The Art Angle

What a difference 12 months makes! After years of declining sales in the auction realm, there are finally signs of life. The Artnet Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2026 reveals that global auction totals were up 13.3 percent in 2025 versus 2024. The full report, rich with new findings, is now available as a crisp PDF. The price? Free. (We hope that its contents will inspire you to subscribe to Artnet Pro, and to partake of the Artnet Price Database.) In the report’s cover story, “Dark Mode,” Artnet’s Art Detective columnist, Katya Kazakina, delves into the intriguing and shadowy world of private auctions, where big-league paintings (and cars, jewelry, and more) trade behind closed doors, for enormous sums. In some cases, only certain collectors are invited. Many in this clandestine business seem to enjoy it, and Kazakina charts the major players and their strategies. Meanwhile, in wide-ranging interviews, an auctioneer (maverick Joe Maddalena), an auctioneer-turned advisor (powerhouse Patti Wong), and an auctioneer-turned dealer (rainmaker David Schrader) share their insights on the changing state of play in public salesrooms. And Margaret Carrigan, who helms The Back Room newsletter for Artnet Pro, marshals data to explain the state of play in the art industry. There is more: Here’s the download link once more. On this week’s Art Angle podcast, Kazakina sat down with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro’s editor, to discuss private auctions, the Intelligence Report, and what to expect at the big May sales in New York.    

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word. Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the “technical image,” “the apparatus,” and “techno-imagination.” These have had a huge impact on media studies, and yet remain under-known. Long in the works but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen: Vilem Flusser’s Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwendener is a teacher, an art historian, and a long-time art critic for the New York Times. The Society of the Screen tackles what Flusser’s wide-ranging and experimental body of thought means for art today and how his theories might help us find a way through our media-saturated moment.

Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He is the prince of painters, a master of the High Renaissance. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given him the full blockbuster treatment in a highly anticipated exhibition called "Raphael: Sublime Poetry." The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. Curated by Carmen C. Bambach, it took 17 years to assemble. No one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did. But what is the story within the story of this artist who left indelible mark on western art? Kate Brown is joined by art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis, who has just published a review of the exhibition, to dive into that question. Register for the Intelligence Report live discussion: ⁠The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month. In this episode, will be discussing: — The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here) — The rise of a new art historical art star: the Flemish baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689). — And a new investigation that claims to definitively, absolutely, positively once and for settle the question of who Banksy really is. Do we think they did it? Does it matter? Register for: The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology. It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work “Peace Core” showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a project space, Earth, on the Lower East Side in New York and in Echo Park in L.A. Kulendran Thomas's works are complicated. They often feature paintings, inspired by A.I.-generated images. His video installations at MoMA and the New Museum involve deepfake interviews with celebrities like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or even other artists, together with documentary footage about Sri Lanka, where his family is from. Beneath all these complex parts, Kulendran Thomas is weaving together an ambitious and maybe even unsettling argument, about political systems, philosophy, technology, human creativity, post-human creativity, and where we might be heading in the future—as artists and as a civilization.

Kim Gordon—artist, musician, writer, and co-founder of the iconic rock band Sonic Youth—is one of the most restlessly creative figures in American culture. Over the past four decades moved between mediums with an ease that few can achieve. She published her memoir Girl in a Band in 2015 to wide acclaim. Her visual work has been shown at institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Busan Biennale. Her 2024 solo album The Collective, a record built on trap beats and with sharp cultural commentary, earned her two Grammy nominations, a career first. But Gordon was always an artist first. Now, she is the subject of two concurrent exhibitions now open at Amant, the Brooklyn-based arts organization. The first is her solo survey "Count Your Chickens," which brings together painting, ceramics, film, and readymades spanning nearly 20 years of work. The second is "Folded Group," a group show she co-curated with Bill Nace, her collaborator in the experimental guitar duo Body/Head, featuring 19 artists and artist-musicians many of whom, like Gordon, have never accepted the boundary between making art and making music. Her third solo album, Play Me, is out on March 13. In her conversation with senior editor Kate Brown, Gordon discusses her visual practice, her relationship to the art world and the music world, and what these two universes share and where they diverge. She reflects on album art as a curatorial act, on how the internet has transformed what it means to make and disseminate work, and on what it has meant to spend a career resisting every category people tried to put her in.

The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum’s big curated show which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging "Greater New York." That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taína H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both these shows at once. For the Whitney, she is even, in a way, the face of the show: a work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child, called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, art critic, Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise— that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.

It’s time for our monthly news roundup where we discuss some of the biggest stories emerging in the art world. On the heels of the first-ever Art Basel Qatar, we will be discussing the Middle Eastern art market and the regional art scenes. Is this simply another fair on the global circuit, or something more structural—an attempt to recalibrate where cultural power sits? We will doing a vibe check on the Ultra-Contemporary art scene’s current obsession with Old Masters, art history, and dead artists. As market pressures mount and institutions increasingly turn toward estates and historical figures, we’ll ask whether this is a genuine intellectual reckoning or a marketing strategy dressed up as scholarship. Maybe it is both? Finally, we will rove over to Rome, Italy, where where a church fresco featuring an angel that bore a striking resemblance to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was abruptly removed, sparking debate within and well beyond the church about restoration, iconography, and the politics of sacred imagery. We reminisce about the great many botched art restorations of years past. To discuss these topics, Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined this month by London-based Artnet News editor Margaret Carrigan. Carrigan is the host of our sister podcast, the Art Market Minute, and co-author of our weekly Artnet Pro market newsletter, The Back Room.

There are many ways to read the vast trove of documents tied to the convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019. The Epstein files offer a window into the rarefied, power-brokering circles he inhabited. But the latest tranche—released by the U.S. Department of Justice in late January and comprising some three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images—also provides a behind-the-scenes view of high-level financial maneuvering, including Epstein’s connections to the art and cultural worlds. Revelations in the latest files have already had consequences: former French culture minister Jack Lang resigned as president of the Arab World Institute after disclosures connecting him to Epstein, and French financial-crimes prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into him and his daughter for alleged “aggravated tax-fraud laundering.” Art collector and film producer Steve Tisch is also facing scrutiny over email correspondence with Epstein in 2013 concerning multiple women. In early February, David A. Ross, chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Art Practice at New York’s School of Visual Arts, resigned after documents showed ties to Epstein. The files also shed additional light on the art holdings of the billionaire Leon Black and his dealings with Epstein. Black, who served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2018 to 2021, stepped down from that role after backlash over his financial ties to Epstein, though he remained on the board as a trustee. Black has faced civil lawsuits and allegations that he sexually assaulted women introduced to him through Epstein. Black has denied the claims, and no criminal charges have been filed. So we knew about Black and Epstein, to an extent. But my colleague, senior reporter Katya Kazakina, recently focused on how the latest documents illuminate Epstein’s sophisticated use of financial structures to enhance the value of Black’s vast art holdings—and just how much of his wealth was effectively stored in art. This enormous release is wide-ranging, touching people and industries far beyond the criminal sexual activity in which Epstein was involved. Because of its sheer breadth, it bears emphasizing that inclusion in the files does not imply criminal wrongdoing. More will come to light as journalists and the public sift through the documents.

There is an enduring association with creative experiment and psychedelic experiences. Recently, psychedelics have become more mainstream, explored not just for their far-out spiritual associations but as medicine, as therapy, and even just to make you more productive. How should we think about psychedelics and how they relate to art and art-making now? Ryan McGinness has had a long and well-known career as an artist. His densely layered, colorful abstract paintings have been shown at museums and galleries around the world. He’s also long explored world-building through his art, expanding his designs to maze-like environments and staging sprawling events and parties. Recently, however, McGinness has showed a new side of his creative journey. He has just published an art book, Trip Advisor: Notes From over 25 Years of Psychedelic Voyages, from Blurring Books. The colorful tome collages together images of McGinness's paintings and photos of his studio and life with the raw diaries he kept beginning in 1999, as he chronicled his own mind’s voyages on psilocybin mushrooms, alongside essays reflecting on what they have meant and continue to mean to him. So, what insight do these trips offer about art and life? What might you gain creatively and what are the pitfalls? Ryan McGinness is our guide into the world of psychedelics and art today.

If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been at the center of both these conversations. As a theorist, her essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity, from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important venues advocating for digital art. As as an artist, Dean has been in many important shows, from the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial to the Whitney Biennial here in New York. Recently, for the Performa biennial of performance art, Dean staged The Color Scheme, a two-person theatrical work, which is also set to tour to Berlin later this year. The Color Scheme focuses on an imagined meeting in the 1920s in Berlin, between two Black intellectuals, one called The Poet and the other called The Philosopher. It may be as close as Dean has come to totally fusing her work as a thinker with her work as an art maker. It literally stages a conversation about Black culture, politics, and art. Yet The Color Scheme also plunges us a century back in time, very much away from the world of digital culture she has written so much about. It felt to me like a continuation of the important debates Dean has been a part of, but also an attempt to find new perspective. And that seemed a good cue to talk with her about how she’s viewing art now, why she’s looking to art history, and how her views have evolved over a tumultuous decade.

Here we are, already at the end of the first month of the new year. That means it’s time to do the first Art Angle Round-Up of 2026, where, as is custom, we’ll review some of the art news stories that people are talking about, and what they might tell us something about the forces shaping the year to come. Today art critic Ben Davis, senior editor Kate Brown and editor in chief Naomi Rea talk about three stories: —The big controversy over the South Africa pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which Artnet News has had multiple pieces about. —The Prado Museum in Madrid, which has a good problem: it has too many visitors. It also has a plan to deal with overcrowding. —The mini-genre of "speed painting," specifically the painter Vanessa Horabuena. She sold a painting of Jesus for almost $3 million dollars that she made in 10 minutes at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser—a sign of the world out of control, though perhaps a slightly more fun one to talk about than some of the other things in the news. Or maybe not.

The first quarter of the 21st century is now behind us. Yet a pervasive sense of cultural stagnation persists: many observers and participants feel that creativity across the arts, media, and popular culture has slowed, leaving society with a muted sense of innovation and excitement. David Marx’s new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, provides an incisive guide through the cultural touchstones that have defined the last twenty-five years. Marx examines how commercialization gradually came to dominate contemporary culture, propelled by rapid technological advancements and a shifting cultural mindset that favors profit-driven formulas over experimentation. He argues that these dynamics—spanning art, literature, music, film, and fashion—have stymied radical innovation, making the opening decades of the new century some of the least transformative since the invention of the printing press. As Marx observes, there is now “a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” In Blank Space, Marx also proposes five strategies to help restore a society that values and nurtures cultural inventiveness. He joins the Art Angle to discuss the pressures and developments that slowed the emergence of radical new formats in art and broader culture over the last 25 years, and he outlines potential paths forward. Topics explored include the rise of kitsch, nostalgia, cultural omnivorism, and poptimism, all of which, he suggests, have contributed to the current climate of creative inertia. Marx is a Tokyo-based American critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He is also the author of several previous books, including Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century was published in November 2025 by Penguin Random House.

In art right now, it's hard to avoid talking about Beeple. That, of course, is the alias of Charleston-based Mike Winkelmann, known to millions of followers for digital images that he makes and posts daily. These works give off the sense of a brain overdosing on memes—we're talking pictures of giant emojis and pop culture junk being worshiped in dystopian techno hellscapes, or melted versions of celebrities and politicians turned into grotesque monsters and killer robots. Beeple first burst into the center of the art world conversation in early 2021 when his work Everydays, The First 5,000 Days hit the block at Christie's Auction House. Sold as an NFT, it was essentially a high-resolution digital image that compiled everything he had made in his first decade-plus of daily posting. It sold for a shocking $69 million, still one of the biggest prices ever for a work by a living artist, and it made Beeple a symbol of both the new respect and opportunity for digital artists and of critics' worst fears about a blockchain-fueled art bubble and the meltdown of taste. While that digital art bubble did crash, Beeple survived and experimented with new media. One of his interactive video sculptures has only just closed at LACMA in Los Angeles, while a set of robot dogs with human heads that he created was the talk of the recent Art Basel Miami Beach art fair in December. His work inspires a lot of commentary, positive and negative, including from national critic, Ben Davis. But there is no doubt that his influence seems to be growing as both museums and galleries try to figure out how to court a new generation of digital natives.

At the top of 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak, and art insiders' worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market you have been hearing the drumbeat of bad news: Galleries shuttering, a lot of the buying energy drying up, some fairs shriking operations, and the secondary market stuttering. But the picture is, as usual, quite nuanced depending on how you look at it. There were some upsides to the slowdown in the hype and the speculation gamification of art seems to be over, which some art insiders say is not the worst thing. Things seemed to turn a corner in the closing months of 2025, which included a successful fall New York auction week and a stronger-than-expected edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Following two years of a down market and declining sales, the world’s two leading auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s reported at the close of the year, upticks in total projected revenue for 2025. So is the wind back in the sails? After years of downturn, has the art market changed in permanent ways? What major shifts can we expect in 2026? Senior editor Kate Brown is joined by Marc Spiegler to consider these questions. For those who don’t already know, Spiegler led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, and the brand saw a major expansion under his tenure. Currently, he works on a portfolio of cultural strategy projects with major foundations, private corporation, including digital and experiential endeavors. Spiegler has long been a visiting professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and launched the Art Market Minds Academy.

As we close out another bumpy year in the art market, we are revisiting a recent episode that looks at one of the factors in play: the erosion of logic when it comes to the price of works of art. Our editor-in-chief was on the podcast sharing what she learned about how the rules of art pricing were made and broken—and what may come next.   What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that question of price has never been easy—but lately, it’s gotten harder than ever. As we’ve discussed on this podcast before, the art market has cooled off. But this isn’t just a downturn—it’s a disruption. The system that once supported pricing logic is now in disarray, and dealers and advisors are feeling the strain. In a recent report for Artnet News Pro, our editor-in-chief Naomi Rea explored how the traditional rules of art pricing have stopped making sense. With confidence waning and speculation drying up, dealers are quietly recalibrating. What we’re seeing may be more than a correction—as Naomi reports, it could be the unraveling of an entire logic. Naomi joins senior editor Kate Brown to unpack what’s going on in the “danger zone” of the market and how different players—from mega-galleries, emerging dealers, to advisors and collectors—are adapting. They also discuss whether we might be heading toward a more sustainable and meaningful art market.

We love to do deep dives into trends that we are noticing in painting and the trend of “Bordercore” was one of our best-loved from the year, so we decided to revisit it this holiday season. We take a look at the emergent trend in art which is wild and inventive takes on frames, suddenly front and center for many painters of the moment as a way to push new boundaries in painting.  Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice. But if you go to the art galleries to look at paintings now, you might get a very different sense of what a frame can or even should do. Weird and wild frames that very much draw attention to themselves seem to be having a moment. Recently, Artnet writer and editor Katie White penned a piece titled “Bordercore: Why Frames Became the New Frontier in Contemporary Art,” in it, she writes:  A new wave of contemporary art is reconsidering the frame as a central character, one that is surreal, sculptural, and symbolic. Artists are using the border not just to contain, but to comment, disrupt, or extend the work beyond itself. This is driven by an embrace of more bespoke, historic artistic processes, but also, as a rebuttal to the superflat virtual age. More and more, paintings have been appearing at fairs and in exhibitions with statement frames, after a long era of often-frameless display. If for previous generations, the frame was a liability that could detract from the cerebral, intellectual, and aesthetic experience of the canvas, artists today are creating frames that attempt to pull us back into bodily reality, a haptic experience of art. In her essay, she looks both at the history of framing styles, and talks to a number of contemporary painters to figure out what is causing so many to treat something that was literally considered peripheral to what they do as very much part of the main attraction. This week she joins art critic Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss this new frontier in art.

Chris Kraus is one of the most well-known contemporary art writers. She is also an important taste-maker, co-editor of independent publisher Semiotext(e), which played a key role in introducing French theory to U.S. audiences. But Kraus is probably best known today as a novelist. Her 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick became a buzzy literary reference in the 2010s, and a model for autofiction. It was even made into an Amazon show. This fall, Kraus put out a new novel, titled The Four Spent the Day Together. It has a cryptic three-part structure that I think I should set up. The first part focuses on a young woman named Catt Greene. Drawing heavily on Kraus’s own life, it describes a childhood growing up in Connecticut, being bullied, and dreaming of leaving the hardships of her depressing lower-class life behind through experiments with drugs and sex, activism and art. The second part focuses on Catt many decades later, now an art critic and novelist who has found unexpected success with a novel called I Love Dick, which is being made into an Amazon show. But it also focuses on the character of Paul, Catt’s husband, an addiction councilor who struggles with addiction himself, which slowly tears the two apart. Like the real-life Kraus, the character Catt Greene owns properties in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which she rents out. Like Kraus, Greene is attacked by online critics in the late 2010s for being a landlord. This leads to Part 3 of the book. Feeling demonized, and that her own life is running out of raw material to turn into literature, Catt Greene finds herself drawn to investigating a real-life murder in bleak rural Minnesota. The character of Catt Greene, and Kraus through her, attempt to reconstruct the grisly facts of the case, and try to make sense of it. That’s probably enough set-up. Chris Kraus joins national critic Ben Davis to talk about her writing, her life, and her new book.

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Round-up, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. As we close out a busy calendar year—and for the last roundup of the year—we are reviewing all of 2025 and the trends, themes, and stories that defined it with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro editor and art critic. It's been a whirlwind of a year. We take a look at the art market, where slumped sales, gallery closures, and existential dread dominated the business up until November, when New York’s fall auctions saw the narrative take a turn, something that seemed to sustain across the primary market at Art Basel Miami Beach. We discuss what this could mean for 2026. In the realm of politics, Trump 2.0 began, which ushered in a wave of policy shifts, cultural tensions, and uncertainty that reverberated across the art world, from federal arts funding to museum governance and international cultural exchange. We also ask whether the art world did finally go post-woke, a question Davis posed at the top of the year, the return of digital art, and the ongoing power of red chip art. And it was a year of profound transformation for institutions, which are facing a multi-front crisis due to the changing expectations from the public, exploding costs, and a shifting political landscape. And, of course, there are also some fun stories in the mix, because this is the art world, a place that is known to be rather unusual.

Millions of people know The Artist's Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or, as she sometimes prefers to call it, “creative recovery.” It found a huge audience, and today you can find Artist’s Way groups all over the world. Cameron’s original The Artist’s Way offered a 12-week path towards overcoming artistic blocks. The book was subtitled “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” and it spoke of plugging into a current of what she called “spiritual electricity.” But her techniques were practical and easy to grasp. Rituals from The Artist’s Way such as starting your day by writing out three pages of unedited text, known as "doing your Morning Pages," have become part of the creative process of many, many artists, musicians, and writers. More than three decades after its publication, The Artist’s Way continues to find new followers, and even got a new bump of popularity during the 2020s. And Julia Cameron herself has returned this year with The Daily Artist’s Way, offering a new way in for fans. Cameron agreed to speak to national critic Ben Davis to revisit the origins of her famous method and how she’s tweaking it now in this new book.

You've been hearing a lot about the Louvre lately. Last month, thieves broke into the Paris Museum in broad daylight when the museum had just opened and made off with eight pieces of royal jewelry. The spectacular heist captured the world news cycle and the imagination of the internet. But why are people so obsessed with the Louvre in general? What is it about this museum in particular? We decided to re-air a recent episode where we look at the enigmatic institution and dive into the many secrets and stories that it holds. The Louvre is among the largest, most-visited, and best-known museums in the world, and for nearly too many reasons to count. It’s home to some of the most celebrated works of art, from the Venus de Milo to the Mona Lisa. Its blended contemporary and historic architecture is astounding. And it also has a truly formidable past, stretching back through time, well before the building became a museum in 1793. An institution and collection that has been a quiet witness to so much history and change is bound to have stories to tell. Elaine Sciolino, contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, has captured many of these stories in her newest book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, which came out in April with Norton & Company. Sciolino is acclaimed for her chronicles of French history, and she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris, The Seine, and La Seduction. And at the Louvre, she spoke to everyone, from the guards to the lead curators, and received unprecedented access to rooms I didn’t even know existed. Senior editor Kate Brown caught up with Elaine, who is based in Paris, to discuss the enigmatic and ever-enchanting Louvre, and what she learned from her exploration of its many halls, backrooms, and basements.

Last year, Jack Hanley—one of New York’s most beloved and idiosyncratic gallerists— announced he would close his gallery after 37 years in business. The news landed with both surprise and sadness: Hanley has always been a disruptor, a dealer with a sharp eye for fresh talent, who followed instinct over market logic. A gem of the New York art scene and beyond. Over the decades, Hanley gave early shows to artists like Günther Förg, Christopher Wool, Sophie Calle, and Christian Marclay—and all of that was long before they became art-world names they are now. He helped define the San Francisco scene of the 1990s, championed artists who blurred lines between high and low and made challenging work; and more recently, even gave the digital artist Beeple his first-ever gallery show. As a former Grateful Dead roadie, avid orchid grower, art fair founder, and having run galleries in several cities, he’s seen a lot. And played music with more than a few art dealers. Hanley joins senior editor Kate Brown to discuss transformation and continuity in the art world and art industry. We talk about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what keeps art interesting, even as the market has grown more absurd.

Before the idea of feminism took shape, there was what writers once called “the woman question.” The phrase comes from the querelle des femmes—a centuries-long debate in Europe about women’s rights, intellect, and place in society. One of the first to take it up was Christine de Pizan, the Italian-French court writer who, in 1405, published The Book of the City of Ladies. At a time when most women were excluded from education and public life, de Pizan challenged misogyny head-on, laying some of the earliest groundwork for what we now understand as feminist thought. That question—what is a woman’s place in culture and history?—has echoed ever since. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin famously reframed it by asking: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” We have a clear answer: there had been great women artists all along, but their stories were often overlooked, dismissed, or erased. A new exhibition at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw hones in on that conversation. "The Woman Question: 1550–2025," curated by Alison M. Gingeras, gathers nearly five hundred years of women’s creative production—from Renaissance pioneers like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, to Baroque heroines such as Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi, and contemporary artists including Betty Tompkins and Lisa Brice. With more than 200 artworks, the exhibition focuses on how women saw and depicted themselves and the world, and how the represented power, resistance, desire, and violence. Through portraits, allegories, and bold depictions of female experience, these artists reveal how women have long claimed creative agency despite the structures built to contain them. On this episode of The Art Angle, Gingeras joins senior editor Kate Brown from Warsaw, Poland, to talk about early women art stars, recent rediscoveries, and why, after all this time, we still need all-women exhibitions.

Nigerian modern art is having a moment. In London, the Tate has opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, called “Nigerian Modernism,” featuring more than 50 artists who experimented with vibrant new styles in the mid 20th century in the giant and influential West African nation. More generally, the artists of this era have become more recognized outside of their home country in recent decades, from early figures who laid the groundwork like Aina Onabolu to a towering figure of the 1950s like Ben Enwonwu to younger innovators of the 1950s and 1960s such as Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, with many more important names to know and bodies of work to discover. This was an earth-shaking time in Nigerian history, when a near-century of British colonial domination was shed and the many problems of a fragile new independent nation had to be faced. These artists were part of figuring out how to express that new sense of identity in images. But their art was not always so celebrated, sometimes dismissed as derivative of European art. The scholar and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu has been important to the recent re-estimation of Nigeria’s art history. He teaches at Princeton, and is the author of, among many other things, of Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, a book that personally excited me very much when I first found it. With the Tate show drawing a fresh wave of interest, art critic Ben Davis thought Okeke-Agulu would be an excellent guide to what this art was, what it meant, and why it still demands attention today.

It’s been a really dizzyingly busy October, and as is customary, we are ending the month by talking about three of the biggest topics. We have a palette of stories that gives a sense of how head-spinning it was. First, we are going to talk about one of the biggest stories in the world, the $102 million jewel heist at France’s Louvre museum, which has transfixed the public. Second, it’s been a busy few weeks in the European art world on top the Louvre heist, with both Art Basel Paris and Frieze London. Our reporters were there so we are going to check in on what the news from the art biz is. And third, we’ll talk about the new Sora 2 app, an all-A.I. TikTok clone that isn’t public yet but is at the top of the app charts. I got a chance to try it out and looked at it. An artist I know called it “the death of video art.” Is it that bad or that good? What does it mean for art? We’ll talk about that too. Ben Davis is joined as is custom by Artnet’s senior editor and Art Angle co-host Kate Brown, in Berlin, alongside European news reporter Jo Lawson-Tancred.

One of the things Ben Davis likes about contemporary art is that he is always learning new things, because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, Jeanette Andrews. Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that’s something new, exploring magic as an expressive medium. Her works usually bring together the science of perception, the intrigue of coded messages, and the history of illusion as a craft. Andrews has performed parlor tricks dreamed up by an algorithm to investigate human versus machine creativity; re-performed the earliest documented magic trick from 1584; and made art inspired by the use of sleight of hand in actual CIA espionage in the 1950s. And her explorations of this unusual creative space are actually getting their first dedicated museum exhibition soon, at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois—that’s a little bit of news we’re breaking on the Art Angle, as a matter of fact. Earlier this month, Ben went to see one of Jeanette Andrews’s most recent commissions in Boston, "The Attestation," at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology. He describes it as a hybrid of stage magic and social experiment. The questions of why, if, and how magic fits in in the museum seem fascinating to me, so he was happy that Andrews agreed to talk about how she pulled off her biggest trick of all: making magic art.

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick. After months on the run, U.S. authorities finally tracked Inigo Philbrick to a remote island nation in the South Pacific: Vanuatu, a tropical archipelago more than 9,000 miles from London and a world away from the art fairs and galleries where he once thrived. What followed was a scene straight out of an action thriller: a dramatic arrest, a secretive extraction by private jet—at the height of the pandemic, no less—and a return to face justice, along with tens of millions in claims from furious investors and collectors. In this fourth and final episode, we uncover what happened in the months after Philbrick disappeared and how his high-flying double life came to an abrupt end. Law enforcement officials and art-world insiders weigh in on how they found him, what it takes to prosecute art fraud—and whether a man like this could ever make a comeback in the art world.

Manga is surely one of the most beloved and influential types of culture in the world. And while there’s long been a thriving international fandom around Japanese graphic novels, in the last 5 years in particular, there’s been a huge surge of popular interest, with manga impossible to miss in book shops and comic stores—and now in museums too. The big exhibition “Art of Manga” at the De Young Museum in San Francisco is proving to be a real event. As the title suggests, the show looks at manga not just as a cultural phenomenon but as visual art, digging into the history of the medium and celebrating its dynamic graphic and storytelling style. Specifically, “Art of Manga” focuses on 10 Japanese creators, selected to show the breadth of what manga has meant, and can be. They are: Akatsuka Fujio, Araki Hirohiko, Chiba Tetsuya, Oda Eiichiro, Tagame Gengoroh, Takahashi Rumiko, Taniguchi Jiro, Yamashita Kazumi, Yamazaki Mari, Tanaami Keiichi, and Yoshinaga Fumi. What is the connection of manga to Japanese art history? What does a museum have to add to the story of manga? And what can the popularity of manga, in turn, teach museums? The show’s curator, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, agreed to talk to us about all of this.

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.   After a bombshell $13 million lawsuit from angry collectors, Inigo Philbrick vanished. What followed was a cascade of international claims from clients who had entrusted him with millions, drawn in by his supposed Midas touch in the art market. From art fairs to gallery openings to gala dinners, the question on everyone’s lips was the same: Where’s Inigo? In this third episode, we examine the fallout from Philbrick’s fraudulent deals, and the frenzy that erupted in the art world after his sudden disappearance.

