The Art Angle

39:37

The Past, Present, and Future (??) of Website Art

The Art Angle ·

2026/10/01

What does it mean to make art on the internet? It's not a new question, but it's far from a settled question. From very early on in the history of the World Wide Web, artists leapt in to start experimenting, and very shortly after that, the organization Rhizomewas born. Dedicated to digital art, it quickly became one of the most important advocates and keepers of its history.Last week, Rhizome celebrated its 30th birthday with a gala that brought together the luminaries of online art, both present

en

45:22

NYC Gallery Blitz, the Lucas Museum Arrives, a Messy...

The Art Angle ·

2026/09/24

For many, many reasons, it has been several months since we have done one of our Art Angle chat-casts, where we assemble writers to talk about a few different news stories on the site. But it's September, and we're finally back at it.Today we'll be talking about three topics: First, here in New York, the fall art season kicked off with literally hundreds of gallery openings, followed by a bunch of fairs this week. The fall openings are always an event. This year, they're even more closely

en

47:08

Re-Air: Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art

The Art Angle ·

2026/09/17

This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen.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,

en

42:15

Why Are Museum Wall Texts So Bad?

The Art Angle ·

2026/09/11

The humble wall label at an art exhibition has a funny status. It feels, on the one hand, like a side note or an afterthought. On the other, it is a first point of contact and literal guide for a visitor looking to know more.There is an entire undersung discipline, Visitor Studies, which has put a lot of time into thinking about how museums communicate. And yet, even so, some of the most prestigious exhibitions in the world are crawling with texts that I can barely understand. As a matter of fact,

en

35:41

The Etruscans Made Astonishing Art. Why Aren't They...

The Art Angle ·

2026/09/03

The ancient Romans called the Mediterraneanmare nostrum, "our sea." But before the Romans rose to power, the Etruscans had extensive trade networks in the area and controlled much of the Italian peninsula, the future heart of the Roman Empire. Between around 900 B.C.E. and the first century B.C.E., the Etruscans lived in city-states, developing beguiling artworks and making technological advances that are the subject of an astonishing show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco."The Etruscans:

en

36:36

Why Artists Keep Turning to Tarot

The Art Angle ·

2026/08/27

Artists and creatives have been fascinated with tarot for over 600 years. Recently, that fascination has resurfaced in a big way, showing up everywhere from museum walls to fashion runways.That's not surprising. As a sweeping universal narrative language small enough to fit in your pocket, tarot's archetypal imagery is built for rediscovery and reinterpretation. Once a medieval royal court game, tarot drifted into the realms of the occult, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 21st,

en

37:51

Welcome to the World of Julio Torres and Martine...

The Art Angle ·

2026/08/20

Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez share a knack for building worlds and characters that operate on their own wonderful, absurdist logic. Throw them together, add some sea water, and you get Marina, their new performance commissioned by the Whitney Biennial.Marina begins with a construction worker tossing a smartphone into the ocean and ends with a sea wench possibly discovering the internet. It’s like the Little Mermaid, but filtered through the flights of imagination that Torres and Gutierrez

en

38:16

What's New in New York Art?

The Art Angle ·

2026/08/13

We’re in the hot dog days of August, awaiting the new art season to kick off in September. In the meantime, I thought we might take the temperature of art in New York, looking at two big museum shows that opened earlier ruin the year, and that seek to highlight new voices from the city.So, we will be talking about “Greater New York,” the important show at MoMA PS1 in Queens that once every five years. This time out it has over 53 artists and collectives from the Big Apple, stretched across several

en

43:53

Here's Where the Art World Eats

The Art Angle ·

2026/08/06

At the end of last year, Annie Armstrong stepped down as Artnet's gossip columnist after filing 198 Wet Paint columns over the span of more than four years. Gabi Vidal-Irizarry has picked up the mantle.Annie departed the art world for the food world to write for Caper Media, an enterprising new startup that aims, in its words, "to tell the inside story of the restaurant business in New York." While Annie is on a new beat, she's found that the art and restaurant worlds are closely intertwined in

en

43:37

An Untold History of the Art Market

The Art Angle ·

2026/07/30

The art market is a famously opaque place, a world of handshake agreements and big-dollar private deals. How does it actually operate, and how has it changed over the centuries? In a richly researched new book titled Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, Valentina Castellani provides surprising answers, drawing on a long and storied career in the industry.She's worked at Sotheby's and Gagosian, where she helped organize landmark exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso

en

29:17

Re-Air: The Magic of ‘The Artist’s Way’

The Art Angle ·

2026/07/23

In this re-air of an episode from last year. Ben Davis speaks with Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way. It is a somewhat unusual subject for us, but it's also been an episode that's been very meaningful to a lot of listeners. And in case you're wondering, Ben started doing morning pages to prepare for the interview, and six months later, and he has stuck with it.Millions of people knowThe Artist’s Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author,Julia

en

47:09

Welcome to the Society of the Psyop

The Art Angle ·

2026/07/16

It is a time of disorienting, sometimes surreal shifts in the worlds of politics and technology. There aren’t too many artists who you might trust as a guide, but Trevor Paglen is one of them. Paglen has long functioned as an artist-researcher, with a fascination for pushing to the outer limits of what is seen or known. His work has often not just responded to but anticipated major conversations around government surveillance, conspiracy theory, and the politics of Silicon Valley. And he has an

en

27:50

The Case for M.C. Escher

The Art Angle ·

2026/07/09

There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names, figures like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher’s impact on the wider culture may be as big, or even bigger that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist. Born Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artist was a highly skilled maker of woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, bringing a sense of exquisite

en

27:34

How Doug Aitken Thinks in Music

The Art Angle ·

2026/07/02

Doug Aitken’s new installation Lightscape has just landed at the Shed in New York. It is many things at once: a seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music. The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds those worlds and narratives together is sound. Aitken built Lightscape around an original song cycle he wrote. The

en

35:49

How to Make a Sculpture With Sound

The Art Angle ·

2026/06/25

Some of the most important visual artist working today are sound artists. It seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind of another is everywhere in and around the art. Ben Davis wanted to dig into this “sonic turn” in art, if that’s what it is—and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui’s work often takes the

en

49:26

What Does It Take to Keep Art Basel on Top?

The Art Angle ·

2026/06/18

This week the art world descends on Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine River, where the latest edition of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fair is taking place. We're talking about Art Basel, of course. Its 290 exhibitors include all the top galleries of the world. It's a place where you can see and buy museum-quality Picassos and Warhols next to still-wet-paint by emerging artists, though there's not as many of those lately. Major collectors like Don and Mera Rubell are there,

en

40:12

Roberta Smith Still Has Notes

The Art Angle ·

2026/06/11

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

en

39:20

Re-Air: How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance

The Art Angle ·

2026/06/04

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,

en

46:39

Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art

The Art Angle ·

2026/05/28

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

en

37:46

How Is Arts Patronage Changing?

The Art Angle ·

2026/05/21

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

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

The Slowdown: Poetry & Reflection Daily

Eliana Benavides

The Moth

The Moth

About Art

Heidi Zuckerman

Stage Whisper

Andrew Cortes and Hope Bird

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a