Danielle Baskin
the
Baskin just might be the perfect Millennial artist: She funnels short attention spans into micro-businesses, synthesizes the limitless absurdity of the Internet into performance, and mocks social media (virally!) without losing herself—or her sense of humor—in the process.
She spoke into the headset while she walked around the reunion, describing the scene to her “team” and letting them tell her whether to go sit on the couch, for example, or join a particular clutch of people. “That made it so much fun,” she recalls. “I felt like I was in this video game where someone was playing me as a character. And I loved it.”
Her fellow alums took all this in stride, since Baskin was someone who always did her own thing. “People thought it was really funny,” she says. “No one knows what to do at a high school reunion. It was comic relief to have something unusual happening.”
The stunt was part of a series of digital audio experiments using a connected headset to spice up the experience of various rote situations—networking events, conferences, and so on—that eventually led to a project and a company, Dialup, that is one of Baskin’s chief preoccupations these days. And she has many preoccupations.
There’s her popular face masks with photo-realistic depictions of the user’s actual visage; a real-world equivalent to the Twitter “verified” check mark that a qualified person can mount on their home; and a service that advises people whether to quit their jobs. Before that there were the venture-capitalist trading cards; a recurring event series devoted to the notion of waiting in line; a dating app for ship crews stuck in the Suez Canal; and branded fruit as event swag, among many others.
Some of these ideas proved fleeting, and others developed into businesses, but they almost always started out as a joke. That’s
a word that’s often avoided by artists—even those whose works rely on humor—but Baskin uses it all the time and unselfconsciously.
This may in part be because, by her own account, she’s extremely online, and humor is a principal lingua franca of the Internet. Almost everything Baskin does seems partly designed to amuse the Internet. But her approach is thoughtful, and she’s always quite determined about whether, and how, to proceed. “Some jokes,” she says, “are very serious.”
“I have always been very interested in designing pranks,” Baskin, a 32-year-old based in the Bay Area, says. “I’ve done trollish things since I was a kid.” Even so, she definitely doesn’t come across as the troll-y type—the toxic rage that is the other principal lingua franca of the Internet doesn’t seem to be her thing.
She grew up outside of Chicago, then went to NYU in pursuit of a dual degree in art and psychology. Like Rick Rubin, she launched her first business from an NYU dorm room: hand-painting a line of “invisible” bike helmets under the name Inkwell Helmets. And she started to see a path to a career that suited her mercurial and entrepreneurial temperament better than the gallery world or academia.
Another crucial thing happened there—a film-major friend suggested she look into theatrical set design, a world she knew nothing about. A Craigslist ad led her to an unpaid internship for experimental set designer Deb O, a former auto factory worker with a relentless work ethic. “She influenced me to be really fast and scrappy at making things with my hands,” Baskin says. This gig ended up lasting three years.
After graduating from NYU in 2010, she supplemented Inkwell with a variety of mini-enterprises—renting out a large, customized tricycle as a sales-and-marketing tool under the name Peddler Pop-Ups; starting a sign-making service; selling her own art. What she never did was get any formal training in design or coding. But thanks to her art and commerce projects, she learned how to make websites, mastered SEO tactics, figured out e-commerce before there were plug-and-play options, and showed a natural talent for attracting attention, both online and in the media. (As other influences, Baskin cites an interesting range of DIY artist/makers, including ECHO creator Stacy Horn, media prankster Joey Skaggs, and Zardulu, the anonymous author of various hoax viral videos such as Selfie Rat.)
In 2015, a New York Times business columnist wrote about Baskin juggling six businesses out of a 160-square-foot space in the East Village. This has basically been Baskin’s m.o. ever since—restless experimentation with a rotating series of ideas in various stages along a continuum from concept to actual product. The first step is simply floating a notion (read: a joke) to friends. If it goes nowhere, she moves on. But if it shows potential, she’ll build a site, or circulate some version of the idea on social media, and monitor the response. “I figure out where it lands on the spectrum,” she says, “and assess whether or not to take it another step further and make it real.”
For years, this method had mixed results. Baskin did lots of cool things, and often got positive attention for them. But she struggled to turn her multifaceted practice into a steady living. In 2015 she moved to San Francisco, where she developed a wary fascination with the Silicon Valley “startup, tech mentality” that was completely new to her.
Then she had a breakthrough. Noticing that companies produced mountains of basically useless merch by slathering their brand names on T-shirts, cheap sunglasses, and socks, Baskin wondered if there might be a more sustainable way to approach the promotional object. When a friend’s startup was acquired, and she was invited to a party to celebrate, she figured out a way to emblazon the startup’s logo on avocados, and brought them to the party—another joke. “People were taking pictures,” she later recalled. She acquired the URL BrandedFruit.com (strong SEO!), and before long, she had clients ranging from Pizza Hut to Twitter to MailChimp to AT&T. Fast Company pronounced it “the hot new conference swag.”