Museums across the globe are facing unprecedented challenges. In the West, public funding is shrinking, politics is creeping into the galleries, and institutions are asking hard questions about how to stay relevant to their donors and their publics. In an era of increasing scrutiny and diminishing returns, even the most established museums are questioning what long-term sustainability means. Meanwhile in China, the private museum boom that once symbolized cultural ambition and real-estate wealth is cracking, and some of these lavish new museums are having to close or scale back. In short, museums are in crisis. Senior editor Kate Brown recently worked with Margaret Carrigan, our news editor and host of the Art Market Minute, to edit a four-part series examining this issue from different angles. Margaret joins her on the podcast to talk about the takeaways and the financial, political, and ethical pressures reshaping museums. We also discuss whether this breaking point could be the start of a new era of reinvention.

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.   Long before headlines exposed his $86 million fraud, Inigo Philbrick was just another ambitious intern at one of the most powerful galleries in the world. Then a student at Goldsmiths College, Philbrick caught the attention of legendary dealer Jay Jopling and landed a coveted internship at White Cube—the gallery that defined 1990s London, and launched the YBAs (Young British Artists) including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. In this second episode, we explore how Philbrick so quickly ingratiated himself into the upper echelons of the art world that, within just a few years, he was running his own eponymous gallery. With hindsight, were there early warning signs of what was to come that the art world failed to see?

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick. What happens when you mix staggering sums of money with opaque financial deals in the high-stakes world of art? Welcome to Art World Infamy, a new podcast mini-series about the scandals and larger-than-life figures that have gained industry notoriety. We begin with a four-part investigation into how Inigo Philbrick climbed to the top of the art world—and how it all unraveled. Once hailed as a wunderkind dealer, Philbrick leveraged personal connections and the soaring contemporary art market to build what looked like an unstoppable career. But his fortunes hinged on deception, and once uncovered, the losses were staggering. In this opening episode, we’ll trace the convoluted deals that propelled Philbrick to the top, and would eventually lead to a spectacular collapse that left collectors and investors out of tens of millions of dollars.  

It’s September, and the art world is back to business. In this month’s episode of the Art Angle Round-Up, we’re diving into the stories making headlines from Buenos Aires to New York—and even into the fantastical worlds of ⁠Frank Frazetta⁠. We start with a remarkable development out of ⁠Argentina, where a couple has been charged with concealing looted art⁠. Then, we turn to the gallery scene, where art superstar ⁠Jeff Koons is once again on the move, returning to Gagosian⁠ after ditching Pace. And finally, we celebrate a record-breaking sale in the fantasy art market: ⁠Frazetta’s iconic Conan the Barbarian painting⁠ Man Ape fetched $13.5 million, more than doubling his previous auction record. Joining Kate Brown to unpack these stories is co-host Ben Davis, along with returning art market expert Eileen Kinsella.

We’re thrilled to be able to say that the latest edition of Artnet's Intelligence Report: The Mid-Year Report 2025, has been published. It's free for all—head to Artnet News to download it as a handsome PDF. Within its covers, you'll find a bounty of information on the auction world and the art industry, which artists have been having a great year, how various countries' markets are performing, and a great deal more. Surprises abound from the Old Masters to the ultra-contemporary. You'll also find interviews with power players from the field, like the Guggenheim Museum's chief, Mariët Westermann, and the widely admired, now retired art dealer, Jack Hanley. And then there is the cover story by our ace columnist, Katya Kazakina. It's titled The Storm Hits the Art Market: Who's Getting Swept Away? It looks at recent upheavals in the art industry with galleries closing left and right, and everyone spent their summer thinking about how to run an art business now. There are tales of crash-outs and heartening new models; there's something for everyone. Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth speaks with Katya about her reporting after she pounded the pavement at openings for exhibitions all over New York City.

Fans of the Art Angle know our monthly Art Angle Round-Up, where Kate Brown and Ben Davis are usually joined by a writer to talk about three topics in art. For the early September week of art fairs in New York, we decided to mix it up with an experiment: a live edition of the Art Angle Round-Up, at Independent 20th Century. Our guest was the curator Matthew Higgs. He’s the director of storied New York alternative art space White Columns; founding curatorial advisor to Independent; and—I’m really not just saying this—someone who's been on my shortlist of people to have on the show for a long time. Higgs is one of the most thoughtful observers of the art scene that you could to have a chat with. The house was packed for the live Saturday recording. Of course, we know that people listen to the show—but to see people actually turn out and to hear from listeners who have thoughts about it and want to talk about art and toss around ideas was very exciting. So, a big thank you to everyone who joined us in the audience. And of course thanks Independent 20th Century, and to Matthew for a lively and serious conversation.

Most of us can agree: we are living through a cultural crisis. It doesn’t come from a single source—it isn’t just algorithms, aesthetics, politics, or the economy. It’s the convergence of all these forces, and beneath them, the erosion of institutions that once anchored collective life. Over the past decade, digital platforms, like social media, promised to be a new kind of connective tissue—a democratizing force to replace more slow-moving institutions. But while platforms have transformed our economies and society, they’ve also hollowed out the very structures that once gave us shared ground. Mike Pepi has long been a sharp voice in this particular debate. Straddling both the tech industry and the worlds of art criticism and cultural theory, he brings a rare perspective. His writing, which has appeared in Frieze, e-flux, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail, also takes the form of a compelling new book called Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia that was published earlier this year. In it, Pepi dismantles some of Silicon Valley’s most enduring myths, and it’s a bracing argument about what we have lost and what’s at stake as we hand over so much power, diminishing along the way some of our core institutions. But he also looks at how we might begin to rebuild them. For the art world in particular, the implications of Pepi's ideas are profound.

 This is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year. Have you ever asked yourself: What do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not—but the question is at the heart of the work of Miriam Simun, who currently has an exhibition about her Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at the art space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer is mind-expanding. Almost literally. Simun’s unusual art practice can be seen as part of a serious trend in recent years of artists exploring non-human thought of all kinds in the hopes of shifting our troubled relationship to the natural world. The centerpiece of Simun's show at Recess is a series of workshops titled “How to Become an Octopus (and sometime squid).” For these, the artist guides participants through a two-hour program of “psycho-physical” exercises she has developed over many years through collaborations with marine biologists, engineers, dancers, and synchronized swimmers. She’s taught the method all over the world, and the description says the classes are “open to anyone curious about cephalopods, new ways of sensing, and expanding the definition of self”—an audience which included national art critic Ben Davis. He got in there to explore my cephalopod side, and for this week's Art Angle, we talk about Simun’s art and what he took away from my experience in her workshop.

If you want to know which artist is having the biggest year in museums, there is one name that springs to mind for me: Cara Romero. Since her first big breakout a decade ago at Santa Fe Indian Market, Romero has been steadily growing in influence. If you don’t know it yet, her photo-based art is full of color, drama, and detail. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical. And it moves between a variety of themes that are extremely important in museums right now: Indigenous identities, environmental concern, science fiction, and staged or set-up photography, to name a few. For that reason, Romero finds her work part of many surveys and touring exhibitions at the moment. She had this year a mid-career retrospective at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai,” meaning “Living Light.” She also has a two-person spotlight with her husband, the artist Diego Romero, called “Tales of Future Past,” currently at the Crocker art Museum in Sacramento. For someone who has risen to the very top of the museum circuit, Romero has had a unique career path and story. Join The Art Angle hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown for a special live edition of The Round-Up with special guest Matthew Higgs at Independent 20th Century Art Fair on Saturday, September 6, at 5 p.m. in New York. Purchase your tickets at Independenthq.com, and learn more about Independent 20th Century’s full programming here.

In art history, the pastoral has long offered a vision of nature as sanctuary—Arcadian meadows, idyllic countrysides, and timeless landscapes painted as if untouched by human conflict or change. It is a mode steeped in longing, often idealizing rural life as a place of harmony, simplicity, and beauty. From the verdant backdrops of Renaissance allegories to the sunlit fields of 19th-century landscape painting, the pastoral tradition has provided generations of artists and their audiences a gentle escape from the turbulence of urban and political life. You can still see these scenes in their full, romantic bloom at institutions like the Met in New York or the Louvre in Paris, where they stand as visions of a perfect, almost mythical world. Today, however, a different strain of pastoral is taking root—one that resists the urge to smooth over complexity. My sharp-eyed colleague Katie White has spotted a cohort of contemporary artists who are engaging with pastoral imagery in ways that raise the stakes, bringing the countryside into conversation with the crises and contradictions of the present. She’s dubbed this approach the para-pastoral, a genre that does not retreat into a calm and untroubled countryside but instead ventures into ambiguous, layered, and sometimes unsettling terrains. According to Katie, this new approach reframes the landscape not as a static refuge but as a charged space, marked by ecological urgency, political tension, and social change. Rather than romanticizing, the para-pastoral interrogates: Who has access to land? What histories does it conceal? How do rural spaces fit into the global story of climate and capitalism? Katie joins senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to trace the history of pastoral art and explore the tense, resonant present of the para-pastoral. Together, we’ll look at what’s fueling the genre’s resurgence, the social and environmental urgencies shaping it, and how artists are reimagining the natural landscape—not as a refuge from reality, but as a mirror of it. Episode artwork: Samantha Joy Groff, Backwoods Diana the Huntress (2024). Photograph: Sofia Colvin. Courtesy of the artist. 

While we are on summer break, this is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year. Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can—and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver, or sent a chill up your spine. This is the phenomena that is called “Aesthetic Chills.” It’s tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it’s also associated with some of our most memorable art encounters. What does it mean for an artwork to be literally “spine-tingling?” Why does it happen when it happens, and why is it so rare? Ben Davis wrote a two-art essay last year on this fascinating phenomena. Ben’s essay argued that this was more than just a technical subject. He thought that it might even point towards some vital parts of what make art important in our lives that don’t get enough attention. Based on the reaction of readers, many seem to agree—we also published an essay of readers responding with their own examples of artworks that had the effect on them.

It may be the dog days of summer, but the art world doesn’t take a break, and there’s plenty to talk about for our monthly roundup episode, where we parse and analyze the biggest headlines shaping the art world and industry. In this episode, we take a look at what is going on in the art scenes across London, New York, and Berlin, including some of the biennials going on this summer. Then, we get into the headlines: including a dive into a long-gestating biopic by actor Johnny Depp, called Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness. The new film is Depp's first directorial effort in nearly three decades, and it dramatizes 72 chaotic hours in the artist Amedeo Modigliani’s life as he chases around early 20th-century Paris with artists Chaim Soutine and Maurice Utrillo. We also talk about Depp's new art drop. Is it all a rebranding exercise? After that, we break down the intrigue swirling around the U.S. pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale and what it might reveal about American cultural diplomacy in 2025. Within that fold, we take stock of a proposal from controversy-loving artist Andres Serrano and another idea from far-right American blogger Curtis Yarvin. Last but not least, we analyze the Labubu mania, a craze for these mischievous little dolls that has finally made its way into the art world and into the market. National art critic Ben Davis and our editor-in-chief, Naomi Rea joined senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to talk about it all.

If you’ve been around art in the last several decades or so, you likely have heard the term “institutional critique.” This is a genre of art that turns the lens back  onto the world around the art object as its subject, finding playful or polemical ways to provoke thought on art’s unspoken rules and expectations and links to the wider world. Andrea Fraser is one of the artists who has most helped define “institutional critique” as a genre and as a practice. She has done this in artworks that sometimes look like performances, or lectures, or works of research—but also in her essays and theoretical writings. One of her recent essays, “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” published over at e-Flux Notes, is an attempt literally to map out how contemporary art is not one thing but a landscape of different competing camps and value systems, so that you might figure out where you stand within it. She calls this theory “a resource to make sense of a field that makes no sense,” and she agreed to talk to art critic Ben Davis about it.  

What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that question of price has never been easy—but lately, it’s gotten harder than ever. As we’ve discussed on this podcast before, the art market has cooled off. But this isn’t just a downturn—it’s a disruption. The system that once supported pricing logic is now in disarray, and dealers and advisors are feeling the strain. In a recent report for Artnet News Pro, our editor-in-chief Naomi Rea explored how the traditional rules of art pricing have stopped making sense. With confidence waning and speculation drying up, dealers are quietly recalibrating. What we’re seeing may be more than a correction—as Naomi reports, it could be the unraveling of an entire logic. Naomi joins senior editor Kate Brown to unpack what’s going on in the “danger zone” of the market and how different players—from mega-galleries, emerging dealers, to advisors and collectors—are adapting. They also discuss whether we might be heading toward a more sustainable and meaningful art market.

Every rising generation reinvents the rules of how art works. What are the new new ways of working? What kinds of spaces serve those needs? Art critic Ben Davis keeps coming back to these questions, and it’s part of why he decided he wanted to talk to Maya Man. Man got her MFA from the famous Media Art program at the University of California in 2023. She makes art that’s fun and very online, looking at the digital world and the way it blurs reality and performance. Right now, her work A Realistic Day in My Life Living in New York City is the first-ever work commissioned by the Whitney Museum for its “On the Hour” program, taking over the museum’s website every hour for 30 seconds. Set your clock if you want to catch it. Man is also a scene-maker herself. Davis first heard about her experimental art space, Heart, after it had already closed, earlier this year. But in its brief, frenzied life, it left a big mark. It was a space where a certain kind of experimental online/offline art scene that feels very now started to define itself.

When we first aired this episode about red chip art a few months back, it captured a cultural and art market phenomenon hiding in plain sight. My colleague Annie Armstrong mapped out a world of Cybertrucks, crypto wallets, and Alec Monopoly openings—a bro-filled art scene where KAWS, MSCHF, and Daniel Arsham are the mainstays, and where spectacle often outpaces substance. Then Adrien Brody had an art show. This summer, at Eden Gallery in New York, the Oscar-winning actor unveiled his solo exhibition "Made in America," including a body of work that dives headfirst into the visual language of red-chip art. The show includes mixed-media paintings with portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and there are also Basquiat-inspired crowns, rats, and images of Mickey Mouse. There’s even a participatory element that involves audience members sticking their used chewing gum on the gallery wall. Brody's maximalist, pop-culture salad seems tailor-made for virality, sure—but reactions in the art world have been quite mixed. Some see Brody’s exhibition as a genuine creative endeavor; but others view it as a high-profile example of what happens when celebrity, commerce, and art collide in an already hype-driven market. Some don't mind the celebrity aspect but think it is just bad painting. Either way, what’s certain is that Brody isn’t just dabbling in this so-called red chip art world sphere—he’s fully committed and he is now the new face of it— in all of its chrome-coated, algorithm-charmed aesthetic. In honor of the buzz surrounding "Made in America," we’re re-airing our episode on red chip art. In it, I spoke to Annie about the phenomenon, exploring how social media, speculation, and celebrity culture are reshaping a corner of the art world that often defies traditional critical frameworks. Whether you see it as democratizing or dystopian, red chip art is impossible to ignore.

It’s the end of June. It’s hot. And it’s time to take a look back at the hot art stories of the last month. Today the Art Angle team has picked out three items. On the agenda: —The announcement of a brand new, ambitious museum-like art venue, Canyon, dedicated to immersive video art, on the Lower East Side. We'll also talk about the general state of immersive art attractions. —What went down at Art Basel, the big Swiss art fair that is the art industry’s most important event, and the ongoing chaos in art prices. —And finally, the Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody’s painting show in New York City, which has everyone talking—or at least, tittering. Culture editor Min Chen joins art critic Ben Davis and Artnet senior editor—and Art Angle co-host—Kate Brown to talk about it all.

The Los Angeles–based trend forecaster and writer Sean Monahan is known for his sharp takes on the zeitgeist. Over the past decade, his cultural insights have routinely gone viral—most famously when he coined the term “vibe shift,” a phrase that quickly spread from niche corners of the internet to mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian. In the early 2010s, he co-founded the trend-forecasting collective K-HOLE with Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal, and Dena Yago. Though short-lived, their reports had an outsized influence on the cultural sphere, best known for popularizing the term “normcore”—a concept that began in the art world and ended up becoming a household world an era of anti-style. Today, Monahan runs 8Ball, his cult-favorite newsletter on Substack that decodes contemporary aesthetics, social dynamics, tech, and the subtle undercurrents of change. If you want to understand why things look, feel, and behave the way they do right now—his writing is essential. Senior Editor Kate Brown spoke with Sean about his own journey from art school to consulting for brands, and how that path informs his view of the present moment. They discussed institutional decay, the legacy of post-internet art, generational shifts, and the persistent sense that culture has entered a holding pattern. He also offered thoughts on why the 2020s—after several false starts—may finally be congealing into a definable decade.

We’re on the cusp of the 2025 edition of Art Basel—the flagship fair held each June in Basel, Switzerland. More than 200 galleries from around the world gather to present works spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Art Basel is both a bellwether and a battleground. Participation is prestigious—and costly. It’s competitive, and it’s high-stakes. That’s always been true. What’s newer is the softening of the art market. Sales are down. Demand is cautious. Buying patterns are shifting. “Uncertainty” was the word last year—and it still is. Much of the focus tends to fall on the top of the market. But what about the emerging tier? The galleries selling works under $250,000 and $100,000? The ones spotting and raising new talent, pushing aesthetics forward? What does a “win” look like for them in this moment? What does growth mean now—and how do they survive in a contracting ecosystem? To unpack these questions, Senior Editor Kate Brown is joined by three dealers whose programs I’ve followed closely over the years. Their perspectives offer a real-time snapshot of what’s at stake. On the podcast with us is Robbie Fitzpatrick, of Fitzpatrick Gallery, a dealer who has operated galleries in Los Angeles and Paris, and who recently decided to take his gallery program nomadic. Robbie also founded Art Basel Social Club in 2022, an annual event that has become a defiant and central alternative during the week in Basel. This year, the edition is bigger than ever and takes place in a formidable location of a former bank in the center of the city. Kate is also joined by Lisa Offermann, founder of the gallery LC Queisser. Lisa opened the gallery in 2018 in Tbilisi, Georgia, and launched a second location in Cologne earlier this year. She’s participated in several editions of Art Basel and is part of its newest sector, Premiere, this year. Freddie Powell, founder of Ginny on Frederick, is also on the show—Freddie opened in London in 2020. With a sharp program and quick ascent, the gallery is making its debut at Art Basel this year, in both Basel and in Paris in the fall.

Have you ever asked yourself: What do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not—but the question is at the heart of the work of Miriam Simun, who currently has an exhibition about her Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at the art space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer is mind-expanding. Almost literally. Simun’s unusual art practice can be seen as part of a serious trend in recent years of artists exploring non-human thought of all kinds in the hopes of shifting our troubled relationship to the natural world. The centerpiece of Simun's show at Recess is a series of workshops titled “How to Become an Octopus (and sometime squid).” For these, the artist guides participants through a two-hour program of “psycho-physical” exercises she has developed over many years through collaborations with marine biologists, engineers, dancers, and synchronized swimmers. She’s taught the method all over the world, and the description says the classes are “open to anyone curious about cephalopods, new ways of sensing, and expanding the definition of self”—an audience which included me. Art Critic Ben Davis got in there to explore his cephalopod side, and for this week's Art Angle, he talks about Simun’s art and what he took away from his experience in her workshop.

It's been a minute, but we're back with our Round-Up episode, where we parse and discuss some of the biggest stories going on around the art world, and it's really good to be back into this format again after a little commercial break.  A lot has been happening lately in the so-called art world—good, bad, and there's been plenty of in-between that—but it remains as colorful, contradictory, and chaotic as ever.  We'll be diving into crypto collector Justin Sun’s escalating legal battle with Blue Chip Titan David Geffen over a long-nosed Giacometti sculpture; a trio of massive Hulk sculptures by Jeff Koons that descended on Frieze New York a couple of weeks ago—these big green bellwethers for the state of the market are in play; and finally, we'll look at some of the major developments at Art Basel, including the launch of its very first art award. Senior Editor Kate Brown is joined by co-host, art critic Ben Davis, and Artnet News Pro Editor Andrew Russeth. 

There is nothing that Artnet’s Art Critic Ben Davis likes better than finding a name for a phenomenon that’s all around him, but that he doesn’t have a name for yet. The writer and theorist Nadia Asparouhova has a new book out that offered exactly this. It’s called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. We tend to think of cultural influence as being tied to popularity and visibility. What Asparouhova wants us to pay attention to is a whole other class of cultural stuff whose influence is linked instead to being hard to find or difficult to understand. These are what she calls “anti-memes.” It’s the opinion puts you at odds with some people but really connects you to others, so you’re careful how you share it. It’s the artwork that looks like nonsense to the majority of the audience but is full of intricate meaning to fans. The theory of "anti-memes” is about how some of our most intense cultural investments are below the radar—not because they haven’t been found yet, but because that’s how they are built. All this touches on themes that a lot of artists have been thinking about. Asparouhova’s book, in fact, is published by a group of artists and thinkers called the Dark Forest Collective, named after writer Yancey Strickler’s idea of the internet as a “dark forest,” a space that has become so contentious and commercial that the smart people retreat to more private digital spaces for authenticity and cachet. Asparouhova’s book helps focus in on the question of how difficult ideas and art that’s not built to go viral survive and find real fans now.

Spring art week just wrapped in New York City. Known for its extravagant floral displays and signature oysters and champagne, TEFAF is the fair with a vibe. This year, 91 exhibitors from 13 countries presented everything from antiquities to modern and contemporary art and design at the stately Park Avenue Armory. There’s a real sense of passion here— dealers are eager to share the stories behind their works. Which brings us to today’s episode, recorded live at the Thrill of the Chase panel with three very different cultural omnivores who personify Tefaf’s ethos which span centuries and styles. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn‘s gallery Salon 94, has long blurred the lines between art and design. Housed in a Beaux-Arts townhouse on the Upper East Side she has presented everything from Rick Owens furniture to the recent Kennedy Yanko solo exhibitions. Adam Charlap Hyman, co-founder of Charlap Hyman & Herrero, brings a sweeping vision to interiors, furniture, architecture, and opera sets. He also curates, most recently Glass Subjects at R & Company which is currently on view. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper Hewitt, began her career in literature before turning to storytelling through objects. Her work explores symbolism, inclusion, and cultural memory. Together, they explore what makes an object irresistible. Is it beauty, rarity—or the story it tells? In this conversation, Artnet Studio's William Van Meter dig into the thrill of discovery, the elusive “X factor,” and how great objects help shape layered narratives.

Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice. But if you go to the art galleries to look at paintings now, you might get a very different sense of what a frame can or even should do. Weird and wild frames that very much draw attention to themselves seem to be having a moment. Recently, Artnet writer and editor Katie White penned a piece titled Bordercore: Why Frames Became the New Frontier in Contemporary Art. In her essay, she looks both at the history of framing styles, and talks to a number of contemporary painters to figure out what is causing so many to treat something that was literally considered peripheral to what they do as very much part of the main attraction. This week she joins Art Critic Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss this new frontier in art.

Kent Monkman is one of the most vital and provocative voices in contemporary painting. Based between Toronto and New York, and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory, Monkman is known for his epic, genre-bending canvases that challenge dominant historical narratives and reframe them through Indigenous and queer perspectives. Monkman has developed a distinctive visual language that subverts classical European art traditions—particularly those of 19th-century and 20th-century history painting—to expose the distortions and omissions of colonial narratives. His work blends these European conventions with Indigenous histories, recontextualizing colonization while exploring themes of resilience, sexuality, joy, and identity. At the center of many of these works is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s time-traveling alter ego. Clad in high heels, Miss Chief operates as both a trickster figure and a witness to colonial encounters, embodying Indigenous worldviews and queering history in a way that destabilizes settler-colonial perspectives. Through Miss Chief, Monkman reimagines historical events, placing Indigenous presence and agency at the forefront. Monkman’s large-scale commissions include mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), a pair of monumental paintings created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019, which directly confronted the institution’s colonial legacies. His work has been exhibited in major museums across North America and Europe, and is part of significant public and private collections. As his first major U.S. museum exhibition, "History is Painted by the Victors," opens at the Denver Art Museum, Monkman joined me to reflect on the road to this moment—a journey that spans decades of challenging entrenched narratives in Western art history. We spoke about how growing up in Winnipeg, amidst the complexities of Indigenous representation in Canadian institutions, shaped his relationship to museums; how painting serves as both a political tool and a personal method for processing historical trauma; and the collaborative energy that fuels his expansive studio practice.

This week we are running a re-air of an interview with the curator and writer Elisa Auther about the fascinating history of fiber art and its recent rise. The show we mentioned in the episode, woven histories, textiles and modern abstraction has arrived at the Museum of Modern Art in New York this week. And I think Auther's perspective makes a nice compliment to that important show. Contemporary art comes in many shapes and forms, but close your eyes and think of what an artist looks like and nine times out of 10, I bet you are still thinking of a painter in front of a canvas. If recent interest for museums and galleries is any indication, however, that image should be joined by another one: the fiber artist. Think of a weaver seated at the loom or a quilt-maker laboriously stitching together layers of fabric. The textile arts have experienced a quiet but steady groundswell of interest in the last decades, and recently I've noticed that it feels as if it is kicked into a new, even higher level, from the many kinds of textile based art throughout the most recent Venice Biennale to the major show "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," which is on a tour of some of North America's most important museums right now. As many textile scholars will tell you, tapestry was once as exalted as painting as an art form, and it may be so again. This surge of interest is bringing new audiences, new histories, and new vocabularies into the center of the action that are worth getting familiar with, and to unravel all the different threads, Art Critic Ben Davis turned to Elissa Auther, a scholar who looked at the tangled history of fiber art in her book String Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art.  More importantly, she's been closely observing and encouraging the contemporary boom in textile art as the chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. This week she the podcast to discuss what's behind the resurgence of interest in this medium.

To say that the last few months have been chaos in the United States would most definitely be an understatement. Since Donald J. Trump's return to office in January, an angry culture war, divisive policies, and a seemingly endless barrage of executive orders has become the new normal. His office has sought to upend the relationship of government to culture, with no signs of slowing down. From cancelling humanities grants to fund a "heroes" sculpture garden, to calling for the decimation of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to personally making himself the boss of the Kennedy Center, and shuttering DEI offices across the country, Trump is on a mission to upend the cultural landscape as we know it. It is very hard to keep up with the onslaught of changes, but one person who has is art critic and journalist Brian Boucher, who has written story after story for Artnet about the unfolding events. As we approach the end of Trump’s first 100 days at the end of this month, we asked Boucher to join us on the Art Angle podcast to discuss how this administration has, and will continue to enact changes that put the arts at serious risk.

In a recent essay, Artnet writer Annie Armstrong spotlighted a chaotic new force in the art world: red-chip art. It’s the brash, chrome-dipped, algorithm-boosted cousin of blue-chip art—and it’s booming. In her latest essay, Annie sketches out its archetypal collector: a guy barreling down the highway in a Cybertruck, checking his crypto wallet, queuing up a Joe Rogan episode, and racing to the next art opening—maybe an Alec Monopoly show, maybe a MSCHF drop. Red-chip art, as Annie defines it, is more than a market category—it’s a mood. On The Art Angle this week, she joins Senior Editor Kate Brown to unpack this sensibility, tracing its fanbase from crypto bros to Kanye West, and its canon from KAWS’s Companions to Daniel Arsham’s sculpture of Mark Zuckerberg’s wife in Tiffany blue. And yes, as Annie points out, red-chip art is not not related to Trumpism.

This week, we’re taking on a subject that affects the majority of the arts workforce— gender inequity in the industry. Women make up the backbone of the art world, but they continue to face barriers when it comes to work-life balance, pay, and career progression. So, what does the data actually tell us about the state of the industry? And, more importantly, what can be done to change things for the better? To answer those questions, we’re unpacking key findings from a major survey conducted by Artnet News in collaboration with the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA). More than 2,000 people responded to the call, with an additional 140 participating in a follow-up survey, ultimately providing an informative look at how women experience the art world—from hiring and pay to mentorship and bias. Joining Editor-In-Chief Naomi Rea, to break it all down is our News Editor Margaret Carrigan, who has been leading this project since last year. Margaret recently moderated a panel discussion on the topic in London with three industry powerhouses who shared their own experiences: gallerist Sadie Coles, India Phillips from Bonhams, and Clarrie Wallis, director of public institution Turner Contemporary. As the editor of our four-part editorial series on the findings, linked below, Margaret is perfectly positioned to break down the statistics and offer actionable advice on how the industry can do better for women, today.  

When Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s last mistress, pleaded for “just a little moment more” before her execution in 1793, in the throes of the French Revolution, she seemed to capture the fleeting pleasures and indulgence of the Rococo age. Artnet Editor Katie White eloquently described this moment before du Barry’s death in the opening of a recent essay, exploring how, centuries later, the aesthetic of whimsy, romance, and unapologetic luxury is making a bold return. She calls it Neo-Rococo. So what is Neo-Rococo, really? It’s a contemporary movement that merges the delicate pastels, ornamental elegance, and sensuality of 18th-century Rococo with modernist abstraction and feminist perspectives of contemporary art. Artists like Flora Yukhnovich, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca DiMattio are key figures in this revival. They draw on the decorative roots of Rococo while addressing the complexities of today’s world. On this episode of The Art Angle, Katie joins Senior Editor, Kate Brown, to discuss this fascinating resurgence of a centuries-old aesthetic sensibility, and how it extends beyond the art world into broader pop culture. What lessons can we learn from this era of late Baroque history? Quite a few as a turns out. And some surprising ones—these artists are actually subverting the escapist art movement to draw out some interesting questions about beauty and femininity.

For the latest edition of the Artnet Intelligence Report, which is now free to download, Artnet columnist Katya Kazakina wrote a wide-ranging cover story about the state of play in the art industry. Titled “New Money, New Taste,” it charts a revolution that is underway in the market, amid what has been dubbed the Great Wealth Transfer. Economists, Kazakina reports, believe that $84 trillion in assets will change hands over the next 20 years—that's trillion... with a T. Gen Xers will inherit $30 trillion, millennials $27 trillion, and Gen Zers $11 trillion, according to one study. (Huge amounts of money!) She writes, "Their values, taste, and investment decisions will help determine the next cohort of top artists—who’s in and who’s out, who will endure and who will not." Could longstanding kings of auction houses, like Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, be dethroned? Will new names—and new types of material—arise to take their place? Everyone is guessing, aiming to protect their assets while angling for business. All of this is happening against the backdrop of an art market marked by intense uncertainty, following some very tough years, as data in the Intelligence Report shows. The whole industry feels unsettled and off-kilter, and firms of all sizes are trying to figure out how to navigate the situation. This week on the podcast, Editor of Artnet News Pro, Andrew Russeth, speaks to Kazakina about her reporting.

The Louvre is among the largest, most-visited, and best-known museums in the world, and for nearly too many reasons to count. It’s home to some of the most celebrated works of art, from the Venus de Milo to the Mona Lisa. Its blended contemporary and historic architecture is astounding. And it also has a truly formidable past, stretching back through time, well before the building became a museum in 1793. An institution and collection that has been a quiet witness to so much history and change is bound to have stories to tell. Elaine Sciolino, contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, has captured many of these stories in her newest book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, which is out this April with Norton & Company. Sciolino is acclaimed for her chronicles of French history, and she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris, The Seine, and La Seduction. And at the Louvre, she spoke to everyone, from the guards to the lead curators, and received unprecedented access to rooms I didn’t even know existed. Artnet's Senior Editor, Kate Brown, caught up with Elaine, who is based in Paris, to discuss the enigmatic and ever-enchanting Louvre, and what she learned from her exploration of its many halls, backrooms, and basements.

The artist Gertrude Abercrombie is not someone whose name I knew until very recently. But she’s definitely a name to know now. Born in 1909 in Austin, Texas and dying in 1977 in Chicago, Abercrombie was a painter of witchy and surreal canvases. They seem like lucid dreams, full of haunted landscapes, lone women, masked figures, barren trees, forked paths, and mysterious towers. In life, Abercrombie was a remarkable character. She was variously known as the “Queen of Chicago,” for her big presence in Hyde Park where she presided over a vibrant, self-curated social scene at a stately Victorian-era home; and as the “Jazz Witch,” for her enthusiastic support of Chicago jazz musicians in the 1940s and 50s—plus her personal affectation of wearing a peaked witch’s hat. Abercrombie was long a pretty obscure figure. But in recent years, her art has seen a remarkable upsurge of interest, culminating in an exciting touring exhibition of her paintings titled “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery" on view now at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. We've run multiple stories on Abercrombie recently, one by Katie White recounting her life and art ("Meet Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, the ‘Jazz Witch’ Who Captivated the Art World"), and one by Eileen Kinsella, tracking this once nearly forgotten artists’s recent return to the art market spotlight, nearly a half century after her death ("Once a ‘Regional Thing,’ Gertrude Abercrombie’s Enigmatic Art Is Selling for Huge Sums. Here’s Why"). In this episode, We talk to both of them, to get a full picture of this artist's life and legacy.

It’s the end of February 2025, and we are back for our Roundup podcast, talking about some of the news of the month. Today, we’re going to talk about: —the Frieze week of art fairs in L.A., which went ahead in the wake of the horrible fires that have mauled the city —some updates on the disgraced art adviser Lisa Schiff, who is back in the news —and the debate over whether a painting purchased for $50 at a Minnesota garage sale is actually a Vincent Van Gogh painting worth millions. We’ll give our opinions At the end, I'll also say a few words about the artist and art critic Walter Robinson, who passed away this month. Our art critic, Ben Davis opines with Kate Brown, Artnet’s senior editor and co-host of this Art Angle, calling from Berlin, and Annie Armstrong, Artnet’s Wet Paint columnist, in New York.

Caspar David Friedrich is considered one of the most important German painters, and his landscape works live large in the cultural consciousness in Germany and beyond. You have probably seen the 19th-century artist's most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure that you see from the back looking out over a wide valley of cliffs and mists. To mark what would have been the 250th birthday of Friedrich, over the last year, major institutions have been celebrating the artist’s works: a vast oeuvre of deeply contemplative, almost surreal landscapes that broke with their times. A string of major exhibitions took place throughout 2024 across Germany, and this month, that roving program reached its final stop with a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “The Soul of Nature” is on view through May 11, and it is the largest showing of Friedrich’s works to come together in the U.S., including an impressive amount of loans of works that rarely travel (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is one of them). Shows in 2024 in Europe included "Art for a New Age" at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, "Unending Landscapes" at the Berlin State Museums, and "Where it All Began" at the Dresden State Collections. Art Critic Ben Davis, recently saw the show at the Met, which opened this month, and Senior Editor, Kate Brown, had the pleasure of seeing the Dresden exhibition in December, which happens to be the city where Friedrich lived and made most of his famous works. Davis joins Brown on the podcast to discuss Friedrich's enduring legacy, and they dive into some of the major currents in his work, as well as the backstory that underpins his serene nature scenes: shifting ideas about religion and the spirit transforming European consciousness and a very tumultuous time in the continent's history.

“Identity politics” is among the most contentious terms in recent debates about art. And now, the most powerful people in the United States are blaming just about everything on “DEI” and “wokeness.” The very concept of diversity as a positive ideal seems to be under threat. At the same time, so far there has been nowhere near the protest you would expect. Civil society feels stunned. At least part of this seems to be confusion about what has gone wrong to bring us here, with sections of the population now seeming to reject or just tune out progressive ideas that were all but dominant in mainstream culture just a few short years ago. Maybe backlash was always inevitable. But how do we find a way forward? How do you talk about real criticisms of what may have made the social justice culture of the recent past confusing or alienating—without adopting the terms of a truly destructive culture war that is now all around? A few weeks ago, we had the art critic Dean Kissick on the podcast to talk about his December cover story for Harper’s magazine, which argued that identity politics had, in his words, “ruined contemporary art.” In Ben Davis' essay for Artnet responding to him, called “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?”, Davis concluded by saying that those looking for a constructive way forward should read the theorist Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Táíwò teaches philosophy at Georgetown University and has written pieces for outlets including Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He’s written two books of political theory, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Davis has found the concepts that he’s developed, which include “elite capture,” “deference politics,” and “being-in-the-room privilege” very useful in thinking about some of these problems, which are some of the most important problems of the day—so Davis brought him on to discuss.

Art comes in all shapes and sizes, of course—but recently it has been getting smaller. Or at least that is what is argued in an article by Kate Brown, Artnet Senior Editor and Art Angle co-host. It's called "Why is Small Art So Big Right Now?" Not so long ago, the trend was in the other direction. Gigantism and grandiosity were the rage, and artwork stretched to environmental scale. There's still plenty of that, of course—don't worry. But Kate gathers together a number of signs and talks to a number of artists and art dealers, and it all points towards a growing interest in smaller, more intimate kinds of art experiences. And it turns out there's a lot to think about in the question of little art—about the contemporary pressures on art-makers, and about what makes an artwork rewarding to look at in the first place. So, this week, we have Kate on the podcast to talk with Artnet National Critic Ben Davis about her essay.

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to discuss some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Caroline Goldstein, acting managing editor of Artnet News, joins the show. It’s been quite the January. Though it is typically a slow month, some major stories have transpired. We’ll be talking about censorship in the museum world in the U.S., looking in particular at the case of two Sally Mann photographs that were seized from a museum in Dallas, Texas. We will also talk about the passing of the filmmaker David Lynch on January 15. Lynch is famous for his films, but he was also a respected artist with his fair share of institutional exhibitions under his belt. He has always been a painter, but do we like his paintings? We discuss. Lynch has been represented by Pace Gallery since 2022. We take a look at his artistic legacy and his enigmatic ways. Last but not least, New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum has ventured into the blockchain world of all places with a free-to-play video game that you can access on Web3. The game was launched this month together with TR Lab, a platform that aims to connect artists and technologists and creates and sells fine art collectibles. The Met's new game, called Art Links, does weekly drops. If you win you can collect badges in your OpenSea wallet and win IRL prizes. Sound fun? Maybe not? We each played it and gave it our honest review.

We don’t need to tell anyone listening that it is a difficult and alarming political moment. You may be asking, How will art weather the storm? To answer that question, you probably need to take stock of how art has navigated the political storms of the recent past. And there’s been a lot of debate about this recently, centered on the critic Dean Kissick’s long essay for Harper’s magazine from late last year, titled “The Painted Protest: How Politics Ruined Contemporary Art.” Kissick first drew major attention as a chronicler of New York’s downtown scene in a column he wrote for the art magazine Spike from 2017 to 2022. In his Harper’s piece, he narrates being drawn to art in the late 2000s as a space of experimentation and glamor—a spirit, he wrote, that big museums and biennials had lost. Kissick described disaffection from institutions that now focused, in his words, on art “dressed up as protest and contextualized through decolonial or queer theory, with a singular focus on identity.” The essay has been both slammed as carelessly feeding the cultural backlash that’s rising all around and hailed for speaking honestly about an art world grown complacent. Some of this was already discussed on the Art Angle for our year-end roundup in December. Artnet Art Critic Ben Davis also started the new year writing his own take, titled “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?” The reaction to that piece, in turn, led Kissick and Davis to this discussion.

Last weekend, warnings to evacuate were issued to the suburban westside neighborhood of Brentwood, which includes the esteemed Getty Center, home to one of the city’s most prized art collections. After more than a week of burning, L.A.’s devastating wildfires, which began on January 7, are still not fully contained, forcing ongoing evacuation orders around the coastal city. It is the worst fire event in L.A.’s history and has taken 24 lives. As part of the Getty Trust, the museum features European paintings, including Van Gogh’s Irises, and works by Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, and Peter Paul Rubens. It also houses Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity—some of which is partially held at its second campus, the Getty Villa. Days before the threat of fire reached the museum’s main venue over the weekend, the Villa was already grappling with the Palisades blaze, which ended up destroying or damaging around 4,000 structures and spreading over 23,000 acres. As the fires raged around Los Angeles, intensified by strong winds, media imagery circulating online showed brush burning around the Getty Villa in the Palisades. This prompted panic about the security of the collection. The institution, however, has long billed itself as a highly fire-safe institution. Built in 1997, the Getty Center has been described as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering.” Throughout the last week, its team has worked tirelessly to defend the property and has communicated daily about the safety and security of its sites. Unfortunately, many other properties—including thousands of homes, businesses, and smaller cultural institutions—have been destroyed. Many cultural workers, collectors, and gallerists are among those who lost their homes, and artists’ homes and studios—including entire bodies of work and archives—have been irretrievably lost. The extent of livelihoods destroyed in Los Angeles is truly heartbreaking. We will link to resources in the show notes where you can find out how to help. We also have a story on our website providing frequent updates on the state of the cultural scene. This week, the J. Paul Getty Trust and a coalition of local and international cultural institutions announced a $12 million emergency relief fund for members of the Los Angeles arts community affected by the wildfires. Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, joins me on The Art Angle to discuss her experience of the wildfires, the Getty’s state-of-the-art prevention protocols for its valuable art, and what the fires mean for Los Angeles’ cultural scene as it eventually seeks to rebuild.

Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can—and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver, or sent a chill up your spine. This is the phenomena that is called “Aesthetic Chills.” It’s tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it’s also associated with some of our most memorable art encounters.What does it mean for an artwork to be literally “spine-tingling?” Why does it happen when it happens, and why is it so rare? My colleague and Art Angle co-host Ben Davis wrote a two-art essay last year on this fascinating phenomena. Ben's essay argued that this was more than just a technical subject. He thought that it might even point towards some vital parts of what make art important in our lives that don’t get enough attention. Based on the reaction of readers, many seem to agree—we also published an essay of readers responding with their own examples of artworks that had the effect on them. So, to kick the year off, I thought I'd talk with him about "Aesthetic Chills." —Kate Brown Read the original articles referenced in the piece: —"Unlocking the Secrets of Art That Gives You Chills" —"Why Only Some Artworks Give You Chills—And Most Just Don’t" —"Readers Weigh In on Which Artworks Give Them Chills"  

The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and needing each other in our capacity to change and love—all these aspects that really make us human. With this, July has built a diverse and awe-inspiring body of work. It includes a messaging app she developed called Somebody and an interfaith secondhand shop. Her art has been on view with the Venice Biennale, and she's also made three feature length films, two of which she starred in. She's published four books and a participatory website called Learning to Love You More that she created with American artist Harold Fletcher that consists of assignments for the general public who make the art. There are instructions like "make a portrait of your friend's desires," or "perform the phone call someone else wishes they could have." One of these assignments is part of her first solo exhibition, a major retrospective on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan until the end of October. It is "Assignment 43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house," and it was completed by a local woman from Milan. It is one piece among many in a show that spans 30 years of July's practice. There is also a new participatory video series in the mix called F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You). Her newest novel, All Fours was published in May this year. A New York Times bestseller and long list finalist for the National Book Award, All Fours is an astonishingly candid look at sexuality and transformation, but also at an extremely underrepresented topic in literature: menopause and female aging. When I connected with July, she was in her home, which is also her studio in Los Angeles, a small painting by Louise Bonnet hung just behind her. It's called Miranda, and it's a contemplative portrait of a female figure in what looks like a state of metamorphosis. It suits July's universe quite poetically.

But Lippard has also been much more than a writer. She curated “Eccentric Abstraction” in 1966, helping to define what would come to be called post-Minimalism in sculpture. Her experimental and traveling card shows helped create the audience for conceptual, minimal, and land art. She curated maybe the first museum show of Second Wave feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in 1971, and was a part of the founding mother-collective behind Heresies, a journal that shaped the field of feminist art history. Radicalized by sixties activism, she participated in the Art Workers Coalition, a historic activist formation protesting against the Vietnam War and for equality in the museum world. She was part of many, many other collectives and activist groups thereafter, including the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in the early 1980s, a project she discussed with us on the Art Angle back in 2022. Now Lippard has written a new book called Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. It’s a short-packed tome that surveys an eventful life through photos that catalog the items Lippard finds around her in the home where she has lived since moving from New York to the small town of Galisteo in rural New Mexico in the early nineties. It’s a fitting way to tell the story of a writer who has thought so much about how images and words fit together, and how meaning emerges from place and community. This week on the podcast, Ben Davis speaks once again to Lucy Lippard about a life in and out of art.

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a special guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. Usually, we look back on the previous month, but as we head into the holidays and close out a busy calendar in the art world, we are doing things differently for the last roundup of the year, reviewing all of 2024 and the trends, themes, and stories that defined it. It was tough going in the art market, where slumped sales were countered by some big flashy media moments, including one duct-taped banana and a lot of other novelties and masterpieces that tried to grab dwindling attention spans and loosen tightened purse-strings. Did the approach work out for the market? (spoiler: not exactly; the industry experienced a rash of gallery closures). We discuss what that all means for the outlook for 2025. In the realm of politics, culture workers and artists vocalized frustrations with arts institutions they deemed to be silent or lagging on key global issues. Picket lines continued to proliferate around this, and livewire discussions about aesthetics were ignited by the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennale this year, both of which received mixed reviews. At the same time, a new era of technology—led by leaps of progress in the realm of artificial intelligence—is being ushered in and changing the way we see and understand art, and other kinds of work (some of the work is arguably not quite art) that is being made. There are also some ridiculous and fun stories in the mix, because this is the art world, a place that is known to be, well, deeply unusual. To discuss all this and more, senior editor Kate Brown and art critic Ben Davis, jumped on the air with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro editor and art critic. They parsed the headlines and the conversations that stirred the art industry in a year that was anything but ordinary.

With his themes of repetition and appropriation, Andy Warhol’s work can seem mass produced. He was prone to say that his assistants did his work for him and often invented different narratives in interviews. In fact, weaving tall tales and shaping his own mythology was another important aspect of his art: he was creating the ultimate persona of an artist every bit as Pop as his paintings, one who specialized in glacial coolness and glib detachment. Although the paintings might look like they came off of a conveyor belt, that was by design, and Warhol maintained close involvement with his work. In fact, before silkscreen printing became his trademark, Warhol hand-painted the 32 canvasses that make up the iconic 1962 work Campbell’s Soup Cans. Warhol gained fame in the 1960s as part of the Pop boom, but this was actually the second phase of his career. He spent the 1950s in New York as a successful commercial illustrator, doing advertisements, book and record covers. All the while he made personal work and had a smattering of shows in small galleries, most of which were ignored or poorly received. But the seeds of his subversive repertoire were being slyly developed in his intimate drawings to which Warhol would return in his later life. For this week’s episode, Artnet editor William Van Meter is joined by the journalist, critic, and author of the 2020 biography Warhol, Blake Gopnik. What more could be said about the artist that the heap of other biographies hadn’t covered? It turns out, plenty. Gopnik spent eight years researching and writing Warhol, and at almost 1,000 pages it is filled with wonderful details and newly discovered data. On this episode we discuss Warhol by-hand, his pre-Pop era as well as some of his later, less mechanized moments such as his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how he managed to leave his mark on every aspect of his work, handmade and beyond.

When Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s last mistress, pleaded for “just a little moment more” before her execution in 1793, in the throes of the French Revolution, she seemed to capture the fleeting pleasures and indulgence of the Rococo age. My colleague, Artnet Editor Katie White eloquently described this moment before du Barry’s death in the opening of a recent essay, exploring how, centuries later, the aesthetic of whimsy, romance, and unapologetic luxury is making a bold return. She calls it Neo-Rococo. So what is Neo-Rococo, really? It’s a contemporary movement that merges the delicate pastels, ornamental elegance, and sensuality of 18th-century Rococo with modernist abstraction and feminist perspectives of contemporary art. Artists like Flora Yukhnovich, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca DiMattio are key figures in this revival. They draw on the decorative roots of Rococo while addressing the complexities of today’s world. On this episode of The Art Angle, Katie joins me to discuss this fascinating resurgence of a centuries-old aesthetic sensibility, and how it extends beyond the art world into broader pop culture. What lessons can we learn from this era of late Baroque history? Quite a few as a turns out. And some surprising ones—these artists are actually subverting the escapist art movement to draw out some interesting questions about beauty and femininity.

Say the words "artificial intelligence" or simply, "A.I." in an art setting, and people think of either cutting-edge, new media art, or of misinformation., hallucination, and plagiarism. But there's a case to be made that those words should prompt you to think about very old art and about very new technology's use in finding out what's real. My colleague at Artnet, Jo Lawson-Tancred has a new book out called A.I. and the Art Market, that serves as an accessible guide to a range of ways that artificial intelligence and machine learning are impacting the art market. There's a lot in the book about valuing art, about selling art, and about navigating the intellectual property challenges around A.I., but we thought we'd drill down into the question of art authentication, which has drawn plenty of headlines and controversy in recent years, all on its own. After all, huge amounts of money hinge on the question of whether a given piece of paint on canvas is actually considered to be by a particular old master painter. The art market has an entire robust world of art historical expertise built up around art authentication, which is revered, but sometimes also viewed with suspicion as corruptible and subjective. Then, here come various forms of A.I. art authentication with its own jargon and new kinds of suspicion aimed at it. So who should you trust? Jo has spent a lot of her time talking to various players to help begin to answer that question, and today we dig into the thorny question.

The contemporary art world is nothing if not confusing. It is simultaneously deeply frivolous, and takes itself way too seriously. Its business dealings combine total mystification with conspicuous consumption, and the exact mechanisms by which one type of art gets celebrated above another are very often impossible to figure out. If you've ever struggled to make sense of it all, the journalist, Bianca Bosker's new book is worth picking up. It's called Get the Picture, A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends who Taught Me How to See, and it joins books like Anthony Hayden Guest's classic True Colors from 1998 and Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World from 2008, as an entertaining behind-the-scenes chronicle of art, though in a very different and maybe even more confusing moment. Bosker previously wrote Original Copies (2013) about architecture in China that replicates famous world monuments, and Cork Dork (2017), where she went inside the world of fine wine to try to decode its rituals. For Get the Picture, Bosker inserted herself in the striving, less-visible layers of the art industry, just beneath the glamorous images. She works the booth at a satellite fair in Miami where a gallery's very survival hinges on a few sales. And as a studio assistant for a painter whose success becomes a major headache as speculators start flipping her work. In some ways, Get the Picture will confirm all of the worst stereotypes about the contemporary art industry, and in others is the story of someone who slowly learns how to look past the caricatures by throwing herself into the thick of it, finding her own way to appreciate some of art's more eccentric values.

In the early 1900s, art movements within the then-burgeoning category of modern art were exploding in multiple directions, and among them was a strand called Orphism. What was it? In some ways, it is hard to say. Relatively short-lived and debated even as soon as it was coined around 1912, Orphism was a form of abstract art, informed by motion, radial shapes of vibrant colors. Most known and neatly associated with Orphism are Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who thought colors could be used to create visual harmonies, where form and hue worked on a canvas in the same way that notes worked to build a piece of music. The artist could be thought of as composer. And yet the contours movement is still somewhat vague. In fact, there were debates about what Orphism was or meant from within the group that was most often associated with it. It remains elusive. My co-host, the art critic Ben Davis, recently went to a major showing of Orphist works, an exhibition called “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at the Guggenheim, in New York that opened earlier this month and will run until March 2025. We discussed about the art form and its impact as well as some of the the unanswered questions he left the show with.

As a novelist, Jonathan Lethem is basically a genre all his own. His books mash up literary fiction and pulp into disorienting but engaging combinations, for which he’s won both a MacArthur Grant and the National Book Award. Since the success of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, he's published many very well received novels—including The Fortress of Solitude in 2003 and Brooklyn Crime Novel, from last year—as well as many more short stories and essays for places including the New Yorker, Harper’s and Rolling Stone. And it turns out he's written a lot about art too—enough in fact, to fill an entire volume. Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, published this summer by ZE Books, is its own type of unexpected hybrid of writing. It spans genres, containing short stories, essays, and criticism, as well as types of art, its essays hopping between his reverence for a Hans Holbein at the Frick and respect for the “scratchiti” artist Pray. Part of the joy of the book is Lethem’s determinedly eclectic and personal taste, giving his attention to both names you know and obscure children’s book authors or indie comics artists. Among other things, Cellophane Bricks offers Lethem's personal recollections of growing up around artists, including his father, painter Richard Lethem, in the grassroots alternative art world rooted in the collective spaces of a pre-gentrified Brooklyn. He also writes of the ethos of the graffiti-art world around his brother, Blake "KEO" Lethem. Aside from a spirit of unconventionality, the biographical material may seem to come from another world from the delirious and sometimes fantastic short fictions in the volume, mostly written for artist catalogues for the likes of Nan Goldin, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli and gathered here for the first time. However, these also embody an ethos that clearly relates to the communal creative scenes of his youth: Lethem insists on only offering short stories as catalogue contributions, paying with his art, while accepting only artworks in return as payment. There’s more still to Cellophane Bricks: essays on what it means to live with art, and varied reflections on what art and literature, word and image, bring to each other. Introducing Lethem at an event recently at the Brooklyn Public Library, the art critic Dan Fox said that, as a novelist, Lethem had left the same kind of indelible mark on how people see Brooklyn that Warhol had on Manhattan. With Cellophane Bricks, he is leaving his imprint on the art world. A footnote for the future: The book is nicely illustrated with pictures of the eclectic work it describes, and next year, the art from Cellophane Bricks the basis for a show that will be at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Southern California. “Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing” is described as “a chronicle of an author who roams among visual artists,” and ill feature art by Gregory Crewdson, Rosalyn Drexler, Charles Long, and others. Look out for it.

Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is famous for his deep dives into topics of American history, ranging from the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, and the history of baseball, to name just a few.  Now Burns is delving into the fascinating life of 15th century genius Leonardo da Vinci, examining his life and his numerous roles as a draftsman, painter, and scientist. This venture marks the first time the director has tackled a subject that is not American. The film, which is divided into two, two-hour segments was co-written by his daughter Sarah Burns along with Dave McMahon, and was directed and produced by all three. Leonardo's many notable achievements are explored via close examination and analysis of his prolific personal notebooks alongside accounts of his life and on-camera interviews with leading scholars, contemporary artists, engineers, and some famous fans like biographer Walter Isaacson and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.  Leonardo da Vinci also marks a departure from Burns's traditional filmmaking style, in which a pan or zoom added in post-production across a still image gives the illusion of movement.  That style of filmmaking has become so closely associated with his material that it has garnered his own filter in iMovie software as what else? "The Ken Burns effect," of course. However, here, the filmmakers use split screens with images, videos, and sound effects from a range of time periods to highlight da Vinci's many achievements through his artistic and scientific explorations, along with the original music commission from celebrated composer Caroline Shaw. It creates a compelling effect and new stylistic approach for the iconic documentarian. This week, Burns joins Senior Market Editor Eileen Kinsella to discuss the endlessly revelatory and fascinating life of Leonardo.

Re-Air from August 15,2024 There’s so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole… but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It’s not always clear when you’re in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called “Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism.” Across a broad array of culture, both high and low, Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, “immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production.” She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It’s a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis’s pick for our summer reading list, and we’re not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age. It’s heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it.

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Naomi Rea, newly appointed editor in chief of Artnet News joins the show. Kate and Naomi just returned from reporting on the ground at Art Basel Paris, which came just one week after Frieze London and Frieze Masters, where a clearer picture of the art market was taking shape. Before we get to that, speaking of London, there was big news that activists were sentenced to prison time for the souping of a very famous Vincent Van Gogh painting. The trio discusses what the implications of this punishment are for the activists using soup-throwing and other tactics to get their message across, and if it's working at all. Next, we dive into the state of the art market, which has been the subject of many think pieces, often providing contradictory views. Finally, we dig into the man of many controversies: Elon Musk. He has been the subject of multiple accusations of alleged plagiarism in the past couple of weeks. First, Alex Proyas, who directed the 2004 adaptation of the short story I, Robot, called out Musk's Tesla on social media, writing simply: “Hey Elon, can I have my designs back please?” and shared a side-by-side image of his work on the film next to those of newly-released prototypes of Optimus, Cybercab, and Robovan at a long-awaited October 10 event intended to showcase Tesla’s future products to investors. Just days later, the producers of Blade Runner 2049 filed a lawsuit suing Tesla for using imagery from that film without permission. In fact, Alcon Entertainment denied a request from Tesla and Warner Bros Discovery to use images from its film, and then Musk went ahead and used A.I.-generated references anyway. Alcon Entertainment called it “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit.”

