The Art Angle

’Tis the season, once again, it's The Art Angle Christmas episode. Can you believe we made it through another one of these incredibly intense pandemic years? It's almost hard to believe and so we figured we would craft this festive little holiday-cast as something soothing and reflective, some old fashioned balm for the soul. No NFTs here. So what is the antithesis of NFTs? Why archeology of cours...

The art market is a notoriously woolly place where deals are done with hushed shakes behind closed doors. This of course applies to auctions, art sales and art fairs, but it's also true of something even more fundamental to the art business, artist representation. How exactly does a gallery nab a hot new artist? And how does an artist ultimately decide to join them and to stay on during moments of...

Last week, fresh panic spread around the globe as a new COVID variant of unknown power called Omicron came into view, threatening to potentially plunge society back into lockdown just as we were beginning to emerge from pandemic. Also last week, throngs of art loving party animals from 72 countries around the world converged on Miami for a week long bacchanale of art collecting, champagne-soaked s...

The NFT market exploded this spring and has kept on exploding all year long. Artnet News Editor-In-Chief Andrew Goldstein is joined on the show by one of the guys who lit the fuse on NFTs, Noah Davis, the head of digital sales at Christie’s, who listeners may know best as the guy who sold the Beeple NFT this spring for $69.3 million, waking up the world to the dizzying potential of crypto art.  It...

This week, those of us who live in the United States are celebrating Thanksgiving. For many of us that means a lot of family time. For Artnet News Executive Editor Julia Halperin, it means visiting Immersive Van Gogh with her entire family bright and early. Yes, they are immersing ourselves in a light show, dedicated to the 19th century Dutch painter at nine o'clock in the morning during the Thank...

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. 

For artists, writers, and musicians, copyright is an invaluable safeguard, protecting intellectual property of original works of authorship. But eventually, no matter how jealously a large corporation might hoard the rights to a lucrative property, all creative work passes into the public domain, making it free for reproduction or adaption without permission. In the U.S., copyright terms were exte...

In 2017 Canadian software developers, Matt Hall, and John Watkinson debuted what would become a landmark project in the early crypto art movement, the CryptoPunks. Released through their company Larva Labs, the CryptoPunks consisted of 10,000 unique collectible characters whose chain of title would be tracked on the Ethereum blockchain. Each punk is a 24 by 24 pixel avatar whose individual traits...

This week we aren't so much going down to earth as we are climbing up into the art market stratosphere, where only the wealthiest collectors reside. All eyes are on this tip top of the market as the art world prepares for what may be the biggest auction of the decade, Sotheby's sale of the Macklowe collection. This star studded group of works was assembled over 50 years by the billionaire couple H...

If you consider yourself a dedicated fan of contemporary art, then you're probably no stranger to watching things onscreen that the average person would find bizarre, upsetting, or even downright gruesome. So it should come as no surprise that the art world––and the Artnet News staff––contains more than a couple die-hard fans of horror movies, too. But what's more surprising than the contemporary...

If you are familiar with the artist Judy Chicago, chances are you associate her with one piece: her magnum opus The Dinner Party, an epic work of installation art featuring elaborate place settings for 39 famous women, both mythical and historical, at a triangular banquet table. The feminist masterpiece took nearly six years and a veritable army of some 400 volunteers to complete. It became an int...

This week, we're hopping into a time machine and traveling to the not so distant future to answer this question, how will the technological tools being developed today shape the art world of tomorrow. It's a question we delve into in the fall 2021 edition of the Artnet Intelligence Report, which is out now.  The theme of the issue is the roaring 2020s and inside we introduce you to the collectors...

It’s hard to describe the experience of a work by Ryoji Ikeda. The Japanese artist has worked as an experimental musician, performer, researcher, and art-maker, and he brings it all together for immense, immersive installations that fill the senses. But while the word “immersive” has come to connote Instagram bait, Ikeda’s works are anything but lowbrow. The experience of a Ryoji Ikeda work is bot...

An art industry ritual returned after an unprecedented hiatus: on a Monday evening last week, art advisors, dealers, and collectors ceremoniously filed into the formidable fairgrounds of Switzerland’s Art Basel. The premier art fair’s 50th edition was set to take place across a balmy week in June 2020, but it slid back nearly a year and half, its plans marred by a raging public health crisis, limi...

For the 100th episode of the Art Angle, Artnet News’s Style Editor, Noor Brara had the pleasure of speaking with critically acclaimed author, professor, and social commentator Roxane Gay, whose writings on feminism, politics, intersectionality, and culture have made her one of the keenest and most important observers of our time. Gay is also an avid art collector and appreciator who, along with he...

Artists Peter Halley and Keltie Ferris first met sometime in the mid-2000s, at the height of the abstract painting revival. Halley, a pioneering Neo-Conceptualist renowned for his disciplined grids, was head of painting and printmaking at the Yale School of Art; Ferris, a graduate student with a knack for wielding fluid materials like spray paint.  Nevertheless, their work had a lot in common: a l...

Some of the most impactful stories to surface this past year have revolved around three major issues affecting the world as a whole: there’s a worsening climate emergency, a global health crisis and—in the fold—a breakneck acceleration of technology that’s increasingly entangling itself into every aspect of our lives. When it comes to the art world, we can probably agree it's time to ask some hard...

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Thousands of people who worked at the trade center or who witnessed the events of 9/11, or who lost loved ones, have stories about that. Among these are the artists of the World Views Artists Residency. In a terrible irony, the residency had been started by the Port Authority to put unused office space to wo...

For centuries, Western art-making centered around religious imagery during the middle ages and Renaissance icons. Altar pieces and stained glass windows were regarded as meditative objects through which the faithful might reach a more profound religious transcendence. Needless to say the art world of 2021 is far more secular and openly religious artists are few and far between. So, what does it me...

Love him or laugh at him, Bob Ross is absolutely one of America’s best known painters. A quarter century after he died in 1995, a Bob Ross Experience debuted in Indiana last October as a site of pilgrimage for fans. Meanwhile, Bob Ross Inc. continues to mint money authorizing new products, even licensing a canibus company to make Bob ross eyeshadows in his signature colors. People around the world...

It’s late August, and for the first time in two years, it looks like the fall art season could be jam-packed with major in-person art-market events––even if some of them don’t normally happen at the same time as Starbucks is trying to coat the globe in pumpkin spice. But this summer, art-world trends and circumstances way beyond the industry’s control have led to some of the most noteworthy market...

I'm sure you've heard it: For the past few months, the U.S. news media has been following the saga of pop star Britney Spears and the unusual conservatorship arrangement which prevents her from controlling her own finances or life decisions, put in place more than a decade ago after a very public breakdown. In June, Spears spoke out for the first time in court, asking for the conservatorship to be...

If you're a fan of Italian Renaissance art and you were in New York right now, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a treat for you. It's called The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1520-1570 and it offers a spectacular sampling of ninety works of art from Florence's 16th century. But there's a twist. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that Italian Renaissance art was connected to the most po...

Right now there is a powerful, highly ambitious, and deeply relevant art show in New York that weaves together the histories of conservation and American art in a way most people haven't seen before. It's a quick jag from the city across the Rip Van Winkle Bridge into Catskill, New York, but light years away from the bustling metropolis, where on either side of the river are the historic homes of...

This episode is devoted to Hunter Biden. Why? If you read the news, click on any cable network or walk down the street. You've probably heard that everybody is in a tizzy about the son of the president of the United States art career and his overnight emergence as a seemingly unlikely market darling. So to talk about Hunter Biden's art practice; how he views it; how the industry is embracing; the...