The Art Angle

Artnet News
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. 

  1. Critics Say 'Identity Politics' Ruined Art. Here's A Better Argument

    5 DAYS AGO

    Critics Say 'Identity Politics' Ruined Art. Here's A Better Argument

    “Identity politics” is among the most contentious terms in recent debates about art. And now, the most powerful people in the United States are blaming just about everything on “DEI” and “wokeness.” The very concept of diversity as a positive ideal seems to be under threat. At the same time, so far there has been nowhere near the protest you would expect. Civil society feels stunned. At least part of this seems to be confusion about what has gone wrong to bring us here, with sections of the population now seeming to reject or just tune out progressive ideas that were all but dominant in mainstream culture just a few short years ago. Maybe backlash was always inevitable. But how do we find a way forward? How do you talk about real criticisms of what may have made the social justice culture of the recent past confusing or alienating—without adopting the terms of a truly destructive culture war that is now all around? A few weeks ago, we had the art critic Dean Kissick on the podcast to talk about his December cover story for Harper’s magazine, which argued that identity politics had, in his words, “ruined contemporary art.” In Ben Davis' essay for Artnet responding to him, called “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?”, Davis concluded by saying that those looking for a constructive way forward should read the theorist Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Táíwò teaches philosophy at Georgetown University and has written pieces for outlets including Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He’s written two books of political theory, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Davis has found the concepts that he’s developed, which include “elite capture,” “deference politics,” and “being-in-the-room privilege” very useful in thinking about some of these problems, which are some of the most important problems of the day—so Davis brought him on to discuss.

    43 min
  2. The RoundUp: Censorship Surges, David Lynch's Art, and the Met's Video Game

    JAN 30

    The RoundUp: Censorship Surges, David Lynch's Art, and the Met's Video Game

    We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to discuss some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Caroline Goldstein, acting managing editor of Artnet News, joins the show. It’s been quite the January. Though it is typically a slow month, some major stories have transpired. We’ll be talking about censorship in the museum world in the U.S., looking in particular at the case of two Sally Mann photographs that were seized from a museum in Dallas, Texas. We will also talk about the passing of the filmmaker David Lynch on January 15. Lynch is famous for his films, but he was also a respected artist with his fair share of institutional exhibitions under his belt. He has always been a painter, but do we like his paintings? We discuss. Lynch has been represented by Pace Gallery since 2022. We take a look at his artistic legacy and his enigmatic ways. Last but not least, New York’s prestigious Metropolitan Museum has ventured into the blockchain world of all places with a free-to-play video game that you can access on Web3. The game was launched this month together with TR Lab, a platform that aims to connect artists and technologists and creates and sells fine art collectibles. The Met's new game, called Art Links, does weekly drops. If you win you can collect badges in your OpenSea wallet and win IRL prizes. Sound fun? Maybe not? We each played it and gave it our honest review.

    33 min
  3. The Vibe Shifted in Art. Now What?

    JAN 23

    The Vibe Shifted in Art. Now What?

    We don’t need to tell anyone listening that it is a difficult and alarming political moment. You may be asking, How will art weather the storm? To answer that question, you probably need to take stock of how art has navigated the political storms of the recent past. And there’s been a lot of debate about this recently, centered on the critic Dean Kissick’s long essay for Harper’s magazine from late last year, titled “The Painted Protest: How Politics Ruined Contemporary Art.” Kissick first drew major attention as a chronicler of New York’s downtown scene in a column he wrote for the art magazine Spike from 2017 to 2022. In his Harper’s piece, he narrates being drawn to art in the late 2000s as a space of experimentation and glamor—a spirit, he wrote, that big museums and biennials had lost. Kissick described disaffection from institutions that now focused, in his words, on art “dressed up as protest and contextualized through decolonial or queer theory, with a singular focus on identity.” The essay has been both slammed as carelessly feeding the cultural backlash that’s rising all around and hailed for speaking honestly about an art world grown complacent. Some of this was already discussed on the Art Angle for our year-end roundup in December. Artnet Art Critic Ben Davis also started the new year writing his own take, titled “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?” The reaction to that piece, in turn, led Kissick and Davis to this discussion.

