly became a real life rage room. Toronto youts pulled up with flamethrowers and sledgehammers. One of the streamers dropped his car keys into a crack at the top, on some finder’s keeper’s. 16 hours later, streamer Kishka discovered the package in a nook at the top of the pyramid. He then brought that package to The Embassy and revealed the release date of Iceman: May 15th. All the while streaming, printing cash, and receiving gifted subs from The Boy.

What was pulled out of that ice wasn’t just a release date. It was a zine, a dense, maximalist visual document of the entire Iceman era. Pop culture references, cinema, OVO iconography, and the word ICEMAN rendered in multiple different typefaces. FRAIM called it “graphic design heaven,” yet some comments called it a corporate picture book. Both reactions are telling. Because the criticism that it feels too produced, too polished to be a genuine zine, misses the point entirely. Know ball. Comb through @plottttwistttttt and see the imagery for yourself. This was clearly never meant to be lo-fi. Kaprow built his ice structures with construction crews, too. Scale and sincerity are not mutually exclusive.

Furthermore, sports franchises, corporate brands, and media accounts started copy-trading the aesthetic. The Los Angeles Chargers posted their own cryptic ice blue typographic slide for promo before draft day, “get more love in the city you from.” The visual language Drake built for this era, around a cold palette, fragmented text, and deliberate ambiguity, has become a template that brands were mimicking within days. I wish my finsta in high school had even a tenth of the aura.

That same ambiguity has media members in a frenzy. Even those who turned on him, quite literally calling him a cancer post-2024, are taking their stab at interpretation and declaring their excitement for the music. This is what a cultural moment looks and feels like. When the NFL is doing Drake impressions to sell football AFTER slotting a Super Bowl performance to metaphorically dance on his “supposed” grave, you know it’s up, and it’s stuck. The art is undeniable.

But back to the sculpture. Drake didn’t just borrow from Kaprow. He took a 60-year-old concept about impermanence and public space, dropped it in the middle of his hometown, and gave it something Kaprow never did: stakes. A secret inside. A reason to act. He turned passive observers into participants, and participation into a cultural moment that the world watched from our phones. And those participants had just as much skin in the game. Drake gave them the stage, and they ran with it. Cameras were rolling, and everyone was eating. Toronto’s own happening.

That’s what makes this special, what makes this transcend performance art. Marketing his album with his fans as opposed to them is the most unguarded we’ve seen an artist be, possibly ever. He handed them the moment and trusted them to run with it. Because those kids out in the cold, taking sledgehammers to blocks of ice like the rent was due, are the ones who have rocked with him on this journey for the last 15 years.

This was the culmination of a rollout that Drake has been engineering, patiently and deliberately, for nearly a year. It began on the 4th of July last year. Not with a press release or a radio single, but with a cryptic “9 PM” teaser that led fans to a livestream. What followed were three cinematic episodes, each one a world-building exercise more than a promotional tool. In Episode 1, Drake drove an Iceman-branded truck through the streets of Toronto, eventually arriving at a warehouse where he watched old videos of himself (Bieber might’ve actually just taken a page from this playbook), and premiered What Did I Miss?, which by the way, was a fun little record that so happens to be the last hip hop song to appear on Billboard’s Top 100. The game is truly in disarray.

Episodes 2 and 3 followed suit, each dropping a new single and a new layer of this Iceman character. Between episodes, the breadcrumbs kept coming. We saw a custom Iceman chain with functioning icebox doors, an OVO x Marvel capsule, his courtside Raptors seats iced out, a notebook posted to Instagram alongside the phrase “Make Them Cry.” All seeming to foreshadow things revealed in the zine and likely the music. Every hint was designed to make you feel like you were piecing something together. Drake, much like myself, has a penchant for mystery, pettiness, and theatrics. But the sculpture was his moment to invite you in.

It would be difficult to find a precedent for this type of rollout, like quite literally the entire architecture of it. The livestreams alone represent a fundamental shift in how an artist can introduce music to the world. Nobody has ever used the format this way as the primary vehicle.

But that got me thinking. Frank Ocean once live streamed himself building a staircase in a woodshop for days ahead of Endless. If you didn’t know the story behind it, you might have just thought it was a beautiful, strange piece of ambient art. But it was chess. Frank owed Def Jam one more album under a contract he’d been trying to escape for years. A deal that entitled them to a major slice of whatever he delivered. So he gave them Endless. It was abstract, difficult to sell, and deliberately unclassifiable. Nonetheless, it fulfilled his obligation, and he dropped Blonde independently twenty-four hours later on his own label Boys Don’t Cry, keeping 70% of revenues and his masters. He described the seven-year negotiation as a “chess game.” The label was left holding a visual album that wasn’t for sale, while the most anticipated R&B record in a decade went to number one without them. It was art as litigation.

The parallel gets more intriguing when you consider what Drake is navigating right now. Frank’s battle with Def Jam ended with him walking out the door free, independent, and masters in hand. Drake’s chess game is happening in real time. He is currently in active litigation against UMG, his own label, alleging they ran a coordinated campaign to defame him using Kendrick as the instrument. A lawsuit filed, dismissed, and now on appeal at the Second Circuit. His attorneys filed their final reply brief on April 17th. Four days later, he put this 25-foot block of ice in a Toronto parking lot. He’s releasing this project through the very label he is suing. Frank said I don’t need you by leaving. Drake is saying I don’t need you by staying, winning anyway, and making you watch. Both show us that the art will always speak for itself. Both seemingly onto greener pastures.

