The Art Angle

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 know The Artist’s Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or...

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 important new book just out from Verso, How to See Li...

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 precision and intricate geometry to his compositions. But as an...

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 soundtrack also incorporates compositions by Minimalist pioneers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk, per...

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 form of environments, with sculptures...

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, and so are celebrities like Kanye West and James Franco.

At the...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,” Artnet’s Art Detective columnist, Katya Kazakina, delves into the intriguing and shadowy world of priva...

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 returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In h...

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 Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have...

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 hi...

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 “Peace Core” showed a...

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 beats and with sharp cultural commentary, earned her two Grammy nominations, a career first.

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 the Whitney, she is...

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 artists. As market pressures mount and institutions increasingly turn toward estates and hi...

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 connections to the art and cultural worlds.

Revelations in the latest files have already had consequences: former French culture minister Jack L...

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 galleries around the world. He’s also long explored world-building through his art, expanding his designs to maze-like environments and st...

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 venues advocating for digital art.

As as an...

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 Artnet News has ha...

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 commercialization gradually came to dominate contemporary culture, propelled by rapid technological advancements and a shifting cultural mindset that favors profit-driven fo...

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 the center of the art world conversation in early 2021 when his work Everydays, The First 5,000 Days hit...

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 slowdown in the hype and the speculation gamification of...

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 this pod...

We love to do deep dives into trends that we are noticing in painting and the trend of “Bordercore” was one of our best-loved from the year, so we decided to revisit it this holiday season. We take a look at the emergent trend in art which is wild and inventive takes on frames, suddenly front and center for many painters of the moment as a way to push new boundaries in painting. 

Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice.

But if you go to the a...

Chris Kraus is one of the most well-known contemporary art writers. She is also an important taste-maker, co-editor of independent publisher Semiotext(e), which played a key role in introducing French theory to U.S. audiences.

But Kraus is probably best known today as a novelist. Her 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick became a buzzy literary reference in the 2010s, and a model for autofiction. It was even made into an Amazon show.

This fall, Kraus put out a new novel, titled The Four Spent the Day Together. It has a cryptic three-part structure that...

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Round-up, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. As we close out a busy calendar year—and for the last roundup of the year—we are reviewing all of 2025 and the trends, themes, and stories that defined it with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro editor and art critic.

It's been a whirlwind of a year. We take a look at the art market, where slumped sales, gallery closures, and exis...

Millions of people know The Artist's Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or, as she sometimes prefers to call it, “creative recovery.” It found a huge audience, and today you can find Artist’s Way groups all over the world.

Cameron’s original The Artist’s Way offered a 12-week path towards overcoming artistic blocks. The book was subtitled “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” and it spoke of plugging into a current of what she called “spiritual electricity.” But her techniques were practical and...

You've been hearing a lot about the Louvre lately. Last month, thieves broke into the Paris Museum in broad daylight when the museum had just opened and made off with eight pieces of royal jewelry. The spectacular heist captured the world news cycle and the imagination of the internet. But why are people so obsessed with the Louvre in general? What is it about this museum in particular? We decided to re-air a recent episode where we look at the enigmatic institution and dive into the many secrets and stories that it holds.

The Louvre is among the...

Last year, Jack Hanley—one of New York’s most beloved and idiosyncratic gallerists— announced he would close his gallery after 37 years in business. The news landed with both surprise and sadness: Hanley has always been a disruptor, a dealer with a sharp eye for fresh talent, who followed instinct over market logic. A gem of the New York art scene and beyond.

Over the decades, Hanley gave early shows to artists like Günther Förg, Christopher Wool, Sophie Calle, and Christian Marclay—and all of that was long before they became art-world names they are now. He he...

Before the idea of feminism took shape, there was what writers once called “the woman question.” The phrase comes from the querelle des femmes—a centuries-long debate in Europe about women’s rights, intellect, and place in society. One of the first to take it up was Christine de Pizan, the Italian-French court writer who, in 1405, published The Book of the City of Ladies. At a time when most women were excluded from education and public life, de Pizan challenged misogyny head-on, laying some of the earliest groundwork for what we now understand as feminist thought.

That question...

Nigerian modern art is having a moment. In London, the Tate has opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, called “Nigerian Modernism,” featuring more than 50 artists who experimented with vibrant new styles in the mid 20th century in the giant and influential West African nation. More generally, the artists of this era have become more recognized outside of their home country in recent decades, from early figures who laid the groundwork like Aina Onabolu to a towering figure of the 1950s like Ben Enwonwu to younger innovators of the 1950s and 1960s such as Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, with many more...

It’s been a really dizzyingly busy October, and as is customary, we are ending the month by talking about three of the biggest topics. We have a palette of stories that gives a sense of how head-spinning it was.

First, we are going to talk about one of the biggest stories in the world, the $102 million jewel heist at France’s Louvre museum, which has transfixed the public.

Second, it’s been a busy few weeks in the European art world on top the Louvre heist, with both Art Basel Paris and Frieze London. Our re...

One of the things Ben Davis likes about contemporary art is that he is always learning new things, because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, Jeanette Andrews.

Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that’s something new, exploring magic as an expressive medium. Her works usually bring together the science of perception, the intrigue of coded messages, and the history of illusion as a craft.

Andrews has pe...