Contemporary art comes in many shapes and forms, but close your eyes and think of what an artist looks like and nine times out of 10, I bet you are still thinking of a painter in front of a canvas. If recent interest for museums and galleries is any indication, however, that image should be joined by another one: the fiber artist. Think of a weaver seated at the loom or a quilt-maker laboriously stitching together layers of fabric. The textile arts have experienced a quiet but steady groundswell of interest in the last decades, and recently I've noticed that it feels as if it is kicked into a new, even higher level, from the many kinds of textile based art throughout the most recent Venice Biennale to the major show "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," which is on a tour of some of North America's most important museums right now. As many textile scholars will tell you, tapestry was once as exalted as painting as an art form, and it may be so again. This surge of interest is bringing new audiences, new histories, and new vocabularies into the center of the action that are worth getting familiar with, and to unravel all the different threads, I turned to Elissa Auther, a scholar who looked at the tangled history of fiber art in her book String Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art.  More importantly, she's been closely observing and encouraging the contemporary boom in textile art as the chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. This week she joins me on the podcast to discuss what's behind the resurgence of interest in this medium. —Ben Davis Fiber Art Is (Still) Having a Moment Artists working in fiber and textile are increasingly visible at art fairs, museums and galleries, and there's no sign of a slowdown.  

Few creative works ever managed to get the weird pathologies and unique characters of the art world quite right. But journalist and author Hari Kunzru's newest novel Blue Ruin is definitely one of those works. Set in the early stages of the pandemic, Kunzru's novel looks at how wealth and privilege function and fester in the art world. It's  an astonishing and incisive exploration of the power dynamics and value creation in art by an author who has been keenly observing the art world's odd rituals for decades. Blue Ruin moves between lockdown in upstate New York where some art professionals are hiding out on a very nice property, and then moves back in time to the optimistic art scene of the 1990s in London. Between these places, we follow Jay, a British artist who makes a grand gesture of quitting art in his twenties, only to find himself ramped back into the art world and the people who haunted it, all of which he had tried to leave behind. Originally from Britain and based in New York. Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including White Tears and Red Pill. Blue Ruin is the third of this trilogy.  He's also a regular contributor to the New York Review of books in the New York Times and writes a column for Harpers. Kunzru also teaches in the creative writing program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone.

Over the past 200 years, a museum in New York has quietly grown to become one of the city's most esteemed cultural institutions. You might think I'm talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MoMA, but no, it's the Brooklyn Museum. Founded in 1823 as a community library which later merged with the Brooklyn Institute, the Brooklyn Museum is now firmly fixed on the city's cultural landscape. Its James Polshek-designed glass facade is immediately recognizable. It comes backed by a collection spanning historical artifacts and contemporary art, and it remains dedicated to reflecting the diversity of the borough it calls home. Recently, the museum has grabbed headlines for high-profile shows from "Giants," a very starry showcase of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz's collection, to "It's Pablo-matic," the Picasso retrospective curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, which caught a lot, a lot of heat. But behind those headlines, the museum has been programming for its community. It has staged crowd-curated exhibitions, hosted pop-up markets, and served as a polling station. Its Spike Lee exhibition last year was accompanied by events including ASL and stroller tours intended to engage the community with a filmmaker who was also born and bred in the borough. For almost a decade, the Brooklyn Museum has been led by director Anne Pasternak. She has sought to balance the needs of its audience as well as the evolving role of a cultural institution. It's a position that's been rewarding as much as it has been challenging. Ahead of the museum's 200th anniversary, I caught up with Anne, who shared more about the opportunities and headwinds facing the Brooklyn Museum today and what it means to lead the institution into its third century.

The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and needing each other in our capacity to change and love—all these aspects that really make us human. With this, July has built a diverse and awe-inspiring body of work. It includes a messaging app she developed called Somebody and an interfaith secondhand shop. Her art has been on view with the Venice Biennale, and she's also made three feature length films, two of which she starred in. She's published four books and a participatory website called Learning to Love You More that she created with American artist Harold Fletcher that consists of assignments for the general public who make the art. There are instructions like "make a portrait of your friend's desires," or "perform the phone call someone else wishes they could have." One of these assignments is part of her first solo exhibition, a major retrospective on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan until the end of October. It is "Assignment 43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house," and it was completed by a local woman from Milan. It is one piece among many in a show that spans 30 years of July's practice. There is also a new participatory video series in the mix called F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You). Her newest novel, All Fours was published in May this year. A New York Times bestseller and long list finalist for the National Book Award, All Fours is an astonishingly candid look at sexuality and transformation, but also at an extremely underrepresented topic in literature: menopause and female aging. When I connected with July, she was in her home, which is also her studio in Los Angeles, a small painting by Louise Bonnet hung just behind her. It's called Miranda, and it's a contemplative portrait of a female figure in what looks like a state of metamorphosis. It suits July's universe quite poetically.

It is time once again for our Round Up episode for the month of September, where we talk about some of the most interesting and timely art news stories of the last month with our writers here at Artnet. This month, Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by senior writer Sarah Cascone, and the three stories they discuss all center around museums. The first is the announcement that longtime director of New York's Museum of Modern Art Glenn Lowry will retire after 30 years, which marks the end of an era, and perhaps the beginning of something new. Artnet's Katya Kazakina wrote an article speculating on who might replace Lowry, and the panel discusses what this means for the future of one of the world's most famous museums. There's been a lot of leadership around New York museums, with the news of Alex Rüger taking over the role of director at the Frick Collection from Ian Wardropper, who is stepping down in 2025; plus the departure of Klaudio Rodriguez from the Bronx Museum, which has seen three directors in just seven years. Next up, the trio takes a deep dive into an article penned by Ben Davis that shares the result of an analysis he did looking at the shows on view at over 200 museums across the United States to see which artists are cropping up most frequently. The results were surprising, and give us all a window into the cultural zeitgeist. Finally, we talk about the news of a rediscovered painting by beloved Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi that is going on view in Texas, based on a story written by Sarah Cascone.

At the start of September, a massive chunk of the international art world descended on South Korea for a bounty of high-profile art offerings. The marquee event was Frieze Seoul, in its third edition, at the Coex convention center in the luxe Gangnam district, running alongside the long-established Korea International Art Fair. But they represented just one element of the action. All over Seoul, museums and galleries were opening big shows, angling for attention. Samsung’s Leeum museum hosted an Anicka Yi blowout and a superb show of young artists curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija. The beauty giant Amorepacific welcomed Elmgreen & Dragset at a museum in the basement of its David Chipperfield–designed headquarters, while Gagosian set up shop with a Derrick Adams exhibition on the ground floor. Up above, local heavyweights came out swinging—PKM with Yoo Youngkuk, Pace with the potent pairing of Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko, and Jason Haam with Urs Fischer. Celebrities were everywhere. Parties were everywhere. No one seemed to be sleeping. Everyone was on the move. And the festivities were not confined to Seoul. The esteemed Gwangju Biennale inaugurated its 15th edition in that southern city the day after the fairs opened, a sharp, tough show curated by the Frenchman Nicolas Borriaud that ran alongside more than 30 national pavilions. And along the country’s southern coast, the latest Busan Biennale also drew crowds, with more than 60 artists selected by its curators, Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte. There was so much happening that it was impossible to see it all—even with a dedicated driver—which many VIPs had—and even if you were willing to forgo moments of rest. This week, Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth is joined by London-based reporter and co-author of the Asia Pivot newsletter Vivienne Chow to discuss the art, the food, and everything in between.

If you've been keeping an eye on the art market, you know that the industry has been going through some turbulent times... there's really no other way to say it: It's been a tough year, as the frothy post-pandemic surge in the art business has fully retreated.  Amid this market slowdown comes our latest data-packed and information-rich issue of the Mid-Year Intelligence Report, which is appropriately titled The Art Market Reset: Riding the Waves of Change. This Fall issue looks at the numbers behind the mood, and it is packed with relevant insights that will help buyers, sellers, and spectators make informed decisions in the months ahead.  Katya Kazakina, Artnet's award-winning columnist who pens a weekly art market column called The Art Detective is joining Art Angle co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week to discuss her must read cover story for the new Intelligence Report. In it, she investigates what led to the sharp drop in the demand for art, as well as resale values for once coveted pieces. They discuss how the data reveals a market in free fall, where galleries have been faced with cost-cutting measures, or are shuttering altogether. There are some silver linings in her story, as Katya examines the smart responses that are being made across the industry, revealing how sales tactics are evolving and why some people actually believe that a slowdown in art production is not a bad thing altogether. Before we get to that, a few more words about the rest of the report.  Our illuminating By the Numbers section details how, as compared with last year, there has been a substantial drop in money being spent on Ultra Contemporary art, a downturn in the sales generated by the big three auction houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips), fewer artworks selling publicly for over $10 million, and the average price of art at auction is also going down. You can find specific breakdowns in the actual report.  What does it all mean though? News editor Margaret Carrigan, gives a spin-free analysis of the auction stats. Also in this issue, our Editor in Chief Naomi Rea, spoke with Art Basel Paris Fair Director Clément Delépine about what to expect at the revamped art fair, which is moving back into the Grand Palais next month.  Our market reporter, Eileen Kinsella, spoke to Sotheby's Phyllis Kao about how the secondary market is adjusting its working processes amid the flux, and our marketplace section brings you the stories behind the top selling works, and the scoop on artists whose markets are on the rise. Even amid this slump, Artnet's esteemed reporters and editors have worked hard and put together an excellent issue that will help you navigate the current art market season, where the road ahead feels anything but clear.

Thurston Moore is one of the most famous names in rock. With Kim Gordon and Lee Ronaldo, he formed Sonic Youth, one of the definitive art rock bands... yes, ART rock. Sonic Youth album covers famously spotlighted artists, from Gerhard Richter’s candle on the cover of 1988’s Daydream Nation to Raymond Pettibon’s cartoon couple on the cover of 1990’s Goo to Mike Kelley’s stuffed animal on the cover of 1992’s Dirty to Marnie Weber’s collage for 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Well, now Moore is back, putting out a new dreamy solo album titled Flow Critical Lucidity, and true to form, the cover is another literal work of art: a photo of a sculpture of what appears to be metal helmet, studded with tuning forks. This is a work called Samurai Walkman, by the artist Jamie Nares. Nares is a figure of major cachet herself. She only just had a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York in the summer. Back in 2020, her fantastic 2011 video Street was the first film to be projected on the exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Thurston Moore, in fact, did the soundtrack to that film. Nares and Moore have a fruitful history of collaboration together, having both come up in the chaotic, experimental No Wave scene of the 1970s, and this week they join Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss. We're also thrilled to announce the launch of Art Market Minute, our new micro-podcast, hosted by news editor Margaret Carrigan. It offers a weekly snapshot of essential art market news, expertly compiled by the Artnet PRO editorial team. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts every Monday.

We are back this week with our monthly roundup, where we talk through some of the big stories that are making waves in the art world. Today co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by Artnet's art and pop culture editor, Min Chen. Min commissions and edits a lot of our news coverage including a couple of the stories that we're going to be talking about today. It's August, and despite the fact that this is supposed to be the month where art and culture tends to gear down and the professional art world goes to Greece or the Hamptons, increasingly with every passing summer it seems that the news doesn't stop at all, and in fact sometimes actually ramps up. This week we're going to discuss the abruptly halted auction of artworks allegedly made by Michael Jackson, the art stories on both sides of a prisoner exchange that occurred this month between Russia and the West, and finally the artist who just can't quit: Banksy. He dropped nine animal-themed art pieces this month around London and many are wondering if the world's most famous street artist has slightly lost his touch. Tune in to find out.

There is a lot to unpack—literally and figuratively—in the Metropolitan Museum’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” which closes on September 2. It’s about nature and the cycle of life (and as it turns out, there is a lot about death). It also touches on chemistry, biology, mythology, and so much more, all told through the lens of fashion. Added to this litany of themes, the show also tells the story of The Met itself, and the goings-on behind the scenes. It’s about how archived garments are preserved and how they are disintegrating. It’s not just about clothes, but about how they were worn and who wore them. It tells the story of us. It’s a visceral exhibition of over 400 years of fashion that engages the senses. It can be a heady experience. There are the sounds of waves crashing, and birds calling, and poems being read aloud. There is textured wallpaper you can touch—and courtesy of the German artist Sissel Tollas, wallpaper you can scratch and sniff and tubes you can snort. Frankly, this portion of the exhibit kicks like a mule and is unforgettable, with scent being such a powerfully triggering memory force. “Sleeping Beauties” was curated by this week’s guest Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who previously helmed such blockbusters as “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” “China Through the Looking Glass,” and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which were some of the most visited exhibitions in the museum’s entire history. Today’s fashion-exhibit-heavy museum landscape has a lot to do with Bolton’s successes, but with his trained anthropologist’s eye, he never fails to zero in on the intellectual and human connotations in the garments.  

There's so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole... but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It's not always clear when you're in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called "Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism." Across a broad array of culture, both high and low Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, "immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production." She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It's a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis's pick for our summer reading list, and we're not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age. It's heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it.

What is the future of an art career? Where do you look to find relevant new culture? And as an artist, where do you find collaborators and fans  in art as in so much else? A lot has changed in the last decade, and the answers to all of these important questions feel tenuous and up for grabs. On the one hand, traditional art institutions seem both dominated by wealth and starved for resources. On the other, there's an explosion of Internet culture full of subcultural energy, but also terrible incentives with a race-to-the-bottom quest for attention that hardly seems ideal for supporting art. The artist Joshua Citarella is someone who's been thinking hard about these problems, and above all, about how to steer a course in between these different, often competing worlds. His artwork has been exhibited in illustrious places including Berlin's KW Institute for Temporary Art in its recent "Poetics of Encryption" show, which attracted a lot of buzz, but he's also been cited as an authority on the ideologies and aesthetics of Internet subcultures by the New York Times, the Guardian, and many other outlets. This week, Citarella joins Artnet's Ben Davis to talk about his position as a figure in a new hybrid type of internet era, moving between art maker, podcaster, micro influencer, and community manager of the heady online platform Do Not Research, and theorizing how all these strands fit together. On the podcast, the two discuss the evolving demands on artists in the digital era, the changing art audience, and a lot more.

It is mid-summer and as always there a lot of exciting things going on in Paris, but this year is special as it sets the stage for the Summer Olympic Games. Now in full swing, there are scores of events and performances around iconic landmarks of the city, from equestrian racing on the grounds of Versailles to swimming in the Seine. While at first blush it may not seem like the place for an art publication, art and the Olympics have a long and storied history from the ancient to modern games, artists used to compete in various media as Olympic events, in fact. And so this month we turned the lens of our popular Three Things column—an article that looks at three (or more) fascinating aspects of a well-known and well-loved work of art, often illuminating lesser-known backstories—to a hallmark of the Olympics. This week we're focused on one of the most famous pieces of art that is about the Olympics, the Discobolus, which depicts an ancient Greek athlete at the exact moment of tension before hurling the discus, which is one of the oldest events in the Olympics. Artnet's Galleries Editor Annikka Olsen wrote a very compelling article fleshing out this symbolic artwork, and she joins co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week. The duo talk about the amazing and complex history of the discus thrower in all of its many iterations from the before-Christ era right up to today.

It is time, once again for our monthly roundup where we talk about three of the big stories of the month.  In the summer sometimes the art news slows down, but the news news has not slowed down at all, of course. And we have three stories that we're going to talk about that are very much about where art and the news collide. Today we're going to talk about the critical reaction to the instantly famous photo of Donald Trump with his fist raised in the air immediately after the attempted assassination on him two weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. A lot of art critics said that this photo was so powerful, it could define the race. Art critic Ben Davis had his doubts. Obviously, the news cycle moves very fast. This past weekend, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris, and there's a whole new round of uses of the word "unprecedented" floating around. So we are going to talk about what, if anything, the lasting impact of this photo might be. Why it got such a reaction, and what the perils of decoding news images through the lens of art are. Then we're gonna talk about the defacement of a goddess statue by the artist Shahzia Sikander in Texas, which had been protested as satanic, and the artist's decision to leave it in its damaged form rather than repair it as a statement. And finally, we go down under to Australia for a story that has made international headlines. An artist created an art installation in the ladies' bathroom of a museum as a statement about sexism and gender discrimination, filling the washroom with Picasso paintings. But in a twist that has brought the story back into the news, the Picassos have now been revealed to be fake. Is this a serious story? Is it silly? It's a question that Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown tackle along with this week's guest, our hardworking news correspondent Adam Schrader.

The Gladstone gallery director Alissa Bennett was one of a legion to fall under the thrall of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History. A years-spanning mystery told in reverse, the book has sold some five million copies and remains a cult fan favorite. It details a small cadre of college students studying ancient Greek at an isolated North East campus. Myth, reality, and ritual overlap and ultimately Dionysian rites collide with hubris. Here is how Bennett sums up the protagonists: "while their fantasies ricochet around a technicolor past filled to overflowing with gods and mysteries and the seismic tragedies of Homer, their bodies remain tethered to a Taco Bell present." The book has yet to be seen on the big screen, but Bennett has managed to find a super-low-budget obscure video art adaption from 2006, which is now on view as part of the "The Secret History," (on view through August 2) a group art exhibition she curated, on view now at Gladstone 64, the gallery’s upper east side outpost in a converted townhouse. The artists featured in the fascinating show range from familiar names like Matthew Barney, Rachel Rose, and Hope Atherton to younger artists like Matt Hilvers and Karyn Lyons, and her own personal astrologer (and former Art Angle guest) Micki Pellerano. Bennett joined Artnet editor William Van Meter to discuss the show, and her meandering path in life that includes a stint as a runway model, a co-host alongside Lena Dunham of the acclaimed podcast The C-Word, a teacher at the Yale School of Art, and author of the zine "Dead is Better." Now, she holds a post as a gallery director, and along the way she remembers her mentor, Barbara Gladstone, the legendary gallerist who passed away last month.

Art and psychoanalysis have had a very long and intense relationship over the years, and it makes sense that these two fields would be drawn to one another. Critics have long looked at psychoanalysis as offering a sophisticated model of decoding images and fantasies. Artists have made productive use of ideas like the unconscious and the uncanny, and of course, are very concerned with the questions of self-expression and desire that are at the core of analysis. One figure who has gained quite a bit of attention in art lately for her ideas on all these things is Jamieson. Webster. Webster is an analyst and a teacher, and is among the founders of Pulsion, a new school for psychoanalysis here in New York City. She's also the author of essays for places including The New York Times and the New York Review of Books, as well as books of her own, including the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis from 2019 and Disorganization and Sex from 2022. Recently Webster spoke with art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis about the fresh uptick of interest in psychoanalysis among artists now, the uses and abuses of therapy in art, and her new pamphlet titled The Psychoanalyst and the Artist, where she writes about what analysts can learn from two artists in particular, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the painter Carroll Dunham.

Summer is in full swing, which means that crowds from the world over are heading on vacation and many of them are descending in huge numbers into one of the most famous cities in the world—Venice, Italy. Earlier this spring, the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale opened, curated by the highly esteemed Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa. His exhibition “Foreigners Everywhere” is a major feat, and a big talking point of the year. It features more than 330 artists, many of whom are participating in the biennale for the first time, and shines a light on artists who were woefully overlooked in their time. There are multiple ways to look at the show and its title “Foreigners Everywhere,” which is inspired by a famous work of the same name by artist collective Claire Fontaine. It is both an acknowledgement of the artistic positions of exile of the immigrant or outsider, but also importantly asks of the audience to think about who exactly is a foreigner… and who is not. Pedrosa argues that deep down we are all foreigners, and this exhibition, which the curator describes as a “provocation,” arrives as the world is facing a multitude of emergencies centered around the very concepts of exile and belonging. The reviews are in and well-worth reading; Artnet's critic Ben Davis has a great three-part review of the show, and host Kate Brown spoke to Pedrosa before the exhibition opening in a wide-ranging interview that we're revisiting this week. He offers tips on how to walk through the show, key background on the exhibition’s concept, and thoughts on how his show is repaying a debt.

Although the art business world may be on holiday right now, we're still pounding the (international) pavement to bring you a report of the most important and talked-about events in the art world right now. This week, hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by Artnet's London correspondent Vivienne Chow for the monthly roundup. Just two short weeks ago collectors, curators, museum bigwigs, and celebrities arrived in Basel Switzerland for Art Basel's flagship event. Dealers were quick to announce big-ticket sales, but there was an undercurrent of conversation regarding the so-called "doom porn" narrative swirling in the press. As Artnet News's Katya Kazakina has been reporting, the market is in the midst of a major correction. Beyond the fair, where well-heeled visitors traipsed between the installation of Agnes Denes's iconic Wheat Fields and the beloved cow pastures, there was lots to see. In a recent editorial, host Kate Brown wrote about how social media algorithms are affecting performance art, and the trio discuss this trend in relation to the activations in and around the fair. Finally, the trio discuss the life and legacy of Barbara Gladstone, the highly esteemed art dealer who passed away at age 89.

 If you've seen the artworks of Marianna Simnett, you know that it is not easy to forget them. The multidisciplinary artist who works between film, installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, and even theater, is a world-builder of surreal and sometimes horrific proportions. Her works lodge themselves deep into your psyche with an unsettling amount of imagery, dark humor, and mythologically tinted storylines where animals may become nefarious protagonists, and roadkill might come back to life. Simnett often deals with the body as a site of pain, control, vulnerability, and intervention. And her artworks may make you squirm or even evoke fear, and you may just find yourself wondering, 'am I supposed to be watching this?' I think the answer is yes. While Simnett's boundary-pushing art may not be for the faint of heart, as viewers it is important to be challenged, roused out of our complacency and our comfort zones, it is one way to become more empathetic.  Simnett has been showing widely at institutions on both sides of the Atlantic. Her film, The Severed Tail, was a major talking point at the 59th Venice Biennale, "The Milk of Dreams." It tells the tale of a little pig who enters a fetishistic underworld after a farmer snips off her tail. This coming fall Simnett will be included in Manifesta 15 in Barcelona.  Currently, the artist has a solo exhibition on view at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Called Winner, it is part of the official cultural program for the Euro 2024 Soccer Championship, which is being hosted in Germany this year. In this multi-channel video installation Simnett takes on the world's and rituals of soccer, its fouls, injuries, social dynamics, and hooliganism. I won't spoil it for you, but it is definitely soccer like you've never seen it before. On top of all that talent and accolades, Simnett is also a classically trained flutist. It's an instrument that I find compliments her wider art practice perfectly—its fantastical, folkish, a bit eerie, and definitely other-worldly. On this episode of the Art Angle, Senior Editor Kate Brown speaks to Simnett, who also obliged us by playing the flute at the top of the episode. All audio excerpts in this episode are included courtesy of Marianna Simnett. 

There's no denying that we live in an era of crisis, from geopolitical strife to economic squeezes and widening wealth disparity. Looming behind all of that is the ecological devastation brought on by climate change. All of these challenges have had an impact on the art market and the wider cultural sector writ large. Artists, galleries, museums, and cultural policy-makers are all looking for ways to respond to these issues, and change the way the art world works to foster a brighter and more sustainable future. Speaking of sustainability, it's perhaps worth noting that in the same time that awareness of the global climate emergency has grown over the last two decades, so too has the art market, which has swelled to an annual turnover of $65 billion in revenue. This has been fueled in part by the ever higher prices for art as the global high-net-worth population has grown, but also a proliferation of galleries, fairs, and events, all of which have contributed to a year-round travel schedule for collectors, curators, dealers, advisors, journalists, and everyone in between. Victoria Siddall is one of the figures at the forefront of a push for change within the industry. After a nearly 20 year career at Frieze where she helped grow the fair into the global platform it is today, she's now the founding director of Murmur, a charity launched earlier this year that is aimed at helping the art and music industries combat climate change by funding initiatives to decarbonize, empower artists to create major societal change, and financing transformative climate work. She's also the co-founder and trustee of the Gallery Climate Coalition, and continues on with Frieze as a non-executive director, while also working with museums and art environmental organizations on strategy, advocacy, and fundraising. There's perhaps no better place to broach the question of the art world's responsibility to climate initiatives than in Venice, a bastion of art, architecture, and culture that is especially vulnerable to rising sea levels. That's where this year's Art For Tomorrow conference took place, at which Siddall spoke about how both museums and the market must take steps to offset their carbon footprint. Additionally, she touches on how the fair landscape has changed over the last 20 years, as have galleries needs, and whether the growth of the market side of the industry has changed the way we view cultural value in the art world.

With his themes of repetition and appropriation, Andy Warhol’s work can seem mass produced. He was prone to say that his assistants did his work for him and often invented different narratives in interviews. In fact, weaving tall tales and shaping his own mythology was another important aspect of his art: he was creating the ultimate persona of an artist every bit as Pop as his paintings, one who specialized in glacial coolness and glib detachment. Although the paintings might look like they came off of a conveyor belt, that was by design, and Warhol maintained close involvement with his work. In fact, before silkscreen printing became his trademark, Warhol hand-painted the 32 canvasses that make up the iconic 1962 work Campbell’s Soup Cans. Warhol gained fame in the 1960s as part of the Pop boom, but this was actually the second phase of his career. He spent the 1950s in New York as a successful commercial illustrator, doing advertisements, book and record covers. All the while he made personal work and had a smattering of shows in small galleries, most of which were ignored or poorly received. But the seeds of his subversive repertoire were being slyly developed in his intimate drawings to which Warhol would return in his later life. For this week’s episode, Artnet editor William Van Meter is joined by the journalist, critic, and author of the 2020 biography Warhol, Blake Gopnik. What more could be said about the artist that the heap of other biographies hadn’t covered? It turns out, plenty. Gopnik spent eight years researching and writing Warhol, and at almost 1,000 pages it is filled with wonderful details and newly discovered data.    On this episode we discuss Warhol by-hand, his pre-pop era as well as some of his later, less mechanized moments such as his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how he managed to leave his mark on every aspect of his work, handmade and beyond.

It is the exhausted end of a jam-packed month of May, and we're staring into what promises to be a similarly jam-packed June. It's overwhelming to think about it all, but exciting to discuss some of the biggest stories of the last few weeks. That's right, it's time again for our monthly roundup, this month hosted by Artnet's national art critic Ben Davis, senior editor Kate Brown, and European news editor Margaret Carrigan. Based in Berlin, Germany, Kate recently visited the Marianna Simnett show at the Hamburger Bahnhof museum, which was commissioned to coincide with the 2024 European Football Championship, being hosted by Germany. Maggie, though based in London, traveled to New York for the Art Business Conference and took in Stanley Whitney's retrospective at the Buffalo AKG, where she suggests visitors pay a visit to Albert Bierstadt's The Marina Piccola, Capri, which was gifted to the institution by the artist himself in 1863. Finally, Ben recommends the project "Means of Production" organized by Lunch Hour, which brings together the work of 75 New York-based artists in a former hosiery factory in Red Hook, Brooklyn. First up on this edition is what may be the biggest story of recent weeks and maybe even all of recent auction history, that is the hack of Christie's website that spanned the all-important week of sales in New York, which continues on, and now features a countdown clock threatening to leak valuable client data. Next, the trio discusses a dispute between the artist Maurizio Cattelan and Anthony James over who owns the right to a specific art idea, which in this case is shooting a gun at a metal panel and presenting  it as a painting. And finally, we'll talk about the public's overwhelmingly critical outrage over recent portraits of British Royals, specifically King Charles and Princess Kate Middleton. Although they are the most recent instances, there is in fact a long history of unpopular royal portraits.