Compare this to what the rest of the industry is doing right now. Take Yeat’s lead single for ADL, Made It On Our Own filmed inside Drake’s Toronto mansion, engineered to make the internet ask a question that the music itself couldn’t answer. The implied co-sign did the heavy lifting. The song had a moment, the album had no legs, and outside of that initial speculation cycle, you don’t hear it anywhere. Drake wasn’t even on the project. His rollout collateral being influenced by The Sopranos was a nice touch, but where did it stick? I love Yeat’s sound, but it’s far from mafioso music.

Or take Jack Harlow’s Monica rollout. An artist who so visibly wanted to be received differently that he announced the reinvention on podcasts before the music could speak for itself. He told interviewers he got blacker (which was obviously hyperbolic not literal). But the criticism wasn’t just about the sound, it was about the effort being visible. Going in the complete opposite direction of what landed him on the map. If that’s what made bro happy, I’m all for it, but to pre-frame how it should be received is rarely going to work, especially when the sound doesn’t ring any bells.

Both rollouts share the same fundamental flaw. They were built on association and aspiration rather than something real. Borrowed credibility, manufactured adjacency, and aesthetic proximity to a culture neither artist fully inhabited. Drake’s ice structure really is the antithesis here.

He took a concept and made it a series, a narrative, a world. Each episode rewards the fans who showed up in real time. He made listening feel alive again. He made anticipation feel like participation. And in doing so, he’s handed a blueprint to every artist who comes after him.

This is what Drake has always done. “I just set the bar, ****** fall under it like a limbo.” Long before it was fashionable, he was charting his own path and building a fanbase through emotional honesty when vulnerability wasn’t considered strength. And we obviously know he took his lumps for it. Wound up turning Toronto into a global cultural capital when nobody was looking in that direction. Every time he moved, doors opened. Not just for himself but for an entire generation of artists and creatives who found permission in what he was willing to try first. Every pond he jumps into winds up flourishing. The Iceman rollout is the latest and perhaps most ambitious extension of that instinct. The way we receive music will not look the same after this, and we should be nothing but optimistic as a result.

You can’t manufacture legacy. Or shall I say “you can’t fake influence.” In a world where marketing and perception often supersedes quality, Drake consistently delivered on both. He’s still the most streamed artist on the planet. Iceman is probably gonna move 500,000 units in the first week. But here’s the thing about music. It’s the most honest transaction there is. Nobody tells you what to put in your headphones when you’re alone. Nobody tells you what to play in the car when nobody’s watching. And for fifteen years, in those private moments, it’s clear who the people have chosen.

As it relates to contemporary art, at its best, it doesn’t ask for your permission or your understanding. It doesn’t hang in a gallery waiting to be validated by someone with a degree.

And that brings us back to 81 Bond Street. Back to the ice. Back to a 25-foot structure in a downtown Toronto parking lot that stopped a city in its tracks and reminded the world exactly who Drake is. Because this is what he does. Death, taxes, Drizzy delivers. Your favorite artist’s favorite artist. Your wife’s #1 wrapped artist since high school. He’s somehow had a stronger handle on the cultural zeitgeist than any creative in the 21st century. He evolves. And in evolving, he pulls the entire culture forward with him.

Allan Kaprow said it best — “there isn’t an original or permanent work. Rather, there is an idea to do something and a physical trace of that idea. Its reinventions further multiply its meanings.”

Last Saturday, we presented an afternoon archive sale for Sachraga. The space held a blend of clothing, art, and design — all anchored in Composition’s ongoing interest in editorial storytelling as an exhibition.

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Some of my favorite artists who make work that falls into this category are James Turrell, Olafur Eliasson, and Anish Kapoor. All of these artists have a clear affinity for creating large works that are not only visually enthralling but also make the viewer tap into their sense of the space around them.

Many of Turrell’s works take place in scenic locations like this one. The integration of this architectural space into the Austrian mountains makes the overall work much more compelling than if this specific space was inside a hill in Alabama.

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For the next few decades following the war, architects argued over how to continue Gaudí’s work. Famous architects including Le Corbusier and Alvar Aalto, publicly opposed the continuation of La Sagrada Família. They argued that Gaudí wasn’t only an architect, but an artist whose work should be left as it was.

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Thanks so much for being here, this is a quick intro before Issue 01 of this newsletter drops next week. This newsletter aims to highlight and showcase contemporary artists, designers, and marketing campaigns that capture my attention and are curated for you. Straight to your inbox.

A quick background on me: I started Composition in my college dorm room as a freshman in 2019. The goal was to display (what I thought was) my impeccable taste in art and fashion. As I progressed through my art school degree I realized my likes and tastes for contemporary art began to shift and that’s when Composition hit its stride in terms of growth. I would post the most interesting pieces I would learn about in class on Instagram and people began to follow and engage.

5 years later, I began to understand that Composition has much more to it as a brand and a concept than purely an Instagram repost page. Therefore this is the first foray into the world beyond Instagram. Although I love Instagram for creating a platform and an audience, the real, in-the-weeds analysis and commentary is going to go down here. The real heat will be behind the paywall so if you are currently a paid subscriber, consider ponying up 5 extra bones a month to get a much deeper insight into the art world and much more.

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Composition’s definition is a work of music, literature, or art. Which gives me free reign to pretty much talk about any piece of art, music, fashion, design, literature, sculpture, or photography that is worth discussing.

I will be the author behind most of these posts, with an occasional guest author here and there. But for the most part, it will be your boy blessing your ears (eyes?) with high-level analysis and gigabrained commentary on the most visually and conceptually compelling highlights from contemporary artists.

I now work as a brand consultant for content and creative services, as well as building out the future of Composition. I envision a full media company, as well as a clothing line, home goods, in-person events, and many collaborations to come. This newsletter will be at the forefront of all Composition-related news, and paid subscribers will get early access to any future product releases and access to in-person events.

Thanks again for subscribing. Will see you next week for Issue 01.