The Art Angle

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 began with an unlikely source: the luxury Scotch whisky maker Royal Salute. Drawing inspiration from the incredible expanse of time contained within an opulent 53-year-old Royal Salute whisky blend, Shawcross created a spectacular kinetic sculpture that merges a massive, sapphire blue glass disc with an oak spindle and oblong crystal decanter to represent how time functions on multiple levels. The new artwork, titled Royal Salute Time Chamber by Conrad Shawcross and the second collaboration in Royal Salute’s Art of Wonder series, debuted at the 2023 edition of Frieze London last week with a discussion about the project between Shawcross and veteran auctioneer and Artnet News contributor Simon de Pury. On this episode of the Art Angle podcast, we present a special live recording of their fascinating conversation.

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 until 11 p. m. on Fridays and Saturdays, Fotografiska believes it gives the public a more flexible platform for encountering culture than the traditional, often sterile museum setting. But it's a model that's not without skeptics, who worry that prioritizing experienced culture risks undermining curatorial rigor. Founded in Stockholm in 2011, today Fotografiska is a global enterprise with locations in Tallinn, Estonia and New York City, and the international expansion continues with a Berlin outpost that opened just last month with exhibitions by celebrated artists including Juliana Huxtable and Candice Breitz at the Kunsthaus Tascheles—a destination with a unique cultural history for the city. The museum's first location in Asia is also set to be unveiled this month in Shanghai. Behind Fotografiska's ascent is Yoram Roth, the institution's chairman, and a Berlin based entrepreneur focused on arts and culture. With a career background that ranges from entertainment and music production to publishing, Roth brings a dynamic energy, unique vision, and infectious attitude to the art sphere. This week, Artnet editor Katie White spoke to Roth about Fotografiska, and a new era of cultural experiences.

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 edited called The Anti Aesthetic. Put out by the Bay Press in 1983, the slim, purple, 150 page collection brought together nine essays by figures including Jürgen Habermas, Rosalind Krauss, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said, plus an introduction by Foster himself, theorizing in exciting, contradictory, and new ways what it meant to write about, make, and see art. It set the tone for a lot of the criticism and reception of art theory in the 1980s and beyond, and helped make theory cool in art. Indeed, this small book has cast such a long shadow that Foster has just published a text for Artforum called The Anti Aesthetic at 40, where he assesses its legacy four decades on from its publication. The work reminds one of the sense of intellectual excitement and seriousness of purpose that drew many into writing about art in the first place. A sense that feels very embattled now. This week on the podcast, Hal Foster joins Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis to discuss the recent past and present of art criticism.

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 and Art Detective columnist Katya Kazakina on another episode of the Art Angle Round Up to take on some of the topics that have been animating the art discussion for the past month. On the docket this week are three topics: why painting is suddenly achieving a state of total dominance in the art galleries, the latest developments around the spectacular $86 million criminal scheme associated with the former art dealer Inigo Philbrick and the spate of lawsuits swirling around the art market, and about the case of the artist who tried to take $84,000 from a Danish museum and call it art.

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 icons. He was a big figure in the Beat Generation and a close friend of Allen Ginsberg, appeared in one of Andy Warhol's screen test films, and he was also a tireless collector of all kinds of cultural objects, from out-of-print records to Ukrainian Easter eggs. Smith was also an experimental filmmaker and artist, an early student of anthropology, and an acolyte of a variety of mystical belief systems. Now, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York is hosting “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith," an unusual, but thrilling new show, with an unusual curator, the artist Carol Bove, herself one of the most celebrated sculptors working today. Bove has had a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art and installed work on the façade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among many other accomplishments. Working with Elisabeth Sussman, a curator at the Whitney, Dan Byers, director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Art, and Rani Singh, director of the Harry Smith Archives, Bove has dedicated herself to helping organize this show, to tell the story of Harry Smith. In advance of “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten,” which opens October 4 at the Whitney, Carol Bove spoke to Artnet News’s chief art critic Ben Davis about Harry Smith's life in art and what it is about this hard-to-categorize figure that fired her imagination and will do the same for visitors to this show. “Fragments of a Faith Forgotten: The Art of Harry Smith” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 4, 2023–January 28, 2024.

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 Show's Live event last week, Artnet News's senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella hosted a panel of experts including collector Alain Servais, art advisor Megan Fox Kelly, and gallerist Suzanne Vielmetter to discuss what the future may hold. Megan Fox Kelley is the founder and director of Megan Fox Kelley Art Advisory, as well as a member and former president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors. Her practice includes advising clients on acquisitions and sales of works of art for their collections, estate planning and execution, strategic planning, and feasibility studies for museums, exhibition planning and administration, collection management, and fine art appraisal services. Suzanne Vielmetter is the founder and director of Vielmetter Los Angeles. Since founding the gallery in 2000, she has been committed to presenting artists from a wide range of diverse backgrounds with a focus on idea-based and political work. Alain Servais is a globally-recognized collector and founder of the Servais Family Collection. For more than 20 years, Servais has focused on underrepresented and museum quality art, which he believes is significant and worthy of preservation. This week on the podcast, we present the live-recording from the Armory Show event.

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 ecosystem has also been facing real difficulties. Recently, there's also been a fresh round of debate about the state of criticism today. Is art writing now too positive, too promotional, or not critical enough? What should the goal of writing about art even be? And if there actually is a problem with art criticism, what's the cause and what's to be done about it? Artnet News's national art critic, Ben Davis, wrote a two-part essay for the site that delves into many of the thorny and often contradictory issues facing the field. Ahead of the kickoff of the fall art season, Europe editor Kate Brown speaks to Ben about the state of art criticism. \\ Is Art Criticism Today Too Affirmative? That's the Wrong Question to Be Asking | Artnet News Sean Tatol's Manhattan Art Review is a bracing new voice in New York art criticism. Ben Davis assesses his manifesto, "Negative Criticism."

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 somewhere around 2,000 objects from the collection and the ripple effect its had on the international art community stretching from China to Africa, and ultimately resulted in the stunning resignation of director Hartwig Fischer. Next up is a conversation about an intriguing development in the United States court system, where a computer scientist made a bid to secure a copyright registration for an artwork that was made by A.I. that has been summarily been shot down. Finally, on a lighter note, the trio heads over to the tony enclave of the Hamptons to Montauk, a typically quiet town that's in the midst of an art world dust up. A turf war involving Andy Warhol's former estate and a physical altercation between two art dealers, Max Levai and Adam Lindemann, that has proved to be one of the juiciest stories of the season.

