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 attack...
Dec 08, 2022•51 min
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 ...
Dec 01, 2022•56 min
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 wil...
Nov 30, 2022•36 min
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 wi...
Nov 24, 2022•41 min
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...
Nov 17, 2022•32 min
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 year...
Nov 10, 2022•39 min
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. T...
Nov 03, 2022•35 min
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, ...
Oct 27, 2022•38 min
"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 artis...
Oct 20, 2022•1 hr 2 min
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....
Oct 13, 2022•31 min
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 o...
Oct 06, 2022•35 min
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 1...
Sep 29, 2022•38 min
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. “A...
Sep 23, 2022•27 min
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 prac...
Sep 15, 2022•42 min
Last week, the art industry descended on Seoul, South Korea, for the inaugural edition of Frieze art fair’s Asian outpost. It was a major affair, packed with K-pop celebrities and six-figure sales that marked yet another peak for the Korean art scene, which seems to be heading along a neverending upward spiral. Installed next to the stalwart fair Kiaf at the formidable CoEx convention center, and not far away from a smaller satellite fair focused on new media, Kiaf Plus, this first year for this...
Sep 08, 2022•31 min
This year was a big one for biennials with the Whitney Biennial in New York, the Venice Biennale in Italy and Documenta in Kassel, Germany as well as many, many more. Earlier this year, our team at Artnet analyzed hundreds of these exhibitions over the past five years to identify the biggest stars of the biennial circuit. As we gear up for the fall art season, we thought it would be useful to revisit the episode where national art critic, Ben Davis and Europe editor, Kate brown, discuss the surp...
Sep 01, 2022•43 min
We thought we’d revisit an episode we recorded earlier this year about one of the more fascinating and under-known figures in American art history. Her name was Belle da Costa Greene, and she was the vivacious and spectacularly connoisseurial force behind building robber baron J.P. Morgan’s art collection and, now, New York’s Morgan Library. Unusual at the time for being a women in such a powerful role, what is even more unusual is that she was a Black woman—a secret she successfully guarded her...
Aug 25, 2022•39 min
Five months into the conflict, the brutal, horrific war in Ukraine grinds on, with no end in sight. And while Ukrainian men and women are fighting, and dying, on the front lines to defend their homeland, art workers are continuing to do their part to aid the struggle by preserving their nation’s rich heritage and keeping the flame of culture alive.Shortly after the invasion, Artnet News European Editor Kate Brown spoke to two such art workers based in the Kyiv—Vasyl Cherepanyn, the director of t...
Aug 18, 2022•33 min
Over the years, we’ve been very fortunate to have some bona fide legendary artists on this show, from Ai Weiwei to Judy Chicago to Anish Kapoor to Ed Ruscha. But none of them, to my mind, are as surprising to talk to as the great performance artist Marina Abramović, who host Andrew Goldstien had the privilege of interviewing toward the start of this year. When you think about her art, what comes to the fore are profound themes of life and death, pain, and transcending the body. When you’re talki...
Aug 11, 2022•38 min
The world rarely sees a creative dynamo on the level of Virgil Abloh—or one harder to quantify. A trained architect, who was born to Ghanian immigrants and grew up in Chicago, he was best known as the visionary men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton (and the first person of color to hold that position)—the position he held when he died at 41 from a rare cancer. But his protean career began blazing long before that. A key early milestone? In 2009, Abloh interned at Fendi alongside rapper and fa...
Aug 04, 2022•31 min
Have you ever wanted to live a different kind of life, in a different kind of place? What if this other place gave you the power to do or be almost anything you wanted, anywhere you wanted, anytime you wanted? Suppose that what you could build there, and who you could be there, had nothing to do with your finances. Not even the laws of physics would hold you back. If you wanted to be the monarch of a Gothic castle perched on a cloud suspended above a Nordic woodland, you could have that. You cou...
