The Art Angle

Few living artists have created an artwork as instantly recognizable as Shepherd Fairey’s Hope poster, which has become the stuff of legend as the face of Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. The image, which the New Yorker dubbed "the most efficacious American political illustration since Uncle Sam Wants You,” remains embedded in the public consciousness even if you don't know the street artist's name. But Fairey has been creating powerful visuals for more than 30 years, dating back to 1989, when he began pasting stickers of Andre, the Giants face over the word obey on the streets of Providence during his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design. In the decades since, Fairey has become equally at home in the art museum as on the streets, bridging the divide between the fine art world and the skateboarding slash graffiti scene with work that reflects his commitment to activism—the Obama poster, it's worth noting, was a grassroots effort, not a campaign commission. Ahead of Fairey's new solo show at Dallas Contemporary, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone, sat down with the artist to talk about his long career from the DIY skate and punk scene to art world acceptance. "Shepard Fairey: Backward Forward" is on view at Dallas Contemporary, 161 Glass Street, Dallas, Texas, September 25, 2022–July 23, 2023.

When visitors go to see Wolfgang Tillmans’s new retrospective at the museum of modern art, one of the first things they'll likely notice is that few pictures are presented in a frame. Most are instead pinned or taped directly to the wall; adorning nearly every service on the museum, six floor and arranged, not by rows, but in clusters, kind of like constellations in the night sky. And that's an analogy that the 54 year old artist might himself appreciate given his abiding love of outer space. “Astronomy,” he once said, “was my visual initiation into seeing.” A cosmological awe pervades To Look Without Fear, as MoMA’s exhibition is called—even though Tillmans’s subject matter is often quite quotidian. More than 300 of the artist's photographs are included spanning his nearly four decade career from his experiments with a photocopier as a student in Germany in the late 1980s and his editorial efforts for Index and I-D magazines in London and New York in the 90’s, to his darkroom abstractions of the early 2000s and beyond. But Tillmans’s practice has always resisted strict taxonomization, and that’s true here, too; what’s on view is not a series of discrete bodies of work but a kind of diaristic journey through the artist’s life: his friends, his lovers; his work, his play; his experience with loss and living with HIV and his constant consideration of what it means to interpret it all through the technology of photography. No lens-based artist revels in the simple profundity of the medium like him. On view now through January 1st of next year, To Look Without Fear is a sprawling, years-in-the-making presentation that rightly casts Tillmans among the today’s most important working artists. Ahead of the show’s opening, Artnet News’s Taylor Dafoe sat down with Tillmans at MoMA for a conversation about language, looking back in time, and how staring into the cosmos taught him to appreciate life on earth.

The year was 1990, and artist Rick Lowe had invited a group of high school students into a studio. Standing surrounded by his billboard size paintings, one of the kids made a comment that stopped him in his tracks. Why was Lowe illustrating problems everyone already knew about rather than proposing creative solutions? The moment changed everything. It pushed Lowe to create art outside the studio and sent him on a path to becoming one of the leading figures in an art movement known as social practice. The term social practice describes art that is created with, and for, communities. Over the past three decades Lowe has done this in a variety of forms, including his most famous work Project Row Houses, a hub for community housing and art-making in Houston's Third Ward. All the while Lowe has maintained a painting practice alongside his socially engaged work, and he won a MacArthur Genius Grant for all of it in 2014. This month, after a long hiatus from the New York gallery world, he returns with his first solo show of paintings at Gagosian. Artnet News contributor, Sade Ologundudu spoke with Lowe as part of a four part series on Artnet News about artists across generations who work with social practice.

Last week, the art industry descended on Seoul, South Korea, for the inaugural edition of Frieze art fair’s Asian outpost. It was a major affair, packed with K-pop celebrities and six-figure sales that marked yet another peak for the Korean art scene, which seems to be heading along a neverending upward spiral. Installed next to the stalwart fair Kiaf at the formidable CoEx convention center, and not far away from a smaller satellite fair focused on new media, Kiaf Plus, this first year for this combined trio of fairs was a runaway success story. At Frieze, 110 galleries participated, drawing in the western art world to this major Asian capital city, which is bolstered by a flourishing art community and a ripe art market, and appeal to the Korean collector scene, which is rapidly growing in power. To color the picture from the ground, our Europe Editor Kate Brown spoke with Seoul-based curator and critic Andy St. Louis—an insider to the art scene who has been based in Seoul for more than ten years. St. Louis is the Seoul desk editor at ArtAsiaPacific, and a contributing editor at ArtReview Asia (and you can also catch his byline on Artnet News). In 2018, he founded Seoul Art Friend, an online platform dedicated to promoting contemporary Korean art, which you can access at seoulartfriend.com or on Instagram and Facebook (at) seoulartfriend. He is currently writing a survey of emerging and mid-career artists which is due to be published in Summer 2023. Andy and Kate debriefed on the goings-on during South Korea’s major launch into the international art scene and discuss what opportunities and challenges lay ahead as Seoul continues to transform itself into a major art world hub.

This year was a big one for biennials with the Whitney Biennial in New York, the Venice Biennale in Italy and Documenta in Kassel, Germany as well as many, many more. Earlier this year, our team at Artnet analyzed hundreds of these exhibitions over the past five years to identify the biggest stars of the biennial circuit. As we gear up for the fall art season, we thought it would be useful to revisit the episode where national art critic, Ben Davis and Europe editor, Kate brown, discuss the surprising findings.

We thought we’d revisit an episode we recorded earlier this year about one of the more fascinating and under-known figures in American art history. Her name was Belle da Costa Greene, and she was the vivacious and spectacularly connoisseurial force behind building robber baron J.P. Morgan’s art collection and, now, New York’s Morgan Library. Unusual at the time for being a women in such a powerful role, what is even more unusual is that she was a Black woman—a secret she successfully guarded her entire adult life.To learn Belle da Costa Greene’s story—which is now being made into a major TV series—I spoke to Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, the authors of The Personal Librarian, a sensational novel about her life.

