The Art Angle
Episodes
Why New York’s Art Scene Will Reign Supreme Post-COVID
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The news cycle for the past seven months has been dominated by staggering data points that seek to quantify the scope of the pandemic's effects on the...
How Does the Art World Feel About Joe Biden’s Victory?
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Well, it finally happened. Former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have won the United States presidential election. The...
How Pepe the Frog Explains America's Toxic Politics
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
When San Francisco-based artist Matt Furie created a zine in 2005 featuring a rag-tag group of immature adolescent animals, including a heavy-lidded f...
Ed Ruscha and Jimmy Iovine on How Art Can End the Trump Era
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most salient images of America's tattered democracy is Ed Ruscha's Our Flag, a startling painting of Old Glory, shredded and flapping agai...
How Frida Kahlo Can Change Your Life (for Better or Worse)
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Frida Kahlo is, by every metric, one of the most famous artists in the world. Recently the priciest Latinx painter at auction, she has also been the s...
The Painter and the Poet: A Tragic Love Story
16 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Through October 24, Galerie Lelong in New York is presenting "Gate to the Blue," a striking show of paintings by the late artist Ficre Ghebreyesus th...
Could TikTok Save a Broken Art World?
09 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For many emerging artists, social media platforms have become an indispensable platform for jumpstarting their careers. But years after Instagram spar...
What New York's Art World Looks Like Post-Lockdown
02 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
To call the mood of this past spring in the New York art world "apocalyptic" would hardly be an exaggeration. Although it was on March 22 that the rap...
How a Powerhouse Hollywood Agency Is Turning Artists Into Stars
25 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It used to be that even the biggest, brawniest Hollywood talent agencies restricted their clientele to... well, Hollywood. That meant actors, filmmake...
How the World Health Organization Is Using Art to Fight the Pandemic
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ask the average informed citizen what the responsibilities of the World Health Organization are, and they're likely to name initiatives like funding m...
Futurist Doug Stephens on What Art Dealers Can Learn From the Retail Revolution
11 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In a July 2020 article published in the Business of Fashion, Canadian futurist Doug Stephens opined on the likely realities of the commercial ecosys...
Re-air: The Unbelievable True Story of the Mystical Painter Agnes Pelton
04 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Art history thrives on stories of fearless visionaries leaving behind the lives they’ve known to embark on journeys into uncertain lands for persona...
The Secret Art History of Burning Man
28 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today, practically everyone on earth knows about Burning Man, the countercultural extravaganza that draws tens of thousands of true believers to a b...
How Rupert Murdoch's Son Became Art Basel's Savior
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Earlier this summer, rumors emerged that a member of the Murdoch media dynasty—most (in)famous for building the far-right Fox News—may be sniffing...
How the Wellness Revolution Just Arrived in the Art World
07 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A blue neon sign reading "You Belong Here" has become a new kind of beacon in Long Beach, California recently. The light sculpture by artist Tavares S...
Art Critic Jerry Saltz on Why It's Time to Build a New Art World
31 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It's not often that you find an art critic—or anyone, for that matter—who can claim upwards of 400,000 Instagram followers, a Pulitzer Prize, and ...
How Black Women Are Leading a Grassroots Art Revolution
24 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just days into the start of 2020, CityLab published an article analyzing which major American cities are the best, and the worst, for Black women resi...
How the Heck Did Auction Houses Just Sell Almost a Billion Dollars in Art During a Global Pandemic?
17 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Each May, as the flowers bloom and the evening light lingers, the world's largest auction houses hold their marquee spring sales in New York, enabling...
How Hank Willis Thomas Is Making Politics an Art Form
10 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hank Willis Thomas is a busy man. The 44-year-old photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, and writer was already a force within the rarefied world of visua...
The Unsettling Truth Behind What Columbus Monuments Really Stand For
26 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In cities across the world over the past month, activists have been taking aim at symbols of oppression in the form of monuments: splashing them wit...
Meet the Smithsonian Curator Who Turns Protesters’ T-Shirts Into National Treasures
19 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Although 2020 isn't even halfway done yet, the worldwide health crisis and the global uprising over civil rights already guarantee that this year will...
Why Artist Trevor Paglen Is Doing Everything He Can to Warn Humanity About Artificial Intelligence
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In fall 2019, a new app called ImageNet Roulette was introduced to the world with what seemed like a simple, fun premise: snap a selfie, upload it to...
Four Artists on the Front Lines of the George Floyd Protests
05 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As American citizens entered Memorial Day weekend this year, the nation was already in turmoil. Nearly 100,000 lives had been lost to a colossal publi...
The Rise and Fall of Anne Geddes, Queen of Baby Photography
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Picture this: a doughy, apple-cheeked infant nestled in between the soft petals of a dew-kissed flower, sound asleep, like the start of a real-life fa...
China’s Most Adventurous Museum Director on Global Art’s Post-COVID Future
21 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In late January, Philip Tinari, the director of Beijing's pioneering UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, was in Davos, Switzerland for the latest outing...
YouTube’s No-Nonsense Art Guru on How to Unlock Your Inner Artist
14 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How many times have you heard someone in a museum scoff "I could do that" in the presence of a solid-black canvas or an obtuse conceptual installation...
How Marina Abramović Became the Center of a Vast Satanic Conspiracy Theory
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Just when you thought the spring of 2020 couldn't get any weirder, a Microsoft ad starring performance artist Marina Abramović caught the attention ...
