The Art Angle

39:21

Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?

The Art Angle ·

2026/05/14

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

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50:06

The Most Provocative Performance in Venice

The Art Angle ·

2026/05/07

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

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31:15

What Biennials Reveal About the Art World

The Art Angle ·

2026/04/30

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

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40:45

Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to...

The Art Angle ·

2026/04/23

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

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37:00

One of the Art Market's Biggest Secrets, Revealed

The Art Angle ·

2026/04/16

What a difference 12 months makes! After years of declining sales in the auction realm, there are finally signs of life. The Artnet Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2026 reveals that global auction totals were up 13.3 percent in 2025 versus 2024. The full report, rich with new findings, is now available as a crisp PDF. The price? Free. (We hope that its contents will inspire you to subscribe to Artnet Pro, and to partake of the Artnet Price Database.)In the report’s cover story, “Dark Mode,”

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44:05

The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art...

The Art Angle ·

2026/04/09

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser.Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before

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38:39

How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance

The Art Angle ·

2026/04/02

Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He is the prince of painters, a master of the High Renaissance. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given him the full blockbuster treatment in a highly anticipated exhibition called "Raphael: Sublime Poetry."The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the

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42:39

Whitney Biennial Trends, a New Baroque Art Star, and...

The Art Angle ·

2026/03/26

Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month.In this episode, will be discussing: — The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here) — The rise of a new art

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44:41

Are We Entering a Post-Individual Era of Art?

The Art Angle ·

2026/03/19

The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology.It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work

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35:39

Kim Gordon Was Always an Artist First

The Art Angle ·

2026/03/12

Kim Gordon—artist, musician, writer, and co-founder of the iconic rock band Sonic Youth—is one of the most restlessly creative figures in American culture. Over the past four decades moved between mediums with an ease that few can achieve. She published her memoir Girl in a Band in 2015 to wide acclaim. Her visual work has been shown at institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Busan Biennale. Her 2024 solo album The Collective, a record built on trap

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40:08

The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With

The Art Angle ·

2026/03/05

The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum’s big curated show which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art.Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging "Greater New York." That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taína H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both these shows at once. For

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36:58

The Art Boom in the Middle East, Are Old Masters Cool...

The Art Angle ·

2026/02/26

It’s time for our monthly news roundup where we discuss some of the biggest stories emerging in the art world. On the heels of the first-ever Art Basel Qatar, we will be discussing the Middle Eastern art market and the regional art scenes. Is this simply another fair on the global circuit, or something more structural—an attempt to recalibrate where cultural power sits?We will doing a vibe check on the Ultra-Contemporary art scene’s current obsession with Old Masters, art history, and dead

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42:25

What Epstein's Emails Tell Us About the Art Market

The Art Angle ·

2026/02/19

There are many ways to read the vast trove of documents tied to the convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019. The Epstein files offer a window into the rarefied, power-brokering circles he inhabited. But the latest tranche—released by the U.S. Department of Justice in late January and comprising some three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images—also provides a behind-the-scenes view of high-level financial maneuvering, including Epstein’s

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29:12

An Artist's Guide to Psychedelic Mushrooms

The Art Angle ·

2026/02/12

There is an enduring association with creative experiment and psychedelic experiences. Recently, psychedelics have become more mainstream, explored not just for their far-out spiritual associations but as medicine, as therapy, and even just to make you more productive. How should we think about psychedelics and how they relate to art and art-making now?Ryan McGinness has had a long and well-known career as an artist. His densely layered, colorful abstract paintings have been shown at museums and

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41:46

How the Debates Over Art, Race, and Tech Have Changed

The Art Angle ·

2026/02/05

If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been at the center of both these conversations.As a theorist, her essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity, from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important

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40:51

A Venice Biennale Meltdown, the Prado Is Too Popular,...

The Art Angle ·

2026/01/29

Here we are, already at the end of the first month of the new year. That means it’s time to do the first Art Angle Round-Up of 2026, where, as is custom, we’ll review some of the art news stories that people are talking about, and what they might tell us something about the forces shaping the year to come.Today art critic Ben Davis, senior editor Kate Brown and editor in chief Naomi Rea talk about three stories: —The big controversy over the South Africa pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which

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38:46

How the 21st Century Broke Culture

The Art Angle ·

2026/01/22

The first quarter of the 21st century is now behind us. Yet a pervasive sense of cultural stagnation persists: many observers and participants feel that creativity across the arts, media, and popular culture has slowed, leaving society with a muted sense of innovation and excitement.David Marx’s new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, provides an incisive guide through the cultural touchstones that have defined the last twenty-five years. Marx examines how

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44:09

Can Brainrot Be Art? Beeple Thinks So

The Art Angle ·

2026/01/15

In art right now, it's hard to avoid talking about Beeple. That, of course, is the alias of Charleston-based Mike Winkelmann, known to millions of followers for digital images that he makes and posts daily. These works give off the sense of a brain overdosing on memes—we're talking pictures of giant emojis and pop culture junk being worshiped in dystopian techno hellscapes, or melted versions of celebrities and politicians turned into grotesque monsters and killer robots.Beeple first burst into

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43:28

Where Art Insiders Are Placing Their Bets in 2026

The Art Angle ·

2026/01/08

At the top of 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak, and art insiders' worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market you have been hearing the drumbeat of bad news: Galleries shuttering, a lot of the buying energy drying up, some fairs shriking operations, and the secondary market stuttering.But the picture is, as usual, quite nuanced depending on how you look at it. There were some upsides to the

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38:17

Re-Air: Why No One Trusts Art Prices Anymore

The Art Angle ·

2026/01/01

As we close out another bumpy year in the art market, we are revisiting a recent episode that looks at one of the factors in play: the erosion of logic when it comes to the price of works of art. Our editor-in-chief was on the podcast sharing what she learned about how the rules of art pricing were made and broken—and what may come next. What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that question of price has never been easy—but lately, it’s gotten harder than ever. As we’ve discussed on

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