Five months into the conflict, the brutal, horrific war in Ukraine grinds on, with no end in sight. And while Ukrainian men and women are fighting, and dying, on the front lines to defend their homeland, art workers are continuing to do their part to aid the struggle by preserving their nation’s rich heritage and keeping the flame of culture alive.Shortly after the invasion, Artnet News European Editor Kate Brown spoke to two such art workers based in the Kyiv—Vasyl Cherepanyn, the director of the city’s Visual Culture Research Center, and Nikita Kadan, an artist whose work is deeply imbued with his political activism—about what it’s like watching the war unfold on their doorstep, and how they are working to counter the crisis by any means.As the Art Angle team is on break, we are proud to re-air this episode.

Over the years, we’ve been very fortunate to have some bona fide legendary artists on this show, from Ai Weiwei to Judy Chicago to Anish Kapoor to Ed Ruscha. But none of them, to my mind, are as surprising to talk to as the great performance artist Marina Abramović, who host Andrew Goldstien had the privilege of interviewing toward the start of this year. When you think about her art, what comes to the fore are profound themes of life and death, pain, and transcending the body. When you’re talking to her, you think: wait, she’s hilarious? And provocative, and blunt, and something like down-to-earth. We enjoyed the conversation about her work and her Abramovic Method so much that, this week, while the Art Angle team hits the beach for a little vacation, we thought we’d re-air the episode for your listening pleasure. In fact, the Abramovic Method might even come in handy for durationally enduring all this heat. Enjoy.

The world rarely sees a creative dynamo on the level of Virgil Abloh—or one harder to quantify. A trained architect, who was born to Ghanian immigrants and grew up in Chicago, he was best known as the visionary men’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton (and the first person of color to hold that position)—the position he held when he died at 41 from a rare cancer. But his protean career began blazing long before that. A key early milestone? In 2009, Abloh interned at Fendi alongside rapper and fashion designer Kanye West—a relationship that led to Abloh later serving as the creative director for West’s agency Donda. He founded the short-lived yet highly influential streetwear label Pyrex Vision in 2012, selling garments by other brands that he screen printed with his own label’s name and elevated to eye-watering prices—a Duchampian gesture that combined appropriation, impeccable branding, and the kind of gleeful outsider-turned-insider humor that marked Abloh’s career. In 2019, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago mounted the first museum exhibition dedicated to Abloh’s work in “Figures of Speech,” a sprawling show that brought in twice the museums normal attendance and helped cement Abloh’s legacy in the realm of fine art. Now on view now in Brooklyn, the show explores Abloh’s luxury brand activations, perspectives on design and architecture, and collaborations with artists including Takashi Murakami, Jenny Holzer, and Rem Koolhaus. On this episode, Artnet News’s brand editor William Van Meter spoke about the designer’s work and legacy with Jian Deleon, the men’s fashion and editorial director of Nordstrom, who collaborated with Abloh on one of his final projects—an capsule collection called New Concepts 18: Virgil Abloh Securities.

Have you ever wanted to live a different kind of life, in a different kind of place? What if this other place gave you the power to do or be almost anything you wanted, anywhere you wanted, anytime you wanted? Suppose that what you could build there, and who you could be there, had nothing to do with your finances. Not even the laws of physics would hold you back. If you wanted to be the monarch of a Gothic castle perched on a cloud suspended above a Nordic woodland, you could have that. You could even do it in a new body, under a new name, with neither one having any apparent connection to your physicality or your past. Even wilder, this other place would welcome millions of other individuals with just as much freedom as you, so that you could all build this new world together. You could form new relationships, establish new traditions, and experience a new wave of art and culture held back by nothing but artists’ imaginations. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? Well, billions of dollars and untold hours of labor are being pumped into making this fantasy a reality—an immersive digital reality. And some of the most influential and most powerful people in the world are saying it will be called the metaverse. But what is the metaverse, exactly? How has it elbowed its way deep enough into the mainstream that your retired parents are asking you about it? And what does it mean for the art world specifically? This week on the Art Angle, business editor and The Gray Market scribe Tim Schneider is joined by three experts to help make sense of this potential new world order: Wagner James Au, the author of The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World (2008) and the forthcoming book Why the Metaverse Matters: From Second Life to Meta and Beyond, A Guide By Its First Embedded Journalist and the ongoing blog, New World Notes; Tina Rivers Ryan, a curator of modern and contemporary art at the Buffalo AKG Museum in New York, who has organized exhibitions including "Difference Machines: Technology and Identity in Contemporary Art"; and Sara Ludy, an artist and composer based in Placetas, New Mexico whose current exhibition, "Swimmer’s Canyon," is on view at Art Mûr in Montréal, Canada.

Jayson Musson has a unique status in the art world: he has the persona and perspective of an outsider, but he's also something of an artist's artist. Originally from the Bronx, Musson got his creative start in Philadelphia in the 2000s, creating cerebral, satirical street art; penning a column for the Philadelphia Weekly called "Black Like Me"; and performing in the cult hip-hop group Plastic Little, which put out songs like "I'm Not a Thug," "Rap O'Clock," and "Miller Time." Musson again popped up unexpectedly onto the radar in 2010 with "Art Thoughtz," a DIY YouTube series that immediately became a treasured reference in art school and art media. It starred Musson in the persona of "Hennessy Youngman," fusing the styles of art theory lecture and Def Comedy Jam, monologuing about everything from concepts of beauty to Damien Hirst's tendency to make faces in press pics. It was fresh enough to surprise, and knowing enough to be a hit. Musson has worked in a variety of styles in the last decade, from painting to sculpture to children's books to mix tapes. He's back this month with a very different spin on art education at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum. Titled "His History of Art," the new show has a characteristically offbeat premise. It takes the form of a combination of sitcom and PBS edutainment, with Musson starring as Jay, explaining the value of art history to Ollie, a rabbit played by a puppet. And there are lots of other surreal detours along the way. Ben Davis, Artnet News's national art critic and a Jayson Musson fan, recently had a chance to talk to the artist about his unusual career and the idea behind his new riff on art history.