Land art, the movement which emerged in the 1960s and 70s with artists such as Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Michael Heizer erecting monumental works in far-flung destinations, is widely regarded for its engagement with the environment and its elements. These remarkable installations are crafted in concert with the Earth, meant to evolve as sun, storms, and seasons weather them continuously over time. But what if you homed in on the core of this concept, creating sweeping land artworks in ways and places where they would be truly temporary, imprints made for a moment before disappearing back into the Earth? This is the crux of California-based artist Jim Denevan’s dynamic practice, which involves interacting with topographies and terrains to craft ephemeral compositions that play with the impermanence of our ever-changing world. Since the mid-1990s, Denevan has traversed the globe creating unfathomably massive works in sand, earth, and ice, often using no more than a rake, stick, or even the soles of his feet. He has etched miles-long Fibonacci circles in Siberia’s frozen Lake Baikal, drawn shore-spanning spirals in San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, and sculpted concentric rings of sand mounds at international public art exhibitions Desert X AlUla in Saudi Arabia and Manar Abu Dhabi. His work has been featured in institutional shows at MoMA PS1, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, as well as the Oscar long-listed documentary Man in the Field, which explored Denevan’s artistic career and his culinary trajectory as the founder of Outstanding in the Field, a roving restaurant set where food is sourced to connect diners with the origins of their meals. This spring, Artnet collaborated with Denevan on an original project, titled “You Only Live Once,” showcasing the all-new 2024 Lexus GX alongside the artist bringing to life an incredible land artwork in Lake Harper north of Los Angeles. Taking the shape of the universal number “1,” the more than quarter-mile piece is a dramatic testament to making the most of our time on this Earth by confidently pursuing our curiosities and drive for adventure.

Who are the rising talents in the art world poised for greatness? Discover them in ‘Up Next’, Artnet’s popular series of profiles introducing you to key visionaries on the verge of stardom. This month, we’re airing two special Art Angle episodes spotlighting two figures shaping their fields in innovative ways. Subscribe to The Art Angle wherever you get podcasts to hear both episodes, and visit News.Artnet.com to catch the latest up-and-comers we’re celebrating in ‘Up Next’. Yung Ma is an international curator who has held positions at some of the world's most prestigious art institutions. In 2021 he was appointed senior curator at London's Hayward Gallery, and previously held positions at M+ in Hong Kong, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He served not once, but twice, as the co-curator of the Hong Kong Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and was the artistic director of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2021. It's fair to say that Ma knows better than most what audiences want from museums, and his track record organizing acclaimed exhibitions of artists like Cao Fei, and a recent retrospective of Mike Nelson proves that he knows how to deliver. Artnet's London correspondent Vivienne Chow spoke to Ma about the changing tides within the realm of museums and his personal experiences at the forefront of contemporary art.

What is a connoisseur? Who can be one? What role do they play in shaping tastes of the art market and the large expanse of art history? There's perhaps no better place to ask these kind of questions than at TEFAF, the many splendored Dutch fair where art, antiquities, and antiques take center stage. Each spring, the event returns to New York City and a swath of visitors—international and local, new and returning, celebrity and, well, not—flock to the storied Park Avenue Armory. Last week amid those festivities, as dealers sold every kind of treasure from ancient Roman sculptures to contemporary Korean paintings, Artnet and TEFAF hosted a panel  featuring three experts discussing the state of connoisseurship today, and how a new generation of collectors is approaching that field. This week, listen to a recorded version of that lively conversation moderated by Artnet Pro Editor Andrew Russeth, joined by Adam Charlap Hyman, Principal at Charlap Hyman & Herrero; Eleanor Cayre, Art Advisor, Cayre Art Group; and Ebony L. Haynes, Senior Director, David Zwirner & Director, 52 Walker.

Who are the rising talents in the art world poised for greatness? Discover them in ‘Up Next’, Artnet’s popular series of profiles introducing you to key visionaries on the verge of stardom. This month, we’re airing two special Art Angle episodes spotlighting two figures shaping their fields in innovative ways. Subscribe to The Art Angle wherever you get podcasts to hear both episodes, and visit News.Artnet.com to catch the latest up-and-comers we’re celebrating in ‘Up Next’. Alexander Shulan has a knack for spotting emerging talents. The founder and curator of Lomex Gallery is a born-and-bred New Yorker who began the venture as a sort of "collaborative project" between himself and a group of artist friends. That lark turned into a full-blown commercial enterprise showing the likes of Robert Bittenbender, Emma McMillan, and Andrea Fourchy, and Maggie Lee. While the gallery's ethos has long been dedicated to showing new-New York artists, when the gallery moved from its original home in the Bowery to the new art mecca of Tribeca, Shulan has begun to expand his purview beyond "hyper-local" confines. In a roving interview with Artnet's Wet Paint columnist Annie Armstrong, Shulan discusses how the gallery is forging a new path in the ever-crowded art world.

There is a lot to unpack—literally and figuratively—in the Metropolitan Museum’s new Costume Institute show, “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” which opens on Friday May 10. It’s about nature and the cycle of life (and as it turns out, there is a lot about death). It also touches on chemistry, biology, mythology, and so much more, all told through the lens of fashion. Added to this litany of themes, the show also tells the story of The Met itself, and the goings-on behind the scenes. It’s about how archived garments are preserved and how they are disintegrating. It’s not just about clothes, but about how they were worn and who wore them. It tells the story of us. It's a visceral exhibition of over 400 years of fashion that engages the senses. It can be a heady experience. There are the sounds of waves crashing, and birds calling, and poems being read aloud. There is textured wallpaper you can touch—and courtesy of the German artist Sissel Tollas, wallpaper you can scratch and sniff and tubes you can snort. Frankly, this portion of the exhibit kicks like a mule and is unforgettable, with scent being such a powerfully triggering memory force. “Sleeping Beauties” was curated by this week’s guest Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who previously helmed such blockbusters as "Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty," "China Through the Looking Glass," and "Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination," which were some of the most visited exhibitions in the museum’s entire history. Today’s fashion-exhibit-heavy museum landscape has a lot to do with Bolton’s successes, but with his trained anthropologist’s eye, he never fails to zero in on the intellectual and human connotations in the garments.

We're sharing a special preview of Previously Unknown, a podcast from our friends at Independent New York.  Previously Unknown reframes and reevaluates what we think we know about contemporary art.  In this segment from the latest episode, Artnet News Pro Editor Andrew Russeth moderates a discussion with Independent art fair founder Elizabeth Dee, curatorial advisor Matthew Higgs and artist Joel Mesler. In 2019, Mesler performed an act of radical generosity by painting portraits of visitors at the fair, to benefit the not for profit gallery White Columns. Mesler will return to Independent this year, to restage the memorable presentation with a series of new portraits made on-site, in honor of the 15th anniversary of the art fair.  Tune in to Previously Unknown on your favorite podcast platform. 

As anyone who has been listening to this show recently will already know, the world's largest and most closely scrutinized art event—the Venice Biennale— is now open in Italy. Every two years, different countries compete for the attention of art lovers and judges with individual national pavilions. For the 2024 Biennale, among the most talked about is that of the United States, which chose Jeffrey Gibson as its representative artist. Gibson is one of the most visible artists currently working, and with his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage, he is also the first Native American to represent the U.S. in Venice. Representing your country at the Biennale is among the highest honors that any artist might receive, and also among the most fraught. Even from this show's title, which is "The Space in Which to Place Me," you can tell that Gibson is pondering what national representation means. Gibson has transformed the U.S. pavilion's brick exterior with prismatic murals. Inside you find a spectacle that is clearly the work of vast amounts of team labor. There are 10-foot-high figures with ceramic faces draped in beads, ribbons, and large fringe; sculptures of large birds and human busts meticulously decked out in detailed rainbow bead work. Vibrant paintings that incorporate artifacts by unknown indigenous makers were sourced from estate and garage sales. Meanwhile, a bright red central chamber contains one of the types of work that has become Jeffrey Gibson's signature, a punching bag that he has transformed via intricate bead work into a hanging sculpture, this one featuring the vaunted phrase, "we hold these truths to be self-evident." Whether that line refers to the truths of the Declaration of Independence that it is citing, or to the truths of the other art that surrounds it, you have to decide for yourself.  Gibson's pavilion climaxes with a nine screen video installation featuring a dancer performing a traditional Ojibwe powwow dance to a techno beat, the images ultimately breaking apart into kaleidoscopic abstraction in its mix of historical references and pop, and above all, in its color and warmth. "The Space in Which to Place Me" is a fine introduction to the themes that define Jeffrey Gibson's career. In the lead up to the opening, host Ben Davis spoke with him about his long road to the Venice Biennale.

It is time for another edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where we look at some of the biggest headlining stories of the past month. But really, let's be honest, in the art world there's just one headlining story, and that is the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale, the so-called "Olympics of the Art World," which opened to the public last Saturday, April 20. Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa's "Foreigners Everywhere" was a major feat, and it brought together more than 330 artists and collectives, the vast majority of whom have not been seen at the Biennale before. So it was truly exciting. And all over Venice, there were scores of collateral shows, galleries that brought their own exhibitions, private foundations pulling their weight as well with all of their palazzos. Suffice to say, the lagoon was busy. As we know, it's a challenge to get anywhere fast in a city without cars and bikes, and it's very easy to get lost along the way, but there is, naturally, a lot of great art to see. This week, Art Angle co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by acting Editor in Chief Naomi Rea, who were all together at the vernissage and are now back to remotely chatting from Berlin, New York, and London respectively. After a very busy week, a look back at what it was like on the ground in Venice, beginning with the main show curated by Pedrosa (who was a recent guest on the podcast); the protests that took place around the Biennale art week; and finally the national pavilions, the nation-state pavilions, and all of the hits, misses, and stories that came out of it.

The art press is filled with headlines about trophy works trading for huge sums: $195 million for an Andy Warhol, $110 million for a Jean-Michel Basquiat, $91 million for a Jeff Koons. In the popular imagination, pricy art just keeps climbing in value—up, up, and up. The truth is more complicated, as those in the industry know. Tastes change, and demand shifts. The reputations of artists rise and fall, as do their prices. Reselling art for profit is often quite difficult—it’s the exception rather than the norm. This is “the art market’s dirty secret,” Artnet senior reporter Katya Kazakina wrote last month in her weekly Art Detective column. In her recent columns, Katya has been reporting on that very thorny topic, which has grown even thornier amid what appears to be a severe market correction. As one collector told her: “There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment. Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.” For instance, a painting by Dan Colen that was purchased fresh from a gallery a decade ago for probably around $450,000 went for only about $15,000 at auction. And Colen is not the only once-hot figure floundering. As Katya wrote: “Right now, you can often find a painting, a drawing, or a sculpture at auction for a fraction of what it would cost at a gallery. Still, art dealers keep asking—and buyers keep paying—steep prices for new works.” In the parlance of the art world, primary prices are outstripping secondary ones. Why is this happening? And why do seemingly sophisticated collectors continue to pay immense sums for art from galleries, knowing full well that they may never recoup their investment? This week, Katya joins Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth on the podcast to make sense of these questions—and to cover a whole  lot more.

Next week, the art world will descend into the Venetian Lagoon for the Venice Biennale, the most highly anticipated art event of this year. The Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa is at the helm of the prestigious group exhibition, which is now in its 60th edition, and his show includes more than 300 artists and collectives presented in the historic Arsenale and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. Many of these artists, who are largely based or from the global South, are on view for the first time in these revered spaces. There are multiple ways to look at the show and its title "Foreigners Everywhere," which is inspired by a famous work of the same name by artist collective Claire Fontaine. It is both an acknowledgement of the artistic positions of exile of the immigrant or outsider, but also importantly asks of the audience to think about who exactly is a foreigner... and who is not. Pedrosa argues that deep down we are all foreigners, and this exhibition, which the curator describes as a "provocation," arrives as the world is facing a multitude of emergencies centered around the very concepts of exile and belonging. Just as everything was coming together over the last weeks ahead of the April vernissage, Artnet's Kate Brown spoke to Pedrosa about what visitors can expect from "Foreigners Everywhere" and his overarching vision for the show. He shared his views on how one should navigate an exhibition of this scale, and discusses his background as a curator in São Paulo, which included organizing pioneering exhibitions of marginalized perspectives and histories during Jair Bolsonaro's populist reign in Brazil. The two also speak about Pedrosa's understanding of what it means to be a foreigner from both a political and artistic perspective.

Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art returns with its signature and much-anticipated biennial. Founded in 1931, the Whitney Biennial is one of the most historically important art events in the United States, a survey that brings together artists from throughout the country, and more recently, from around the world. Often controversial, the Whitney Biennial is viewed by art fans as more than just a show to enjoy. It is closely scrutinized as a statement about art now. Well, the 2024 edition of the Whitney Biennial has just opened here in New York, with the title “Even Better Than the Real Thing.” It is curated by Meg Olni, a curator-at-large, and Chrissie Iles, a veteran Whitney curator. It features just a little more than 40 artists laid out across the museum's galleries. Artnet's critic Ben Davis has written a take on the 2024 Whitney Biennial for Artnet—and so has Danielle Jackson, a critic and Artnet contributor. So, how does this show feel, how does it stack up to previous editions, and what does it all mean? Two art critics got together to hash it all out.

Well, it is the end of March, spring has sprung, and April showers are coming in fast and furious. We're back with the monthly Art Angle Round Up, where we focus our attention on three headline-making stories that have made the rounds in the last month. This week, Art Angle hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by Artnet brand editor William van Meter. First up is the latest from controversy-machine Damien Hirst. The former YBA enfant terrible is back in the news for fudging the dates of his signature formaldehyde animal series, which itself follows the news from a few years ago that those same sculptures "leaked noxious gas." Next up is a conversation about the International Center of Photography (ICP), which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Ben's story, titled "How Do You Tell Photography’s History? ICP’s Big Birthday Show Embodies the Struggle" and William's "The Exquisite Life of Photographer David Seidner" broach larger questions about what ICP's vision is as a photography museum and more broadly address the state of photography today. Finally, it's our birthday! In February, we marked 10 years of Artnet News, and the trio revisits some of the biggest stories published over the last decade, and the future of art media.

A few years back, electrifying bidding wars and monumental transactions routinely had us all on the edge of our seats in the auction room, but this sort of in-room excitement now feels a long way off. Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from the triumphant post-sale press releases that are just as routinely put out by the auction houses who are keen to signal confidence in the market and, of course, in their performance. But in 2023, there's no denying that the art market finally came back down to earth. It took a breather for a combination of reasons, including rising interest rates, geopolitical uncertainty, and let's not forget the crypto crash. But the point is not to wax poetic about the state of the art market because Artnet's Intelligence Report is all about data, and we have the numbers to back it up. Let's refresh with some top line figures: The average price of a fine artwork sold at auction last year dropped almost 16 percent from 2022. Total fine arts sales generated by the big three auction houses—that's Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips—dropped 23 percent year over year. And the total spent on fine art at auction in 2023 is down 12.7 percent. This week we have two speakers here to pull back the curtain on the findings of the latest Intelligence Report, from a conversation first recorded exclusively for Artnet Pro members. First, is Artnet's investigative journalist Katya Kazakina, who won a 2023 National Arts and Entertainment award from the Los Angeles Press Club for her cover story of the last Intelligence Report. Her feature story this time around is just as fascinating. It delves into the Oscar-worthy performances of those very auction houses. To the casual observer (and often, even to those in the art world) it's not that obvious how the houses carefully stage manage their proceedings and, sometimes, even the results. The practice has become all the more insidious following the repeal of a set of laws governing the auction houses in New York City. The second guest this week is Margaret Carrigan, another sharp market mind and the editor behind our insightful Artnet Pro newsletter "The Back Room." Read the full story at the heart of Katya and Margaret's conversation, and the entire Intelligence Report, now.

The contemporary art world is nothing if not confusing. It is simultaneously deeply frivolous, and takes itself way too seriously. Its business dealings combine total mystification with conspicuous consumption, and the exact mechanisms by which one type of art gets celebrated above another are very often impossible to figure out. If you've ever struggled to make sense of it all, the journalist, Bianca Bosker's new book is worth picking up. It's called Get the Picture, A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends who Taught Me How to See, and it joins books like Anthony Hayden Guest's classic True Colors from 1998 and Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World from 2008, as an entertaining behind-the-scenes chronicle of art, though in a very different and maybe even more confusing moment. Bosker previously wrote Original Copies (2013) about architecture in China that replicates famous world monuments, and Cork Dork (2017), where she went inside the world of fine wine to try to decode its rituals. For Get the Picture, Bosker inserted herself in the striving, less-visible layers of the art industry, just beneath the glamorous images. She works the booth at a satellite fair in Miami where a gallery's very survival hinges on a few sales. And as a studio assistant for a painter whose success becomes a major headache as speculators start flipping her work. In some ways, Get the Picture will confirm all of the worst stereotypes about the contemporary art industry, and in others is the story of someone who slowly learns how to look past the caricatures by throwing herself into the thick of it, finding her own way to appreciate some of art's more eccentric values.

It has been 17 years since James Fuentes first hung a shingle out under his own name. In the years since, he has carved out a unique position in the contemporary art world, representing an eclectic mix of older, sometimes overlooked artists, alongside younger, buzzier names. Prior to striking out on his own, Fuentes worked for a handful of high-profile gallerists, including Jeffrey Deitch, whose eye he first caught with an ambitious pitch for a reality television show about artists, an idea that was way ahead of its time, considering it was the early aughts. Fuentes has long been a mainstay of the Lower East Side, which happens to be the same area where he grew up. Between his first smaller gallery on the appropriately named St James Place, and later at a larger location on Delancey Street, he has watched neighborhood undergo seismic shifts. Amid all of the changes, he still regards the Lower East Side as a thriving and incredibly diverse place to live and work. Last year, Fuentes joined the ranks of East Coast dealers heading out West to open a gallery in the burgeoning art scene of Los Angeles. Just as he is set to mark the one year anniversary on Melrose Avenue, another major change is underway: a big move across town in Manhattan to the new gallery hub of Tribeca, into a 3,000-square-foot, ground-floor space on White Street. This week on the podcast, senior reporter Eileen Kinsella caught up with Fuentes to talk about growing up in New York City during the heyday of hip hop and graffiti art, and his unique approach to the art business, alongside the broader growth and changes in the art world at large.

On this week's episode, hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by the newly-minted Artnet Pro editor and veteran art journalist and critic Andrew Russeth. We're thrilled to have him as a part of our team, and he's making his Art Angle debut with another edition of the Round Up, where we discuss three topics making headlines and sparking conversation in and around the art world. The first subject is the opening of The Dean Collection at the Brooklyn Museum, a show featuring the collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys titled "Giants," which is generating a lot of buzz for championing the works of Black artists including Kehinde Wiley, Ebony G. Patterson, Jordan Casteel, Henry Taylor, and Hank Willis Thomas, among many, many others. But that's not the only reason it's in the news. Andrew edited a piece by resident Art Detective Katya Kazakina titled "Should Museums Show Art Owned by Patrons? It's Tempting. It Can Also Blow Up" that investigates the fraught history of institutions doing just that. Though Swizz Beatz resigned as a trustee of the Brooklyn Museum three months before the show opened, "Public museums, critics argue, need to guard their curatorial independence and should not be used by wealthy patrons to boost the value of their holdings." The next topic of conversation is about a long-standing issue of ownership and repatriation surrounding an ancestral sculpture from Africa that was bought and sold to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where it has resided since 2015. A recent push by the art collective Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) has resulted in a temporary loan agreement in which the sculpture will be shown at a local gallery in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and simultaneously live-streamed to the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Finally, on a lighter note, we turn to the recent news of Jeff Koons's art making its lunar landing after hitching a ride on the Odysseus Lander. Koons set a record in 2019 when his mirrored sculpture Rabbit fetched a total of $538.9 million, the most expensive price for a living artist at auction. In recent years though, his market has faltered, and the trio discusses if his moonshot will help send his prices back into the stratosphere.

The words the “Harlem Renaissance” have immense magnetism for vast numbers of people. In art history, however, the Harlem Renaissance has often been treated as a footnote to the main story of 20th century art. It’s often been given scant attention in textbooks, and even U.S. museums have historically given more attention to European movements of the 1920s, such as French Surrealism and Russian Constructivism, than to what was happening with Black artists in their own cities. A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism,” is out to correct the record. Curated by Denise Murrell, it places the explosion of creativity and experimentation by Black artists from the '20s to the '40s at the center of international art conversation in those years. The 160 works on view range from figures like Aaron Douglas and Jacob Lawrence, whose works have long been celebrated, to a host of less familiar names whose stories are not widely known. There’s so much to say about it. To get some perspective on what makes this show such a big deal, art critic Ben Davis spoke to Bridget Cooks. Cooks teaches art history and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and is the author of Exhibiting Blackness, an important 2011 book about the history of U.S. museums’s relationship to Black artists. Cooks also happens to be one of a star group of experts who was on the Advisory Committee for this Met show. With “The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism” drawing major attention, they talked about both the history of the Harlem Renaissance itself and the history how museums have treated the subject in the past.

Last month, much of the art industry was transfixed on the goings-on in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, where the Russian businessman Dimitry Rybolovlev and a group of Sotheby’s auction house representatives were taking turns on the witness stand.  The matter at issue was artworks that Rybolovlev had purchased via the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier. The Russian accused Sotheby’s of conspiring with Bouvier and defrauding Rybolovlev out of tens of millions of dollars in art sales and Sotheby’s denied any wrongdoing. The works in question are masterpieces, not least of which was Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi. That work later made headlines for a totally different reason, when Rybolovlev sold it at Christie’s for $450 million in 2017 Rybolovlev ended up losing his case against the auction house last month, and the verdict is likely the last gasp in a high profile art fraud dispute that has travelled to courtrooms all over the world over the last years. And the Sotheby's trial this January was just part of a wider story that actually tracks back to a time before 2014 when the Russian businessman spent around $2 billion acquiring a world class art, collection of art by the likes of Paul Gaugin, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse. His right-hand man in getting him these works was Bouvier. Their relationship soured though when Rybolovlev discovered that Bouvier was marking up the prices. In some cases, Bouvier would speak with Sotheby's to get works evaluated After years of litigation in court actions, the two men eventually settled out of court in December, 2023. While the details of their settlement are fully confidential, the proceedings with Sotheby's in January have shed light on the secretive world of our business dealings. Artnet’s Senior Editor, Kate Brown spoke about the case with Senior Market spoke with Eileen Kinsella, who has been following this dispute for years, since the very beginning and watched the trial in person last month.

The term “abstraction” gets thrown around a lot in the art world, usually as a vague catchall to describe an otherwise inexpressible style of painting or sculpture. Just going by the dictionary’s definition, “abstract” is described as being disassociated from any specific instance, or having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content. Today, abstract art is not in and of itself considered particularly revolutionary, it is just one of many approaches artists take in pursuit of their vision. But this wasn’t always the case, and the history and tradition of abstraction and abstract art is still rather new in comparison to the long stretch of art history. And there is a lot that can still be mined by looking back to the roots of the movement, to learn about what inspired artists' departure from traditional figurative and representational modes of art making—as well as by looking at how the reverberations of early abstraction can still be felt today. To delve into what abstractionism is, and highlight some of the most important historical practitioners, Artnet's Gallery Editor Annikka Olsen spoke to Artnet’s Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art Martina Batovic, and curator, collector and partner at Leslie Feely Gallery Dakota Sica.  

Artificial intelligence was one of the hottest topics in art in 2023—and we can predict that it will continue to be a major topic in 2024. We can debate whether we should be cautiously optimistic or in an existential panic, but most of us can agree that the impact will be enormous. Way back in May 2022, Art Angle co-pilot, art critic Ben Davis, talked about what A.I. means for art in an episode of the Art Angle in his book, Art in the After-Culture—just when the world was first being transfixed by images generated by Dall-E 2, and before ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022. The year and a half after that conversation brought a huge wave of fascinating—if unnerving—developments around the fields of art and creativity—the most human of pursuits. As we head deeper into 2024, what forms and aesthetics could emerge or take precedence? Recently, Ben put together a new essay, offering 10 speculative predictions about how generative A.I. might transform how art is made, how artists work, and what an audience expects from art. We found them very persuasive. Some are unexpected. Some are alarming. We will have to wait and see if he’s right, but things are moving pretty quickly, so we may not have to wait long. In a wide-ranging conversation, senior editor Kate Brown and Ben review some of the most memorable touchstones around A.I. and art from last year, before going in depth about a few of Ben’s predictions that jumped out from his article—if you want to read all 10, you can check out the full essay, “10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 1 of 2) and 10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 2 of 2).

We are well into 2024 now, coming to the end of January, and looking back at 2023, one of our favorite innovations was this monthly round up here at the Art Angle. Each month, we bring together Artnet News editors and writers to discuss the biggest art news developments of the last month, and take the pulse of what's happening around the world. This week, we have a fully-international cohort, with Ben Davis in New York, Kate Brown in Berlin, and Jo Lawson-Tancred in London. We also have a very diverse set of talking points today, including performance artist Marina Abramović's new skincare line (which may or may not actually be a work of art in itself); a spate of controversies dogging the national pavilions gearing up for the Venice Biennale; and some predictions from art advisors about what to expect in the art market this year.

The author Ishmael Reed is known as a major force in literature and has been called one of the key thinkers of multiculturalism. Born in 1938, Reed arrived with a bang in 1972 with Mumbo Jumbo, a vibrant, hard-to-describe novel that blends real historical events with outrageous fantasy, about a plague of dancing that breaks out, spread by Black artists and musicians, and a shadowy international conspiracy to contain its disruptive power. Reed’s storied career has included novels, essays, and polemics, as well as plays. And he has recently come out with a work for the stage that looks at how we tell the story of another giant of the late 20th century: Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquiat is today among the most widely known painters, and his life story is almost as famous as his art itself. He burst into the spotlight in the early ‘80s, first as a savvy street artist and then with his vibrant style of painting. By 1985, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the symbol of the 1980s art boom. By the end of the decade, he was dead of an overdose of heroin, at the age of 27. Reed’s play, titled The Slave Who Loved Caviar, is sharply critical of how Basquiat’s story gets told as one of self-destruction instead of exploitation. It homes in on Basquiat’s famous relationship with the edler Andy Warhol, which has been told and retold, in the painter Julian Schnabel’s famous 1996 film Basquiat, as well as more recently Anthony McCarten’s Broadway play, The Collaboration, soon to be a film, and in many other places. Like Mumbo Jumbo, The Slave Who Loved Caviar tackles the serious subject of how Black culture is treated in society, in a fantastic way. It features police investigators literarily reviewing the evidence that the white art world failed Basquiat. But it also has a Vampire aristocrat character, depicted as a present-day, Andy Warhol-like figure out to collaborate with a young Black artist, who goes by the name Young Blood. The play was performed in 2021 and 2022 at the Theater for the New City. It has just been published in a text by Archway Editions, with a forward and afterward where Reed responds to some of the criticism his take on Basquiat’s story stirred up then. This week on the podcast, Reed joins Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis to discuss his work.

If you like art and are on Instagram, then you probably know the account @freeze_magazine—that's freeze spelled with an E, like "help me, I'm freezing," not with an I, like the popular art magazine and art fair. It's certainly not the first art meme account, but with now more than 160,000 followers, freeze_magazine has gained a particularly large audience by turning the lens of internet humor on the foibles of the art world. Sometimes it pokes fun at inscrutable art speak, or vents relatable artist insecurities. Other times it uses the meme format to more cutting effect, criticizing the poor treatment of artists and workers who are at the lower rungs of the art world hierarchy. Importantly, in the years since the account blew up, the creator behind it, who goes by Cem A., has done something fairly unlikely. He's made the jump from meme-making to real-world exhibition making, based on his unique Instagram voice. "If you just have this good guy-bad guy dynamic in a meme, it's not really funny. It's more about creating something in between that shows different aspects" Cem says. "Beyond that, the one function of a meme is to just say, that 'the emperor has no clothes on' when that needs to be said." Cem has been tapped by high profile institutions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the Barbican in London to realize IRL projects that toe the line between digital culture, museum outreach, and conceptual art, in clever ways. Though best-known for a funny and witty internet persona, Cem has some quite serious things to say about what it means to use memes as a venue for criticism, as well as what it means to take memes seriously as a creative form of their own, and the strange evolving relationship between social media and art institutions.