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 since the 1960s, artists who want to stay relevant have felt the need to explore the latest technology, even as simply what counts as the latest technology changes at a faster and faster pace. This churn of experiments with art and technology is now old enough that it has its own history, which is where the field of new media conservation comes in. Artnet News reporter Jo Lawson-Tancred recently wrote a feature exploring the field and talking to a variety of key figures within it. A particularly fascinating aspect of the subject is how what seem like literally technical questions open onto much bigger debates about what art even is and what it even means to preserve it. You'd think that art from our near past would be easier to grapple with. It is one of the symptoms of the sped up nature of our times that it might actually pose more challenges than art from the more remote past. Jo's essay even seems to suggest that the problem is only getting more intense even as this whole new specialist field develops to deal with it. This week on the podcast, Artnet's Ben Davis speaks to Jo about the current state of digital art conservation, and what challenges the future may hold.

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 major hit this year. To quickly review a few bracing data points collected between January 1 and May 20 of this year—auction sales of trophy lots $10 million dollars and above plummeted 51 percent compared to the equivalent period last year; the fine-art auction market as a whole tumbled 14 percent, to $5 billion dollars worldwide; and, tellingly, the much-speculated-upon Ultra Contemporary art sector of work by artists born after 1974 fell down by 26 percent. After years of steady growth in the market, these are very troubling numbers—and if you’re an auction house, or an auction consigner, you may be a little freaked out right now. So hat does this mean? Should art professionals be panicking in the streets? Or should they be doing something else… and maybe making a lot of money in the process? Recently these questions were at the heart of a live conversation, exclusive for Artnet Pro members, that editor in chief Andrew Goldstein conducted with the Art Detective columnist herself, senior reporter Katya Kazakina, based on Katya's tour-de-force cover story on the state of the art business in the new Intelligence Report.

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 1884 when Seurat was just 27 years old in his self-created pointillist style, the large canvas depicts an idle summer afternoon on an island in the middle of the river Seine, with multiple fashionably dressed figures glimpsed out and about enjoying a day of socializing and relaxing by the water. Artnet's Katie White is the creator and frequent scribe of a popular art history column for the site called "Three Things," where she revisits well-known works of art and offers new ways to look at them. Her article on Seurat's La Grande Jatte has been one of the most popular editions of that column, where she dives into the research about the painting's inspirations and explores some of the unexpected debates about the meaning of this classic image of summer leisure. As we near the end of the summer season, we thought we'd all take a small (virtual) vacation from the news churn, and take a day trip to visit a favorite work of art from the past. This week, Katie speaks to Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis about this celebrated work of art.

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 said "it describes a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination, and where everyone can change, be transformed, and become something or someone else." This kind of a liberated self was a cornerstone of Carrington's outlook on the world and a key to understanding the fascinating images she created. Her life story is one of world building. Dissatisfied with her well-to-do family's vision for her future, Carrington sought freedom through boundary-pushing art. After being kicked out of schools she eventually fell in with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s, who shared her thinking about art making and also how to live. But a dark era was dawning in Europe, and ultimately Carrington ended up in a mental asylum where she underwent a brutal treatment. And so she left Europe, her family, and everything behind her, and eventually landed in Mexico, where she found the liberation that she was searching for. She'd spend the rest of her days there, and she would become a national treasure. In many ways, she never looked back. If you look at Carrington's paintings, there is a constant haunting from both her youth and the rooms, spaces, and landscapes of Europe. Though totally estranged for decades from her family in Europe, one day, a family member came knocking on her door. It was a cousin, Joanna Moorhead, who had heard by chance of Carrington and went to tracke her down in Mexico City. Moorhead, a journalist whose writing has appeared in The Guardian and The Observer, among other titles, came to know Carrington very well over long nights and days of talking, and she wrote a book in 2017 called The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington that chronicles her relationship with her cousin and her cousin's life and achievements in art. Moorhead has returned in more ways than one to Carrington's world since the artist died in 2011. Her newest book, out on August 22nd, delves into those spaces that defined Carrington's life and her paintings. Called Surreal Spaces, The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, the book is a result of Moore's careful study of Carrington's intricate works. This week on the podcast, Europe editor Kate Brown speaks to Joanna about the places that formed and informed the work of such an important artist.

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 Schneider about three stories. The first item is the news that Frieze, the international art fair chain, has acquired New York's flagship fair Armory Show and Expo Chicago, and what that means for the state of the art market. The second item covers recent developments in the world of NFTs, including a drop from the Jackson Pollock Studio that sold out within the first few hours, and Melania Trump's skirmish with NASA about some space-themed NFTs, plus the state of crypto in the art world at large. Finally, the trio discuss how artists have dealt with Barbie in the past, as a subject of inspiration and satire, and the release of both Greta Gerwig's film based on the Mattel doll and Christopher Nolan's opus on Robert Oppenheimer are filtering through the culture—and which side the art world comes down on in the big Barbie versus Oppenheimer face off.

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 chronicles the daily realities of working at one of the most popular and busiest institutions in the world, and is also a deeply personal story and love letter to the Met. From getting to know virtually every corner of the sprawling institution, having a front-row seat to the installation and display of the world’s premiere art collection, to learning to identify and commune with all types of visitors, and forging relationships with the tribe of fellow blue-suited guards he came to know and love. This week on the podcast, Bringley speaks candidly with senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella about how his time at the museum intertwined with his personal life, starting with the tragic loss of older brother to cancer, and ultimately finding love and starting a family, all against the backdrop of his second home at the museum.