It might be the dog days of summer here in New York, but over in the metaverse, we are firmly in the depths of crypto winter. When NFT NYC, the world’s largest NFT conference, descended on Times Square last month, Bitcoin and ether were down more than 70 percent from where they were in November. That put a damper on the proceedings, and it’s had a ripple effect on the once-ballooning market for digital collectibles. In the first half of 2021, Christie’s had sold $93 million worth of NFTs; this year, they’ve sold just $4.8 million. Meanwhile, NFT players and platforms are being dogged by claims of insider trading and market manipulation, and many in the art world are reconsidering their relationship with the sector. To offer us a micro-history of this fast-changing market, and a recap of how the crypto crash has transformed the NFT space, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Zachary Small, an Artnet News contributor and friend of the Art Angle. Zach is the author of the forthcoming book “Token Supremacy: How NFTs (and a Little Money Laundering) Turned Decentralized Finance Into an Art Form.”

Well, the hot summer season is upon is, and while the Art Angle team is taking some r&r this week we thought we’d offer you some refreshment in the form of re-airing one of our favorite episodes of the year so far—a tale of art-world fakery, double-dealing, and incredibly creative swindling so preposterous it’s worthy of a summer movie. Let’s just say that no one in the story you are about to hear, about jet-setting Italian collectors promoting a favorite artist on Instagram, are who they seem. Kate Brown, who uncovered the story and the brazen theft at its heart, discussed the saga with executive editor Julia Halperin.

This past may New York hosted what is probably the biggest auction season ever selling more than $2.7 billion worth of art. Last week, the traveling circus touchdown in London with multimillion dollar art sales at Phillips, Sotheby's and Christie's. So before the arm market goes into hibernation for the summer, we decided to revisit our episode, decoding the complex sociology of auctions. Auctions are the most public and visible part of the art market—but they are also among the most misunderstood. There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes preparation, psychology, and game theory that goes into pulling off a successful sale. It is a game—and to succeed as both a seller and a buyer, you need to know the rules. We called in Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin to help us decode the complex sociology of auctions.

You're heard quite a bit about biennials on the Art Angle recently—the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial, and, most recently, Documenta, which comes once every five years to Kassel, Germany. On their own, each of these are closely watched events by art mavens looking to spot national and global trends. But they are also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a circuit of Biennial and Triennial art events that girdle the earth, popping up from Athens to Bangkok to Cuenca to Dakar to, well—you could keep going on down through the alphabet. With the newest Documenta now open, we asked ourselves: What if you could go to every one of these biennials? What kinds of trends would you see? To answer the question, our writers looked at the artists included in hundreds of biennials curated since the last Documenta in 2017, to find out which names came up most. The answers that emerged were surprising, frankly, even to us, revealing a list of Biennial Art superstars who have dominated the conversation among curators in the last five years. These figures make art cut to fit that circuit. They even have their own means of economic support. To talk about the findings of the Biennial Art project, today we have two of our writers who worked on it in conversation: Ben Davis, our National Art Critic, and Kate Brown, our European editor. You can read the full project, which includes an extremely long list of all the artists in our data set and an essay on what it means to be a biennial artist on Artnet News.

Kennedy Yanko is not afraid to take up space this week. This week, the Brooklyn-based sculptor unveiled her largest work yet at Art Basel, a 20 foot tall hanging sculpture titled By Means Other Than The Known Senses. The title describes how Yanko often creates her work through exploration and a whole lot of intuition. The apricots green and gray work is a tornado of cascading metal forms. At first glance, it's impossible to tell just how much it weighs since it's suspended in the air. As it turns out, it weighs a lot. It's created from a monumental shipping container that Yanko scrunched, reformed and selectively covered in paint skin. When she's done, the sculpture looks so alive, it almost feels like it's breathing. Yanko's star has been steadily rising over the past few years. Last year, she became the first sculptor to earn the coveted residency at the Rubell museum in Miami. Now she's unveiling her work at Art Basel Unlimited, the section dedicated to large scale projects at the world's most prestigious art fair ahead of the fair, which runs through Sunday. Artnet News Executive Editor Julia Halperin spoke with Kennedy from her hotel room in Switzerland.

How much can an art show do? That’s a question at the heart of documenta, the sprawling exhibition that touches down in Kassel, Germany every five years. Sometimes called a “museum in 100 days,” the show regularly draws millions of visitors from around the world. But it is far from a neutral celebration of contemporary art. Founded in 1955, the show was conceived as a way to regenerate Kassel, which was still in ruins after World War II. But it had broader political aims, too: to project West Germany’s alliance with liberal values and help spread those values to nearby East Germany during the Cold War. Since its inception, documenta has melded art and politics more than almost any other exhibition in the world. So it’s not surprising that its history has been marked by controversy. From hidden Nazi ties to funding crises, the show has stirred up dispute after dispute. And this year is no different, as the show’s curators, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, face allegations of anti-Semitism due to the political affiliations of some of the artists included in the show. When the 15th documenta opens next week, it will present the work of more than 50 artists and collectives. Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin sat down with Europe editor Kate Brown to explore this essential show’s turbulent history—and perhaps even more turbulent present.

Not too long ago, Inigo Philbrick was one of the best-connected dealers in the art world. The son of a museum director and the protege of legendary gallerist Jay Jopling, he was often spotted at VIP previews of major art fairs and in a prominent seat at auctions around the globe. Then, in late 2019, he disappeared. As it turns out, Philbrick was the subject of mounting civil lawsuits and, ultimately, a criminal case that found he conned clients out of $85 million. Prosecutors say he committed “one of the most significant frauds in the art market in history.” He stood accused of selling shares amounting to more than 100 percent in artworks he did not own, falsifying contracts, forging signatures, and inventing fictitious clients. He pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of wire fraud in November. Last week, Philbrick’s case finally came to a close when the former wunderkind was sentenced to seven years in jail, one of the harshest sentences we’ve seen in an art-fraud case in recent memory. Artnet News senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella, who has followed this case from the very beginning, was on the scene reporting from the courtroom. She spoke with executive editor Julia Halperin about Inigo's extraordinary rise and fall.

As we all know, there's a tremendous amount of attention that's being paid lately to NFTs and their whiplash market oscillations. Are NFTs good? Bad? A flash in the pan? Here to stay? Well, there's an argument to be made that NFTs are actually at best a distraction from the real mind-blowing, totally profound technological revolution that is poised to change art as we know it forever. And that of course is the rise of AI art. So what is AI art and is artificial intelligence here to help artists or to make them obsolete? It's a big thorny question and it just so happens that there is a brilliant essay on the topic in the heart of the brand new book, by my favorite thinker on big thorny questions, Artnet News, Chief Art Critic, Ben Davis. Titled Art in The After-Culture, Ben's new book is a combination of traditional critical essays and speculative fiction. And to my mind, it is an instant classic, the kind of book filled with deep insights that will become a touchstone for future generations curious about how art functions in our. I can't overpraise it, but I can tell you that it's available from Haymarket books and that you should buy Art in The After-Culture and read it for yourself. This episode is really focused on the book’s ideas on AI art, which are a lot to chew on on their own. Ben Davis joins the show to break them down a little bit.