Any short list of the most important art critics of the last decades would have to include Lucy R. Lippard. She would also be at the very top of Artnet's art critic Ben Davis's personal list of favorite writers about art. Lippard has written numerous important books, including Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1973, the book that defined what conceptual art was all about for many; as well as volumes like Mixed Blessings: New Art In a Multicultural America, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art; and The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society—each helping set the agenda for a different art historical moment. But Lippard has also been much more than a writer. She curated "Eccentric Abstraction" in 1966, helping to define what would come to be called post-Minimalism in sculpture. Her experimental and traveling card shows helped create the audience for conceptual, minimal, and land art. She curated maybe the first museum show of Second Wave feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in 1971, and was a part of the founding mother-collective behind Heresies, a journal that shaped the field of feminist art history. Radicalized by sixties activism, she participated in the Art Workers Coalition, a historic activist formation protesting against the Vietnam War and for equality in the museum world. She was part of many, many other collectives and activist groups thereafter, including the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in the early 1980s, a project she discussed with us on the Art Angle back in 2022. Now Lippard has written a new book called Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. It's a short-packed tome that surveys an eventful life through photos that catalog the items Lippard finds around her in the home where she has lived since moving from New York to the small town of Galisteo in rural New Mexico in the early nineties. It's a fitting way to tell the story of a writer who has thought so much about how images and words fit together, and how meaning emerges from place and community. This week on the podcast, Ben Davis speaks once again to Lucy Lippard about a life in and out of art.

If you follow the mainstream art world, you will know that for the last decade, one of the biggest stories has been a boom in new kinds of figurative painting. A visit to the recent spate of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing down, but nothing stays unchanged forever, and trend-watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge. Artnet News’s European editor Kate Brown has an essay out where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hypersentimentalism. This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

At the end of the year, it's become something of a tradition for people in all corners of the Internet to review the last 12 months and take a look to the future with a sort of "micro-forecast." The original idea of an "Ins and Outs" list began at the Washington Post in the 1970s, and is now a global sensation.  Here at Artnet, we decided to try our hand at a sort of list of our own, and tapped senior editor Kate Brown, national art critic Ben Davis, and columnist Annie Armstrong to weigh in on some of the more polarizing trends that came and went in 2023. Our biggest takeaway? There's not a whole lot of consensus out there, but we did our best. From the state of the art market to the new brand of shoes everyone seems to be wearing in our little corner of the art world, here's our take on the much beloved tradition.

"Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness." That's a quote from the great Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers that gets shared a lot, and is especially relevant for this week's episode of the podcast on the subject of art and joy. It's actually a little bit unclear what Albers means when she says that "art is a different kind of happiness," different from what? While many websites and even an art fair have borrowed this turn of phrase, it's difficult to find the original source. But the sort of fuzziness of the origins of the quote is perhaps symbolic of the subject itself. Art and happiness seem obvious enough—art gives people pleasure. People like art, looking at art, being surrounded by art, and talking about art. These things are all part of the definition of a life that is rewarding. But if you look closer to idea that art is happiness, it becomes more slippery, because most of what is considered important art is actually quite serious. The notion of art = happiness might even sound low-brow to a lot of listeners, conjuring up the PBS painter Bob Ross cooing that there are "no mistakes, only happy accidents." Comedies, too, rarely make the cut when it comes to awards for best picture or lists of all-time great films, and that's because art that takes emotions like fear, loneliness, or anger, and puts them in a form where we are compelled to look at and reckon with them. After all, that is one classical idea of what good art does—the Greek philosopher Aristotle's idea of art as catharsis. Or maybe the idea of happiness in art is considered lowbrow because it's corrupted by commerce. Getting back to that Anni Albers quote, it turns out to be from a 1968 interview with the artist for the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art, in which she's being asked about the value of craft. She says that she thinks that a lot of the late abstract expressionist painters, the people working in the style that had dominated U.S. art at that time, were trying too hard to go for psychodrama and seriousness. She said: "there's this too-conscious searching of your soul, which very often just turns into this kind of intestinal painting." But that's what Albers is drawing a contrast to, when she says in her full quote: "I have this very, what you call today, square idea, that art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness. The focus on angst as importance can distract from the pleasures that make art fundamentally valuable." She adds, "I find art is something that gives you something that you need for your life." That's a simple definition, but it means that the kind of happiness Albers is talking about isn't necessarily about art that just shows you happy things, obviously, though it can be that too. It can just be the happiness of an idea, finding its exact right form. This week on the podcast, we're doing something experimental. Artnet News is an art website, and we cover a lot of the stories around the controversies and personalities within the art-world writ large, and the art news is almost always by way of definition, about heavy matters. So as we wrap up this year and look to the next, we asked some of our writers to take some time from their busy work days and tell us about a specific piece of art that delights them. Artworks: Philip Dawe, The Macaroni, a real character of the late masquerade (1773)  Edouard Manet, The Balcony (1868–69)  Albert Edelfelt, Boys Playing on the Shore (Children Playing on the shore) (1884)  William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1900–04) Kano Masanobu, Bodhidarma in Red Robes (late 15th century) Gustav Klimt, The Black Feather Hat (1910) Tatsuo Miyajima, Painting of Change (2020) Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All (1997) Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art (1942)

Most loyal Art Angle followers will be familiar with the curator Klaus Biesenbach. The German-born artist made his mark in Berlin in the 1990s, founding the city's biennale and one of its most-beloved art institutions, Kunst-Werke. He moved West, across the water, becoming director of MoMA PS1, and chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before moving even further west in 2021 to take up a directorship at MOCA, Los Angeles. Biesenbach gained a reputation for leveraging the power of celebrity, working with artists and stars like Marina Abramovic and art-adjacent creatives like Patti Smith and Bjork; he is known for creating and capturing social moments while also rethinking the social nature of museums. Now, he’s back home in Germany, heading up not just one, but two of the country’s most important museum projects, in a post he called “once-in-a-life-time honor.” One museum is a highly symbolic historical treasure, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe. The other, is a museum still to come, the massive Berlin Modern, which is set to open next door to the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2026. Artnet News's Berlin-based senior editor Kate Brown checked in with Biesenbach just as he was closing a major retrospective dedicated to Isa Genzken and while the foundation is being laid at the Berlin Modern. 

Well, we made it to the end of the year (almost!), and we are back at the Art Angle with our monthly Round Up, where we bring together some of our esteemed reporters to talk about the big stories that are swirling in the air. Joining host Ben Davis this week to chat are senior editor Kate Brown and senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella. As always, there is a lot to talk about this month. First up, we'll discuss the the state of the art market as evidenced by the recent art auctions in New York, ahead of the final crash of art fairs of the year taking place in Miami. We'll also talk about the state of politics and culture in Italy, which interestingly enough, now involves a conversation about J.R.R. Tolkien, the beloved author of Lord of the Rings. Finally, we discuss artist Anish Kapoor and his Vantablack, ultra-black artworks, which are on view now at Lisson Gallery in New York.

"I was like reborn," the art critic Clement Greenberg once remembered, "it was the most important event in my life." The event in question was his encounter with Sullivanian therapy. His biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, once wrote that it would not overstretch the facts to say that after the late '50s, Clem's comportment in the art world can only be understood in this context. Yet despite how large Clement Greenberg looms as the most impactful U.S. critic of the 20th century, few people know this history. A new book called The Sullivanians, Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune is raising the subject once again, as literally one chapter in a much larger narrative. A lot of other people shared Greenberg's experience of rebirth. From the 1950s to the 1980s, hundreds of bright, educated people looking for purpose and community passed through the doors of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis on New York's Upper West Side. Formulated into a doctrine by Saul Newton and Jane Pierce, this experimental therapy promised to liberate devotees from both creative and sexual repression. In the course of the 60s, it would evolve into a multi-decade experiment in polyamory, collective living, and group child rearing, before eventually coming apart in scandal when the inner workings of the group were exposed in the 1980s. Recently, the author of The Sullivanians, Alexander Stile, joined Ben Davis to talk about both about the Sullivan Institute's contact with U.S. art at mid-century, and more importantly, about the larger story of what this group became and what it represents now.

One of the biggest art events of the year is currently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That, dare we say, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition is “Manet/Degas.” Through more than 160 works of art, including landmark loans from dozens of institutions, it puts into dialogue two of the most famous French painters of the 19th century, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, born two years apart. The show has been a blockbuster, first when it debuted at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and now in its current iteration in New York City, and has attracted a chorus of rave reviews. One of the highlights, of course, is Manet's painting Olympia, a stunningly modern portrait that is on view for the first time on this side of the Atlantic. But there's so much more. Artnet’s art critic Ben Davis recently had a moment to go to the exhibition, and spoke to editor Kate Brown about what stood out to him at this major museum event. We also dug into some of the unexpected history behind some of the artworks he discovered through the Met show, which may actually change the way you look at Manet and Degas, together and separately.  

Marcel Dzama has an immediately recognizable style as a visual artist, but his energy has far exceeded the realm of visual art. Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1974, Dzama got his start with the Royal Art Lodge, a group of students at the University of Manitoba who banded together in the mid-1990s. Their collaborative working method, where one artist would start a work and others finish it, recalled the "Exquisite Corpse," a parlor game associated with the Surrealists. As Dzama developed his own independent practice, moving to New York in 2004, he continued to explore the surreal in watercolor and ink. His work is replete with dancers and masked figures, whimsical animals, groovy monsters, human-plant hybrids, and grinning moons, all in an intricate but deliberately naive style. Dzama has permuted these offbeat interests into a variety of other media as well, from zines to dioramas to films. He's done album art for They Might Be Giants and Beck, made films starring Kim Gordon and Amy Sedaris, and created costumes for both a Bob Dylan music video and the New York City Ballet. Now, he's expanding his list of collaborations even further. New York's performance art biennial, PERFORMA, is returning, with a roster of artists commissioned to do new work in experimental performance of various types. Marcel Dzama's piece, titled To live on the Moon (For Lorca), is among the highlights promised by the 2023 program. In it, the artist fuses multiple threads of his practice, blending costume, dance, drawing, and film. And he also returns to his surrealist inspirations. Specifically, this work is Dzama's tribute to the life and work of Spanish Surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca. It incorporates both Lorca's tragic life story and an obscure, unproduced, Surrealist screenplay called A Trip to the Moon, which Lorca wrote while he was living in New York in 1929. It's fascinating material to dig into on many levels. Ahead of the opening of his show at the Abrons Art Center, Dzama came into the Art Angle studio to talk with critic Ben Davis about his work and interests, the impact of Federico Garcia Lorca, and about what surrealism does and doesn't mean today. "Marcel Dzama: To live on the Moon (For Lorca)" is on view at the Abrons Art Center from November 11–14, 2023. 

In 2018, Helen Molesworth was unceremoniously dismissed from her position as chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The move proved controversial among industry insiders, many of whom cast it as an example of an institution punishing its employee, a straight talking, strong willed feminist, for refusing to march in line. But for Molesworth, whose resume also includes stints at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, The backlash didn't change the facts. For the first time in years, she was a curator without a home. Since then, Molesworth has struck out on her own, and she's been as active as ever. She's guest curated critically acclaimed exhibitions of at David Zwirner, Jack Shainman, and International Center of Photography. She's also hosted a hit podcast, Death of an Artist, about Anna Mendieta, led a series of filmed artist interviews, and been profiled by the New York Times. The forward momentum has given the curator little cause to look back. That is, until now. This month, Phaidon will release Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art, a career spanning collection of Molesworth's essays, all previously published in exhibition catalogs and art journals. Most of the written pieces are about artists, people like Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Lisa Yuskavage. But the real subject of the book, of course, is Molesworth herself, and it's a rich text in that regard. "I trained as an art historian" Molesworth explains, "I really believe in art objects as knowledge producers, and for better or for worse, in the history of the 20th century, museums are the institutions that allow and convey that knowledge. Ahead of the book's release, Artnet News senior writer Taylor Dafoe sat down with Molesworth to talk about the project and the period of deep personal reflection it inspired.

In today's global discourse, “Asia” often takes on an expansive, sometimes oversimplified, identity. Especially within the global art market, this vast continent is frequently painted with broad strokes, overshadowing its rich tapestry of cultures, intricacies, and nuances.  Over the past two decades, major global auction houses have been touting “the Asian market,” highlighting the fact that about one-third of its sales go to Asia. But exactly where and to who? We always hear about sales of blue-chip western galleries at art fairs in Asia, but little on their counterparts from the region. Is the art fair frenzy even sustainable in Asia as the art fair roster is getting more crowded? What about the region’s homegrown talents who are raved by local players but getting little attention in the rest of the world? And what is the future of Asia’s art market amid the economic uncertainties and geopolitical tensions? These are some of the questions we aim to address with The Asia Pivot, our latest bi-weekly newsletter focusing on the art market of the Asia-Pacific region available to Artnet PRO subscribers. The Asia Pivot will bring exclusive market data, analysis, and insights about the region, breaking this big cluster into bite-size takeaways, while shining a spotlight on the local market and rising stars. We'll also trace the growing presence of the Asian diaspora and Asian market players’ increasing outreach in the western market. To mark the launch of the newsletter, Artnet, in partnership with Asia Now in Paris, presents “New Frontiers and Fresh Challenges: The Future of the Art Market in Asia and the Asian Diaspora." Taipei and New York-based art advisor Gladys Lin and Seoul-based collector JaeMyung Noh joined Artnet News's Vivienne Chow at Asia Now in Paris to discuss current market trends and challenges, as well as the hopes and fears of those living in the region. Drawing their various experiences and observations, Lin and Noh shared their insights that are rarely heard beyond the region.

This week, the Art Angle is returning with this month's edition of the Round Up, featuring Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown, National Art Critic Ben Davis, and Global News Editor Naomi Rea. After a whirlwind two weeks of back-to-back art fairs at Frieze London and Paris+, the writers discuss if Art Basel's newest fair can usurp the flagship event in Basel as the most important art fair on the cultural calendar, and if Paris really has what it takes to be a "new" art market hub. Next, Ben Davis delves into the recent articles he wrote addressing why a critical analysis of "parasocial aesthetics" is so necessary, after artist Devon Rodriguez's followers attacked him on social media. Finally, the trio address the news that rare chemical compounds were discovered in analysis of paint from Leonardo's Mona Lisa, part of a broader interest in the process of restoring major artworks.

In December 2020, Congress approved funding for a new Smithsonian Museum dedicated to women's history to be built on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. But our nation's capital has actually been home to a dedicated women's museum, the vaunted National Museum of Women in the Arts, since 1987. The institution, founded by Wilhelmina Cole Holliday and her husband Wallace, was the first of its kind in the world. Its mission was simple, to educate viewers about women's long overlooked contributions to art history. In its 36 years of existence, the museum has amassed an impressive collection of over 6, 000 works by more than 1,500 international artists including Frida Kahlo, Berthe Morisot, and Louise Bourgeois, as well as contemporary figures such as Judy Chicago, Nan Goldin, Mariah Robertson, and Amy Sherald. Less than six months after Wilhelmina's death in March 2021, the museum closed for its first major renovation, a planned $67.5 million project slated to take two years. The work has included a revamp of the performance hall, adding a new learning commons with a research library and education studios where there were once offices, as well as 15 percent more exhibition galleries. Plus, behind the scenes space for collection storage and conservation. On the eve of its reopening, Artnet News spoke with NMWA director Susan Fisher Sterling about the institution's past, present, and future, and the work that still needs to be done to ensure proper recognition for women artists.

For more than 30 years, the acclaimed British sculptor Conrad Shawcross has been preoccupied with the concept of time. Throughout a career defined by blurring the boundaries between art and science and devising ambitious constructs that ask audiences to contemplate the world around them, Shawcross has experimented with different perceptions of time, from its measure in relation to human lives and cosmic events to how it operates as a force of change. Shawcross’s latest exploration on the subject began with an unlikely source: the luxury Scotch whisky maker Royal Salute. Drawing inspiration from the incredible expanse of time contained within an opulent 53-year-old Royal Salute whisky blend, Shawcross created a spectacular kinetic sculpture that merges a massive, sapphire blue glass disc with an oak spindle and oblong crystal decanter to represent how time functions on multiple levels. The new artwork, titled Royal Salute Time Chamber by Conrad Shawcross and the second collaboration in Royal Salute’s Art of Wonder series, debuted at the 2023 edition of Frieze London last week with a discussion about the project between Shawcross and veteran auctioneer and Artnet News contributor Simon de Pury. On this episode of the Art Angle podcast, we present a special live recording of their fascinating conversation.

How can art institutions adapt to meet the changing cultural landscape in the coming decades, and what are the new models that will evolve to fill these needs? Fotografiska, a private, for-profit photography museum, is offering a novel possibility. Fotografiska's self proclaimed mission is to offer a unique cultural destination where people can discover world class photography alongside one of a kind programming with top tier restaurants and bars on site. With expanded late night hours open until 11 p. m. on Fridays and Saturdays, Fotografiska believes it gives the public a more flexible platform for encountering culture than the traditional, often sterile museum setting. But it's a model that's not without skeptics, who worry that prioritizing experienced culture risks undermining curatorial rigor. Founded in Stockholm in 2011, today Fotografiska is a global enterprise with locations in Tallinn, Estonia and New York City, and the international expansion continues with a Berlin outpost that opened just last month with exhibitions by celebrated artists including Juliana Huxtable and Candice Breitz at the Kunsthaus Tascheles—a destination with a unique cultural history for the city. The museum's first location in Asia is also set to be unveiled this month in Shanghai. Behind Fotografiska's ascent is Yoram Roth, the institution's chairman, and a Berlin based entrepreneur focused on arts and culture. With a career background that ranges from entertainment and music production to publishing, Roth brings a dynamic energy, unique vision, and infectious attitude to the art sphere. This week, Artnet editor Katie White spoke to Roth about Fotografiska, and a new era of cultural experiences.

Hal Foster is one of the most well-known thinkers about art today. In a career that spans several decades, he is known for important much-cited books including The Return of the Real from 1996, Design and Crime from 2002 and most recently, Brutal Aesthetics from 2020. He teaches at Princeton and writes for a broader audience at Artforum and the London Review of Books, among many other places.  And anyone who has studied art theory or contemporary art is probably familiar with a masterful book he edited called The Anti Aesthetic. Put out by the Bay Press in 1983, the slim, purple, 150 page collection brought together nine essays by figures including Jürgen Habermas, Rosalind Krauss, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, plus an introduction by Foster himself, theorizing in exciting, contradictory, and new ways what it meant to write about, make, and see art. It set the tone for a lot of the criticism and reception of art theory in the 1980s and beyond, and helped make theory cool in art. Indeed, this small book has cast such a long shadow that Foster has just published a text for Artforum called The Anti Aesthetic at 40, where he assesses its legacy four decades on from its publication. The work reminds one of the sense of intellectual excitement and seriousness of purpose that drew many into writing about art in the first place. A sense that feels very embattled now. This week on the podcast, Hal Foster joins Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis to discuss the recent past and present of art criticism. 

The fall art season is now officially in full swing. We've had a big round of fairs already around the world with the Armory Show, Independent 20th Century, Photofairs and more opening simultaneously in New York, and the second edition of Frieze Seoul and Kiaf Seoul taking place in Asia, plus all of the galleries and museums that have begun to roll out some of their biggest offerings of the year. This week Artnet News's national art critic Ben Davis speaks with with Europe editor Kate Brown and Art Detective columnist Katya Kazakina on another episode of the Art Angle Round Up to take on some of the topics that have been animating the art discussion for the past month. On the docket this week are three topics: why painting is suddenly achieving a state of total dominance in the art galleries, the latest developments around the spectacular $86 million criminal scheme associated with the former art dealer Inigo Philbrick and the spate of lawsuits swirling around the art market, and about the case of the artist who tried to take $84,000 from a Danish museum and call it art.

Harry Everett Smith is an odd figure to come across in an art museum. That's because he's not known primarily as a visual artist at all. For most, Harry Smith is probably best known as the compiler of the legendary Anthology of American Folk Music, a landmark collection of early recordings published in 1952, which became a huge influence on the folk music revival and through that, on rock in the 1960s.  Smith was born in 1923 and died in 1991, and his biography reads like a who’s who of cultural icons. He was a big figure in the Beat Generation and a close friend of Allen Ginsberg, appeared in one of Andy Warhol's screen test films, and he was also a tireless collector of all kinds of cultural objects, from out-of-print records to Ukrainian Easter eggs.  Smith was also an experimental filmmaker and artist, an early student of anthropology, and an acolyte of a variety of mystical belief systems. Now, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is hosting “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith," an unusual, but thrilling new show, with an unusual curator, the artist Carol Bove, herself one of the most celebrated sculptors working today.   Bove has had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art and installed work on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many other accomplishments. Working with Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney, Dan Byers, director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Art, and Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives, Bove has dedicated herself to helping organize this show, to tell the story of Harry Smith.  In advance of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,” which opens October 4 at the Whitney, Carol Bove spoke to Artnet News’s chief art critic Ben Davis about Harry Smith's life in art and what it is about this hard-to-categorize figure that fired her imagination and will do the same for visitors to this show.  “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024. 

What does the future of the art market look like? It's a big and thorny question that cannot possibly be answered with a few simple words. From the big picture issues like how artificial intelligence will factor into business decisions and the global economic situation, to the smaller and more particular aspects, like which multi-million dollar collections will hit the block, and what the expansion of mega-galleries means for the art ecosystem... there are a lot of factors at play. At the Armory Show's Live event last week, Artnet News's senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella hosted a panel of experts including collector Alain Servais, art advisor Megan Fox Kelly, and gallerist Suzanne Vielmetter to discuss what the future may hold. Megan Fox Kelley is the founder and director of Megan Fox Kelley Art Advisory, as well as a member and former president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. Her practice includes advising clients on acquisitions and sales of works of art for their collections, estate planning and execution, strategic planning, and feasibility studies for museums, exhibition planning and administration, collection management, and fine art appraisal services. Suzanne Vielmetter is the founder and director of Vielmetter Los Angeles. Since founding the gallery in 2000, she has been committed to presenting artists from a wide range of diverse backgrounds with a focus on idea-based and political work. Alain Servais is a globally-recognized collector and founder of the Servais Family Collection. For more than 20 years, Servais has focused on underrepresented and museum quality art, which he believes is significant and worthy of preservation. This week on the podcast, we present the live-recording from the Armory Show event.

There are endless ways to write about art, but if you tell someone that's your job, the first thing they're likely going to think is that you write art reviews, though the fact of the matter is that very few people actually do. In other words, the art critic is a key character in the mythology of the art world, as a champion who spots talent and interprets art for the public, and simultaneously as a villain who serves as a gatekeeper and a killjoy. Yet the central function of the art writing ecosystem has also been facing real difficulties. Recently, there's also been a fresh round of debate about the state of criticism today. Is art writing now too positive, too promotional, or not critical enough? What should the goal of writing about art even be? And if there actually is a problem with art criticism, what's the cause and what's to be done about it? Artnet News's national art critic, Ben Davis, wrote a two-part essay for the site that delves into many of the thorny and often contradictory issues facing the field. Ahead of the kickoff of the fall art season, Europe editor Kate Brown speaks to Ben about the state of art criticism. \\ Is Art Criticism Today Too Affirmative? That's the Wrong Question to Be Asking | Artnet News Sean Tatol's Manhattan Art Review is a bracing new voice in New York art criticism. Ben Davis assesses his manifesto, "Negative Criticism."

We're back this week with The Roundup, where we dissect some of the biggest headlines that have been causing a stir over the last weeks in the art world and beyond. This week, Europe editor Kate Brown is joined by International art critic Ben Davis and Wet Paint gossip columnist Annie Armstrong to discuss three headline-making stories. At the top of the list is the very dramatic goings on at the British Museum in London, where a curator is under investigation for stealing what might be somewhere around 2,000 objects from the collection and the ripple effect its had on the international art community stretching from China to Africa, and ultimately resulted in the stunning resignation of director Hartwig Fischer. Next up is a conversation about an intriguing development in the United States court system, where a computer scientist made a bid to secure a copyright registration for an artwork that was made by A.I. that has been summarily been shot down. Finally, on a lighter note, the trio heads over to the tony enclave of the Hamptons to Montauk, a typically quiet town that's in the midst of an art world dust up. A turf war involving Andy Warhol's former estate and a physical altercation between two art dealers, Max Levai and Adam Lindemann, that has proved to be one of the juiciest stories of the season.

Today we're going to be talking about a relatively new and novel career within art, one you might not have thought of because it didn't even really exist until recently. And that is... the conservator of new media art. Anyone who has been to a museum recently will know that contemporary art comes in a dizzying array of forms, an artist today is as likely to be working with computer code or cutting together video in Adobe Premiere Pro as they are to be toiling in front of the easel. At least since the 1960s, artists who want to stay relevant have felt the need to explore the latest technology, even as simply what counts as the latest technology changes at a faster and faster pace. This churn of experiments with art and technology is now old enough that it has its own history, which is where the field of new media conservation comes in. Artnet News reporter Jo Lawson-Tancred recently wrote a feature exploring the field and talking to a variety of key figures within it. A particularly fascinating aspect of the subject is how what seem like literally technical questions open onto much bigger debates about what art even is and what it even means to preserve it. You'd think that art from our near past would be easier to grapple with. It is one of the symptoms of the sped up nature of our times that it might actually pose more challenges than art from the more remote past. Jo's essay even seems to suggest that the problem is only getting more intense even as this whole new specialist field develops to deal with it. This week on the podcast, Artnet's Ben Davis speaks to Jo about the current state of digital art conservation, and what challenges the future may hold.

So... how is the art market doing these days? If you want to know the answer, you’re in luck, because the latest issue of Artnet’s biannual Intelligence Report just dropped. It’s a special edition, marking the five-year anniversary of the report, which we debuted back in 2018 as a way of fusing Artnet’s unparalleled market data with the industry-leading abilities of our market journalists. Unfortunately, the findings this time around are less than festive—in fact, the art market has taken a major hit this year. To quickly review a few bracing data points collected between January 1 and May 20 of this year—auction sales of trophy lots $10 million dollars and above plummeted 51 percent compared to the equivalent period last year; the fine-art auction market as a whole tumbled 14 percent, to $5 billion dollars worldwide; and, tellingly, the much-speculated-upon Ultra Contemporary art sector of work by artists born after 1974 fell down by 26 percent. After years of steady growth in the market, these are very troubling numbers—and if you’re an auction house, or an auction consigner, you may be a little freaked out right now. So hat does this mean? Should art professionals be panicking in the streets? Or should they be doing something else… and maybe making a lot of money in the process? Recently these questions were at the heart of a live conversation, exclusive for Artnet Pro members, that editor in chief Andrew Goldstein conducted with the Art Detective columnist herself, senior reporter Katya Kazakina, based on Katya's tour-de-force cover story on the state of the art business in the new Intelligence Report.

In John Hughes's classic 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the cohort of truant teenagers make a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago, and spend some time with the classic painting by George Seurat, titled Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. One one of the most famous artworks in the world even before that star turn, it has been studied and referenced and riffed on endlessly, and is in fact the subject of at least one musical, and a whole host of academic articles. Painted in 1884 when Seurat was just 27 years old in his self-created pointillist style, the large canvas depicts an idle summer afternoon on an island in the middle of the river Seine, with multiple fashionably dressed figures glimpsed out and about enjoying a day of socializing and relaxing by the water. Artnet's Katie White is the creator and frequent scribe of a popular art history column for the site called "Three Things," where she revisits well-known works of art and offers new ways to look at them. Her article on Seurat's La Grande Jatte has been one of the most popular editions of that column, where she dives into the research about the painting's inspirations and explores some of the unexpected debates about the meaning of this classic image of summer leisure. As we near the end of the summer season, we thought we'd all take a small (virtual) vacation from the news churn, and take a day trip to visit a favorite work of art from the past. This week, Katie speaks to Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis about this celebrated work of art.

