The Art Angle

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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. 

  1. 1 DAY AGO

    Re-Air: Lucy Lippard On a Life In and Out of Art

    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.

    41 min
  2. The Roundup: 2024—The Year in Art

    19 DEC

    The Roundup: 2024—The Year in 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.

    1h 1m

  3. 15 DEC

    Re-Air: How Warhol’s Handmade Art Shaped His Famed Pop Factory

    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.

    47 min
  4. Why Is Rococo Art Making a Comeback?

    12 DEC

    Why Is Rococo Art Making a Comeback?

    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.

    37 min
  5. Can Machine Vision Replace Art Expertise?

    5 DEC

    Can Machine Vision Replace Art Expertise?

    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.

    36 min

  6. 27 NOV

    Re-Air: A Reporter Goes Undercover in the Art World

    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.

    49 min
  7. What Is Orphism, History's Most Enigmatic Art Movement?

    21 NOV

    What Is Orphism, History's Most Enigmatic Art Movement?

    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.

    37 min
  8. A Famous Novelist's Alternate Art World

    14 NOV

    A Famous Novelist's Alternate Art World

    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.

    40 min
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About

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. 

Information

  • Creator
    Artnet News
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2024
  • Episodes
    286
  • Copyright
    2019 ©
  • Show Website
    The Art Angle

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