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 pho...
Jan 30, 2025•33 min
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 dre...
Jan 23, 2025•49 min
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 Euro...
Jan 16, 2025•25 min
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?...
Jan 09, 2025•33 min
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 ...
Jan 02, 2025•50 min
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 his...
Dec 26, 2024•41 min
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 mar...
Dec 19, 2024•1 hr 1 min
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 ca...
Dec 15, 2024•47 min
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 i...
Dec 12, 2024•37 min
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 art...
Dec 05, 2024•36 min
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 Amon...
Nov 27, 2024•49 min
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...
Nov 21, 2024•37 min
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 an...
Nov 14, 2024•40 min
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, whi...
Nov 07, 2024•25 min
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 ...
Nov 03, 2024•45 min
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, s...
Oct 31, 2024•39 min
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...
Oct 24, 2024•38 min
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 ritual...
Oct 17, 2024•45 min
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 collect...
Oct 10, 2024•36 min
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 ...
Oct 03, 2024•49 min
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 ma...
Sep 26, 2024•38 min
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...
Sep 19, 2024•43 min
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 b...
Sep 12, 2024•48 min
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, pu...
Sep 05, 2024•40 min
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 ...
Aug 29, 2024•40 min
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 ar...
Aug 22, 2024•39 min
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 characte...
Aug 15, 2024•44 min
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 ince...
Aug 08, 2024•44 min
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, a...
Aug 01, 2024•28 min
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 assassinat...
Jul 25, 2024•45 min