Despite being among the most-celebrated surrealists of the last century, British born artist Leonora Carrington is still overlooked as compared to her male counterparts, some of whom were close friends and collaborators. One surrealist was even her husband for a time—the famous painter Max Ernst. But over the years, more and more people are coming to know Carrington's work. The 2022 Venice Biennale was named after one of her books, titled The Milk of Dreams, about which curator Cecilia Alemani said "it describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, and become something or someone else." This kind of a liberated self was a cornerstone of Carrington's outlook on the world and a key to understanding the fascinating images she created. Her life story is one of world building. Dissatisfied with her well-to-do family's vision for her future, Carrington sought freedom through boundary-pushing art. After being kicked out of schools she eventually fell in with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s, who shared her thinking about art making and also how to live. But a dark era was dawning in Europe, and ultimately Carrington ended up in a mental asylum where she underwent a brutal treatment. And so she left Europe, her family, and everything behind her, and eventually landed in Mexico, where she found the liberation that she was searching for. She'd spend the rest of her days there, and she would become a national treasure. In many ways, she never looked back. If you look at Carrington's paintings, there is a constant haunting from both her youth and the rooms, spaces, and landscapes of Europe. Though totally estranged for decades from her family in Europe, one day, a family member came knocking on her door. It was a cousin, Joanna Moorhead, who had heard by chance of Carrington and went to tracke her down in Mexico City. Moorhead, a journalist whose writing has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, among other titles, came to know Carrington very well over long nights and days of talking, and she wrote a book in 2017 called The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington that chronicles her relationship with her cousin and her cousin's life and achievements in art. Moorhead has returned in more ways than one to Carrington's world since the artist died in 2011. Her newest book, out on August 22nd, delves into those spaces that defined Carrington's life and her paintings. Called Surreal Spaces, The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, the book is a result of Moore's careful study of Carrington's intricate works. This week on the podcast, Europe editor Kate Brown speaks to Joanna about the places that formed and informed the work of such an important artist.

It used to be that the art news slowed down in the summer months, but these days, it seems like the art news never takes a break. So we're trying something a little different this week. With so much going on, instead of interviewing just one person for the podcast, we have three of our best writer-editors together to chat about some of the stories that have been in the air in July. This week, Artnet News global art critic Ben Davis speaks to Europe editor Kate Brown and business editor Tim Schneider about three stories. The first item is the news that Frieze, the international art fair chain, has acquired New York's flagship fair Armory Show and Expo Chicago, and what that means for the state of the art market. The second item covers recent developments in the world of NFTs, including a drop from the Jackson Pollock Studio that sold out within the first few hours, and Melania Trump's skirmish with NASA about some space-themed NFTs, plus the state of crypto in the art world at large. Finally, the trio discuss how artists have dealt with Barbie in the past, as a subject of inspiration and satire, and the release of both Greta Gerwig's film based on the Mattel doll and Christopher Nolan's opus on Robert Oppenheimer are filtering through the culture—and which side the art world comes down on in the big Barbie versus Oppenheimer face off.

It’s every art lovers dream. To be alone, after hours, inside one of the world’s most august art museums. Away from the throngs of selfie-stick-wielding tourists and the din of the crowd, it’s just you and the masterpieces. That dream was a reality for the ten years that author Patrick Bringley spent as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s sharing that experience (and a lot more) in his new book. Titled All The Beauty In The World (The Metropolitan Museum and Me), the book chronicles the daily realities of working at one of the most popular and busiest institutions in the world, and is also a deeply personal story and love letter to the Met. From getting to know virtually every corner of the sprawling institution, having a front-row seat to the installation and display of the world’s premiere art collection, to learning to identify and commune with all types of visitors, and forging relationships with the tribe of fellow blue-suited guards he came to know and love. This week on the podcast, Bringley speaks candidly with senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella about how his time at the museum intertwined with his personal life, starting with the tragic loss of older brother to cancer, and ultimately finding love and starting a family, all against the backdrop of his second home at the museum.

The company’s origins are the stuff of legend. A scrappy band of Santa Fe artists with a penchant for building fantastical installations from mounds of trash each write down random words on slips of paper. They draw two from a hat, thus christening themselves Meow Wolf. That was 15 years ago. This weekend marks the opening of the fourth permanent Meow Wolf exhibition, located at the Grapevine Mills shopping mall outside Dallas, Texas. Featuring a story conceived by Wisconsin sci-fi and fantasy author LaShawn Wanak, and work by 30 Texas artists who collaborated with in the in-house artist team, "The Real Unreal," as the exhibition is titled, transforms a former Bed Bath and Beyond into an expansive art playground. Like the House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s first permanent location, the new exhibition appears to begin in the real world, in an ordinary suburban house—but the mundane trappings of family life quickly give way to the strange and unfamiliar, the boundaries between reality and fantasy blurring and disappearing. Since the 2016 opening in Santa Fe, Meow Wolf has amassed a devoted following for its interactive, immersive exhibitions, which use art to open portals into unknown realms. Obsessive fans have taken to Reddit to unravel all the secrets of the Meow Wolf universe. The Real Unreal is the company’s first step in tying together the disparate sites and their inter-dimensional narratives in a more readily apparent way. And while you still may not have heard of Meow Wolf, the company is poised for even more explosive growth. Under the guidance of CEO Jose Tolosa, who came over from Viacom in 2022, the punk art collective-turned art and entertainment production company has plans to bring its spectacular artistic vision to a city near you, and to create new ways for you to engage with its unique, otherworldly storyline from the comfort of your own home. What started out as a crazy art funhouse, fueled by maker culture, has struck upon a business model that is primed to become an entertainment juggernaut. Ahead of the public opening in Grapevine, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone spoke with Tolosa not only about the company’s epic, world-building ambitions, but about staying true to its roots. So forget about the metaverse—Meow Wolf’s handmade universe, at once artisanal and high-tech, is about to blow your mind.

Just about everyone who works in the New York art world knows Lisa Schiff, an art advisor to the rich and famous who worked with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio for many years. She was a highly visible presence at art fairs, on museum boards, and generally around town, running her glamorous boutique firm from a first floor gallery space in Tribeca whose entry wall was covered with a memorable floor to ceiling plant installation. So media savvy that she had a PR firm on retainer, Schiff was frequently quoted as an expert in the art press, and she had longstanding relationships with journalists in town, including here at Artnet News, where she even wrote an op-ed last summer on the scourge of "meme art." That's why it came as such a shock to a lot of us this past May when a lawsuit dropped accusing her of essentially using her advisory firm to run a pretty extravagant Ponzi scheme. So what exactly happened with Lisa Schiff? What is she accused of doing, and where do things stand today? This week, Artnet News's ace market reporter Eileen Kinsella dives into the saga.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. To mark the occasion, an international event called Picasso Celebration has been organized, with 50 museums throughout the world running 50 different shows looking at the legacy of Picasso, among the most well-known artists of the 20th century. Certainly the most unusual and most talked about of these is not a “celebration” of Picasso at all. The Brooklyn Museum is hosting “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small have worked with the famous Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby to create an art show that takes its cues from Gadsby’s 2018 blockbuster Netflix comedy special Nanette. That show was, among other things, a blistering argument about the sexism of art history, the art industry, and, specifically, of Picasso.“It’s Pablo-matic” has itself been at the center of a wave of criticism in recent weeks. Rachel Corbett, Artnet's deputy editor, speaks to Ben Davis, Artnet’s national art critic, who wrote a long essay about the show, the reaction to the show, and what both mean for the site.

When artificial intelligence first arrived in the art world in 2017, it was received warmly and with open arms. A.I.-generated works by artists like Obvious and Mario Klingemann were fetching hundreds of thousands at auction, art fairs like Scope in Miami welcomed A.I. art, as did institutions, which eagerly staged exhibitions touting the new technology. Artists working with A.I. were embraced; there was no media outrage or backlash—A.I. art, by and large, was seen as a good thing.  Not so much today. The latest chapter in A.I. art's story has seen artists decrying the tool's widespread use and its violation of creators' rights, with generated artworks sparking outrage online and off. More recently, a handful of industry leaders have even warned of A.I.'s extinction-level threat.  So what changed? Why has A.I. art fallen so out of favor? That's exactly what pioneering A.I. artist and innovator Ahmed Elgammal discusses in a new op-ed for Artnet News. As an A.I. researcher, professor in the department of computer science at Rutgers University, founder of the A.I. art platform Playform, and the developer of AICAN—one of the earliest art generators—Elgammal is well-placed to observe the trajectory of A.I. art. In his view, the gulf between yesterday's and today's era of A.I. art is down to one thing: the emergence of text-to-image generators. He argues that while these new generators have made it a cinch to generate art, they have flouted ethical considerations, and effectively killed creativity.  To dig into his argument, Artnet News's art & pop culture editor Min Chen spoke to Elgammal to learn more about the state of play for A.I. art—why early A.I. art took off, how text-prompting has diminished the creative process, and where artists eager to work with A.I. should go from here. 

Over the past five decades, American artist Jenny Holzer has been engaging in thought-provoking interventions into public space that unflinchingly address politics, power, violence, and vulnerability. The New York-based artist investigates language as both content and form, and she works with unconventional mediums to do this including street signage, T-shirts, and light projections, but also sculptures and painting. Her poetic and often minimalist works are extremely impactful, creating a tension between knowledge and truth and emotion. Last year, Holzer curated an acclaimed exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois at the Kunstmuseum Basel. More recently, she received Whitechapel Gallery’s prestigious Art Icon award. She’s also the subject of a major solo exhibition on view until August 6 at a preeminent institution in Germany, the K21 in Dusseldorf. On the occasion of the show, which includes many key works spanning her career, Artnet’s Europe editor Kate Brown caught up with Holzer, one of the foremost artists of her generation.

If you follow the mainstream art world, you will know that for the last decade, one of the biggest stories has been a boom in new kinds of figurative painting. A visit to the recent spate of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing down, but nothing stays unchanged forever, and trend-watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge. Artnet News’s European editor Kate Brown has an essay out this week where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hyper-sentimentalism. This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

In the Covid summer of 2020, the art world was jolted by a very different kind of drama when reports surfaced that MCH Group, the Swiss corporation best known as the parent company of Art Basel, had entered talks to sell a significant equity stake to Lupa Systems, the private investment company founded by none other than James Murdoch. For listeners who haven’t spent years devouring media-sector or political gossip, James Murdoch is the fourth of six children of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, now most infamous for presiding over the hard-right coverage beamed out through Fox News in the U.S. and various overseas properties via his News Corp conglomerate. The proximity of the Murdoch family to Art Basel initially sent some people in the art world into hysterics. One conspiracy theory even held that James was acting as a front for his father, who would take control of the planet’s best known, most prestigious art fair and… well, it was never quite clear what he would do, or why he would care, but obviously something dastardly and irreparable was about to happen, and we should all prepare for the worst. Yet people interested in digging soon found out that James Murdoch is very much his own man with his own resources. Although he spent decades in the family business, including prominent roles in some of its satellite TV and entertainment companies, he cut his final tie to the empire when he resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020. He has been a public critic of Donald Trump as far back as 2017, and through Quadrivium, the foundation James and his wife Kathryn started in 2014, he has funneled substantial philanthropic resources into counteracting climate change, promoting evidence-based solutions in science and health, expanding voting rights, and pushing back against online extremism.He’s also a mogul in his own right. When Disney paid a knee-buckling $71.3 billion in 2019 to acquire nearly all of the Murdochs’ entertainment assets, James received a reported $2.2 billion from the deal. He launched Lupa Systems shortly after, with sources claiming at the time that he would invest up to $1 billion of his wealth through the company. By fall of 2020, MCH Group’s shareholders had approved the deal to make Lupa Systems the company’s new “anchor shareholder,” with the option to buy up to 49 percent of its shares. But in the time since, we’ve heard relatively little from James Murdoch himself about how MCH Group and Art Basel fits alongside the other ventures in Lupa’s portfolio, including media properties like the Tribeca Festival, advanced technology startups, and sustainability projects Ahead of the 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel, however, Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, managed to sit down with James at Lupa Systems New York offices to hear his thinking firsthand.

In the studio of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s an expected sound—vibrations of a spider working on its web—a sound normally imperceptible to the human ear, but that doesn’t make it any less real. The recent technological feat of capturing and recording the sound of a spider is just one of the many pursuits undertaken by the Berlin-based artist. Saraceno is known for working with experts from the field of science, engineering, and architecture among others, to create works that exist beyond the traditional bounds of the art world. These research intensive, often groundbreaking installations and projects render visible our interconnectedness with one another and the ecosystems in which we exist. They’ve even earned him some world records. It’s an ambitious undertaking and it has solidified him as one of the most impactful artists of our generation. For Saraceno’s first major U.K. solo exhibition, which opens on June 1 at Serpentine in London, Saraceno and his collaborators are moving beyond the walls of the museum of Serpentine South, from the Royal Parks in London all the way to the rural communities of Argentina where people are fighting to stop lithium extraction in their lands, to Cameroon where Spider Diviners challenging our notions about knowledge.At the Serpentine, “Web(s) of Life” delves into critical and urgent questions about how we as people coexist with other life forms and how technology intersects with the climate emergency itself. As the last of his works were en route to London, Artnet News’s Europe editor Kate Brown joined the artist in his bright and beautiful Berlin studio.

The landscape of technological advancement in the art and design world is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of groundbreaking concepts like the Metaverse, NFTs, and easily accessible A.I. available to anyone with an Internet connection. Amid this rapidly changing landscape, it is crucial to evaluate the success and relevance of these platforms as they exist now, and how they might evolve in a future we are just beginning to comprehend. To delve into the significance of these technologies, Artnet and Morlach Whiskey organized a captivating panel discussion titled “Offscreen: The Current and Future State of Art, Design, and Technology.” Moderated by Artnet News’ executive producer, Sonia Manalili, this engaging conversation brought together multi-disciplined artists, Trevor Paglan, Khyati Trehan, and Sebastian Errazuris, each with their diverse expertise, to share their insightful perspectives on the evolving digital domain.

What is connoisseurship, and what does it mean in the present day when Chat-GPT or even plain old Google can answer nearly any art historical question with a single keystroke? It’s a question that lies in the heart of the art world and was the topic of an enlightening panel discussion titled aptly, “The Art of Connoisseurship: Cultivating Expertise in the 21st Century” at the 2023 edition of TEFAF New York last week, which was recorded live for the Art Angle podcast. On this week’s episode, a very special live recording of the conversation, moderated by Artnet News’s editor in chief Andrew Goldstein and featured Dominique Lévy, collector, advisor, gallerist, and co-founder of the newly launched gallery venture LGDR; Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director and COO of the Design Leadership Network, and author of the forthcoming book, “The New Antiquarians: Young Collectors at Home” published by Phaidon/Monacelli in June 2023; and Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, co-founder of the Leiden Collection—the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age art—and chairman of the Electrum Group.

The arrival of A.I. will profoundly change the art world—if it hasn't already. A.I.-generated works have proliferated with the rise of A.I. art generators and large language models from DALL-E to ChatGPT, making their way into galleries and in some cases, winning prestigious awards. But the question remains: is it art, if it's been dreamed up by an algorithm? Or do our existing definitions of art and art-making require rethinking in the age of machine intelligence? To help us answer these questions and more, the Art Angle looked up K Allado-McDowell, a leading voice in a rapidly evolving field. As a long-time A.I. researcher at Google A.I., K founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program, which since 2016 has nurtured artists including Refik Anadol. And as an artist, K has created works—from an opera to numerous books—alongside the language model GPT-3. In a conversation with Artnet News' Art & Pop Culture editor Min Chen, K shed light on their practice, their experiences with machine intelligence, and their view on how A.I. is changing the face of art.

One of the most exciting things about being an art journalist is that art as a subject is ridiculously protean: what it looks like is always changing, how we engage with it is always changing, and the role it plays in society is always changing too. What that means is that you constantly need to shift your perspective in order to see it properly. Searching for the correct lens on art, if you’re really good and really lucky, sometimes you even get to name that lens, like Pop Art, for instance. Artnet News’s national art critic Ben Davis has written an essay that illuminates a recent shift in art that has been making big waves among the cognoscenti. It’s a new tendency that he calls quantitative aesthetics, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein on the Art Angle podcast to discuss it.

February 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of photographer Ryan McGinley’s seminal exhibition “The Kids Are Alright” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which ran from February through May 2003. It was the 26-year-old’s solo exhibition debut, and the 20 photographs captured a particular place and time in New York City, in the shadow of September 11th, 2001 and the AIDS crisis; before the invention of Instagram and TikTok. It wasn’t just the latest downtown-meets-uptown youthquake salvo that reverberated around in the art world, but a photo exhibition that made McGinley a bona fide, post-millennial star—and shifted the culture. At that time the Whitney was still in its Upper East Side location and “The Kids Are Alright” was the most talked about photo show at the museum since Nan Goldin’s exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1996. Overnight, Ryan became the superstar art photographer of his generation, documenting his decadent world. After him, this bohemian lineage basically slams shut with the onset of social media. This week, the Art Angle presents an oral history of the exhibition and its influence featuring Artnet News style editor William Van Meter in conversation with McGinley himself, as well as artists Marc Hundley and Jack Walls; photography critic Vince Aletti, and the show’s original curator Sylvia Wolf.

Today in the spring of 2023, it feels almost impossible to escape news, rumors, debates, think pieces, open letters, diatribes, scandals, lawsuits, or almost any other form of human exchange about artificial intelligence. Whether the specific focus is on large language models like Chat-GPT or text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, the discourse around A.I. technology has only gotten more expansive, more heated, and more perplexing since last fall. That was when a genuinely surreal series of events on the live streaming platform Twitch helped surface the escalating tensions between A.I.-powered image generators and human artists. While the story in question hinged on an accusation of plagiarism, it also served as a launchpad into an in-progress existential crisis in the art world—an existential crisis that keeps intensifying as the influence, accessibility, and aesthetic quality of algorithmic image generators keeps leveling up. In October, Artnet News business editor Tim Schneider interviewed contributor and friend of the pod Zachary Small about the Twitch controversy and the larger questions facing visual culture in the era of big A.I. In many ways, that conversation is even more relevant now than it was back then. If you missed it the first time, or if you just want to review the state of play in the increasingly wild landscape of art and tech, here’s your second chance...

When you hear the name Roy Lichtenstein, an artistic style immediately comes to mind. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s use of comic books as an inspiration for his brightly-colored Pop Art painting was groundbreaking, and even shocking. Today, he is one of the most instantly-recognizable and widely known of all painters, and yet a quarter of a century after his death, the subject of Roy Lichtenstein's source material has unexpectedly become a hot topic once again. In the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for thousands of dollars; in 1995, just a few years before he died, his painting Nurse sold at auction for $1.7 million, and then in 2015 the same painting hit the auction block once again, this time selling for a staggering $95 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings in the world. While marketing that sale, Christie’s auction house said that the imagery in Nurse was drawn from what it called a “comic romance novel” of the early 1960s. What the auction house did not mention was the actual person who drew the original panel Lichtenstein used as source material for that painting was the golden age comic Arthur Petty, and in the world of comic art, this lack of respect for Lichtenstein’s sources is a big, big deal. In museums, the artist’s status may be unquestionable, but crossover into the parallel universe of comic art and Lichtenstein’s status is viewed as a symbol of the disrespect to comics as an art form, and the man himself is seen as a thief who copied hard-working artists without even bothering to credit them by name. Instead of healing over time, this particular rift seems to have only become more inflamed as Lichtenstein’s stock has soared. Some of the most famous voices in comics from Dave Gibbons, the artist behind the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen to Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus, to Neil Gaiman, writer of the legendary comic series The Sandman have all been outspoken, blasting museums for failing to credit the unique voices of the comic book artists who inspired Roy Lichtenstein. The story of the many meanings of Roy Lichtenstein is a story of the shifting relations between museum art and comic culture, of money, morality, and the law; and of how meaning in art is always shifting. At least, that’s one takeaway from the new streaming documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. This week, national art critic Ben Davis spoke to the film’s director James L. Hussey to discuss the issues it raised.

The art market of today is a thriving global industry with a diverse community of buyers and sellers from all over the world who compete privately, and often (very) publicly in the race to acquire art, decorative objects, and even sneakers and watches. That’s why having an edge when it comes to data and information is so crucial, and why Artnet’s Price Database is an indispensable tool for any serious market player. The art market has come a long way from its origins as a small, exclusive business catering to a select group of connoisseurs in major cities around the world. Prices of artworks were once closely guarded secrets, making it inaccessible to the general public. That all changed when, in 1989, Artnet revolutionized the art market by introducing transparency through its Artnet Price Database, which provides clear and precise information on the actual prices of artworks. With data from more than 1,900 auction houses worldwide, Artnet has recently released a major update to the Price Database, incorporating cutting-edge technology, seamless mobile integration, and design, to enhance its value to collectors and art professionals. This week, Artnet News’s editor in chief Andrew Goldstein discusses the role of data in the art market, the transformative power of the price database, and its exciting new era with Albert Neuendorf, Artnet’s chief strategy officer, and Fabian Bocart, Artnet’s chief data scientist.

In recent months, headlines around the world have blared the news of a startling new trend of activism where protesters physically attack famous artworks with paint, food, and glue. The activists are trying to draw attention to global issues of climate change and museum ethics, and agree or disagree, you can’t argue that their tactics are making waves and fines or jail time aren't stopping them. This week we’re re-airing a conversation that delves into this complicated issue. On October 14, two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, walked into the National Gallery in London and threw a can of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while wearing shirts that read JUST STOP OIL. The action was part of a larger cycle of disruptive occupations and direct action by environmentalists in the UK, demanding dramatic action to cut fossil fuels in the face of climate change—but the Van Gogh soup attack by far drew the most media attention. Indeed, the tactic of using attacks on artworks to get their message out has caught on with campaigners this year, with environmentalists in at least half a dozen countries making headlines with spectacular actions in museums—gluing themselves to famous pieces, spray-painting the walls around them, or throwing food at artworks. These actions have, in turn, touched off a fierce debate among observers and activists alike about the art-attack tactic. Is it the kind of desperate move needed to shock the public into action when nothing else seems to work? Or do the actions repel otherwise sympathetic observers, isolating a movement that needs to scale up dramatically?   London-based art journalist Farah Nayeri is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of the recent book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age, which looks at how the digitally empowered activism of the last ten years has changed what the public expects from a museum. In an essay for Artnet News responding to these new museum actions, she wrote about the long history of vandalizing art for a cause, from suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus more than a century ago, to protests within British museums against oil giant BP’s sponsorship over the last decade. This week, we're revisiting Artnet News’s national art critic Ben Davis conversation with Nayeri about this history, and what the stakes of the new protests truly are.

Next to the Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is quite possibly the most famous portrait of all time. The 17th-century painting inspired a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and last year, was the target of climate activists protest, and it’s on view right now as part of the Rijksmuseum’s once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of works by the Dutch master. This week, while the Art Angle is on hiatus, we’re re-airing an episode about the centuries-old secrets of Vermeer that are just now coming to light. You've seen it. A woman in a blue turban set against a black background looking over her shoulder like you just called her name. She's wearing a heavy pearl earring in one ear, and her skin is so luminous it looks like she swallowed a light bulb. Yes, we're talking about Girl with a Pearl Earring, one of the most famous paintings in the world. It's been reproduced countless times on mugs, t-shirts, and pillows. It has inspired poems, novels, and movies. But the artist who created Girl with a Pearl Earring? He remains shrouded in mystery. Strangely little is known about Johannes Vermeer. He lived in Holland in the 17th century and died in 1675 at the age of 43. He made fewer than 36 paintings. And audiences around the globe are fascinated by his portrayals of quiet domesticity. It's always been assumed he worked in the same kind of solitude that he often depicted in his paintings. But new research is challenging that assumption. Over the past several years, museums have used cutting-edge technology to get under the surface of Vermeer and learn more about how he actually worked. To discuss Vermeer's many secrets and the artist we thought we knew, Artnet News's former executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Washington, D.C.-based contributor Kriston Capps.

In a new feature film called Inside, an art heist goes terribly wrong for a thief named Nemo. Nemo is played by the world-renowned actor Willem DaFoe, well-loved by the art world already for his performance in the 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate, where he played Vincent van Gogh. In the ultra-contemporary plot of Inside, Dafoe’s character Nemo is not a world famous artist, but rather an anonymous robber who’s after a self-portrait by Egon Schiele. The artwork is not where it is supposed to be inside the ultra-modern penthouse he’s just broken into. Carefully laid plans seem to be going awry. Precious minutes are lost. Then, the alarm system locks down, leaving Nemo sealed off from the world while in the center of Manhattan. If you haven’t seen Insideyet, be advised that there are spoilers scattered throughout this episode. So, Nemo is now stuck in a resplendent box of glass, steel, and concrete, with little more than some exotic fish, luxury furniture, and a multimillion dollar art collection. On-screen alone for practically the entire film, Dafoe’s character begins to battle against the degradation of his body and spirit—to deal with the latter, the artworks in the apartment become something like a central character, as does Nemo’s own blossoming creativity. The artworks in the apartment, which were carefully curated, drive the plot and deepen the themes. There is a 1999 work by Maurizio Cattelan, a large photograph of a man taped to the wall with tons of duct tape, sarcastically titled A Perfect Day. There is also David Horvitz’s 2019 neon that hangs over the character’s struggle, with a sort of torturous prescience: it says “All the time that will come after this moment.” To build out the idea of a real art collection, there are more emerging stars. Kosovan artists Petrit Halilaj and Shkurte Halilaj’s work for the 2017 Venice Biennale is worn by Nemo when the penthouse’s temperature drops. And a video work by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck from 2016, which was filmed at the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is among the artworks in the film that conjure questions around humanity, planetary survival, and climate crisis—which is an undercurrent theme of the movie. On this week’s episode, European editor Kate Brown speaks to the film’s director Vasilis Katsoupis and art curator Leonardo Bigazzi about this captivating and claustrophobic feature, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale film festival last month and is about to hit theaters in the United States.

All around Europe, there are small brass bricks inlaid into the ground before the front doors of apartment buildings and houses. These bricks are like a decentralized memorial—they are known as Stolpersteine—which means stumbling stones—and engraved on each one is the name of a citizen who was persecuted or exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. At an apartment building in Berlin that stands at Wielandstrasse 15, you will find the name of Charlotte Salomon on one of these stumbling stones. As it says on the little brass brick, she was born in 1917 here; she fled Germany to France in 1939; she was interned at a French concentration camp in Drancy; she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. Charlotte was also a visionary young artist, and she created a hugely ambitious work of art called Life or Theater. Made in just over a year while living in exile in France, Life or Theater consists of more than 1,000 individual gouache paintings, sectioned into three acts. It is an artwork that defies easy categorization. It is something like an autobiography, but also not quite. There are characters that are just like her own family and friends, but their names are slightly changed. There is music that is meant to accompany her vividly painted scenes, which tell the story of her coming of age as a young woman and an artist. The story shows what played out on Wielandstrasse in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power; the persecution of her family; the death of her mother from suicide, and later her grandmother. It tells about her suffering in exile, it discusses a murder. It also captures the birth of a brilliant artist who finds a lifeline in making art. It is hard to neatly summarize everything Life or Theater addresses—but as Charlotte put it herself, the piece is “something crazy special.” Not only is the work picturesque in the way it is painted and formally ground-breaking, Charlotte managed to achieve something deeply intimate and personal but also universal with this work. She gave it to a friend for safekeeping before she was taken to Auschwitz and it survived the war and is now in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. People do not seem to be as aware of Salomon as they should be giving the pioneering, avant-garde nature of this artwork. On the occasion of an upcoming exhibition of Life or Theater at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Artnet News’s Kate Brown was joined by the show’s curator Irene Faber, who is also the curator of collections at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and an expert on Charlotte’s life and art.