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 author LaShawn Wanak, and work by 30 Texas artists who collaborated with in the in-house artist team, "The Real Unreal," as the exhibition is titled, transforms a former Bed Bath and Beyond into an expansive art playground. Like the House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s first permanent location, the new exhibition appears to begin in the real world, in an ordinary suburban house—but the mundane trappings of family life quickly give way to the strange and unfamiliar, the boundaries between reality and fantasy blurring and disappearing. Since the 2016 opening in Santa Fe, Meow Wolf has amassed a devoted following for its interactive, immersive exhibitions, which use art to open portals into unknown realms. Obsessive fans have taken to Reddit to unravel all the secrets of the Meow Wolf universe. The Real Unreal is the company’s first step in tying together the disparate sites and their inter-dimensional narratives in a more readily apparent way. And while you still may not have heard of Meow Wolf, the company is poised for even more explosive growth. Under the guidance of CEO Jose Tolosa, who came over from Viacom in 2022, the punk art collective-turned art and entertainment production company has plans to bring its spectacular artistic vision to a city near you, and to create new ways for you to engage with its unique, otherworldly storyline from the comfort of your own home. What started out as a crazy art funhouse, fueled by maker culture, has struck upon a business model that is primed to become an entertainment juggernaut. Ahead of the public opening in Grapevine, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone spoke with Tolosa not only about the company’s epic, world-building ambitions, but about staying true to its roots. So forget about the metaverse—Meow Wolf’s handmade universe, at once artisanal and high-tech, is about to blow your mind.

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 frequently quoted as an expert in the art press, and she had longstanding relationships with journalists in town, including here at Artnet News, where she even wrote an op-ed last summer on the scourge of "meme art." That's why it came as such a shock to a lot of us this past May when a lawsuit dropped accusing her of essentially using her advisory firm to run a pretty extravagant Ponzi scheme. So what exactly happened with Lisa Schiff? What is she accused of doing, and where do things stand today? This week, Artnet News's ace market reporter Eileen Kinsella dives into the saga.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. To mark the occasion, an international event called Picasso Celebration has been organized, with 50 museums throughout the world running 50 different shows looking at the legacy of Picasso, among the most well-known artists of the 20th century. Certainly the most unusual and most talked about of these is not a “celebration” of Picasso at all. The Brooklyn Museum is hosting “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small have worked with the famous Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby to create an art show that takes its cues from Gadsby’s 2018 blockbuster Netflix comedy special Nanette. That show was, among other things, a blistering argument about the sexism of art history, the art industry, and, specifically, of Picasso.“It’s Pablo-matic” has itself been at the center of a wave of criticism in recent weeks. Rachel Corbett, Artnet's deputy editor, speaks to Ben Davis, Artnet’s national art critic, who wrote a long essay about the show, the reaction to the show, and what both mean for the site.

When artificial intelligence first arrived in the art world in 2017, it was received warmly and with open arms. A.I.-generated works by artists like Obvious and Mario Klingemann were fetching hundreds of thousands at auction, art fairs like Scope in Miami welcomed A.I. art, as did institutions, which eagerly staged exhibitions touting the new technology. Artists working with A.I. were embraced; there was no media outrage or backlash—A.I. art, by and large, was seen as a good thing. Not so much today. The latest chapter in A.I. art's story has seen artists decrying the tool's widespread use and its violation of creators' rights, with generated artworks sparking outrage online and off. More recently, a handful of industry leaders have even warned of A.I.'s extinction-level threat. So what changed? Why has A.I. art fallen so out of favor? That's exactly what pioneering A.I. artist and innovator Ahmed Elgammal discusses in a new op-ed for Artnet News. As an A.I. researcher, professor in the department of computer science at Rutgers University, founder of the A.I. art platform Playform, and the developer of AICAN—one of the earliest art generators—Elgammal is well-placed to observe the trajectory of A.I. art. In his view, the gulf between yesterday's and today's era of A.I. art is down to one thing: the emergence of text-to-image generators. He argues that while these new generators have made it a cinch to generate art, they have flouted ethical considerations, and effectively killed creativity. To dig into his argument, Artnet News's art & pop culture editor Min Chen spoke to Elgammal to learn more about the state of play for A.I. art—why early A.I. art took off, how text-prompting has diminished the creative process, and where artists eager to work with A.I. should go from here.

Over the past five decades, American artist Jenny Holzer has been engaging in thought-provoking interventions into public space that unflinchingly address politics, power, violence, and vulnerability. The New York-based artist investigates language as both content and form, and she works with unconventional mediums to do this including street signage, T-shirts, and light projections, but also sculptures and painting. Her poetic and often minimalist works are extremely impactful, creating a tension between knowledge and truth and emotion. Last year, Holzer curated an acclaimed exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois at the Kunstmuseum Basel. More recently, she received Whitechapel Gallery’s prestigious Art Icon award. She’s also the subject of a major solo exhibition on view until August 6 at a preeminent institution in Germany, the K21 in Dusseldorf. On the occasion of the show, which includes many key works spanning her career, Artnet’s Europe editor Kate Brown caught up with Holzer, one of the foremost artists of her generation.

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 this week where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hyper-sentimentalism. This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

In the Covid summer of 2020, the art world was jolted by a very different kind of drama when reports surfaced that MCH Group, the Swiss corporation best known as the parent company of Art Basel, had entered talks to sell a significant equity stake to Lupa Systems, the private investment company founded by none other than James Murdoch. For listeners who haven’t spent years devouring media-sector or political gossip, James Murdoch is the fourth of six children of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, now most infamous for presiding over the hard-right coverage beamed out through Fox News in the U.S. and various overseas properties via his News Corp conglomerate. The proximity of the Murdoch family to Art Basel initially sent some people in the art world into hysterics. One conspiracy theory even held that James was acting as a front for his father, who would take control of the planet’s best known, most prestigious art fair and… well, it was never quite clear what he would do, or why he would care, but obviously something dastardly and irreparable was about to happen, and we should all prepare for the worst. Yet people interested in digging soon found out that James Murdoch is very much his own man with his own resources. Although he spent decades in the family business, including prominent roles in some of its satellite TV and entertainment companies, he cut his final tie to the empire when he resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020. He has been a public critic of Donald Trump as far back as 2017, and through Quadrivium, the foundation James and his wife Kathryn started in 2014, he has funneled substantial philanthropic resources into counteracting climate change, promoting evidence-based solutions in science and health, expanding voting rights, and pushing back against online extremism.He’s also a mogul in his own right. When Disney paid a knee-buckling $71.3 billion in 2019 to acquire nearly all of the Murdochs’ entertainment assets, James received a reported $2.2 billion from the deal. He launched Lupa Systems shortly after, with sources claiming at the time that he would invest up to $1 billion of his wealth through the company. By fall of 2020, MCH Group’s shareholders had approved the deal to make Lupa Systems the company’s new “anchor shareholder,” with the option to buy up to 49 percent of its shares. But in the time since, we’ve heard relatively little from James Murdoch himself about how MCH Group and Art Basel fits alongside the other ventures in Lupa’s portfolio, including media properties like the Tribeca Festival, advanced technology startups, and sustainability projects Ahead of the 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel, however, Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, managed to sit down with James at Lupa Systems New York offices to hear his thinking firsthand.

