The Art Angle

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...

In the final installment of our mini-series Shattering the Glass Ceiling, Artnet News's art and design editor Noor Brara spoke with pioneering gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, founder of her eponymous gallery. Ibrahim opened her first outpost in Seattle, later launching another outpost in Chicago's West Town neighborhood. Now, as the last year's turbulence begins to level off, Ibrahim is taking another...

The biggest story at Artnet HQ this week is not, as you might imagine, the opening of the first IRL art fair in more than a year, it's the launch of Artnet News Pro! After being in the works for literally years, we have unveiled a very exciting new members-only section of the website dedicated to covering the inside-baseball nitty gritty at the heart of the art market. It encompasses exclusive dat...

In the third episode of the Art Angle's podcast miniseries "Shattering the Glass Ceiling," Artnet News's London editor Naomi Rea spoke to curator and author Legacy Russell.  Russell is currently serving as the associate curator of exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem and is the award-winning author of Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020), which explores how digital tools have created space to...

You know the scene at the end of Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer where they leave the hellish bullet train and see that the frozen Tundra is starting to melt and nature is coming back to life? That kind of gives you the sense of the relief that the art market is hoping to feel next week when, miracle of miracles, the Frieze New York art fair opens to real in-person audiences. This marks the f...

The second installment of this four-part podcast miniseries features Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone's interview with art collector and media executive Catherine Levene. Levene's 25-year career runs the breadth of the media space, beginning at the New York Times Company in both the corporate sales realm and later as part of its burgeoning digital strategy. After obtaining her MBA, Levene v...

Welcome to Shattering the Glass Ceiling, a podcast from the team at the Art Angle where we speak to boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond about how art has shaped their lives and careers. In the first episode of this four-part podcast mini series, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to Lauren Haynes, the director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at...

As we begin to emerge into the new realities of 2021, the challenges of the past year have made vividly clear the importance of having leaders in all areas of society who reflect the true diversity of modern life. Women, in particular, have stepped forward in ways more visible than ever before—from the history-making occupant of the White House to the scientists creating the vaccine and nurses adm...

This month, the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd has brought the racial justice protests of the last summer viscerally back into the public consciousness, reigniting conversations in the news and in households everywhere about the reality of the Black experience in America. This weekend, those same conversations will also have a powerful...

Art shows are a thing again! At least in New York, at least for now, and at least in the socially distanced way that we've come to see as normal. But it's really great news for the art museum-going crowd. And it's even better news that some of the shows on view are really, really good. Without question, one of the buzziest shows of the season is the Brooklyn Museum's sweeping survey of the street...

Amazingly enough, it's now the spring of 2021. That means the weather is warming, the grass is greening, and the little buds are drinking in the cool rain. But more to the point, it means that we've made it through the terrible pandemic winter and are emerging into a strange new world that is very much changed after a full year under the shadow of the coronavirus. In the art industry, normality is...

As we all now know, NFTs are the talk of the art world these days—they're everywhere. It's gotten to the point where you can't have a simple conversation with someone without them bringing up NFTs, or trying to turn the conversation in that direction. Due to an unusually hectic few weeks on the work and home fronts, our illustrious host, Andrew Goldstein, has been hunkered down at home with his wi...

This month, as the world limps its way toward spring and, hopefully, a gradual return of normality, the Brooklyn Museum has opened a show called “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” that provides valuable fodder for thought in the year ahead. As the title suggests, it’s a career retrospective of the venerated performance and experimental artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for more than 40 years has created poet...

In fall 2019, a new app called ImageNet Roulette was introduced to the world with what seemed like a simple, fun premise: snap a selfie, upload it to a database, and wait a few seconds for machine learning to tell you what type of person you are. Maybe a "teacher," maybe a "pilot," maybe even just a "woman." Or maybe, as the app's creator warned, the labels the system tagged you with would be shoc...

The story of the Benin Bronzes is one of the bloodier, more shameful chapters in the history of the Western world’s "encyclopedic" museums. Looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by the British in a punitive raid whose indiscriminate slaughter and wanton cruelty inspired The Hague Convention two years later, the artworks are today scattered across art institutions and ethnographic museums in Eur...