Given the manifold political, climate, and technological crises unfolding just two months into 2023, one wonders if that ominous future our species so fears is much closer than we anticipated. It is a tense and dramatic time, but it does further underscore the importance of the cultural figure Hito Steyerl. The German filmmaker’s bold artworks investigate emerging technologies and media, and she often sites these inquiries within society and politics, globalization, and capitalism. Yet despite the complexity of the subject matter and her research-intensive process, Steyerl’s works are readily enthralling, often manifesting as highly ambitious, immersive architectural environments. It is no small wonder that her work has reached a global stage. Last year, her largest-ever retrospective, called “I Will Survive,” wrapped its European tour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And just last month, her exhibition called “This is the Future” opened at the Portland Art Museum, where it is on view until mid-June. On this week’s episode, European editor Kate Brown spoke to Steyerl to tackle some of the questions about what artificial intelligence, the metaverse, crypto, and an increasingly imperiled natural world might mean for us.

In ancient mythology, figures like Athena and Aphrodite were exalted as paragons of virtue, strength, and beauty. Artnet and Cadillac invited three artists to interpret the goddess theme through their individual lenses and to create new work to celebrate the return of the brand’s Goddess hood ornament on the new ultra-luxury EV CELESTIQ. These images will be offered through an online auction presented by Artnet to benefit the nonprofit organization Free Arts NYC. Last week in Los Angeles, the three contemporary photographers—Ming Smith, Petra Collins, and Dannielle Bowmann—joined Artnet News’s executive producer Sonia Manalili to discuss their unique approaches to the medium, and how to interpret the iconic goddess imagery for a new generation.

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint died nearly 80 years ago in relative obscurity, but you might not immediately realize this if you look her up today. Her paintings, large-scale, vivid, symbolic, and abstract masterpieces infused with mysticism and spirituality, seem uncannily contemporary. But that is not the only reason; af Klint is also now a bonafide star, an art-world household name. In the past several years alone there has been an explosion of interest in her work, catalyzed in no small part via her blockbuster 2018 Guggenheim show in New York called “Paintings for the Future.” Af Klint’s body of work, which bravely departed from the figurative art that was popular at the turn of the 20th century when she was working, predates the first Western abstract compositions by titans like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. It was a staggering revelation, to say the least. But moving beyond the elevator pitch and the catchphrases that have emerged around af Klint as we rush to fit her into an art historical canon that has woefully excluded women, is essential. Up until recently, many of the intricacies of her life, work, ambitions, and friendships, were not well-understood. That is part of the reason why Julia Voss decided to write the first-ever biography on the artist, which came out in English at the end of last year. Voss, a prominent German journalist, art critic, researcher, and curator, spent the better part of a decade learning Swedish and meticulously retracing af Klint’s life and her movements in Europe. Voss combed through more than 20,000 notebooks that belonged to af Klint as well as her massive archive, which the artist had left to her nephew. The biography includes several revelations about af Klint’s inner life, desires, and activities. We are headed into another two years that is sure to bring increased attention and reflection on the work of Af Klint. Her massive catalog raisonne is due out next month, edited by Swedish curator and art critic Daniel Birnbaum. An exhibition called “Swedish Ecstasy” at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels opens this week. Next year, for the first time ever, there will be a show dedicated to Kandinsky and af Klint, curated by Birnbaum and Voss. On this week's episode, Voss joins Artnet News European editor Kate Brown to dive into some of the more fascinating and under-considered aspects of the enigmatic and groundbreaking artist.

One art movement has become a household name in a way that few recent art movements can match. This is Afrofuturism. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installing an Afrofuturist period room to the blockbuster movie Black Panther and its sequel to an upcoming survey of the movement at the National Museum of African American history and culture, Afrofuturism is being canonized in art and beyond. It's an extraordinarily rich tradition, bringing together influences from experimental jazz and Detroit techno sci-fi and fantasy, art and technology. With Black History Month here, we decided to dig into Afrofuturist art history with Ytasha Womack. Womack is the author of Afrofuturism, The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. She's also an artist herself, actively working in the tradition now. So how can you define the afro futurist aesthetic? What are some of its touchstones? And why has there been such a surge of excitement around Afrofuturism in the recent past? Artnet News National Art Critic, Ben Davis, sits down with Womack to find out.

For Art Basel, the most well known art fair in the world, the fourth quarter of 2022 marked the end of one era, and the beginning of another. In early November, leadership of the company transitioned to Noah Horowitz, who returned after a roughly year-long stint at Sotheby’s to become the first ever CEO of the same fair brand where he served as director of the Americas from 2015 to 2021. But clearing Horowitz’s path to the chief executive’s office was the one and only Marc Spiegler. Spiegler shocked the art world in October 2022 by announcing that he would end his decade-long campaign as Art Basel’s global director at the end of that year (though he will stay on as an advisor through June of this one). During his time at the helm, Spiegler oversaw a transformation of the company across multiple dimensions, including doubling the annual number of Art Basel fairs; dramatically expanding the company’s digital presence; quintupling the size of its staff; responding to a global pandemic; and much more. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, if you look closely at these shifts, they mirror back some of the most important ways that the art business as a whole has morphed during the 21st century. Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, sits down with Marc in mid-January for the first extended interview he has given in his post-Basel professional life.

Born in Norilsk, an industrial Siberian town inside the Arctic Circle, Nadya Tolokonnikova was just 18 when she moved to Moscow and became a founding member of the Russian street art and performance art collective Voina in 2007. It was her strong feminist leanings that then inspired her to cofound P***y Riot, known for playing incendiary highly political punk music while wearing balaclava head coverings. The group rose to fame following a now legendary 2012 performance of the song “Punk Prayer,” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, when Tolokonnikova and two other P***y Riot members were arrested and then convicted of “hooliganism.” She spent close to two years incarcerated in a brutal labor camp in Mordovia, Russia. But her time behind bars has not deterred Tolokonnikova from continuing to act as an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, or from leveraging the power of art in the name of activism. This week marks the opening of her first ever gallery exhibition for P***y Riot, held at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the new performance Putin’s Ashes, in which Tolokonnikova leads a coven of women in a witch-like ritual to drive the Russian president from power, burning a giant portrait of Putin to the ground in the process. Ahead of the show’s opening, Artnet News senior reporter Sarah Cascone spoke to Tolokonnikova about the challenges of presenting conceptual performance art in a white cube gallery, and how she continues to remain optimistic about political change in her native country despite the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and her continued persecution at the hands of the Russian government, which in December 2021 labeled her a “foreign agent.”

Here at Artnet, we typically look to thorough data and the hard facts to tell us what to make of the wily, unpredictable art world. But every now and then, it’s important to remember that ours is an industry based on unorthodox minds and a reverence for avant garde expression, so magical thinkers ought to remain a legitimate resource to our team of reporters. To that end, our Artnet News Pro Wet Paint columnist, Annie Armstrong recently spoke with Micki Pellerano, who has earned himself the nickname "The Art Warlock", to discuss the occult's role in the art world, and why so many esteemed minds in our industry look in earnest to astrology for guidance. Pellerano is an artist himself, working mainly in drawing and sculpture to express his affinity to ritual symbolism and esotericism. His work has been on view at esteemed spaces such as MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, and the 2019 Venice Biennale. More than that, though, he has also been the art world's go-to astrologer, hosting one-on-one sessions to art world luminaries such as Jenny Hval and Alissa Bennet from his studio in Brooklyn. Pellerano’s study of the occult is ongoing, and in this conversation, he asserts his belief that astrology's impact is inextricable from the advancement of humankind, and certainly from the canon of art history.

Well, it's happened again. Tim Schneider has gone prophetic, again. At the beginning of every year, our trusted art business editor goes through the Sisyphean task of assessing his predictions for the most recently-wrapped year in the art world, and lays down his prophecies for the next 365 days to come. As is now tradition, for his first Gray Market column of the year, Soothsayer Schneider makes a set of predictions specific to the murky machinations of the art market, each of which must be able to be proven true or false 12 months later. (For the purposes of the podcast recording, we've homed in on four very specific predictions to elaborate on, but the full list of eight is available to readers.) From the rise of artist-branded merchandise (think Basquiat-emblazoned hoodies, dog collars, and phone cases) to the death of an art fair, plus predictions about the state of the market amid skyrocketing interest rates and the ongoing war in Ukraine, here's what you should be prepared for in the year to come.

Anyone who's driven by a car dealership in the U.S. has probably seen them: Inflatable nylon figures with smiley faces, bending and twisting in the breeze. These roadside attention getters are known in the marketing world as "tube men" or "sky dancers." Paul Chan calls them "Breathers," and they have played a central role in the artist's practice since he debuted his own uncanny renditions of the dancers in 2017 at Greene Naftali gallery in New York. The swaying figures also symbolize the artist's own winding approach to his practice, and the need, sometimes, to take a breather. After working primarily with video early in his career—including violating sanctions to shoot a video essay in Baghdad during the U.S. occupation—Chan grew exhausted by screens. He left art production for five years and opened his own publishing house, the beloved indie outfit Badlands Unlimited, which has put out eclectic titles ranging from Saddam Hussein's speeches on democracy to the interactive e-book What Is a Kardashian? Chan made his return to visual art after realizing that those car-lot tube men could be turned into offscreen animations. Now, the "Breathers" are the centerpiece of a major solo show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, open through July 16. Artnet News's deputy editor Rachel Corbett sat down with Chan—a recent winner of the MacArthur 'Genius' grant—to talk about the tyranny of screens, his early adoption of crypto, and the importance, in every artist's life, of simply taking a break.

Well, what do you know? The year of 2022 has officially come to a close, and here at The Art Angle, we are in a reflective. It was an amazing year for the show. We interviewed luminaries like Venice Biennale curator to Cecilia Alemani, artist Marina Abramović, critic Jerry Saltz; we delved deep into the scandalous history of Documenta as well as the whole Board Ape Yacht Club phenomenon, and the new revolution and how we think about surrealism today. The turning of the calendar year, however, also marks a big change around here, with Julia Halpern, Artnet News's executive editor and frequent Art Angle host, moving on to new adventures. She was an invaluable force in shaping the show and shaping Artnet News generally, so she'll be very dearly missed and has our deepest gratitude. We wish her the best of luck. So with all this in mind, as The Art Angle takes some time off to prep for what is looking like an incredible 2023, we thought we would leave you with a repeat of one of our favorite episodes of the year. An episode we think may also prove resonant in the year to come. Well, it may be both crypto and literal winter right now but Tim Schneider's sweeping and truly ambitious Metaverse explainer episode provides a really terrific look at the way that art may evolve into its next digital era. We hope you enjoy it. See you in 2023 and Happy New Year from The Art Angle.

Well, the end of the year is upon us and it is also the end of an era here at Artnet News. Our fearless executive editor, Julia Halperin, is leaving her post. As a sendoff for Julia, we thought we'd in the year, as we usually do with something lighthearted, The Artnet News Year End Quiz. Given the fact that no one has spent more time editing news digests early in the morning, editing art news through the day, and researching the art market, Julia is our perfect contestant and we hope that you at home, our Artnet News Super fans, can play along as well. 

Inside the art world, one of the defining narratives of the past decade has been a renewed push for gender and racial equity. Much of the attention in this realm has focused on the dramatic overrepresentation of white male artists in everything from museum collections and exhibition programs, to auction sales and gallery rosters. Overtures to correcting the imbalance have been so prevalent in trade-media headlines, institutional marketing, and day-to-day conversations that many, if not most, art professionals seem to be confident that the industry is slowly but steadily reversing generations of deeply embedded racism and sexism. But how much has the art world really rebalanced the scales? It turns out that the answer is much less than we hoped––at least if we look past the hype at the actual data. Enter the latest edition of the Burns-Halperin Report, a multipronged data-led project helmed by Charlotte Burns, the veteran art journalist, podcaster, and founder of Studio Burns, and Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin. At the core of the Burns-Halperin Report is a one-of-a-kind database encompassing hundreds of thousands of entries painstakingly compiled from U.S. museums, global auction houses, and top commercial galleries. The data quantifies how little has changed for artists in three historically underrepresented demographics since as far back as 2002. It also leaves the rest of us facing a lot of hard questions about why the art trade at large believes it’s doing so much better at neutralizing its biases than it actually is. On this week’s episode, Charlotte and Julia join Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider to walk us through the report itself, how it came together, and what it all means

On October 14, two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, walked into the National Gallery in London and threw a can of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while wearing shirts that read JUST STOP OIL. The action was part of a larger cycle of disruptive occupations and direct action by environmentalists in the UK, demanding dramatic action to cut fossil fuels in the face of climate change—but the Van Gogh soup attack by far drew the most media attention. Indeed, the tactic of using attacks on artworks to get their message out has caught on with campaigners this year, with environmentalists in at least half a dozen countries making headlines with spectacular actions in museums—gluing themselves to famous pieces, spray-painting the walls around them, or throwing food at artworks. These actions have, in turn, touched off a fierce debate among observers and activists alike about the art-attack tactic. Is it the kind of desperate move needed to shock the public into action when nothing else seems to work? Or do the actions repel otherwise sympathetic observers, isolating a movement that needs to scale up dramatically? London-based art journalist Farah Nayeri is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of the recent book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age, which looks at how the digitally empowered activism of the last ten years has changed what the public expects from a museum. In an essay for Artnet News responding to these new museum actions, she wrote about the long history of vandalizing art for a cause, from suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus more than a century ago, to protests within British museums against oil giant BP’s sponsorship over the last decade. This week, Artnet News's national art critic Ben Davis spoke to Nayeri about this history, and what the stakes of the new protests truly are.

What does it mean to be an art critic today? How do you choose what to write about and how do you even choose what to look at in an age where seeing art in person, which used to be the most common way people encountered art, has now arguably become the rarest? In this episode, Andrew Goldstein speaks with Jerry Saltz, the most famous, most lionized, and arguably the most influential art critic we have. A self-described "failed artist" who only became a professional critic at age 41, Jerry wrote for the Village Voice, Artnet Magazine (the predecessor of Artnet News), and other publications before becoming New York's resident art critic in 2006, where he's been on a run of glory that has included winning the 2018 Pulitzer for criticism. But while he's well known for his exuberant, beautifully wrought criticism, he's even better known as what might be termed an "art critic in the expanded field." He shares his opinions every day with some half a million followers on Twitter and Instagram, alongside frequent TV appearances and a half dozen books, the latest of which, called Art is Life, has just been published by Riverhead Books.

This special episode of the Art Angle is produced in partnership with Belmond.  Recently, four photographers got a dream assignment. They were dispatched into the Maya Riviera to capture the distinctiveness and beauty of the landscape. But it wasn’t all as tranquil as it sounds. The creators battled hurricane season and extremely tight deadlines to get the shots they wanted. The result of their hard work is “Fotografía Maroma,” a collection of photographs commissioned by Belmond. The images will go on display at Maroma, Belmond’s hotel in the Riviera Maya, when it reopens in May 2023. Before then, however, they are going on a world tour. It starts with a display in the Miami Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach and continues with presentations at ZonaMaco in Mexico City in February and Photo London in May. In partnership with Belmond, the Art Angle spoke with the curators behind the project. Fariba Farshad is co-founder and director of Photo London and Patricia Conde is the founder of Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City. Together, they gave us the lowdown on why they chose these four photographers, how the project came together in record time, and what it shows us about Mexico’s vibrant photography scene.

What do Sterling Ruby, Oscar Murillo, Kennedy Yanko, and Aomoako Boafo have in common? Beyond being some of the most sought-after contemporary artists of the last decade, they are all veterans of the prestigious Rubell Museum Residency program. Helmed by its namesake founders, the mega-collecting duo Don and Mera Rubell, the residency program is something of a hit-maker—call it "the Rubell effect." Beyond minting art-market stars, the Rubells now have two museums, a 100,000 square-foot campus with more than 50,000 square-footage dedicated to galleries in Miami's Allapattah, and a newly opened 32,000-square-foot outpost in Southwest Washington D.C. The Rubell's art collecting began when they were newlyweds\ who would squirrel away $25 from Mera's teaching salary to put toward acquisitions while Don was in medical school. Now, along with their son Jason and daughter Jennifer, they own one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in the world, with more than 7,400 works of art by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Catherine Opie. On the heels of their DC museum's grand opening, and just weeks before they will hold court at Art Basel in Miami Beach, Artnet News's senior reporter Katya Kazakina caught up with Don, Jason, and Mera to discuss the origins of their collection, the symbiotic relationship between art and real estate, and their famous Midas touch for sussing out the hottest emerging artists.

You've seen it. A woman in a blue turban set against a black background looking over her shoulder like you just called her name. She's wearing a heavy pearl earring in one ear, and her skin is so luminous it looks like she swallowed a light bulb. Yes, I'm talking about Girl with a Pearl Earring, one of the most famous paintings in the world. It's been reproduced countless times on mugs, t-shirts, and pillows. It has inspired poems, novels, and movies. But the artist who created Girl with a Pearl Earring, he remains shrouded in mystery. Strangely little is known about Johannes Vermeer. He lived in Holland in the 17th century and died in 1675 at the age of 43. He made fewer than 36 paintings. And audiences around the globe are fascinated by his portrayals of quiet domesticity. It's always been assumed he worked in the same kind of solitude that he often depicted in his paintings. But new research is challenging that assumption. Over the past several years, museums have used cutting edge technology to get under the surface of Vermeer and learn more about how he actually worked. To discuss Vermeer's many secrets and the artist we thought we knew, Executive Editor, Julia Halperin, spoke with Kriston Capps, a Washington DC based contributor to Artnet News.

It’s been a challenging few years for art museums. But Sandra Jackson Dumont, the director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, has never felt more energized about their potential. And that feeling is infectious. At the most recent American Alliance of Museums conference, Jackson-Dumont opened her keynote speech with a love song by ’70s soul singer Donny Hathaway. Then she asked the audience: “Don’t you want people to see your institutions that way?”  For more than 20 years, Jackson-Dumont has been a force in education and public programming, launching enormously popular initiatives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. She has spent her career blurring distinctions between fine art and popular culture, and creating alternative ways for the public to interact with art and museums. This mission has followed her to the Lucas Museum. Slated to open in 2025, the museum founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson prioritizes art and audiences that have not always been taken seriously by the elite art world.  It’s clear Jackson-Dumont has a long track record of breaking new ground. That’s why we chose her as one of Artnet News’s New Innovators for 2022. The Innovators List will be published in full later this month. Ahead of the release, Jackson-Dumont spoke with Artnet News contributor Janelle Zara about how she is challenging the museum model as we know it. 

A glittering forest with a floor covered in leaves by Gustav Klimt. A country road painted with psychedelic purples, greens, and pinks by David Hockney. A tangle of loping lines against a gray background by Brice Marden. Most of us have encountered art like this on the walls of a museum. As a matter of fact, these particular works have been shown at LACMA, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Serpentine in London. But after those shows closed, they were all packed up and sent back to the same owner. The owner’s name was Paul Allen. Paul Allen is a bit of a legend in art collecting circles. Part of that was because of his fortune. When he died in 2018, Allen was the 44th richest person in the world. Another part of that legend was his secrecy. Allen was notoriously private about the art he collected. Although he did lend works to museums around the world, he was not always identified as the owner and he never appeared in an auction room holding a paddle. Allen was born in 1953 in Seattle and became friends with Bill Gates in high school. They cofounded Microsoft in 1975 and ushered in the microcomputer revolution. But Paul had a lot of other interests, too. At the age of 35, he became the youngest owner the NBA when he bought the Portland Trailblazers. He also owned the Seattle Sea Hawks and founded museums in his hometown dedicated to vintage computers, military aircraft, and pop culture. For most of his life, art remained a more private passion. But four years after Allen’s death from Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018, Allen’s estate is selling a portion of his art collection—more than 150 lots, to be exact—at Christie’s. And for the first time, the public is able to get a brief glimpse at the many treasures Allen acquired altogether, before they likely disappear into private hands again for who knows how long. The collection is estimated to fetch more than $1 billion, with all the money going to charities he supported during his life. It’s pretty much guaranteed to become the most valuable collection ever sold at auction. So how does one man assemble such a valuable trove of art in a relatively short amount of time? And how does that kind of collector track down, evaluate, and live with art? What makes someone a good art collector in the first place? Artnet News Executive Editor, Julia Halperin spoke with the Director of the Paul Allen Collection, Mireya Lewin, and the Vice Chairman, 20th and 21st Century Art, Americas at Christie's, Max Carter, to find out.

In the borderlands between art and technology, no single development has sucked up more oxygen this year than the rise of image generators powered by artificial intelligence. Not so long ago, projects like these were a fringe experiment whose results were usually more intriguing for what they got wrong than for what they got right. But in 2022, A.I.-driven image generators have made a quantum leap in quality, speed, and affordability. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, thanks to these tools, never in the history of civilization has it been easier, faster, or cheaper to produce professional-looking visuals of anything a person could dream up, even if they have no artistic training whatsoever. This is both extremely cool, and extremely concerning, especially if you happen to be a human who makes a living as a commercial illustrator. This October, a strange saga that played out on the live-streaming platform Twitch showed how the tension between flesh and blood image-makers and A.I. is getting stronger and weirder every day, with serious consequences for age-old debates about plagiarism, ownership, and the value of making art in the first place. Thankfully, knowledgeable and intrepid Artnet News contributor, Zachary Small, joins Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider to discuss the initial scandal and the murky future of commercial art in the age of A.I. Buckle up, because this is going to get a little surreal...

"Flipping" was once a dirty word in the art market. But that is no longer the case. Over the past decade, speculative reselling has become big business as the market for ultra-contemporary art has soared. Sales of art sold within three years of its creation date have grown 1,000 percent over the past decade, to almost $260 million. (For context, over the same period, the S&P 500 rose just about 200 percent.) Historically, only collectors have been able to benefit from this practice—not artists or their dealers. In the U.K. and France, artists receive a small resale royalty when their work is resold at auction. In the U.S., they get nothing. That’s why, over the past few years, artists, gallerists, and entrepreneurs have started to take matters into their own hands, engineering new ways to either stamp out flippers or create systems so that artists can benefit more directly when their work is resold for a big profit. This shift is the subject of our fall 2022 Artnet News Pro Intelligence Report. Ahead of the report’s release, we gathered together an expert panel at Cromwell Place in London during Frieze moderated by our own executive editor Julia Halperin. We spoke with Max Kendrick, co-founder and CEO of Fairchain, a company that is using the blockchain to create new ways of conducting art sales; Rachel Uffner, owner and director of Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York; and Lucien Smith, an artist and director of the Cultural Innovations Lab at the art management platform Lobus. As you’ll see, there is little consensus about what to do about flipping. If you want to learn more, subscribe to Artnet News Pro for the full Artnet News Intelligence Report, out soon.

The art world was caught by surprise earlier this year when it came to light that Paris’s long-standing art fair, FIAC, was being ousted from its precious October slot at the formidable Grand Palais in Paris. It turned out that it was none other than the biggest fair titan of them all Art Basel, and its winning vision for the French capital, that would be taking its place. Enter Paris+, Basel’s newest fair that hopes to be a bridge between the French institutional landscape and the art industry. The timing for Paris could not be better: dealers have been clamoring to open up shop in its arrondissements just as a string of premier new museums have opened their doors. Ahead of the fair’s inaugural opening on October 20, London-based European Market Editor Naomi Rea and Berlin-based Europe Editor Kate Brown sat down to take a look at the dramatic events that led up to the takeover, and offered their predictions for what to expect of this major market moment.

A brand-new publication, penned by the London-based critic and Artnet contributor Hettie Judah, is trying to tear down a dusty old myth that hangs around in the art world: that artists can’t be parents and be successful. With her new book published last week, called How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents), Judah tries to capture the ways in which mothers, fathers, and other guardians have historically been excluded from the various realms of the art world. She interviewed scores of international artists to build a full and complex picture of this significant issue, which remains a problem in nearly every sector of the industry. How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) traces the history of the domestic and artistic pursuits, the pain points that endure, and the success stories that may offer workable ways forward. To crack open this important book and the issue it interrogates, Judah spoke with our Europe editor Kate Brown.

Few living artists have created an artwork as instantly recognizable as Shepherd Fairey’s Hope poster, which has become the stuff of legend as the face of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. The image, which the New Yorker dubbed "the most efficacious American political illustration since Uncle Sam Wants You,” remains embedded in the public consciousness even if you don't know the street artist's name.  But Fairey has been creating powerful visuals for more than 30 years, dating back to 1989, when he began pasting stickers of Andre, the Giants face over the word obey on the streets of Providence during his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the decades since, Fairey has become equally at home in the art museum as on the streets, bridging the divide between the fine art world and the skateboarding slash graffiti scene with work that reflects his commitment to activism—the Obama poster, it's worth noting, was a grassroots effort, not a campaign commission.  Ahead of Fairey's new solo show at Dallas Contemporary, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone, sat down with the artist to talk about his long career from the DIY skate and punk scene to art world acceptance. "Shepard Fairey: Backward Forward" is on view at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass Street, Dallas, Texas, September 25, 2022–July 23, 2023.

When visitors go to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s new retrospective at the museum of modern art, one of the first things they'll likely notice is that few pictures are presented in a frame. Most are instead pinned or taped directly to the wall; adorning nearly every service on the museum, six floor and arranged, not by rows, but in clusters, kind of like constellations in the night sky. And that's an analogy that the 54 year old artist might himself appreciate given his abiding love of outer space. “Astronomy,” he once said, “was my visual initiation into seeing.” A cosmological awe pervades To Look Without Fear, as MoMA’s exhibition is called—even though Tillmans’s subject matter is often quite quotidian. More than 300 of the artist's photographs are included spanning his nearly four decade career from his experiments with a photocopier as a student in Germany in the late 1980s and his editorial efforts for Index and I-D magazines in London and New York in the 90’s, to his darkroom abstractions of the early 2000s and beyond. But Tillmans’s practice has always resisted strict taxonomization, and that’s true here, too; what’s on view is not a series of discrete bodies of work but a kind of diaristic journey through the artist’s life: his friends, his lovers; his work, his play; his experience with loss and living with HIV and his constant consideration of what it means to interpret it all through the technology of photography. No lens-based artist revels in the simple profundity of the medium like him. On view now through January 1st of next year, To Look Without Fear is a sprawling, years-in-the-making presentation that rightly casts Tillmans among the today’s most important working artists. Ahead of the show’s opening, Artnet News’s Taylor Dafoe sat down with Tillmans at MoMA for a conversation about language, looking back in time, and how staring into the cosmos taught him to appreciate life on earth.

The year was 1990, and artist Rick Lowe had invited a group of high school students into a studio. Standing surrounded by his billboard size paintings, one of the kids made a comment that stopped him in his tracks. Why was Lowe illustrating problems everyone already knew about rather than proposing creative solutions? The moment changed everything. It pushed Lowe to create art outside the studio and sent him on a path to becoming one of the leading figures in an art movement known as social practice. The term social practice describes art that is created with, and for, communities. Over the past three decades Lowe has done this in a variety of forms, including his most famous work Project Row Houses, a hub for community housing and art-making in Houston's Third Ward. All the while Lowe has maintained a painting practice alongside his socially engaged work, and he won a MacArthur Genius Grant for all of it in 2014. This month, after a long hiatus from the New York gallery world, he returns with his first solo show of paintings at Gagosian. Artnet News contributor, Sade Ologundudu spoke with Lowe as part of a four part series on Artnet News about artists across generations who work with social practice.