In the studio of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s an expected sound—vibrations of a spider working on its web—a sound normally imperceptible to the human ear, but that doesn’t make it any less real. The recent technological feat of capturing and recording the sound of a spider is just one of the many pursuits undertaken by the Berlin-based artist. Saraceno is known for working with experts from the field of science, engineering, and architecture among others, to create works that exist beyond the traditional bounds of the art world. These research intensive, often groundbreaking installations and projects render visible our interconnectedness with one another and the ecosystems in which we exist. They’ve even earned him some world records. It’s an ambitious undertaking and it has solidified him as one of the most impactful artists of our generation. For Saraceno’s first major U.K. solo exhibition, which opens on June 1 at Serpentine in London, Saraceno and his collaborators are moving beyond the walls of the museum of Serpentine South, from the Royal Parks in London all the way to the rural communities of Argentina where people are fighting to stop lithium extraction in their lands, to Cameroon where Spider Diviners challenging our notions about knowledge.At the Serpentine, “Web(s) of Life” delves into critical and urgent questions about how we as people coexist with other life forms and how technology intersects with the climate emergency itself. As the last of his works were en route to London, Artnet News’s Europe editor Kate Brown joined the artist in his bright and beautiful Berlin studio.

The landscape of technological advancement in the art and design world is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of groundbreaking concepts like the Metaverse, NFTs, and easily accessible A.I. available to anyone with an Internet connection. Amid this rapidly changing landscape, it is crucial to evaluate the success and relevance of these platforms as they exist now, and how they might evolve in a future we are just beginning to comprehend. To delve into the significance of these technologies, Artnet and Morlach Whiskey organized a captivating panel discussion titled “Offscreen: The Current and Future State of Art, Design, and Technology.” Moderated by Artnet News’ executive producer, Sonia Manalili, this engaging conversation brought together multi-disciplined artists, Trevor Paglan, Khyati Trehan, and Sebastian Errazuris, each with their diverse expertise, to share their insightful perspectives on the evolving digital domain.

What is connoisseurship, and what does it mean in the present day when Chat-GPT or even plain old Google can answer nearly any art historical question with a single keystroke? It’s a question that lies in the heart of the art world and was the topic of an enlightening panel discussion titled aptly, “The Art of Connoisseurship: Cultivating Expertise in the 21st Century” at the 2023 edition of TEFAF New York last week, which was recorded live for the Art Angle podcast. On this week’s episode, a very special live recording of the conversation, moderated by Artnet News’s editor in chief Andrew Goldstein and featured Dominique Lévy, collector, advisor, gallerist, and co-founder of the newly launched gallery venture LGDR; Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director and COO of the Design Leadership Network, and author of the forthcoming book, “The New Antiquarians: Young Collectors at Home” published by Phaidon/Monacelli in June 2023; and Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, co-founder of the Leiden Collection—the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age art—and chairman of the Electrum Group.

The arrival of A.I. will profoundly change the art world—if it hasn't already. A.I.-generated works have proliferated with the rise of A.I. art generators and large language models from DALL-E to ChatGPT, making their way into galleries and in some cases, winning prestigious awards. But the question remains: is it art, if it's been dreamed up by an algorithm? Or do our existing definitions of art and art-making require rethinking in the age of machine intelligence? To help us answer these questions and more, the Art Angle looked up K Allado-McDowell, a leading voice in a rapidly evolving field. As a long-time A.I. researcher at Google A.I., K founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program, which since 2016 has nurtured artists including Refik Anadol. And as an artist, K has created works—from an opera to numerous books—alongside the language model GPT-3. In a conversation with Artnet News' Art & Pop Culture editor Min Chen, K shed light on their practice, their experiences with machine intelligence, and their view on how A.I. is changing the face of art.

One of the most exciting things about being an art journalist is that art as a subject is ridiculously protean: what it looks like is always changing, how we engage with it is always changing, and the role it plays in society is always changing too. What that means is that you constantly need to shift your perspective in order to see it properly. Searching for the correct lens on art, if you’re really good and really lucky, sometimes you even get to name that lens, like Pop Art, for instance. Artnet News’s national art critic Ben Davis has written an essay that illuminates a recent shift in art that has been making big waves among the cognoscenti. It’s a new tendency that he calls quantitative aesthetics, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein on the Art Angle podcast to discuss it.

February 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of photographer Ryan McGinley’s seminal exhibition “The Kids Are Alright” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which ran from February through May 2003. It was the 26-year-old’s solo exhibition debut, and the 20 photographs captured a particular place and time in New York City, in the shadow of September 11th, 2001 and the AIDS crisis; before the invention of Instagram and TikTok. It wasn’t just the latest downtown-meets-uptown youthquake salvo that reverberated around in the art world, but a photo exhibition that made McGinley a bona fide, post-millennial star—and shifted the culture. At that time the Whitney was still in its Upper East Side location and “The Kids Are Alright” was the most talked about photo show at the museum since Nan Goldin’s exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1996. Overnight, Ryan became the superstar art photographer of his generation, documenting his decadent world. After him, this bohemian lineage basically slams shut with the onset of social media. This week, the Art Angle presents an oral history of the exhibition and its influence featuring Artnet News style editor William Van Meter in conversation with McGinley himself, as well as artists Marc Hundley and Jack Walls; photography critic Vince Aletti, and the show’s original curator Sylvia Wolf.

Today in the spring of 2023, it feels almost impossible to escape news, rumors, debates, think pieces, open letters, diatribes, scandals, lawsuits, or almost any other form of human exchange about artificial intelligence. Whether the specific focus is on large language models like Chat-GPT or text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, the discourse around A.I. technology has only gotten more expansive, more heated, and more perplexing since last fall. That was when a genuinely surreal series of events on the live streaming platform Twitch helped surface the escalating tensions between A.I.-powered image generators and human artists. While the story in question hinged on an accusation of plagiarism, it also served as a launchpad into an in-progress existential crisis in the art world—an existential crisis that keeps intensifying as the influence, accessibility, and aesthetic quality of algorithmic image generators keeps leveling up. In October, Artnet News business editor Tim Schneider interviewed contributor and friend of the pod Zachary Small about the Twitch controversy and the larger questions facing visual culture in the era of big A.I. In many ways, that conversation is even more relevant now than it was back then. If you missed it the first time, or if you just want to review the state of play in the increasingly wild landscape of art and tech, here’s your second chance...