Today, Jean-Michel Basquiat is unquestionably one of the most recognizable and beloved artists on the planet. A native New Yorker of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat first attracted attention as a teenage graffiti writer in the late 1970s, before rapidly transitioning into the role of international sensation in the newly glamorous, increasingly global gallery world of the 1980s. Although the main draw was his inimitable artistic practice, which merged cryptic poetry and symbology with antic, Expressionistic figures, Basquiat quickly became a downtown celebrity of the first order, walking the runway, collaborating with musicians, and famously dating Madonna. Tragically, Basquiat died from an overdose at the age of 27. His short artistic career makes it all the more remarkable that his work and his visage seem to be everywhere in the 21st century. Of course, I’m not just talking about his actual paintings, which reliably sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction. Licensed reproductions of Basquiat’s work now fuel a wide range of products and branding opportunities, from affordable t-shirts and keychains, to an unprecedented collaboration with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets resulting in a Basquiat-inspired home court design and team uniform. But as licensing has become a lucrative revenue stream for contemporary artists and estates, it has also intensified age-old criticisms about the corrosive powers of commercialization on creative integrity. The Basquiat estate’s approach has made Jean-Michel’s work one of the focal points of this tension, especially after the opening of “King Pleasure,” a major exhibition about the artist’s life and work now on view in Manhattan. To sort through this tangled web, Artnet News art business editor Tim Schneider spoke to market guru Katya Kazakina about her look into Basquiat and the increasingly big business of artwork licensing.

The Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist Nari Ward was barely out of his 20s when he exploded onto the New York art scene in 1993 with Amazing Grace, an extraordinary installation of 300 baby strollers he found abandoned around Harlem. The work, installed in a dimly lit former firehouse, resonated with audiences as a startling and humble commentary on the seemingly endless crises plaguing New York: the AIDS and crack epidemics, rampant homelessness, racial violence, and a city on edge after the Crown Heights and City Hall riots.In the nearly 30 years since, Ward has maintained his role as one of our mourners-in-chief, and his latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in Chelsea is no exception. The show, titled “I’ll Take You There; A Proclamation,” again taps into musical and cultural history to offer a dignified yet sobering reflection on the Covid pandemic and its devastating fallout of economic inequality, political instability, and profound loss. More than anything, the brilliant new exhibition, which continues Ward’s use of refuse and discarded objects, picked up around the streets of the city, suggests that none of us—not even Ward—knows exactly where we’re headed next.To get a sense of the show, we called in Artnet News managing editor Pac Pobric to get the artist’s take on his remarkable new work.

Get your paddles ready: New York is about to kick off what may be the biggest auction season ever. Over the next two weeks, as much as $2.6 billion worth of art is expected to be sold across glitzy evening sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips. The offerings include a sage-blue portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol that could bring in over $200 million, a billboard-size Basquiat that could fetch $70 million, and Richters, Picassos, and Rothkos galore. Auctions are the most public and visible part of the art market—but they are also among the most misunderstood. There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes preparation, psychology, and game theory that goes into pulling off a successful sale. It is a game—and to succeed as both a seller and a buyer, you need to know the rules. We called in Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin to help us decode the complex sociology of auctions.

At long last, this week the 59th Venice Biennale has officially thrown itself open to the world in Italy. The Biennale is always a big event for the art world. The 2022 edition may be even more anticipated than usual. Because of the pandemic, it was delayed a year—the first time that has happened since World War II. And it emerges in a moment of global turmoil and uneasiness, when everyone is wondering how art might respond to the challenges of the present. The Artnet News team was on the scene last week for the Biennale previews, cranking out news reports from around Venice you can find on the site, including reports from the many national pavilions. But as listeners of the Art Angle will know, the big event of the Biennale is the main show, curated this year by New York-based Italian art curator Cecilia Alemani. Alemani was on the podcast a few weeks ago to talk about her vision. Now we get to see whether she pulled it off. The exhibition carries the dreamy title “The Milk of Dreams,” and it is full of dream-like images, references to myth and magic, beasts and cyborgs, and mystery. It is notable in being almost entirely composed of women or gender non-nonconforming artists. This Biennale is also notable for how it rethinks the past—normally a survey of new trends in art, this year the Biennale includes 5 special mini-exhibitions, shows-within-the-show that look at how female figures from the past explored the themes of "The Milk of Dreams." In effect, Alemani is writing a new art historical timeline to insert her work into. There’s a lot to talk about in this ambitious and complex Venice Biennale. To do so, we have assembled a panel of people who were in Venice. National Art Critic Ben Davis is joined by Emmanuel Balogan and Barbara Calderon, both of who are writing about aspects of the 2022 Biennale for Artnet News.

So want to buy a Picasso? No, it's too expensive? Want to buy a teensy-weensy, tiny little microscopic flack of a Picasso? That sounds better, doesn't it? Believe it or not, that kind of sales pitch is actually gaining traction in a big way. In the wild world of fractional art sales, where massive new startup companies are buying up the bluest of blue chip art, think Basquiat, Joan Mitchell and Ed Ruscha, and selling what are essentially shares in these pieces to speculative investors. It's rapidly becoming a big business. But what you do you actually get if you buy a share in a painting, how does it work and what is it really worth? Artnet News, Senior Reporter, Katya Kazakina, author of the incredible Art Detective column joins this episode to talk about her new in-depth report on fractional art funds for the spring edition of the Artnet News Pro Intelligence Report, which just dropped last week.

