Let’s make more of art and words.
Both visual art and the written word facilitate social progress and community growth by disseminating impactful ideas. These forms are uniquely capable of opening up new subjectivities–unearthing novel ways to be human and engage the world. In this sense, a great creative power has been lost, papered over and diluted by the proliferation of cheap entertainment and consumable media.
Kuhns, Inc. exists to invigorate artistic and social enterprises with cutting edge direction and razor-sharp conceptual tools.
If you also believe these forms have the power to positively shape our hearts and minds, let’s make sure your next venture has the greatest impact possible.
Meet Dustin Kuhns
Raised in a family of blue-collar tradesmen and women in rural Pennsylvania, Dustin was born with an innate desire to learn from masters and unearth the hidden qualities of excellence in life and work.
With a portfolio career that includes a chapter in live event production, another in construction project management, and the most recent in editorial direction, Dustin has shaped engaging publications, shows, venues, design, and installation from all operation angles.
Following a unique path from historical, literary and theological Biblical studies to graduate work unpacking modern literature and philosophy his education bridges conservative and progressive traditions. He’s worked alongside and edited cutting-edge thought leaders in classical world scholarship, philosophy, theology, and social anthropology.
As a working writer, Dustin developed his own digital publication platformThe Terminal Post, to inspire and challenge an international audience to think more deeply about how humanity engages “the internet” as a space and phenomenon. His writing is uniquely and coherently independent and engages intelligently without opaque academic tropes. For a deeper look into Dustin’s work, life and aesthetics, visit dustinkuhns.com.
He founded Kuhns, Inc. to cultivate the positive social change he believes has yet to come through art and its many enterprises—and support the growing, global humanism that seeks the best for our planetary life. By building a like-minded, well-spoken network of passionate organizations and individuals, Dustin believes we will chart clear paths forward and lead a spirited, international audience looking for means to positively contribute to our world’s future and humanity’s evolution.
“We see Art proliferating wherever we turn; talk about Art is increasing, even more rapidly. But the soul of Art—Art as adventure, Art with its power of illusion, its capacity for negating reality, for setting up an ‘other scene’ in opposition to reality, where things obey a higher set of rules, a transcendent figure in which beings, like line and colours on a canvas, are apt to lose their meaning, to extend themselves beyond their own raison d’être, and, in an urgent process of seduction, to rediscover their ideal form (even though this form may be that of their own destruction)—in this sense, Art is gone. Art has disappeared as a symbolic pact, as something thus clearly distinct from that pure and simple production of aesthetic values, that proliferation of signs ad infinitum, that recycling of past and present forms, which we call ‘culture.’ There are no more fundamental rules, no more criteria of judgement or of pleasure. In the aesthetic realm of today there is no longer any God to recognize his own. Or, to use a different metaphor, there is no gold standard of aesthetic judgement or pleasure. The situation resembles that of a currency which may not be exchanged: it can only float, its only reference itself, impossible to convert into real value or wealth.”
—From “Transasethetics” in Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil
(Follow this train of thought to Dustin’s essays
“Lost in Curation” or “The Hollow Gaze of Value.”)