When you hear the name Roy Lichtenstein, an artistic style immediately comes to mind. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s use of comic books as an inspiration for his brightly-colored Pop Art painting was groundbreaking, and even shocking. Today, he is one of the most instantly-recognizable and widely known of all painters, and yet a quarter of a century after his death, the subject of Roy Lichtenstein's source material has unexpectedly become a hot topic once again. In the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for thousands of dollars; in 1995, just a few years before he died, his painting Nurse sold at auction for $1.7 million, and then in 2015 the same painting hit the auction block once again, this time selling for a staggering $95 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings in the world. While marketing that sale, Christie’s auction house said that the imagery in Nurse was drawn from what it called a “comic romance novel” of the early 1960s. What the auction house did not mention was the actual person who drew the original panel Lichtenstein used as source material for that painting was the golden age comic Arthur Petty, and in the world of comic art, this lack of respect for Lichtenstein’s sources is a big, big deal. In museums, the artist’s status may be unquestionable, but crossover into the parallel universe of comic art and Lichtenstein’s status is viewed as a symbol of the disrespect to comics as an art form, and the man himself is seen as a thief who copied hard-working artists without even bothering to credit them by name. Instead of healing over time, this particular rift seems to have only become more inflamed as Lichtenstein’s stock has soared. Some of the most famous voices in comics from Dave Gibbons, the artist behind the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen to Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus, to Neil Gaiman, writer of the legendary comic series The Sandman have all been outspoken, blasting museums for failing to credit the unique voices of the comic book artists who inspired Roy Lichtenstein. The story of the many meanings of Roy Lichtenstein is a story of the shifting relations between museum art and comic culture, of money, morality, and the law; and of how meaning in art is always shifting. At least, that’s one takeaway from the new streaming documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. This week, national art critic Ben Davis spoke to the film’s director James L. Hussey to discuss the issues it raised.

The art market of today is a thriving global industry with a diverse community of buyers and sellers from all over the world who compete privately, and often (very) publicly in the race to acquire art, decorative objects, and even sneakers and watches. That’s why having an edge when it comes to data and information is so crucial, and why Artnet’s Price Database is an indispensable tool for any serious market player. The art market has come a long way from its origins as a small, exclusive business catering to a select group of connoisseurs in major cities around the world. Prices of artworks were once closely guarded secrets, making it inaccessible to the general public. That all changed when, in 1989, Artnet revolutionized the art market by introducing transparency through its Artnet Price Database, which provides clear and precise information on the actual prices of artworks. With data from more than 1,900 auction houses worldwide, Artnet has recently released a major update to the Price Database, incorporating cutting-edge technology, seamless mobile integration, and design, to enhance its value to collectors and art professionals. This week, Artnet News’s editor in chief Andrew Goldstein discusses the role of data in the art market, the transformative power of the price database, and its exciting new era with Albert Neuendorf, Artnet’s chief strategy officer, and Fabian Bocart, Artnet’s chief data scientist.

In recent months, headlines around the world have blared the news of a startling new trend of activism where protesters physically attack famous artworks with paint, food, and glue. The activists are trying to draw attention to global issues of climate change and museum ethics, and agree or disagree, you can’t argue that their tactics are making waves and fines or jail time aren't stopping them. This week we’re re-airing a conversation that delves into this complicated issue. 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 attacks on artworks to get their message out has caught on with campaigners this year, with environmentalists in at least half a dozen countries making headlines with spectacular actions in museums—gluing themselves to famous pieces, spray-painting the walls around them, or throwing food at artworks. These actions have, in turn, touched off a fierce debate among observers and activists alike about the art-attack tactic. Is it the kind of desperate move needed to shock the public into action when nothing else seems to work? Or do the actions repel otherwise sympathetic observers, isolating a movement that needs to scale up dramatically? London-based art journalist Farah Nayeri is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of the recent book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age, which looks at how the digitally empowered activism of the last ten years has changed what the public expects from a museum. In an essay for Artnet News responding to these new museum actions, she wrote about the long history of vandalizing art for a cause, from suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus more than a century ago, to protests within British museums against oil giant BP’s sponsorship over the last decade. This week, we're revisiting Artnet News’s national art critic Ben Davis conversation with Nayeri about this history, and what the stakes of the new protests truly are.

Next to the Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is quite possibly the most famous portrait of all time. The 17th-century painting inspired a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and last year, was the target of climate activists protest, and it’s on view right now as part of the Rijksmuseum’s once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of works by the Dutch master. This week, while the Art Angle is on hiatus, we’re re-airing an episode about the centuries-old secrets of Vermeer that are just now coming to light. 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, we're 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 Earring? He remains shrouded in mystery. Strangely little is known about Johannes Vermeer. He lived in Holland in the 17th century and died in 1675 at the age of 43. He made fewer than 36 paintings. And audiences around the globe are fascinated by his portrayals of quiet domesticity. It's always been assumed he worked in the same kind of solitude that he often depicted in his paintings. But new research is challenging that assumption. Over the past several years, museums have used cutting-edge technology to get under the surface of Vermeer and learn more about how he actually worked. To discuss Vermeer's many secrets and the artist we thought we knew, Artnet News's former executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Washington, D.C.-based contributor Kriston Capps.

