The Art Angle
A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more.
Episodes
Re-Air: Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art
This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen.
Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But
Why Are Museum Wall Texts So Bad?
The humble wall label at an art exhibition has a funny status. It feels, on the one hand, like a side note or an afterthought. On the other, it is a first point of contact and literal guide for a visitor looking to know more.
There is an entire undersung discipline, Visitor Studies, which has put a lot of time into thinking about how museums communicate. And yet, even so, some of the most prestig
The Etruscans Made Astonishing Art. Why Aren't They Better Known?
The ancient Romans called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, "our sea." But before the Romans rose to power, the Etruscans had extensive trade networks in the area and controlled much of the Italian peninsula, the future heart of the Roman Empire. Between around 900 B.C.E. and the first century B.C.E., the Etruscans lived in city-states, developing beguiling artworks and making technological adv
Why Artists Keep Turning to Tarot
Artists and creatives have been fascinated with tarot for over 600 years. Recently, that fascination has resurfaced in a big way, showing up everywhere from museum walls to fashion runways.
That's not surprising. As a sweeping universal narrative language small enough to fit in your pocket, tarot's archetypal imagery is built for rediscovery and reinterpretation. Once a medieval royal court game,
Welcome to the World of Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez
Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez share a knack for building worlds and characters that operate on their own wonderful, absurdist logic. Throw them together, add some sea water, and you get Marina, their new performance commissioned by the Whitney Biennial.
Marina begins with a construction worker tossing a smartphone into the ocean and ends with a sea wench possibly discovering the internet. It
What's New in New York Art?
We’re in the hot dog days of August, awaiting the new art season to kick off in September. In the meantime, I thought we might take the temperature of art in New York, looking at two big museum shows that opened earlier ruin the year, and that seek to highlight new voices from the city.
So, we will be talking about “Greater New York,” the important show at MoMA PS1 in Queens that once every five
Here's Where the Art World Eats
At the end of last year, Annie Armstrong stepped down as Artnet's gossip columnist after filing 198 Wet Paint columns over the span of more than four years. Gabi Vidal-Irizarry has picked up the mantle.
Annie departed the art world for the food world to write for Caper Media, an enterprising new startup that aims, in its words, "to tell the inside story of the restaurant business in New York." Wh
An Untold History of the Art Market
The art market is a famously opaque place, a world of handshake agreements and big-dollar private deals. How does it actually operate, and how has it changed over the centuries? In a richly researched new book titled Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, Valentina Castellani provides surprising answers, drawing on a long and storied career in the industry.
She's work
Re-Air: The Magic of ‘The Artist’s Way’
In this re-air of an episode from last year. Ben Davis speaks with Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way. It is a somewhat unusual subject for us, but it's also been an episode that's been very meaningful to a lot of listeners. And in case you're wondering, Ben started doing morning pages to prepare for the interview, and six months later, and he has stuck with it.
Millions of people know
Welcome to the Society of the Psyop
It is a time of disorienting, sometimes surreal shifts in the worlds of politics and technology. There aren’t too many artists who you might trust as a guide, but Trevor Paglen is one of them.
Paglen has long functioned as an artist-researcher, with a fascination for pushing to the outer limits of what is seen or known. His work has often not just responded to but anticipated major conversations
The Case for M.C. Escher
There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names, figures like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher’s impact on the wider culture may be as big, or even bigger that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist.
Born Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artis
How Doug Aitken Thinks in Music
Doug Aitken’s new installation Lightscape has just landed at the Shed in New York. It is many things at once: a seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music.
The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds those worlds and na
How to Make a Sculpture With Sound
Some of the most important visual artist working today are sound artists.
It seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind of another is everywhere in and around the art.
Ben Davis wanted to dig into this “sonic turn” in art, if that’s what it is—and the artist Tarek
What Does It Take to Keep Art Basel on Top?
This week the art world descends on Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine River, where the latest edition of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fair is taking place. We're talking about Art Basel, of course. Its 290 exhibitors include all the top galleries of the world. It's a place where you can see and buy museum-quality Picassos and Warhols next to still-wet-paint by emerging ar
Roberta Smith Still Has Notes
Roberta Smith is the exemplar of popular art criticism.
For almost four decades, Smith was a familiar voice on the arts pages of the New York Times, serving for many of those years as co-lead art critic. Both feared and revered, she is known above all for close looking, precise description, and a style that’s accessible but serious. In 2019, she won the Rabkin Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Smi
Re-Air: How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance
This week we're re-airing a favorite episode featuring Kate Brown interviewing Ben Davis about the “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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 L
Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art
Arthur Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went viral in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that
How Is Arts Patronage Changing?
During fair week in New York in mid-May, Andrew Russeth had the high pleasure of moderating a panel about the state of arts philanthropy at TEFAF New York. Joining him on stage at the Park Avenue Armory were two leading figures in American patronage, Sarah Arison and Michi Jigarjian.
Arison was named president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024 at the age of only 39, mak
Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?
