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The Art Angle: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Artnet News
A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more.
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- 5 days ago40 min
Roberta Smith Still Has Notes
Roberta Smith is the exemplar of popular art criticism. For almost four decades, Smith was a familiar voice on the arts pages of the New York Times, serving for many of those years as co-lead art critic. Both feared and revered, she is known above all for close looking, precise description, and a style that’s accessible but serious. In 2019, she won the Rabkin Award for Lifetime Achievement. Smith moved to New York in the late 1960s, studying at the Whitney’s Independent Study Program and meeting her first mentor, the sculptor Donald Judd. In the early 1970s, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and Paula Cooper Gallery, then began writing for various art magazines. In the 1980s, she began writing for larger audiences at the Village Voice, and then for the Times starting in 1986. Smith retired two years ago. This week, she is back because a film, called House of Criticism, about her and her husband, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, is making its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. Ben Davis took that as his cue to interview someone who has shaped the worlds of art-making and art-writing so deeply. Smith was nice enough to talk to him about her method, what she thinks people get wrong about the art world, and what she’s looking at now.
- 1 weeks ago39 min
Re-Air: How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance
This week we're re-airing a favorite episode featuring Kate Brown interviewing Ben Davis about the “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. Curated by Carmen C. Bambach, it took 17 years to assemble. No one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did. But what is the story within the story of this artist who left indelible mark on western art? This week, we find out.
- 2 weeks ago46 min
Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art
Arthur Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went viral in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible, and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. A follow-up film, called The White Album, won the Golden Lion for Best Artist as part of the main show of the Venice Biennale back in 2019. And this month, Jafa is back in Venice, this time in a two-person show called “Helter Skelter,” curated by Nancy Spector, pairing him with the famous artist Richard Prince, also known for using found and appropriated imagery to disorienting effect. That show opened alongside the Venice Biennale at the Prada Foundation, and was one of the few things during the opening weekend that everyone could agree was a must-see event. Jafa has also curated a show currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Less Is Morbid,” a deliberately packed display of his favorite art. He is also one of the winners of this year’s Art Basel Award, to be honored at that fair. In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa agreed to talk to Artnet's Ben Davis about his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.
- 3 weeks ago37 min
How Is Arts Patronage Changing?
During fair week in New York in mid-May, Andrew Russeth had the high pleasure of moderating a panel about the state of arts philanthropy at TEFAF New York. Joining him on stage at the Park Avenue Armory were two leading figures in American patronage, Sarah Arison and Michi Jigarjian. Arison was named president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024 at the age of only 39, making her the youngest person to ever hold that position. The president of the Arison Arts Foundation, she also chairs the board of YoungArts and serves on a variety of boards, including those of MoMA PS1 and American Ballet Theatre. Jigarjian is CEO of Work of Art Holdings and a partner at 7G Group. She is the force behind the culturally rich Rockaway Hotel out in Queens, and for 15 years led the Baxter St at CCNY as its president. A first-generation Mexican American, she is on the boards of the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1. During the panel, which was titled “Who Supports Art Now? Patronage in a Shifting Cultural Landscape,” Arison and Jigarjian charted how arts philanthropy has changed in recent decades and described how they and their peers are leading institutions and supporting artists in a period of tremendous uncertainty—and potential.
- May 14, 202639 min
Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?
Los Angeles has a new museum. Or a new vision for an old one. One of the most important museums in the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has just debuted a long-awaited new building. It’s designed by the revered Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to realize. And long before it opened to the public last month, it has been controversial, for a whole host of reasons. It debuts with LACMA’s charismatic director Michael Govan promising not just a new LACMA, but a new vision for how museums show art and relate to the public. Ben Davis went out to Los Angeles to see the new building last month, and spoke to culture critic Carolina Miranda. Miranda has the gift of being both a sharp observer or L.A. art and a gifted translator of sometimes esoteric museum and architecture debate. She has published an analysis of Zumthor and Govan’s vision means for CityLab, called “For Better or Worse, the New LACMA Is an Instant LA Icon,” and she is here with me today to talk about what LACMA means for the city and for museums now.
- May 7, 202650 min
The Most Provocative Performance in Venice
At the Venice Biennale, every two years, we expect big things from the artists picked to represent their countries. But I'm not sure anyone can quite prepare themselves for the universe of Florentina Holzinger. After years becoming a titan of the theater world, Holzinger is now getting one of the most visible slots in the art world, a national pavilion in the Giardini. She’s representing Austria this year for what is surely going to be one of the most talked about pavilions. Known for feminist performances that push the human body—and, by extension, the viewer—to their absolute limits, she does not shy away from nudity or sexuality. Flesh hooks, stunt artistry, live tattooing, bodily fluids, heavy machinery—all of it is in play, and none of it is trying to be polite. The physicality of her practice is not for the faint of heart, nor for her performers. Her work tends to divide a room, something Holzinger seems entirely unbothered by. Opening May 9th, her exhibition called “Seaworld Venice” fills the Austrian Pavilion with water, turning it into an underwater theme park and a fully functional sewage treatment plant. Audiences can be part of the work: they can urinate in the onsite portable toilets, and their fluids will get cleaned and cycled back into the tanks. The work is about the human body, but it's also about ecology and about Venice itself, a city that is sinking, built on water it cannot drink, overwhelmed by the waste of mass tourism. Kate Brown spoke with Holzinger about what went into building her trailblazing project for Venice, about the move from theater and dance into the art world, and about what it means to make genuinely uncompromising work.
- Apr 30, 202631 min
What Biennials Reveal About the Art World
We talk a lot about biennials. Art is in some ways a very local, in-person thing. Yet artists and creators and writers are also part of a global conversation, looking at and thinking about each other across borders, and these big, recurring art festivals can serve as an opportunity or a prompt to think about what that bigger conversation. One of the biggest, the Venice Biennale, is coming up next month. It’s centered around a show called “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. My colleague Jo Lawson-Tancred recently had an article looking at the artists in that show, comparing where they were from and how old they were to the last several editions, to see how the art conversation was evolving. Meanwhile, Ben Davis just published a big project this week, looking at the last four years of art biennials around the world, from the big ones in places like Istanbul, Gwangju, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Venice, to smaller or more experimental ones. He gathered all the names of artists to find out who has shown the most around the world since the 2022 Venice Biennale four years ago. Some are familiar names, some were total surprises. With Venice soon to open, Ben speaks with Jo to talk about what we’ve learned from our different projects about where the global art conversation has been and where it might be headed.
- Apr 23, 202640 min
Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With
This interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and on the occasion of the opening of Greater New York at MoMA PS1, where Cruz is also featured, we're resurfacing it. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young (born in 1998), and who just earned her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, critic Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise—that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.
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About The Art Angle
A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more.
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