The Art Angle

Six decades ago, an editor at Newsweek magazine summoned a young journalist named Calvin Tomkins out of the foreign-news department to interview the legendary conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who had allegedly left art-making in favor of playing chess and... simply breathing. Although it would be years before Tomkins discovered Duchamp had in fact already been at work on his magnum opus, Étant Do...

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 show's business: the art world's impact on Mother Earth. From thousands of deep-pocketed collectors flying in to south Florida for the week's festivities, to the hundreds of black cars and Ubers ferrying attendees from event to event, to the (literal) t...

This week, what seems like the entire art industry, every luxury company, and every celebrity or status-seeker available will be traveling to south Florida for the 18th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the final stop on the annual art-market calendar—as well as a champagne-soaked playground for the rich and famous. And while people love to complain about this particular fair, Art Basel matters to...

The 90-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is an international sensation. Exhibitions featuring her ongoing series of “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” consistently draw tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of visitors from all walks of life, with many enduring multiple-hour wait times for the opportunity to spend as little as a single minute inside the installations (and almost undoubtedly using much of...

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 everyone expected to be a quiet Monday, the usual cycle was disrupted by a breaking-news earthquake: Sotheby's, the world's oldest auction house, had struck a deal in principle to be acquired for $3.7 billion by a mysterious telecom magnate named Patrick Dr...

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-founding the first-ever art fair (Art Cologne), and putting his resources behind homegrown star-to-be Georg Baselitz when the artist was still roundly dismissed.  But nothing Neuendorf did earlier changed the art market as drastically or irreversibly...

Already one of the world's most renowned and visible artists, Anish Kapoor is entering new territory by opening multiple major exhibitions on opposite ends of the Earth within a few weeks of each other this fall. On October 25, he debuted twin shows of new work at Lisson Gallery's two spaces in New York. And on November 10, he unveils a significant solo exhibition split between Beijing's Central A...

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 Master's greatest works, along with a few technological surprises to help viewers see his contributions in a whole new way. But do these moves manage to contextualize Leonardo in our contemporary moment? And what role is—or isn't—played by Salvator...

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 sits down with host Andrew Goldstein to address the curators' attempts to decenter the Western canon, what the changes might mean for MoMA's hordes of tourists, and whether a museum this hallowed can ever be a sanctuary from the larger cultural conversa...