The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl on His Adventures in Life as an Accidental Art Critic
30 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his 2019 essay "The Art of Dying," acclaimed critic Peter Schjeldahl describes Patsy Cline's voice as "attending selflessly to the sounds and the s...
Ai Weiwei on the Coronavirus, China, and Art's New Role
23 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ai Weiwei is not shy about tackling the big issues. Despite winning international acclaim for his interdisciplinary, boundary-pushing art, the Chinese...
How Photography Is Being Revolutionized in the Coronavirus Era
16 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today, Antwaun Sargent is known as the preeminent critical and curatorial voice for one of the most important movements in contemporary photography. A...
Why Germany's COVID-19 Relief Plan Is the Envy of the Art World
09 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Although the coronavirus pandemic is first and foremost a public-health emergency, it rapidly proved to be a deep financial emergency, too. With busin...
The Unbelievable True Story of the Mystical Painter Agnes Pelton
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Art history thrives on stories of fearless visionaries leaving behind the lives they've known to embark on journeys into uncertain lands for personal ...
Three Ways Coronavirus Will Transform the Art World
26 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the past month, the world—and by extension, the art world—has changed so drastically that it is almost unrecognizable. While the novel 2019 cor...
Why Art and Fashion Need Each Other Now
19 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For its first-ever live episode, recorded at the 2020 Armory Show, the Art Angle brought on couture wunderkind Sander Lak, the creative director of th...
What Does an Art Scene Look Like Under the Coronavirus?
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Usually, the first weeks of March are intensely busy ones for the international art community, as they lead up to the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair: an...
How an Art-Dealing Prodigy Became the Market's Most Wanted Outlaw
03 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A man on the run, millions of dollars missing, major artworks with multiple claims to ownership: these aren't plot points in the latest Hollywood bloc...
Is the Museum of Ice Cream the Future of Art, or Just a Sugar Rush?
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There's a buzzy new museum taking over New York, and it boasts the types of specs that would make competitors drool. Now housed in a prime 25,000-squ...
What Is Saudi Arabia Trying to Do With Contemporary Art?
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Some 16 months after the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of state agents, the organizat...
How Hollywood Finally Fell for the Art Market
11 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Oscars may be over, but Hollywood is about to be overrun with a different kind of A-lister this week when the art world descends on Tinseltown for...
How Jeffrey Epstein Made the Art World His Hunting Ground
04 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Over the past few weeks, the long-awaited trial of former Hollywood rainmaker Harvey Weinstein has unfolded in harrowing fashion, with one after anoth...
How the Art World Fell Under the Spell of the Occult
28 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
You don't hear the words "witch hunt" much nowadays, unless they are being deployed by a certain US President. But the term is increasingly relevant—...
Nicolas Party on Why Being an Art Star Is Like Being in Love
21 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
After a period of reckoning with a less-than-inclusive art historical canon, it seems increasingly clear that viewers (and dealers) are once again rea...
What Do the Protests in Hong Kong Mean for Art?
14 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Above and beyond its well-established status as a global financial center, Hong Kong has spent the 21st century rapidly transforming into an internati...
Four Predictions on How the Art World Will Transform in 2020
07 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Whether you ascribe to the centuries-old Georgian Calendar or slept through the clock striking midnight, ushering in a new year is often a time for re...
How to Understand the Radical, Viral Artworks That Defined the 2010s
31 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As a barrage of retrospective pieces from countless publications (including Artnet News) made clear throughout December 2019, the opening moments of 2...
How an Artist’s $120,000 Banana Ate the World
24 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of December, the Art Angle team had other, loftier ideas for the show's first Christmas episode. Maybe we would dig into the most importa...
New Yorker Art Scribe Calvin Tomkins on What Makes Great Artists Tick
17 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Six decades ago, an editor at Newsweek magazine summoned a young journalist named Calvin Tomkins out of the foreign-news department to interview the ...
Is the Art World Causing a Climate Catastrophe?
15 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For our latest episode, team Art Angle traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach to examine a much thornier and more urgent issue than the glamorous trade sho...
Art Basel Rules the Art Market. Is That a Good Thing for Art?
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
This week, what seems like the entire art industry, every luxury company, and every celebrity or status-seeker available will be traveling to south Fl...
How Yayoi Kusama Became an Unlikely Pop-Culture Phenomenon
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The 90-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is an international sensation. Exhibitions featuring her ongoing series of “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” ...
Who Is Sotheby's Mysterious New Owner, and What Does He Want?
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Normally, the week following Art Basel in June sees the art market begin its downshift into the summer doldrums. But this year, on what nearly everyon...
Hans Neuendorf on 30 Years of Artnet, and What Comes Next
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hans Neuendorf had already built a storied career as an art dealer by the late 1980s, helping to bring Pop art from the United States to Germany, co-f...
Anish Kapoor on "Radical" Art, China, and the Magic Paint Wars
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Already one of the world's most renowned and visible artists, Anish Kapoor is entering new territory by opening multiple major exhibitions on opposite...
Why Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre Matters
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death, the Louvre pulled out all the stops to present a blockbuster exhibition of some of the Old...
How MoMA Remade Itself for the Trump Era
27 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
After over $400 million in renovations and a multiple-month closure to the public, the Museum of Modern Art is back. National art critic Ben Davis sit...