Spilling the beans doesn’t count—women know anyway.
The red line is letting them know what we intend to do!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHuUcxpupQ4

Swiss (now Liechtenstein) entrepreneur Daniel Model was sentenced in Austria to nine months in prison for posing a “threat” to the surveillance (self-proclaimed) “state.” An interesting and entertaining conversation with the “painter” (or rather, convicted art forger) Wolfgang Beltracchi (activate auto-translated subs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhHUmmcurMg

AI summarizes:

This conversation starts as an interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi, but it quickly becomes something bigger: a sweeping, often provocative meditation on art, skill, fraud, markets, museums, fear, politics, and survival. Beltracchi presents himself as someone who doesn’t just paint but truly *sees*, and that ability, he says, is rare, exhausting, and impossible to teach. He argues that real artistic seeing is like an overdrive mode: most people never access it, but when he does, he can read a painting’s structure, movement, time, and hand almost instantly. For him, that’s the core of why his paintings worked — not just because he could imitate style, but because he could inhabit the logic behind a hand’s movement.

A major theme is the collapse of the old idea that “good art” and “bad art” are neatly separable. Beltracchi insists that art can come from talent, but it can also emerge from what he calls lack of talent or limitation. He mocks the fantasy that art school automatically produces artists, and he draws a sharp distinction between real craft and the huge amount of art-world production that’s basically factory output. In his view, most famous artists today operate like brands backed by assistants, workshops, and market machinery, and scarcity is often manufactured to keep prices inflated.

He keeps returning to the market as a kind of absurd truth machine. Old-master paintings, he says, were often workshop products, not solitary miracles, and the same logic still applies today: demand shapes production, production shapes supply, and the market then pretends the whole thing was always sacred. He’s especially skeptical of the art world’s moral theater — the idea that value is purely spiritual or cultural — when, in reality, price, scarcity, and institutional framing do most of the heavy lifting. Even contemporary art, he suggests, can become overproduced, hollow, and worthless once the illusion of rarity breaks.

There’s also a personal, almost mystical side to his account. He says he dreams paintings before making them, works in his sleep, and sometimes even enters paintings as if they were environments he could physically inhabit. Childhood deprivation, long observation of nature, and years spent in churches and workshops all seem to have sharpened his visual instincts. He describes painting not just as making an image but as entering a state, a story, or a world. That’s why he can paint not only the surface of a person or scene but something deeper — a kind of lived presence or future version of a subject.

The conversation then shifts into darker territory: history, apocalypse, war, surveillance, and the feeling that modern civilization has crossed certain lines it can’t uncross. Beltracchi treats Hiroshima as the start of a real apocalyptic era and sees nuclear weapons and AI as irreversible turning points. At the same time, he speaks with a strangely calm fatalism, saying he doesn’t fear death and has long believed he would live to 89. That confidence extends into his worldview: he’s unusually fearless, even in situations of violence or threat, and he treats fear almost as a foreign language he never learned.

He also reflects on LSD, the counterculture, and the 1960s as a uniquely open period in which people felt connected to everything and had unusual freedom to study, drift, experiment, and refuse conventional life paths. He doesn’t romanticize the drugs themselves so much as the state of mind and cultural openness they sometimes created. That openness, he suggests, is very different from today’s more rigid, surveilled, and politicized climate.

Politics is where his skepticism hardens into something sharper. He says he has little interest in politics, has never voted, and feels more at home in Switzerland than in Germany because Switzerland gives people more direct say and a stronger feeling of security. Germany, by contrast, left him with deep distrust, especially because of the surveillance and monitoring he says he experienced long after his imprisonment. He doesn’t frame himself as ideologically extreme, but he clearly has little patience for bureaucratic overreach, political posturing, or the state acting as if it owns what it shouldn’t.

The interview closes on a very Beltracchi note: part sarcasm, part resignation, part swagger. He talks about the absurdity of art ownership, the strange afterlife of his forged works now becoming collectible in their own right, and the way the market can transform even condemned paintings into valuable objects. When the host pushes toward a final philosophical point, Beltracchi lands it with one of his favorite images: as long as the elephant is standing there and not stepping on your feet, you can let it be. It’s a fitting ending for a man who treats art, power, and life itself as things best understood by looking straight at them, not pretending they’re simpler than they are.

https://de.zxc.wiki/wiki/Model_Holding
https://archive.ph/ZkMaf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Beltracchi
https://archive.is/6ztcC