The Art Angle

As American citizens entered Memorial Day weekend this year, the nation was already in turmoil. Nearly 100,000 lives had been lost to a colossal public-health crisis, with a disproportionately high number of the victims being African American; tens of millions of people had filed for unemployment since mid-March; and many states central to the US economy remained largely locked down, with few soli...

Picture this: a doughy, apple-cheeked infant nestled in between the soft petals of a dew-kissed flower, sound asleep, like the start of a real-life fable. Almost everyone who conjures that mental image will do so using a nearly identical aesthetic—and whether you realize it or not, that's almost entirely because of the work of legendary baby photographer Anne Geddes. After her debut photography bo...

In late January, Philip Tinari, the director of Beijing's pioneering UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, was in Davos, Switzerland for the latest outing on the non-stop international carousel of events that has defined the art world for much of the 21st century. It was there, on a ski lift, that he began receiving frantic messages from his team back at the museum: a mysterious disease had begun affl...

How many times have you heard someone in a museum scoff "I could do that" in the presence of a solid-black canvas or an obtuse conceptual installation? You're not alone, and frankly, curator-turned-YouTube-star Sarah Urist Green understands the disconnect between art enthusiasts and art skeptics. But she wants to fix it by guiding all of us, from truck drivers to art historians, into tapping our o...

Just when you thought the spring of 2020 couldn't get any weirder, a Microsoft ad starring performance artist Marina Abramović caught the attention of conspiracy peddler Alex Jones and his followers, sparking accusations that the artist was practicing satanism and reigniting the "pizzagate" controversy that ensnared Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman John Podesta four years ago. It all bega...

In his 2019 essay "The Art of Dying," acclaimed critic Peter Schjeldahl describes Patsy Cline's voice as "attending selflessly to the sounds and the senses of the words... consummate." The same could be said about Schjeldahl's incomparable writing about art, most notably during his 22 years (and counting) as the art critic for the New Yorker. And no one expected this outcome less than Schjeldahl h...

Ai Weiwei is not shy about tackling the big issues. Despite winning international acclaim for his interdisciplinary, boundary-pushing art, the Chinese-born artist is better known in some circles for his activism—though in his estimation, the two are inextricably linked. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to wreak varying degrees of havoc around the globe, Ai has increasingly turned his attentio...

Today, Antwaun Sargent is known as the preeminent critical and curatorial voice for one of the most important movements in contemporary photography. Along with its accompanying exhibition, his book, The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion, stands as an important statement on a diverse set of young artists finding their own unique ways to break down the traditional boundaries se...

Although the coronavirus pandemic is first and foremost a public-health emergency, it rapidly proved to be a deep financial emergency, too. With businesses and cultural institutions around the world forced to shutter en masse in the face of social-distancing regulations, questions loom large about how the global economy and the workforce will endure a prolonged period in which all but "essential"...

Art history thrives on stories of fearless visionaries leaving behind the lives they've known to embark on journeys into uncertain lands for personal enrichment and artistic illumination. But few are as surprising as that of Agnes Pelton, the spiritualist painter who departed New York in 1932—alone, at the age of 50—to begin a new chapter in the California desert. There, she supported herself for...

In the past month, the world—and by extension, the art world—has changed so drastically that it is almost unrecognizable. While the novel 2019 coronavirus continues to threaten countries around the globe and industries of all types, major and minor art institutions alike have shuttered until further notice, hundreds of galleries have temporarily closed their doors, and both artists and art lovers...

For its first-ever live episode, recorded at the 2020 Armory Show, the Art Angle brought on couture wunderkind Sander Lak, the creative director of the white-hot Sies Marjan, to discuss the intersection of art and fashion. The Dutch designer, who named his label after his parents, strutted out onto the sartorial landscape in 2016 with his debut collection, and he was officially anointed by the hig...

Usually, the first weeks of March are intensely busy ones for the international art community, as they lead up to the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair: an unmissable event that galleries, museums, and even other cultural sectors in the region have used as an anchor to present their own very best programming to visitors from around the globe. This year, though, the staggering impact of the novel 2019 c...

A man on the run, millions of dollars missing, major artworks with multiple claims to ownership: these aren't plot points in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, they're elements of the real-life rise, fall, and disappearance of the young art dealer Inigo Philbrick. The son of a lauded museum director and a graduate of the esteemed Goldsmiths University of London, Philbrick got his start in the art m...

There's a buzzy new museum taking over New York, and it boasts the types of specs that would make competitors drool. Now housed in a prime 25,000-square-foot building in the hip SoHo neighborhood, this fresh destination has welcomed more than 1.5 million visitors since it launched as a pop-up back in 2016, and its $39 ticket price is higher than any major museum in America. But it's not the Museum...

Some 16 months after the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist and Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of state agents, the organization behind the namesake Southern California biennial Desert X announced that it would put on an ambitious new exhibition of contemporary art in AlUla, a UNESCO World Heritage Site deep in the Medina region of Saudi Arabia. Word of the show (which debut...

The Oscars may be over, but Hollywood is about to be overrun with a different kind of A-lister this week when the art world descends on Tinseltown for the second edition of Frieze Los Angeles. Despite the glut of disposable income earned from media moguls and tech startups, it has long proven difficult for East Coast dealers to make inroads with prospective clients on the country's opposite flank....

Over the past few weeks, the long-awaited trial of former Hollywood rainmaker Harvey Weinstein has unfolded in harrowing fashion, with one after another of his accusers taking the stand to allege patterns of sexual and psychological abuse. The grim courtroom proceedings are only the latest shockwave from the #MeToo movement, which grew from accusations against Weinstein into a national reckoning w...

You don't hear the words "witch hunt" much nowadays, unless they are being deployed by a certain US President. But the term is increasingly relevant—in a much more literal sense—to any tour through the art-historical canon, where witchcraft, paganism, and the occult seem to be more important presences every day. This development is in tune with what's happening in mainstream culture, too. More tha...

After a period of reckoning with a less-than-inclusive art historical canon, it seems increasingly clear that viewers (and dealers) are once again ready to embrace fresh young talent from the land of the living—artists bringing new perspectives and ideas into the sometimes-staid institutional mix. Among this up-and-coming group, one name on almost everyone's lips right now is Nicolas Party. A pret...

Above and beyond its well-established status as a global financial center, Hong Kong has spent the 21st century rapidly transforming into an international nexus for the art market: welcoming to both Eastern and Western collectors, appealing to institutions and artists alike for its vibrant economy and cosmopolitan character, and stabilized by its unique embrace of democratic values just a stone's...

Whether you ascribe to the centuries-old Georgian Calendar or slept through the clock striking midnight, ushering in a new year is often a time for reflection on what's past, and what is to come. Here at Artnet News, resident business editor and part-time soothsayer Tim Schneider embraces his mystical powers to peer into the future and offer a slew of highly specific predictions for the art world....

As a barrage of retrospective pieces from countless publications (including Artnet News) made clear throughout December 2019, the opening moments of 2020 signal a new decade, not just a new year. Looking back, the 2010s seem to be defined by one intense development after another, including an ever-expanding digital revolution, an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, the ever-heightening peri...

At the start of December, the Art Angle team had other, loftier ideas for the show's first Christmas episode. Maybe we would dig into the most important developments in the art world this past year or examine the growing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and their effect on the city's cultural community. But then, we lived through this year's edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, where superstar Ita...

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...