It's biennial season in a big bi-annual year. The Toronto Biennial just opened, the Venice Biennale opens next week, and around the corner are the German heavyweights, the Berlin Biennale and documenta—which is actually a quinquennial, but who's quibbling. This would be an exciting time in any year, but in 2022, it has the added dimension of being the first time that the world's art community will be able to get together with a ton of important new work in person after these past two pandemic years, as Cecilia Alemani, the curator of this years Venice Biennale, recently discussed on this very podcast. This episode is dedicated to another sprawling show near and dear to our hearts that opened earlier this month. Of course, it's the Whitney Biennial, a signature offering of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it tries to live up to its full name by taking a snapshot of what the country's artists have been making, thinking, and feeling. Artnet News, chief art critic, Ben Davis joins to shed some light on this very ambitious, very interesting show.

Just around one year ago, two literary bros from Miami decided to launch a business venture. It was a couple weeks after Beeple’s Everydays had sold for $69 million at Christie’s and NFTs were taking the art world by storm. Still, few could have guessed at the time that their little company, called Yuga Labs, would produce a series of cartoon apes that would become some of the most successful—and divisive—characters in the entire NFT universe. "It's hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the art... they're cartoon apes" says crypto journalist Amy Castor. "They're cute, you know, but is it worth that kind of money?" For many regular people, and a whole host of celebrities, the answer is yes. Today, Yuga Labs has more than 60 employees and more than $2 billion in total sales. Over the past few weeks, it has gone on a tear announcing new initiatives, from the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits, arguably the two other most popular NFT series, to the launch of Apecoin, its own brand of cryptocurrency. Larva Labs now hopes to create what is essentially a Marvel universe from all this intellectual property—and make a lot of money along the way. But Castor, for one, says that Yuga Labs's recent acquisitions are antithetical to the core tenets that NFT evangelists tout. "The whole idea about NFTs is that they're supposed to be decentralized. It's not supposed to be one outfit having control of the top three most expensive NFT projects" she says. "They've created a perceived value out of thin air so that they can then monetize that brand." Its strategy shows us what the future of the NFT space might look like. But it remains unclear whether this future will benefit everyday NFT collectors and enthusiasts as much as the big investors and founders of companies like Yuga Labs. To unpack the wild and winding story of Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Amy Castor, who chronicled the rise of this phenomenon on Artnet News.

We're sharing a special preview of a podcast I’ve been enjoying, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, from Pushkin Industries. Talk Easy is a weekly interview podcast, where writer Sam Fragoso invites actors, writers, activists, and politicians to come to the table and speak from the heart in ways you probably haven't heard from them before. Driven by curiosity, he’s had revealing conversations with everyone from George Saunders and Cate Blanchett to Ocean Vuong and Gloria Steinem. In this preview, Sam talks with visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola about visiting Nigeria, creating the subjects in her new book, and feeling alive. You can listen to Talk Easy at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/talkeasyangle.

This April, after a punishing two years apart during the pandemic, the whole art community will gather together on the magical watery isle of Venice for its periodic ritual assessment of what the world's finest artists have been thinking about and making to grapple with our changing world. They call this climactic event, the Venice Biennale and each time it has presided over by a visionary figure whose role it has been to transmute the work of all these artists into a coherent statement about our time. This year, that exalted figure is named Cecilia Alemani. Cecilia is a professional art curator, whose day job is curating art for New York's Highline. The Venice Biennale is just a big exhibition, but the show always has an aura of the religious about it, where we get to commune with the biggest and best ideas floating around the globe. This time around, the globe is in rare and urgent need of big ideas with existential crises, raging all around us that need to be understood and reckoned with now. So can this year's edition of the Venice Biennale help? To find out, we welcome Cecilia Alemani to the show to talk about her big exhibition, which is beautifully titled the Milk of Dreams.

In August 2021, the world watched in horror as U.S. troops withdrew, and the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, with over 600,000 displaced people fleeing the country since last January, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Among the many groups threatened by the Taliban's rule are artists, with the fundamentalist government viewing freedom of artistic expression as a threat to the Islamic faith. Fearing for their lives, some artists have felt compelled to destroy or censor their own work, or to seek asylum outside Afghanistan. For curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, the crisis provided an opportunity for their arts organization, Art at a Time Like This, to help raise awareness of the plight of Afghan artists. The two had started the platform in March, 2020 as a way of staging both online and in-person exhibitions in response to lockdown restrictions following the outbreak of COVID-19. To organize the virtual show "Before Silence: Afghan Artists In Exile," the two partnered with the PEN America affiliated non-profit Artists at Risk Connection to bring together the work of nine Afghan artists now dispersed around the world. To learn more about the situation faced by these brave creatives, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone spoke with Julie Trebault, director of the Artists at Risk Connection at PEN America; Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights; and Shamayel Shalizi, an Afghan artist currently living in Berlin. https://artatatimelikethis.com/before-silence

On February 24, just three short weeks before this recording the world as we knew it was utterly upended by the Russian army’s invasion of the Eastern European nation of Ukraine. Spurred on by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dream of restoring a quasi-mythical version of the Russian empire, the assault has unleashed devastating carnage, widespread damage, and a complex political and socioeconomic crisis whose effects have been rippling around the globe ever since. Yet stories of breathtaking heroism and selflessness have also emerged from the fog of war, and the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people has won hearts and minds across continents, leading millions in the West to stand in solidarity with them. As in any armed conflict, however, culture can become collateral damage. Putin’s war machine has already inflicted irreversible harm on some of Ukraine’s most cherished museums, heritage sites, and it is threatening to do the same to the country’s vibrant homegrown art scene. But as with the rest of the nation, that art scene has much more fight in it than most outsiders knew. To tell this story of resistance, Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown spoke with two key cultural figures who are based in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and who have stayed behind to counter this crisis in the ways that they can.

Ask fans of crypto and NFTs why they think blockchain is such a revolutionary technology, and it probably won’t be long before they mention large-scale data transparency, a concept near and dear to our own hearts here at Artnet. Since the blockchain permanently and publicly documents key information about every transaction it hosts, then people with the right know-how and technical resources could theoretically map the entire history of any given crypto platform or project. And the wild, wooly market for NFTs is no exception. That’s where Laszlo Barabási comes in. Laszlo is the founder and leader of Barabási Lab, a team of artists and data scientists that study complex networks. Just a few weeks ago, he and his co-authors published a fascinating, data-rich analysis of the NFT platform Foundation. Launched in February 2021, Foundation has now hosted some of the most significant NFT sales to date, including the $5.4 million crypto art debut of era-defining whistleblower Edward Snowden. Based on Laszlo’s study, our resident NFT sage, art business editor Tim Schneider, put together a data-driven guide on how to succeed as a crypto artist (which Artnet News Pro subscribers can read online now). For this episode, Tim spoke with Laszlo about the inner workings of Foundation, the synthesis of art and science, and much more.