In a new feature film called Inside, an art heist goes terribly wrong for a thief named Nemo. Nemo is played by the world-renowned actor Willem DaFoe, well-loved by the art world already for his performance in the 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate, where he played Vincent van Gogh. In the ultra-contemporary plot of Inside, Dafoe’s character Nemo is not a world famous artist, but rather an anonymous robber who’s after a self-portrait by Egon Schiele. The artwork is not where it is supposed to be inside the ultra-modern penthouse he’s just broken into. Carefully laid plans seem to be going awry. Precious minutes are lost. Then, the alarm system locks down, leaving Nemo sealed off from the world while in the center of Manhattan. If you haven’t seen Insideyet, be advised that there are spoilers scattered throughout this episode. So, Nemo is now stuck in a resplendent box of glass, steel, and concrete, with little more than some exotic fish, luxury furniture, and a multimillion dollar art collection. On-screen alone for practically the entire film, Dafoe’s character begins to battle against the degradation of his body and spirit—to deal with the latter, the artworks in the apartment become something like a central character, as does Nemo’s own blossoming creativity. The artworks in the apartment, which were carefully curated, drive the plot and deepen the themes. There is a 1999 work by Maurizio Cattelan, a large photograph of a man taped to the wall with tons of duct tape, sarcastically titled A Perfect Day. There is also David Horvitz’s 2019 neon that hangs over the character’s struggle, with a sort of torturous prescience: it says “All the time that will come after this moment.” To build out the idea of a real art collection, there are more emerging stars. Kosovan artists Petrit Halilaj and Shkurte Halilaj’s work for the 2017 Venice Biennale is worn by Nemo when the penthouse’s temperature drops. And a video work by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck from 2016, which was filmed at the exclusion zone surrounding the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, is among the artworks in the film that conjure questions around humanity, planetary survival, and climate crisis—which is an undercurrent theme of the movie. On this week’s episode, European editor Kate Brown speaks to the film’s director Vasilis Katsoupis and art curator Leonardo Bigazzi about this captivating and claustrophobic feature, which had its world premiere at the Berlinale film festival last month and is about to hit theaters in the United States.

All around Europe, there are small brass bricks inlaid into the ground before the front doors of apartment buildings and houses. These bricks are like a decentralized memorial—they are known as Stolpersteine—which means stumbling stones—and engraved on each one is the name of a citizen who was persecuted or exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. At an apartment building in Berlin that stands at Wielandstrasse 15, you will find the name of Charlotte Salomon on one of these stumbling stones. As it says on the little brass brick, she was born in 1917 here; she fled Germany to France in 1939; she was interned at a French concentration camp in Drancy; she was deported and murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. Charlotte was also a visionary young artist, and she created a hugely ambitious work of art called Life or Theater. Made in just over a year while living in exile in France, Life or Theater consists of more than 1,000 individual gouache paintings, sectioned into three acts. It is an artwork that defies easy categorization. It is something like an autobiography, but also not quite. There are characters that are just like her own family and friends, but their names are slightly changed. There is music that is meant to accompany her vividly painted scenes, which tell the story of her coming of age as a young woman and an artist. The story shows what played out on Wielandstrasse in Berlin as the Nazis rose to power; the persecution of her family; the death of her mother from suicide, and later her grandmother. It tells about her suffering in exile, it discusses a murder. It also captures the birth of a brilliant artist who finds a lifeline in making art. It is hard to neatly summarize everything Life or Theater addresses—but as Charlotte put it herself, the piece is “something crazy special.” Not only is the work picturesque in the way it is painted and formally ground-breaking, Charlotte managed to achieve something deeply intimate and personal but also universal with this work. She gave it to a friend for safekeeping before she was taken to Auschwitz and it survived the war and is now in the possession of the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam. People do not seem to be as aware of Salomon as they should be giving the pioneering, avant-garde nature of this artwork. On the occasion of an upcoming exhibition of Life or Theater at the Lenbachhaus in Munich, Artnet News’s Kate Brown was joined by the show’s curator Irene Faber, who is also the curator of collections at the Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam, and an expert on Charlotte’s life and art.

Given the manifold political, climate, and technological crises unfolding just two months into 2023, one wonders if that ominous future our species so fears is much closer than we anticipated. It is a tense and dramatic time, but it does further underscore the importance of the cultural figure Hito Steyerl. The German filmmaker’s bold artworks investigate emerging technologies and media, and she often sites these inquiries within society and politics, globalization, and capitalism. Yet despite the complexity of the subject matter and her research-intensive process, Steyerl’s works are readily enthralling, often manifesting as highly ambitious, immersive architectural environments. It is no small wonder that her work has reached a global stage. Last year, her largest-ever retrospective, called “I Will Survive,” wrapped its European tour at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. And just last month, her exhibition called “This is the Future” opened at the Portland Art Museum, where it is on view until mid-June. On this week’s episode, European editor Kate Brown spoke to Steyerl to tackle some of the questions about what artificial intelligence, the metaverse, crypto, and an increasingly imperiled natural world might mean for us.

In ancient mythology, figures like Athena and Aphrodite were exalted as paragons of virtue, strength, and beauty. Artnet and Cadillac invited three artists to interpret the goddess theme through their individual lenses and to create new work to celebrate the return of the brand’s Goddess hood ornament on the new ultra-luxury EV CELESTIQ. These images will be offered through an online auction presented by Artnet to benefit the nonprofit organization Free Arts NYC. Last week in Los Angeles, the three contemporary photographers—Ming Smith, Petra Collins, and Dannielle Bowmann—joined Artnet News’s executive producer Sonia Manalili to discuss their unique approaches to the medium, and how to interpret the iconic goddess imagery for a new generation.

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint died nearly 80 years ago in relative obscurity, but you might not immediately realize this if you look her up today. Her paintings, large-scale, vivid, symbolic, and abstract masterpieces infused with mysticism and spirituality, seem uncannily contemporary. But that is not the only reason; af Klint is also now a bonafide star, an art-world household name. In the past several years alone there has been an explosion of interest in her work, catalyzed in no small part via her blockbuster 2018 Guggenheim show in New York called “Paintings for the Future.” Af Klint’s body of work, which bravely departed from the figurative art that was popular at the turn of the 20th century when she was working, predates the first Western abstract compositions by titans like Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian. It was a staggering revelation, to say the least. But moving beyond the elevator pitch and the catchphrases that have emerged around af Klint as we rush to fit her into an art historical canon that has woefully excluded women, is essential. Up until recently, many of the intricacies of her life, work, ambitions, and friendships, were not well-understood. That is part of the reason why Julia Voss decided to write the first-ever biography on the artist, which came out in English at the end of last year. Voss, a prominent German journalist, art critic, researcher, and curator, spent the better part of a decade learning Swedish and meticulously retracing af Klint’s life and her movements in Europe. Voss combed through more than 20,000 notebooks that belonged to af Klint as well as her massive archive, which the artist had left to her nephew. The biography includes several revelations about af Klint’s inner life, desires, and activities. We are headed into another two years that is sure to bring increased attention and reflection on the work of Af Klint. Her massive catalog raisonne is due out next month, edited by Swedish curator and art critic Daniel Birnbaum. An exhibition called “Swedish Ecstasy” at BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels opens this week. Next year, for the first time ever, there will be a show dedicated to Kandinsky and af Klint, curated by Birnbaum and Voss. On this week's episode, Voss joins Artnet News European editor Kate Brown to dive into some of the more fascinating and under-considered aspects of the enigmatic and groundbreaking artist.

