The Art Angle

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...

This week, the subject of our show is less a story and more of a phenomenon, and his name is Simon de Pury. A legendary auctioneer who has actually been called the "Mick Jagger of auctions," de Pury has led a storied career in art. A baron by heredity who was born in the Swiss art capital of Basel, de Pury entered the art business with the help of the legendary dealer Ernst Beyeler and swiftly bla...

Last month, a new name entered the art discussion when a suite of five digital artworks sold in a special sale at Christie's auction house in New York for $2.1 million. And it's a name you might not expect: Fewocious. That's the nom de art of Victor Langlois, an 18-year-old Seattle artist, originally from a family of El Salvadoran immigrants in Las Vegas. Sold during Pride month, the opus is title...

The Art Angle team is taking this week off, but we'll be back July 9 with a new episode. In the meantime, here's one of our favorite recent episodes, featuring photographer Dawoud Bey on the occasion of his retrospective, "An American Project," on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. After former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison f...

Today one of the swiftest rising stars in the art world is a 26-year-old wunderkind photographer who is equally comfortable shooting heads of state for magazine profiles as he is putting together shows for the gallery context. Of course, we’re talking about Tyler Mitchell, who gained international fame when Beyoncé tapped him to be the first black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue and has no...

Unless you are living under a particularly out of touch rock, you’ve probably heard of the immersive Van Gogh craze that is currently sweeping the globe. In a sign of our strange times, the nineteenth century Dutch painter best-known for the vibrating intensity of his paintings and the tragic circumstances of his life, including what one Washington Post writer called “the whole ear thing.” He has...

We’ve all seen the movie with the glamorous art dealer, maybe a villain who lives in a cutting edge palatial home, drives an impressive car and speaks with an impressive accent. That pretty much is the image of the art dealer in the popular consciousness, a sophisticated suave, sexy, probably ruthless, strikingly dressed person who is conspicuously rich.  But how well does this image match up with...

We wanted to make sure you had a chance to check out a very special new podcast miniseries we’ve rolled out. It’s called Shattering the Glass Ceiling, and its dedicated to spotlighting boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond who have build extraordinary careers around—and inspired by—art. Today, we’ll be re-airing an episode of the series that is of special significance, it’s an interv...

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been running a little experiment here at the Art Angle—namely our first-ever breakout mini-series, called Shattering the Glass Ceiling, dedicated to remarkable women in the art world who have succeeded in changing the game in their respective arenas. It’s such a good group of interviews, and we want to make sure you have a chance to hear it. We also, it so happe...

It’s a cliche to say that going to greater China is a bit like visiting the future, where technology is threaded into every aspect of daily life in ways that are both wondrous and scarily dystopian. But it’s totally true! And it was certainly the case for collectors and dealers who went to Art Basel’s revitalized art fair in Hong Kong last week. A little more than a year after the pandemic forced...

As much of the art world is beginning to rebound from the pandemic, the art market got a major shot in the arm itself: in little more than a week, New York’s big three auction houses held a spate of absolutely mammoth art sales, bringing in a cumulative $1.3 billion and showing, pretty unequivocally, that the art business is back, baby. But, to me at least, one of the most remarkable things about...

Right now, there's an exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, that is gaining international attention for a tragic reason. That’s because the show, titled “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” is dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman who was killed by police during a raid of her Louisville home on March 13, 2020. A former emergency medical technician...