These days as contemporary art continues to pervade pop culture, there are art stars i.e. the talents who captivate the attention of art professionals. And then there are superstars, the handful of figures who have broken through to legitimate actual fame, winning a spot in the minds of the public at large. If you ask me the most appealing of all of these titans is Marina Abramovic. The high priestess of performance art whose unforgettable work plumbs eternal, profound themes of life and death whose impact on art history is huge and undeniable, but who is nonetheless in person just a lovely, brilliant, hilarious, vivacious human being. Given her biography that might not be what you'd expect. Growing up the child of two emotionally Cold War hero parents in Belgrade, she developed a particularly arduous strain of performance art, and fought an uphill battle for most of her astonishing five decade career in an art world that gave practically no support institutional or financial to her chosen medium of performance. Her closest artistic collaborator, her long-time lover Ulay, betrayed her in spectacular fashion in a way that has entered art history and then after they reconciled years later, sued her. But despite all of this, when success came such as with her 1997 Golden Lion win at the Venice Biennale and then her blockbuster, 2010 survey at MoMA, what has been most palpable is her enormous enjoyment of her career and its accomplishments. Now, that career is about to once again be surveyed in an oeuvre spanning show at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.

Right now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, there's an exhibition of paintings on view that might remind you of the postwar abstractions of painters like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, who made a virtue of empty space and muted palettes. The difference is that the paintings at the Guggenheim today are not just meant to be looked at and admired. No, they are meant to be listened to—and that's because the artist, Jennie C. Jones makes art that is as aural as it is visual, building her compositions directly onto acoustic panels, her signature material in order to shape the sound of the rooms in which they are installed. For Jones, this barely perceptible effect is a way of paying deep homage to the black architects of mid-century avant-garde music, such as free jazz pioneers who turned strategic silence into a statement. "Listening" Jones has said, "is a conceptual practice all on its own." . On the occasion of the exhibition, which is called "Dynamics" and acts as a mid-career survey of the artist's unique body of work, Artnet News’s features writer Taylor Dafoe met Jones at her studio in Hudson, New York, where they talked about embracing gesture, John Coltrane, and the artist’s own upstream path to recognition.

It's Black History Month, and we wanted to take the opportunity to devote this episode to the story of a Black museum leader. We know that people of color have historically been excluded from positions of power in the mainstream art world, but that's not the full story. In many cases, Black people were present, only their contributions were not properly recorded or acknowledged. What if you were told that one of the most famous museums in America was in fact headed by a Black visionary? That's the case with the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, which was founded in 1906 to house the collection of the legendary Wall Street tycoon John Pierpont Morgan. That collection was amassed and overseen by Belle Da Costa Greene, a brilliant scholar and bon vivant, who we now know was Black, and passed as white for her entire adult life. So, how did that happen, and who was Belle DaCosta Greene, the woman who built Morgan's peerless collection, which includes renowned illuminated medieval manuscripts, three Gutenberg Bibles, original scores by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin, and prints and drawings by Leonardo and other Renaissance artists? To find out, we spoke with Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, the authors of The Personal Librarian, a sensational novel about Belle’s life, on this week's episode.

If you were out and about in 1984, you might have noticed a striking poster wheatpasted everywhere. It featured two heroic silhouettes pulling down a statue, clearly avatars of the People topping the icon of a hated political dictator. But instead of a statue of a man in uniform, they were bringing down an image of a huge banana. If you were an art fan you might also recognize the signature of Claes Oldenburg, one of the most famous Pop artists. But whereas Oldenburg was best known for playful, giant-sized sculptures of everyday objects, this giant banana had a clear and outspoken message of political solidarity: the term “banana republic” comes from the bad governments of Central America that the U.S. propped up at the behest of its fruit corporations. And the U.S. was once again intervening in Central America."Installation view, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities at Tufts University Art Galleries, 2022. Peter Harris Photography."[/caption] Oldenburg’s memorable lithograph was one image associated with the "Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America." And it is one of a huge number of artworks and artifacts relating to this intense early-’80s moment of artist organizing that have just gone on view at Tufts University Art Galleries in the show “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities.” The ’80s are remembered as a time of political conservatism and yuppie excess. But it was also the height of the late Cold War machinations. The Ronald Reagan administration’s backing of death squads and repression of left-wing movements in places like Nicaragua and El Salvador is one of its darkest chapters. A robust Central American solidarity movement across the United States in the early ’80s organized to defend refugees and decry the U.S.’s backing of the brutality. The Artists Call was inspired and in dialogue with this wave of public activity, an attempt to use art’s clout to raise money and to reach an influential public. Involving figures including the Salvadoran poet and exile Daniel Flores y Ascencio, the curator and artist Coosje van Breuggen, and the famed art critic Lucy Lippard, the Artists Call was an organizing network that brought together, as Lippard remembers, “young and old, Latin, Central, and North American, lefties and liberals, artists working in a broad spectrum of styles.” Emerging from the discussions around a show by the art collective Group Material dedicated to Central American activism in 1982, the Artists’ Call would ultimately inspire participation from thousands of artists, including Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Ana Mendieta, and Cecilia Vicuña. Yet despite the high-profile names it rallied and the recent interest in historical models of artist activism, the Artists’ Call has been little remembered until now. On this week's episode, Ben Davis, Artnet News’s chief art critic, had the chance to talk about the Artists Call with the curators of “Art for the Future”: Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky, as well as Lucy Lippard herself.

This week’s story begins with an art purchase made like so many others... . A collector notices his peers talking up an artwork on Instagram, so he messages the artist’s dealer and makes a purchase. In this case, there was just one problem: neither the collector peers nor the artist actually exist. That fateful transaction is just the tip of the iceberg of a broader scheme: someone (quite possibly a group of people) created fake social media profiles for jet-setting Italian collectors to promote a fake artist—and ended up making real money in the process. The tale reveals just how easy it is to play the part of an art-world sophisticate, and how little we tend to know about the person on the other end of the line. On this week's episode, Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown joins Executive Editor Julia Halperin to discuss the story she wrote about catfishing collectors, fake artists, and the twisted tale that had her chasing ghosts all over the web.

