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 ar...
Jan 11, 2024•47 min
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 S...
Jan 04, 2024•40 min
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 exampl...
Dec 28, 2023•46 min
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 s...
Dec 21, 2023•41 min
"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 ...
Dec 14, 2023•35 min
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 o...
Dec 07, 2023•46 min
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 ...
Nov 30, 2023•41 min
"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 th...
Nov 22, 2023•53 min
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 cu...
Nov 16, 2023•38 min
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 ind...
Nov 09, 2023•25 min
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 t...
Nov 02, 2023•38 min
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...
Oct 31, 2023•40 min
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 Da...
Oct 26, 2023•39 min
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 contribution...
Oct 19, 2023•34 min
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...
Oct 17, 2023•42 min
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 unt...
Oct 12, 2023•34 min
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 ...
Oct 05, 2023•46 min
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 an...
Sep 28, 2023•36 min
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...
Sep 21, 2023•45 min
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...
Sep 14, 2023•49 min
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 eco...
Sep 07, 2023•43 min
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 somewher...
Aug 31, 2023•35 min
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 sinc...
Aug 24, 2023•29 min
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 maj...
Aug 17, 2023•48 min
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 ...
Aug 10, 2023•30 min
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 s...
Aug 03, 2023•36 min
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 Schne...
Jul 27, 2023•41 min
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 chroni...
Jul 20, 2023•30 min
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 ...
Jul 13, 2023•40 min
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 fr...
Jul 06, 2023•34 min
