Fame in the art world doesn’t necessarily lead to fortune, concluded Andrew Norman Wilson as he decided to quit contemporary art to make films instead. The American artist speaks to SWI swissinfo.ch about this career change and his enchantment with Swiss oddities. A few years ago, it would have been inconceivable that Andrew Norman Wilson, an American contemporary artist best known for his fascination with American pop culture kitsch would utter words that expressed an intense obsession with the bric-a-brac of Swiss culture. “It all started when I was attending a Swiss wrestling [schwingen] festival in 2023. I was there to speak with Samuel Giger, perhaps the greatest schwinger of all time," says the artist whose most recent claim to fame was a 5,000-word essay about quitting the art world, published in the combative American cultural magazine The Baffler, that went viral in April last year. “I went there because I wanted him to play a part in my next movie.” Samuel Giger? Swiss ...