Los Angeles has a new museum. Or a new vision for an old one. One of the most important museums in the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has just debuted a long-awaited new building.
It’s designed by the revered Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to realize. And long before it opened to the public last month, it has been controversial, for a wh
The Most Provocative Performance in Venice
At the Venice Biennale, every two years, we expect big things from the artists picked to represent their countries. But I'm not sure anyone can quite prepare themselves for the universe of Florentina Holzinger.
After years becoming a titan of the theater world, Holzinger is now getting one of the most visible slots in the art world, a national pavilion in the Giardini. She’s representing Austria
What Biennials Reveal About the Art World
We talk a lot about biennials. Art is in some ways a very local, in-person thing. Yet artists and creators and writers are also part of a global conversation, looking at and thinking about each other across borders, and these big, recurring art festivals can serve as an opportunity or a prompt to think about what that bigger conversation.
One of the biggest, the Venice Biennale, is coming up next
Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With
This interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and on the occasion of the opening of Greater New York at MoMA PS1, where Cruz is also featured, we're resurfacing it.
This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young (born in 1998), and who just earned her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a v
One of the Art Market's Biggest Secrets, Revealed
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
The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment
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.
Bor
How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance
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 to
Whitney Biennial Trends, a New Baroque Art Star, and Banksy Unmasked
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 wh
Are We Entering a Post-Individual Era of Art?
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, h
Kim Gordon Was Always an Artist First
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 Muse
The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With
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 tempera
The Art Boom in the Middle East, Are Old Masters Cool Now?, and a Fresco Fracas in Italy
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
What Epstein's Emails Tell Us About the Art Market
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
An Artist's Guide to Psychedelic Mushrooms
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-know
How the Debates Over Art, Race, and Tech Have Changed
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 Infi
A Venice Biennale Meltdown, the Prado Is Too Popular, and a $2.7M Speed Painting?!
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 abo
How the 21st Century Broke Culture
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 thr
Can Brainrot Be Art? Beeple Thinks So
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 c
Where Art Insiders Are Placing Their Bets in 2026
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 th
Re-Air: Why No One Trusts Art Prices Anymore
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, tha
Re-Air: How Painters Today Are Reframing… the Frame
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 defini
Why This Famed Art Writer Turned to True Crime
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 autofictio
The Round-Up: 2025’s Highs, Lows, and WTFs
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 criti
The Magic of 'The Artist's Way'
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 a
Re-Air: Uncovering the Louvre’s Hidden Stories
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
A Long, Strange Trip Through the New York Gallery Scene
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 s
Do We Still Need All-Woman Art Shows?
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
The Dramatic Story of Nigerian Modernism
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, fr
The Round-Up: Louvre Heist!, Europe's Art Market Reboot, and the Queasy Art of Sora
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 bu
The Magician Who Became an Artist
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, ex
Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Nowhere to Run (Ep. 4)
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 Pa
Manga Mania Gets Its Big Museum Moment
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 Mus
Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Flight Risk(Ep. 3)
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 casca
The Silent Emergency Facing Museums
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.
Mean
Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Golden Boy (Ep. 2)
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
Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Asset Class (Ep. 1)
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?
We
The Round-Up: Looted Art Exposed in House Listing, Jeff Koons Back With His Ex, and $13M For 'Conan' Cover Art
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, whe
A Turning Point for the Art Market?
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, a
The Round Up: Live From New York
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
Why We Need New Art Institutions
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 dem
Re-Air: The Art World's Octopus Teacher
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 li
Is This the Museum World's Favorite Artist?
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
Why This New Art Trend Feels So Familiar
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 landsca
Re-Air: What Makes Spine-Tingling Art? Aesthetic Chills: Explained
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
The Round-Up: Johnny Depp Does Modigliani, Labubu Mania, and a Weird Idea for the Venice Biennale
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 i
There Is Not One Art World. There Are (at Least) Five
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
Why No One Trusts Art Prices Anymore
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 fo
How the Post-Pandemic Generation Is Changing Digital Art
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, look
Re-Air: The Rise of the Red Chip Art World
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
The Round-Up: Tech’d Out Museums, Art Basel Takeaways, and Adrien Brody's Awesomely Awful Art
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
Why Does Culture Feel Stuck?
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 tr
How Does an Emerging Gallery Make It Now?
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 softeni
The Art World's Octopus Teacher
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 se
A Crypto Billionaire's Lawsuit, Koons’s Hulk Blasts Back,' the Art Basel Awards
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 ch
The New Rules of Subculture
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. Wha
How to Curate a Life: Lessons From 3 Art World Tastemakers
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 t
How Painters Today Are Reframing… the Frame
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 Bor
Megastar Artist Kent Monkman Is Rewriting Colonial Narratives on Canvas
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 langua
Re-Air: How Textiles Took Over the Art World
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 a
Trump: Cultural Offensive or Offensive Culture?
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 canc
The Rise of the Red-Chip Art World
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 ne
What’s Holding Women Back in the Arts—And How Can We Fix It?
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 th
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