Yesterday, a sumptuous portrait of a woman with a confident regard and rouged cheeks, porcelain skin, and a powdered up do reminiscent of cool whip, hit the block at Sotheby's auction house. Titled Portrait of a Lady as Pomona by the 18th century French artists Nicholas de Largilliere, the painting was less notable as a market event than for what it sale meant to its sellers. The sellers, in this case, being the twenty heirs of Jules Strauss, a pioneering German art collector. In 2014, one of his great granddaughters Pauline Baer De Perignon began investigating the fate of his beloved artworks during World War II, including pieces by the likes of Renoir, Monet, Degas and Tiepolo. As a Jew living in Paris, Jules Strauss, like so many others of his religion faced persecution under the German occupation. While he avoided deportation, Strauss' forced to hand over a still unknown number of works to the Nazis, an ugly truth that Pauline's family chose to forget for decades. Lady as Pomona, it so happens is the first painting from his collection to be restituted to the family. And that's thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of Pauline, detailed in her new book, The Vanished Collection. In the run-up to this week's auction, we were pleased to welcome Pauline to The Art Angle to talk to Artnet News senior writer, Sarah Cascone about the challenges of tracking downloaded art, sifting through archival records and what the quest for restitution and justice means to the families of those who lost everything during the Holocaust.

If, perhaps, someone in a trench coat who was smoking a pipe and had a gigantic eyeball for a head were to approach you a street on a particularly sunny night and ask you what surrealism was, you'd probably answer by throwing out a few names—Salvator Dalí, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo—and you wouldn't be wrong. But what if that strange interlocutor were to tell you that everything you know about surrealism is in fact, just the tip of a very large iceberg? And that this lastingly popular movement stretched in fact, far beyond Paris, far beyond Europe, to every corner of the globe, and to countless fascinating artists who you've never heard of before? Well that, in a sense, is exactly what an extraordinary and frankly revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing right now. Titled "Surrealism Beyond Borders," the exhibition, organized by Met curator Stephanie D'Alessandro together with Tate curator Matthew Gale and closing at the end of this month makes it plain that the riveting story of surrealism has hardly begun to be told, and it's lessons are shockingly relevant to a lot of the biggest debates of our present day. To discuss what we should know about the show and what it changes about the history of art, chief critic Ben Davis joins the podcast to discuss this week.

Everyone knows the dirty little secret of the dog-eat-dog art market, which is that while an artist creates the artwork, the vast majority of the value of that artwork is created—and captured—by others, from the 50 percent that goes to the dealer to the multiples made by the collectors who flip if the artist gets hot. But what if there was a way for artists to protect themselves from this kind of exploitation, by banding together and pooling their art together into a fund to provide a safety net against the vicissitudes of the market, where all artists—hot and not alike—benefit from the rising values of rising stars? Well, something like that does exist, and it’s called the Artist Pension Trust, which since 2004 has enlisted hundreds of artists behind this common cause. The only catch? It is apparently too good to be true—at least if you go by the maelstrom of threats of lawsuits, recriminations, and accusations that have sprang up around the trust in recent years. So, what went wrong with the utopian project of the Artist Pension Trust? And who is behind it, anyway? To find out, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to reporter Catherine Wagley about her recent investigation into the one art fund everyone wanted to root for. Enjoy the conversation, and for the full story, check out Catherine’s riveting two-part series on Artnet.

Here we are, at the beginning of a new year, a time that, at least in the past, used to be full of hope and anticipation, but after the last two years requires a deep breath and a brace for impact. But, there are still many fascinating and encouraging developments underway all around us, and there's an awful lot to be grateful for. We're all grateful to work alongside an authentically magical human being, known to mere mortals as Tim Schneider, Artnet News's art business editor. As longtime listeners know, Tim undergoes a mystical transformation at the beginning of every new year to become a soothsayer capable of peering into the future to see what the months ahead hold for the art industry. Tim recently published his prognostications on Artnet News Pro, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein to break out a few of the most pressing predictions he made, from Beeple's potential gallery representation to the future of art fairs amidst the ongoing pandemic.

We did it, 2021 is in the can. We are about to finally make the transition into what is hopefully going to be a great, exciting, and healthy 2022. Here at The Art Angle, we are very excited to celebrate this milestone and we also want to give everybody a little bit of a year end bonus. So here is an episode that we think is maybe going to be relevant for what's coming around the bend. Obviously it is about NFTs. NFTS were the big revelation of 2021 and everybody is kind of getting a little bit of an education about what they are, but there's no harm in getting a refresher course. So please enjoy an episode with Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, from earlier this year about NFTs, what they are and why they're important.

’Tis the season, once again, it's The Art Angle Christmas episode. Can you believe we made it through another one of these incredibly intense pandemic years? It's almost hard to believe and so we figured we would craft this festive little holiday-cast as something soothing and reflective, some old fashioned balm for the soul. No NFTs here. So what is the antithesis of NFTs? Why archeology of course and it just so happens that this year was filled with all kinds of fascinating revelations that continue to shape, and sometimes radically rewrite our understanding of the ancient world. On this episode Artnet News Senior Writer, Sarah Cascone, discusses what happened this year in the world of old news.

The art market is a notoriously woolly place where deals are done with hushed shakes behind closed doors. This of course applies to auctions, art sales and art fairs, but it's also true of something even more fundamental to the art business, artist representation. How exactly does a gallery nab a hot new artist? And how does an artist ultimately decide to join them and to stay on during moments of skyrocketing success or to leave at any given time? There are no rules to this game, but there are definitely some trends and some are almost too strange to believe. On this episode Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown is joined by European Market Editor Naomi Rea to untangle the secretive art of wooing artists on to rosters.