    49 min
  4. How the Getty Museum Survived L.A.'s Fires

    JAN 16

    How the Getty Museum Survived L.A.'s Fires

    Last weekend, warnings to evacuate were issued to the suburban westside neighborhood of Brentwood, which includes the esteemed Getty Center, home to one of the city’s most prized art collections. After more than a week of burning, L.A.’s devastating wildfires, which began on January 7, are still not fully contained, forcing ongoing evacuation orders around the coastal city. It is the worst fire event in L.A.’s history and has taken 24 lives. As part of the Getty Trust, the museum features European paintings, including Van Gogh’s Irises, and works by Rembrandt, Monet, Manet, and Peter Paul Rubens. It also houses Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art from the Neolithic to Late Antiquity—some of which is partially held at its second campus, the Getty Villa. Days before the threat of fire reached the museum’s main venue over the weekend, the Villa was already grappling with the Palisades blaze, which ended up destroying or damaging around 4,000 structures and spreading over 23,000 acres. As the fires raged around Los Angeles, intensified by strong winds, media imagery circulating online showed brush burning around the Getty Villa in the Palisades. This prompted panic about the security of the collection. The institution, however, has long billed itself as a highly fire-safe institution. Built in 1997, the Getty Center has been described as “a marvel of anti-fire engineering.” Throughout the last week, its team has worked tirelessly to defend the property and has communicated daily about the safety and security of its sites. Unfortunately, many other properties—including thousands of homes, businesses, and smaller cultural institutions—have been destroyed. Many cultural workers, collectors, and gallerists are among those who lost their homes, and artists’ homes and studios—including entire bodies of work and archives—have been irretrievably lost. The extent of livelihoods destroyed in Los Angeles is truly heartbreaking. We will link to resources in the show notes where you can find out how to help. We also have a story on our website providing frequent updates on the state of the cultural scene. This week, the J. Paul Getty Trust and a coalition of local and international cultural institutions announced a $12 million emergency relief fund for members of the Los Angeles arts community affected by the wildfires. Katherine E. Fleming, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, joins me on The Art Angle to discuss her experience of the wildfires, the Getty’s state-of-the-art prevention protocols for its valuable art, and what the fires mean for Los Angeles’ cultural scene as it eventually seeks to rebuild.

    25 min
  5. JAN 2

    Re-Air: Is There Anything Miranda July Can't Do?

    The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and needing each other in our capacity to change and love—all these aspects that really make us human. With this, July has built a diverse and awe-inspiring body of work. It includes a messaging app she developed called Somebody and an interfaith secondhand shop. Her art has been on view with the Venice Biennale, and she's also made three feature length films, two of which she starred in. She's published four books and a participatory website called Learning to Love You More that she created with American artist Harold Fletcher that consists of assignments for the general public who make the art. There are instructions like "make a portrait of your friend's desires," or "perform the phone call someone else wishes they could have." One of these assignments is part of her first solo exhibition, a major retrospective on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan until the end of October. It is "Assignment 43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house," and it was completed by a local woman from Milan. It is one piece among many in a show that spans 30 years of July's practice. There is also a new participatory video series in the mix called F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You). Her newest novel, All Fours was published in May this year. A New York Times bestseller and long list finalist for the National Book Award, All Fours is an astonishingly candid look at sexuality and transformation, but also at an extremely underrepresented topic in literature: menopause and female aging. When I connected with July, she was in her home, which is also her studio in Los Angeles, a small painting by Louise Bonnet hung just behind her. It's called Miranda, and it's a contemplative portrait of a female figure in what looks like a state of metamorphosis. It suits July's universe quite poetically.

    50 min
  6. 12/26/2024

    Re-Air: Lucy Lippard On a Life In and Out of Art

    But Lippard has also been much more than a writer. She curated “Eccentric Abstraction” in 1966, helping to define what would come to be called post-Minimalism in sculpture. Her experimental and traveling card shows helped create the audience for conceptual, minimal, and land art. She curated maybe the first museum show of Second Wave feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in 1971, and was a part of the founding mother-collective behind Heresies, a journal that shaped the field of feminist art history. Radicalized by sixties activism, she participated in the Art Workers Coalition, a historic activist formation protesting against the Vietnam War and for equality in the museum world. She was part of many, many other collectives and activist groups thereafter, including the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in the early 1980s, a project she discussed with us on the Art Angle back in 2022. Now Lippard has written a new book called Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. It’s a short-packed tome that surveys an eventful life through photos that catalog the items Lippard finds around her in the home where she has lived since moving from New York to the small town of Galisteo in rural New Mexico in the early nineties. It’s a fitting way to tell the story of a writer who has thought so much about how images and words fit together, and how meaning emerges from place and community. This week on the podcast, Ben Davis speaks once again to Lucy Lippard about a life in and out of art.

    41 min
4.7
out of 5
288 Ratings

About

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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