Branded Fruit was profitable, and for the first time, Baskin had to take on contract employees to keep up with demand. Still, she kept juggling. The helmet business continued, and with her friend, the artist and software engineer Max Hawkins, she had started the voice and audio-tech experiments that, among other things, enlivened her high school reunion. She made a set of venture capitalist trading cards (“Yes, they really exist!” TechCrunch reported). She dreamed up a service to print entrepreneurial pitch decks onto yoga mats, “so you can attract investors at the gym.” She co-organized LineCon, which involved speakers entertaining people waiting in “San Francisco’s best lines” at trendy eateries.
“With a lot of my projects, I think of them as evolving performance pieces,” she says. Consider that yoga mat. “I imagined a scenario where someone actually goes to a yoga studio and rolls one out and then ends up talking to the person next to them—and then they're pitching their company. I'm interested in designing that scenario.”
More recently, Baskin created a minor online sensation with a prank that imagined a real-world equivalent of the “verified” blue check mark familiar from Twitter. “You can now get a Verified Badge crest on your Bay Area home if you're an influencer, public figure, or represent a brand,” she tweeted, linking to a (completely fake, at the time) service called Blue Check Homes that claimed to offer a $3,000 plaster check-mark badge—if you could prove you were authentic and influential. (The idea riffed on decorative plaster crests she had noticed on some older San Francisco homes.) Hundreds applied, and while some were clearly kidding and most seemed in on the joke, Baskin is currently reviewing the applications with the intent to award a single plaster house badge.
With the vaccines apparently bringing the pandemic under control, and even the Centers for Disease Control announcing that the vaccinated can basically ditch their masks, Baskin recognizes (she hopes) that Maskalike has a limited future. She does not seem concerned. It’s been joking as usual.
This raises an issue that becomes clearer and clearer the more you talk to Baskin about her projects and goals: Her time-management strategy is a bit of a mystery. Aside from cranking out her various high-speed projects and devoting hours to choosing the winner of a Blue Check house medallion, she also spends time serving as a kind of informal counselor to total strangers who are considering quitting their jobs. This is her service Decruiter, which is positioned as something like a recruiting firm, but entirely devoted to quitting, and proving that you are qualified to do so. “I find the conversation just really fascinating,” she says. “I don't have a job at a company, so I'm telling them about what it's like to be in between jobs, unemployed, freelance, self-employed—and I'm learning about what it's like in an office.”
“The thing that is more important to me about Dialup is that people actually have had their life impacted by it,” Baskin says. “They've been in a conversation with someone, and they didn't even plan to pick up their phone, but then they talk to someone for four hours—and decide to move, or change something in their life. Or just make a new friend. I get these stories all the time, because you could write feedback after your call. I read thousands of anecdotes on how these calls impacted someone, and I just feel like that's way more powerful than my other projects.”
It’s also complicated. “It's a service that 31,000 people use and requires specific technology that's difficult to build,” she continues. Plus, it doesn’t make money. She’s recently set up a Patreon account to back the service, but hasn’t yet launched it. She clearly believes it could be more. “Dialup has the potential to be a business,” she says, “which is why I'm investing a lot of time in it. But it is not there yet.”
At around this point in the conversation, Baskin’s tone shifts a bit. “I'll tell you the sad story,” she says. “I've pitched Dialup to 110 investors. And I've been rejected.” She pauses. “It's pretty traumatizing.” This surprised me—“Everyone's surprised,” she responds—and I asked if she had a theory about what the problem might be.
She says she’s easily gotten meetings with potential investors—even through cold emails to venture capitalists. But, she muses, perhaps she’s just not quite the safe bet that the next young guy out of Stanford might be. “I don't fit a normal model of who a founder is,” she says. Then there’s her VC trolling—some of the people she pitched were aware of her trading cards, for example. Gabriel Whaley, founder of the buzzy (and venture-backed) creative agency MSCHF, “tried to train me,” Baskin says. “He said: ‘When you go into meetings with VCs, strip away all of your artistic-ness. You have to be pure business. You have to channel your inner MBA.’ And I tried,” she says.
According to The Harvard Business Review, about 2.3% of all venture investments in 2020 went to women-led startups—actually a decrease from 2.8% in 2019. Baskin is aware of this, but wary of coming across as bitter or sore. Instead, she says the experience has given her an idea for a project that she didn’t want to talk about on the record. Suffice it to say, there might be a good prank to play here, and a new scenario to create. One that’s sort of a joke—a serious one.
THE JOKE AS R&D
DESIGNING
SCENARIOS
BUT SERIOUSLY:
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
“ I have always been very interested
in designing pranks. I’ve done
Stacy Horn
“ I THINK of a lot of my projects as evolving performance pieces.”
