Rachel Bell, Curator of High Art
“Show, don’t tell” is an old adage about writing. Could the same advice apply when it comes to marketing cannabis? “You cannot post weed on Instagram,” Rachel Bell, the content director of Gotham, a New York purveyor of marijuana products, said the other day. She was standing in the rotunda of the Guggenheim, wearing a gray skirt and a green T-shirt. “Even if it’s legal in your state, Meta doesn’t care—they’re gonna take it down.”
Major buzzkill. But what about documenting the buzz itself? That turns out to be a gray area that can elude the algorithm, as Bell found when she hit a vape and visited the 2023 Frieze Art Fair with a cameraman. “I’m stoned,” she says in a video from the expedition, ambling past a Rothko-esque canvas. “All right, that’s gorge. Loving that.” A trip to the American Museum of Natural History, enhanced by a ten-milligram “cheer” gummy, followed. “Sorry, guys, you’re dead,” Bell says in front of a pair of taxidermy antelopes. “Owls are freaky-deaky creatures,” she observes at another vitrine.
Views of the series—titled “Hi, I’m High”—accrued, reaching more than a million for Bell’s trip to the New York Botanical Garden. (“That one’s called Miracle on the Hudson,” she says, reading the label on a rosebush. “Like the guy who landed the plane?”) So did visitors to Gotham’s four stores.
Fun, fizzy dispatches from the city and beyond
Joanne Wilson, Gotham’s founder, is pleased with the results. “Rachel is so charming and likable that just seeing her experience and be curious about the world under the influence makes you want to get involved,” she said.
Shooting the videos is not always a cinch. “The past two episodes, we were told to stop filming—which is, like, my worst fear,” Bell said. “It’s hard to pivot when you’re not sober.” On the way to the Guggenheim, she’d drunk a can of THC-infused lemonade; her cameraman, Gianluca Randazzo, abstained. “I’m, like, the designated driver,” he said.
She walked up to the ticket counter and put down her credit card. Declined. “Ugh. O.K., let’s try the other one,” she said, fishing through her wallet. “Somebody didn’t do her expense report on time.”
Once inside, Bell and Randazzo took the elevator to the top. “This is a good spot to talk about what you’ve consumed,” Randazzo said.
“On the ledge here?” Bell asked. She leaned over. “Jesus, that will make you feel vertiginous!” She paused, hearing the pitter-patter of little feet approaching. “One of our biggest obstacles,” she said. “Kids can’t be in cannabis content.”
“It was a nightmare at the A.K.C. dog show,” Randazzo said. “So many children.”
Bell was ready to start exploring. “Is that art or a couch?” she asked, considering a row of gray cushions. “I see butt prints.” She wandered ahead and found some more. “Confirmed that those are, in fact, couches, not art, because why would there be more than one?”
They passed a long black cylinder (“Foam roller,” Bell said. A glyph by Carol Bove) and a chain-link net (“Netting,” also Bove). “I heard, like, fifty-eight per cent of people who come here come for the building, not the art,” she said.
They stopped at an assemblage of driftwood, seashells, and peacock feathers, titled “The Foamy Saliva of a Horse,” another Bove. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful,” Bell said, “but I’d like to see some paintings. Is there more to the museum than just the roundy part?” She stumbled across some pictures in gilt frames. “Oh, hell yeah,” she said. “Modigliani, let’s go.” She read aloud the label below a Pierre Bonnard painting of a woman at a table: “ ‘The painter’s oft-depicted wife.’ That’s what I like to see. Your wife should be depicted.”
“Do you want to sit and talk about how you feel?” Randazzo asked.
“Very wasteful, the design,” Bell concluded. “Not enough pictures.”
Bell, who is thirty-three, came to her job in a sideways fashion. A poet and novelist, she schooled herself in Instagram to promote her work. “All of the small presses that I published with had, like, no money, so marketing was on me,” she said. If she could sell poetry through social media, she thought, she could probably sell other things. When Wilson found her, Bell was running social media for a real-estate app.
“People are always, like, ‘Wow, your job is amazing,’ ” Bell said. “ ‘You just get high and do stuff.’ Like, yeah, but then I have to reply to e-mails. Don’t get too excited.” ♦