Jul 29, 2022•45 min
Jayson Musson has a unique status in the art world: he has the persona and perspective of an outsider, but he's also something of an artist's artist. Originally from the Bronx, Musson got his creative start in Philadelphia in the 2000s, creating cerebral, satirical street art; penning a column for the Philadelphia Weekly called " Black Like Me "; and performing in the cult hip-hop group Plastic Little , which put out songs like "I'm Not a Thug," "Rap O'Clock," and "Miller Time." Musson again pop...
Jul 21, 2022•35 min
It might be the dog days of summer here in New York, but over in the metaverse, we are firmly in the depths of crypto winter. When NFT NYC , the world’s largest NFT conference , descended on Times Square last month, Bitcoin and ether were down more than 70 percent from where they were in November. That put a damper on the proceedings , and it’s had a ripple effect on the once-ballooning market for digital collectibles. In the first half of 2021, Christie’s had sold $93 million worth of NFTs; thi...
Jul 14, 2022•42 min
Well, the hot summer season is upon is, and while the Art Angle team is taking some r&r this week we thought we’d offer you some refreshment in the form of re-airing one of our favorite episodes of the year so far—a tale of art-world fakery, double-dealing, and incredibly creative swindling so preposterous it’s worthy of a summer movie. Let’s just say that no one in the story you are about to hear, about jet-setting Italian collectors promoting a favorite artist on Instagram, are who they se...
Jul 07, 2022•28 min
This past may New York hosted what is probably the biggest auction season ever selling more than $2.7 billion worth of art. Last week, the traveling circus touchdown in London with multimillion dollar art sales at Phillips, Sotheby's and Christie's. So before the arm market goes into hibernation for the summer, we decided to revisit our episode, decoding the complex sociology of auctions. Auctions are the most public and visible part of the art market—but they are also among the most misundersto...
Jun 30, 2022•36 min
You're heard quite a bit about biennials on the Art Angle recently—the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial, and, most recently, Documenta, which comes once every five years to Kassel, Germany. On their own, each of these are closely watched events by art mavens looking to spot national and global trends. But they are also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a circuit of Biennial and Triennial art events that girdle the earth, popping up from Athens to Bangkok to Cuenca to Dakar to, we...
Jun 23, 2022•42 min
Kennedy Yanko is not afraid to take up space this week. This week , the Brooklyn-based sculptor unveiled her largest work yet at Art Basel, a 20 foot tall hanging sculpture titled By Means Other Than The Known Senses. The title describes how Yanko often creates her work through exploration and a whole lot of intuition. The apricots green and gray work is a tornado of cascading metal forms. At first glance, it's impossible to tell just how much it weighs since it's suspended in the air. As it tur...
Jun 17, 2022•38 min
How much can an art show do? That’s a question at the heart of documenta, the sprawling exhibition that touches down in Kassel, Germany every five years. Sometimes called a “museum in 100 days,” the show regularly draws millions of visitors from around the world. But it is far from a neutral celebration of contemporary art. Founded in 1955, the show was conceived as a way to regenerate Kassel, which was still in ruins after World War II. But it had broader political aims, too: to project West Ge...
Jun 09, 2022•36 min
Not too long ago, Inigo Philbrick was one of the best-connected dealers in the art world. The son of a museum director and the protege of legendary gallerist Jay Jopling, he was often spotted at VIP previews of major art fairs and in a prominent seat at auctions around the globe. Then, in late 2019, he disappeared. As it turns out, Philbrick was the subject of mounting civil lawsuits and, ultimately, a criminal case that found he conned clients out of $85 million. Prosecutors say he committed “o...
Jun 02, 2022•35 min
As we all know, there's a tremendous amount of attention that's being paid lately to NFTs and their whiplash market oscillations. Are NFTs good? Bad? A flash in the pan? Here to stay? Well, there's an argument to be made that NFTs are actually at best a distraction from the real mind-blowing, totally profound technological revolution that is poised to change art as we know it forever. And that of course is the rise of AI art. So what is AI art and is artificial intelligence here to help artists ...
May 26, 2022•44 min