Zardulu
Influences
Deb O
the
JOKE
i
probably wouldn’t have gone to her 10-year high school reunion a few years ago if a funny idea hadn’t occurred to her. She has a lot of funny ideas, and they often involve some combination of design, technology, and real-world interaction. She went to the reunion wearing a plainly-visible headset that connected her to a group of four (post-high school) friends. When anyone at the reunion struck up a conversation, she would explain: “I don't answer questions for myself anymore. I have a whole team. Let me consult them.”
Sometimes this ethos—designing a scenario based on an internet joke and morphing it into a real-world experience—does build a business. And when the pandemic hobbled the conference business and sidelined Branded Fruit, Baskin’s fidgety creativity sparked new imagined scenarios—and new revenue sources.
Most notably, it caught Baskin’s attention that wearing a mask interfered with the facial-recognition technology that technorati types had gotten used to using to unlocks their smartphones. The absurd consternation about this was amusing, but gave her a (jokey) idea: what about a mask that was a photorealistic representation of the owner’s face? Could it be done well enough to work with facial recognition tech? And just how creepy would it look? The answers turned out to be “yes,” and, “pretty creepy (but maybe in a good way?).” The idea was an online hit—and Maskalike, a new business, was born.
Actually, it took about eight months, Baskin says, to get the technology and the construction right. By then, there was a waiting list, and she’s now sold to thousands of people who have uploaded their own pictures for a custom mask. Plus, the idea proved malleable: she created versions with celebrity visages, or semi-surreal glitches. Then she set off a fresh wave of Internet attention with a “chin masker” version—which makes it look like you’re wearing your mask wrong, even though you aren’t.
All the designs are vaguely discomfiting, like offerings from the Uncanny Valley gift shop. Multiple users have made viral Maskalike videos, and Baskin has strategized to capture “chin mask illusion” and related search traffic, even as copycats have emerged. “I even have emails from some people who said that they refused to wear a mask,” she says, “but said this one is fine, because it's funny.”
Masklike turned out to be an ideal scenario: entertaining, a mix of online and real-world experience, and a bit of a cash cow. “It's crazy,” she says, “that that joke is most of my income.”
“ THAT JOKE IS
MOST OF MY INCOME ”
“ Some jokes are
very serious. ”
text by ROB WALKER & design by jEREMIAH MCNAIR
of
joey Skaggs
WHO'S CALLING PLEASE
Though Dialup conjures up images of “the magic of old telephones,” the mobile app is anything but outdated.
COLLECT YOUR FAVORITE VCs!
Baskin’s venture capitalist trading cards feature a different kind of heavy hitter.
COLLECT YOUR FAVORITE VCs!
Baskin’s venture capitalist trading cards feature a different kind of heavy hitter.
BRANDED FRUIT
Sustainable response to the endless mountain of cheap, unwanted
event swag.
THE VERIFIED HOME
Nothing says you’ve made it like a verified check mark on your Silicon Valley home—Baskin will select one lucky winner.
TAKING IT ON THE CHIN
Making it look like you’re wearing your mask improperly.
GET UNHIRED!
Plenty of sites will help you find a job, but only Decruiter will help you quit yours.
CALLING ANYONE
The interface of Dialup, Baskin’s new mobile app that connects random people for phone conversations about anything at all.
Former GM factory worker, current set designer and teacher. The mastermind behind unique theater experiences like a
play set inside the abandoned grain
elevator
in Brooklyn.
New York-based performance artist whose true identity is unknown. She has orchestrated a few rat-related viral incidents in NYC—first was “Selfie Rat,” then “Pizza Rat.”
Artist, activist,
and serial prankster. He has “hosted” NYC’s annual April Fools’ Day Parade (which doesn’t actually exist, of course) every year
since 1986.
Businesswoman and author most famous
for founding EchoNYC, an electronic salon and early online community. She’s since published six books.
“ THAT JOKE IS
MOST OF MY
INCOME"
Though Dialup conjures up images of “the magic
of old telephones,” the mobile app is anything but outdated.
Who’s Calling Please?
Baskin’s venture capitalist trading cards feature a different kind of heavy hitter.
COLLECT YOUR FAVORITE VCs!
The venture capitalist is a different kind of heavy hitter.
COLLECT YOUR FAVORITE VCs!
Sustainable response to the endless mountain of cheap, unwanted event swag.
Branded Fruit
Nothing says you’ve made it like a verified check mark on your Silicon Valley home—Baskin will select one lucky winner.
The Verified Home
Making it look like you’re wearing your mask improperly.
Taking it on the Chin
Plenty of sites will help you find a job, but only Decruiter will help you quit yours.
Get Unhired!
The interface of Dialup, Baskin’s new mobile app
that connects random people for phone conversations about anything at all.
Calling Anyone
Stacy Horn
joey Skaggs
Zardulu
Deb O
Influences
Stacy Horn
trollish things since I was a kid."
ART
art
the
of