Last week, fresh panic spread around the globe as a new COVID variant of unknown power called Omicron came into view, threatening to potentially plunge society back into lockdown just as we were beginning to emerge from pandemic. Also last week, throngs of art loving party animals from 72 countries around the world converged on Miami for a week long bacchanale of art collecting, champagne-soaked soirees, nonstop-socializing, and celebrity-studded VIP events that stretched into the night. Very weirdly, both of those things are actually true. The latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was by all counts of massive success with 60,000 people in attendance, booths selling out in nanoseconds amid boundless enthusiasm about both traditional art (remember that?) and NFTs. And that's just the main fair. The entire city was lit up with art events from the fairs to incredible museum shows to crypto art conferences galore that were filling the air with revolutionary fervor. So what was it like to hit Miami art week for this totally surreal discombobulating affair? To answer that question, we're thrilled to be joined on the show by none other than Annie Armstrong, author of Artnet News's beloved gossip column Wet Paint, who tackled the whole party thing down there with an almost alarming degree of gusto.

The NFT market exploded this spring and has kept on exploding all year long. Artnet News Editor-In-Chief Andrew Goldstein is joined on the show by one of the guys who lit the fuse on NFTs, Noah Davis, the head of digital sales at Christie’s, who listeners may know best as the guy who sold the Beeple NFT this spring for $69.3 million, waking up the world to the dizzying potential of crypto art. It's a busy time for Noah. Right now. Christie’s first on-chain NFT sale on the crypto platform OpenSea is taking place with some of the coveted works on offer also being displayed in an immersive art exhibition down in Miami, during Art Basel, Miami Beach, which is turning into a giant coming out party of sorts for crypto art. This is also a very exciting time for Artnet as well, which is about to hold its own first on-chain auction of major NFT works on December 15th in conjunction with the launch of our new Artnet NFT platform.

This week, those of us who live in the United States are celebrating Thanksgiving. For many of us that means a lot of family time. For Artnet News Executive Editor Julia Halperin, it means visiting Immersive Van Gogh with her entire family bright and early. Yes, they are immersing ourselves in a light show, dedicated to the 19th century Dutch painter at nine o'clock in the morning during the Thanksgiving break. Even if you aren't spending the weekend visiting one of the many immersive Van Gogh experiences that have popped up across the country and around the globe, chances are someone at your Thanksgiving table has already been. As of mid-September Lighthouse Immersive, the company behind just one of these touring van Gogh shows had sold 3.2 million tickets. That's 700,000 more than Taylor Swift's 2018 Reputation Tour. Today, we're revisiting an episode from earlier this year in which Chief Art Critic, Ben Davis, and a very special guest. Ms Seija Goldstein, yes, that is Andrew's mother, weighs in on the trend.

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For artists, writers, and musicians, copyright is an invaluable safeguard, protecting intellectual property of original works of authorship. But eventually, no matter how jealously a large corporation might hoard the rights to a lucrative property, all creative work passes into the public domain, making it free for reproduction or adaption without permission. In the U.S., copyright terms were extended twice during the 20th century, to a term of 95 years—which meant nothing new entered the public domain between 1998 and and 2019, and that many works of art were forgotten long before becoming fair game for any contemporary reimagining. The realm of public domain, therefore, offers almost limitless possibilities for creativity, allowing artists to breath new life into forgotten works of art and reintroduce them to modern audiences. That is the genesis for "Public Domain," a musical collaboration between writer and visual artist Katherine McMahon and musician and producer Ray Angry that turns old songs that have passed out of copyright into new music for the 21st century. This week marks the release of the second track of the album, "Alcoholic Blues." Artnet News Senior Writer Sarah Cascone is joined by Ray and Katherine to discuss the project and the creative importance of public domain.

In 2017 Canadian software developers, Matt Hall, and John Watkinson debuted what would become a landmark project in the early crypto art movement, the CryptoPunks. Released through their company Larva Labs, the CryptoPunks consisted of 10,000 unique collectible characters whose chain of title would be tracked on the Ethereum blockchain. Each punk is a 24 by 24 pixel avatar whose individual traits were generated algorithmically. From Mohawks to shaved heads, from eye patches to colored eyeshadow and even from human men and women to apes, zombies, and aliens, every punk is one of a kind, but all would look perfectly at home intimidating a businessman in a classic eight bit Nintendo game. Although Hall and Watkinson kept a thousand CryptoPunks for themselves, the duo released the other 9,000 punks for free to any Ethereum users willing to pay the gas fees to claim them back in 2017. But the punks value on the secondary market and their presence in popular culture have exploded in the years since. In June 2021, a single alien punk sold at Sotheby's for $11.75 million. Two months later, Visa paid $150,000 to acquire a CryptoPunk for its corporate collection and at this September's Met gala Reddit, co-founder Alexis Ohanian wore a badge depicting a CryptoPunk he bought for his wife, tennis superstar, Serena Williams, because he thought it resembled her. But the crypto punks have also brought together a tight knit global community who see the project and the wider crypto art space as so much more than driver of record sales and red carpet moments. As part of art Artnet’s effort to bridge the gap between the crypto community and the world of fine art, Artnet’s Director of NFTs, Jiayin Chen, recently held a round table discussion with three early collectors of Crypto Punks, also known within the community simply as OGs. They are B, one of the only known women among the original crypto punk claimants, Claire Silver, who is now a renowned crypto artist in her own rights and Mr. 703, who originally claimed well over 700 crypto punks and currently ranks as the fifth largest collector of the series worldwide. Jiayin connected with the trio over zoom a few days before the third annual NFT NYC conference kicked off in Time Square.

This week we aren't so much going down to earth as we are climbing up into the art market stratosphere, where only the wealthiest collectors reside. All eyes are on this tip top of the market as the art world prepares for what may be the biggest auction of the decade, Sotheby's sale of the Macklowe collection. This star studded group of works was assembled over 50 years by the billionaire couple Harry and Linda Macklowe, but those were happier times. Over the past five years, their divorce has grown so acrimonious that a judge ordered 64 of their most prized paintings and sculptures to be sold at auction because they couldn't agree on how else to split the assets. The collection of work by Alberto Giacometti, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly and many more are some of the most high quality blue chip artworks to hit the auction block in. They're expected to fetch more than $600 million at Sotheby's over the next six months, beginning with an evening sale on November 15th. To find out more about how this collection came to auction and what it reveals about the state of the art market Artnet News Executive Editor Julie Halperin spoke with Artnet News resident Art Detective and Senior Reporter Katya Kazakina.