One art movement has become a household name in a way that few recent art movements can match. This is Afrofuturism. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installing an Afrofuturist period room to the blockbuster movie Black Panther and its sequel to an upcoming survey of the movement at the National Museum of African American history and culture, Afrofuturism is being canonized in art and beyond. It's an extraordinarily rich tradition, bringing together influences from experimental jazz and Detroit techno sci-fi and fantasy, art and technology. With Black History Month here, we decided to dig into Afrofuturist art history with Ytasha Womack. Womack is the author of Afrofuturism, The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. She's also an artist herself, actively working in the tradition now. So how can you define the afro futurist aesthetic? What are some of its touchstones? And why has there been such a surge of excitement around Afrofuturism in the recent past? Artnet News National Art Critic, Ben Davis, sits down with Womack to find out.

For Art Basel, the most well known art fair in the world, the fourth quarter of 2022 marked the end of one era, and the beginning of another. In early November, leadership of the company transitioned to Noah Horowitz, who returned after a roughly year-long stint at Sotheby’s to become the first ever CEO of the same fair brand where he served as director of the Americas from 2015 to 2021. But clearing Horowitz’s path to the chief executive’s office was the one and only Marc Spiegler. Spiegler shocked the art world in October 2022 by announcing that he would end his decade-long campaign as Art Basel’s global director at the end of that year (though he will stay on as an advisor through June of this one). During his time at the helm, Spiegler oversaw a transformation of the company across multiple dimensions, including doubling the annual number of Art Basel fairs; dramatically expanding the company’s digital presence; quintupling the size of its staff; responding to a global pandemic; and much more. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, if you look closely at these shifts, they mirror back some of the most important ways that the art business as a whole has morphed during the 21st century. Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, sits down with Marc in mid-January for the first extended interview he has given in his post-Basel professional life.

Born in Norilsk, an industrial Siberian town inside the Arctic Circle, Nadya Tolokonnikova was just 18 when she moved to Moscow and became a founding member of the Russian street art and performance art collective Voina in 2007. It was her strong feminist leanings that then inspired her to cofound Pussy Riot, known for playing incendiary highly political punk music while wearing balaclava head coverings. The group rose to fame following a now legendary 2012 performance of the song “Punk Prayer,” at Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Savior, when Tolokonnikova and two other Pussy Riot members were arrested and then convicted of “hooliganism.” She spent close to two years incarcerated in a brutal labor camp in Mordovia, Russia. But her time behind bars has not deterred Tolokonnikova from continuing to act as an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, or from leveraging the power of art in the name of activism. This week marks the opening of her first ever gallery exhibition for Pussy Riot, held at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles. The centerpiece of the exhibition is the new performance Putin’s Ashes, in which Tolokonnikova leads a coven of women in a witch-like ritual to drive the Russian president from power, burning a giant portrait of Putin to the ground in the process. Ahead of the show’s opening, Artnet News senior reporter Sarah Cascone spoke to Tolokonnikova about the challenges of presenting conceptual performance art in a white cube gallery, and how she continues to remain optimistic about political change in her native country despite the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and her continued persecution at the hands of the Russian government, which in December 2021 labeled her a “foreign agent.”

Here at Artnet, we typically look to thorough data and the hard facts to tell us what to make of the wily, unpredictable art world. But every now and then, it’s important to remember that ours is an industry based on unorthodox minds and a reverence for avant garde expression, so magical thinkers ought to remain a legitimate resource to our team of reporters. To that end, our Artnet News Pro Wet Paint columnist, Annie Armstrong recently spoke with Micki Pellerano, who has earned himself the nickname "The Art Warlock", to discuss the occult's role in the art world, and why so many esteemed minds in our industry look in earnest to astrology for guidance. Pellerano is an artist himself, working mainly in drawing and sculpture to express his affinity to ritual symbolism and esotericism. His work has been on view at esteemed spaces such as MoMA, the Serpentine Gallery, Brooklyn Museum, and the 2019 Venice Biennale. More than that, though, he has also been the art world's go-to astrologer, hosting one-on-one sessions to art world luminaries such as Jenny Hval and Alissa Bennet from his studio in Brooklyn. Pellerano’s study of the occult is ongoing, and in this conversation, he asserts his belief that astrology's impact is inextricable from the advancement of humankind, and certainly from the canon of art history.

Well, it's happened again. Tim Schneider has gone prophetic, again. At the beginning of every year, our trusted art business editor goes through the Sisyphean task of assessing his predictions for the most recently-wrapped year in the art world, and lays down his prophecies for the next 365 days to come. As is now tradition, for his first Gray Market column of the year, Soothsayer Schneider makes a set of predictions specific to the murky machinations of the art market, each of which must be able to be proven true or false 12 months later. (For the purposes of the podcast recording, we've homed in on four very specific predictions to elaborate on, but the full list of eight is available to readers.) From the rise of artist-branded merchandise (think Basquiat-emblazoned hoodies, dog collars, and phone cases) to the death of an art fair, plus predictions about the state of the market amid skyrocketing interest rates and the ongoing war in Ukraine, here's what you should be prepared for in the year to come.

Anyone who's driven by a car dealership in the U.S. has probably seen them: Inflatable nylon figures with smiley faces, bending and twisting in the breeze. These roadside attention getters are known in the marketing world as "tube men" or "sky dancers." Paul Chan calls them "Breathers," and they have played a central role in the artist's practice since he debuted his own uncanny renditions of the dancers in 2017 at Greene Naftali gallery in New York. The swaying figures also symbolize the artist's own winding approach to his practice, and the need, sometimes, to take a breather. After working primarily with video early in his career—including violating sanctions to shoot a video essay in Baghdad during the U.S. occupation—Chan grew exhausted by screens. He left art production for five years and opened his own publishing house, the beloved indie outfit Badlands Unlimited, which has put out eclectic titles ranging from Saddam Hussein's speeches on democracy to the interactive e-book What Is a Kardashian? Chan made his return to visual art after realizing that those car-lot tube men could be turned into offscreen animations. Now, the "Breathers" are the centerpiece of a major solo show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, open through July 16. Artnet News's deputy editor Rachel Corbett sat down with Chan—a recent winner of the MacArthur 'Genius' grant—to talk about the tyranny of screens, his early adoption of crypto, and the importance, in every artist's life, of simply taking a break.

Well, what do you know? The year of 2022 has officially come to a close, and here at The Art Angle, we are in a reflective. It was an amazing year for the show. We interviewed luminaries like Venice Biennale curator to Cecilia Alemani, artist Marina Abramović, critic Jerry Saltz; we delved deep into the scandalous history of Documenta as well as the whole Board Ape Yacht Club phenomenon, and the new revolution and how we think about surrealism today. The turning of the calendar year, however, also marks a big change around here, with Julia Halpern, Artnet News's executive editor and frequent Art Angle host, moving on to new adventures. She was an invaluable force in shaping the show and shaping Artnet News generally, so she'll be very dearly missed and has our deepest gratitude. We wish her the best of luck. So with all this in mind, as The Art Angle takes some time off to prep for what is looking like an incredible 2023, we thought we would leave you with a repeat of one of our favorite episodes of the year. An episode we think may also prove resonant in the year to come. Well, it may be both crypto and literal winter right now but Tim Schneider's sweeping and truly ambitious Metaverse explainer episode provides a really terrific look at the way that art may evolve into its next digital era. We hope you enjoy it. See you in 2023 and Happy New Year from The Art Angle.

Well, the end of the year is upon us and it is also the end of an era here at Artnet News. Our fearless executive editor, Julia Halperin, is leaving her post. As a sendoff for Julia, we thought we'd in the year, as we usually do with something lighthearted, The Artnet News Year End Quiz. Given the fact that no one has spent more time editing news digests early in the morning, editing art news through the day, and researching the art market, Julia is our perfect contestant and we hope that you at home, our Artnet News Super fans, can play along as well.

Inside the art world, one of the defining narratives of the past decade has been a renewed push for gender and racial equity. Much of the attention in this realm has focused on the dramatic overrepresentation of white male artists in everything from museum collections and exhibition programs, to auction sales and gallery rosters. Overtures to correcting the imbalance have been so prevalent in trade-media headlines, institutional marketing, and day-to-day conversations that many, if not most, art professionals seem to be confident that the industry is slowly but steadily reversing generations of deeply embedded racism and sexism. But how much has the art world really rebalanced the scales? It turns out that the answer is much less than we hoped––at least if we look past the hype at the actual data. Enter the latest edition of the Burns-Halperin Report, a multipronged data-led project helmed by Charlotte Burns, the veteran art journalist, podcaster, and founder of Studio Burns, and Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin. At the core of the Burns-Halperin Report is a one-of-a-kind database encompassing hundreds of thousands of entries painstakingly compiled from U.S. museums, global auction houses, and top commercial galleries. The data quantifies how little has changed for artists in three historically underrepresented demographics since as far back as 2002. It also leaves the rest of us facing a lot of hard questions about why the art trade at large believes it’s doing so much better at neutralizing its biases than it actually is. On this week’s episode, Charlotte and Julia join Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider to walk us through the report itself, how it came together, and what it all means

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 attacks on artworks to get their message out has caught on with campaigners this year, with environmentalists in at least half a dozen countries making headlines with spectacular actions in museums—gluing themselves to famous pieces, spray-painting the walls around them, or throwing food at artworks. These actions have, in turn, touched off a fierce debate among observers and activists alike about the art-attack tactic. Is it the kind of desperate move needed to shock the public into action when nothing else seems to work? Or do the actions repel otherwise sympathetic observers, isolating a movement that needs to scale up dramatically? London-based art journalist Farah Nayeri is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of the recent book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age, which looks at how the digitally empowered activism of the last ten years has changed what the public expects from a museum. In an essay for Artnet News responding to these new museum actions, she wrote about the long history of vandalizing art for a cause, from suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus more than a century ago, to protests within British museums against oil giant BP’s sponsorship over the last decade. This week, Artnet News's national art critic Ben Davis spoke to Nayeri about this history, and what the stakes of the new protests truly are.

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 for the Village Voice, Artnet Magazine (the predecessor of Artnet News), and other publications before becoming New York's resident art critic in 2006, where he's been on a run of glory that has included winning the 2018 Pulitzer for criticism. But while he's well known for his exuberant, beautifully wrought criticism, he's even better known as what might be termed an "art critic in the expanded field." He shares his opinions every day with some half a million followers on Twitter and Instagram, alongside frequent TV appearances and a half dozen books, the latest of which, called Art is Life, has just been published by Riverhead Books.

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 will go on display at Maroma, Belmond’s hotel in the Riviera Maya, when it reopens in May 2023. Before then, however, they are going on a world tour. It starts with a display in the Miami Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach and continues with presentations at ZonaMaco in Mexico City in February and Photo London in May. In partnership with Belmond, the Art Angle spoke with the curators behind the project. Fariba Farshad is co-founder and director of Photo London and Patricia Conde is the founder of Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City. Together, they gave us the lowdown on why they chose these four photographers, how the project came together in record time, and what it shows us about Mexico’s vibrant photography scene.

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 with more than 50,000 square-footage dedicated to galleries in Miami's Allapattah, and a newly opened 32,000-square-foot outpost in Southwest Washington D.C. The Rubell's art collecting began when they were newlyweds\ who would squirrel away $25 from Mera's teaching salary to put toward acquisitions while Don was in medical school. Now, along with their son Jason and daughter Jennifer, they own one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in the world, with more than 7,400 works of art by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Catherine Opie. On the heels of their DC museum's grand opening, and just weeks before they will hold court at Art Basel in Miami Beach, Artnet News's senior reporter Katya Kazakina caught up with Don, Jason, and Mera to discuss the origins of their collection, the symbiotic relationship between art and real estate, and their famous Midas touch for sussing out the hottest emerging artists.