The Art Angle

In art right now, it's hard to avoid talking about Beeple. That, of course, is the alias of Charleston-based Mike Winkelmann, known to millions of followers for digital images that he makes and posts daily. These works give off the sense of a brain overdosing on memes—we're talking pictures of giant emojis and pop culture junk being worshiped in dystopian techno hellscapes, or melted versions of c...

At the top of 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak, and art insiders' worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market you have been hearing the drumbeat of bad news: Galleries shuttering, a lot of the buying energy drying up, some fairs shriking operations, and the secondary market stuttering. But the...

As we close out another bumpy year in the art market, we are revisiting a recent episode that looks at one of the factors in play: the erosion of logic when it comes to the price of works of art. Our editor-in-chief was on the podcast sharing what she learned about how the rules of art pricing were made and broken—and what may come next.   What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that...

We love to do deep dives into trends that we are noticing in painting and the trend of “Bordercore” was one of our best-loved from the year, so we decided to revisit it this holiday season. We take a look at the emergent trend in art which is wild and inventive takes on frames, suddenly front and center for many painters of the moment as a way to push new boundaries in painting.  Almost by definit...

Chris Kraus is one of the most well-known contemporary art writers. She is also an important taste-maker, co-editor of independent publisher Semiotext(e), which played a key role in introducing French theory to U.S. audiences. But Kraus is probably best known today as a novelist. Her 1997 autobiographical novel I Love Dick became a buzzy literary reference in the 2010s, and a model for autofiction...

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Round-up, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. As we close out a busy calendar year—and for the last roundup of the year—we are reviewing all of 2025 and the trends, themes, and stories that defined it with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro editor and art criti...

Millions of people know The Artist's Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or, as she sometimes prefers to call it, “creative recovery.” It found a huge audience, and today you can find Artist’s Way groups all over the world. Cameron’s original The Artist’s Way offered a 12-week path towards overcoming ar...

You've been hearing a lot about the Louvre lately. Last month, thieves broke into the Paris Museum in broad daylight when the museum had just opened and made off with eight pieces of royal jewelry. The spectacular heist captured the world news cycle and the imagination of the internet. But why are people so obsessed with the Louvre in general? What is it about this museum in particular? We decided...

Last year, Jack Hanley—one of New York’s most beloved and idiosyncratic gallerists— announced he would close his gallery after 37 years in business. The news landed with both surprise and sadness: Hanley has always been a disruptor, a dealer with a sharp eye for fresh talent, who followed instinct over market logic. A gem of the New York art scene and beyond. Over the decades, Hanley gave early sh...

Before the idea of feminism took shape, there was what writers once called “the woman question.” The phrase comes from the querelle des femmes—a centuries-long debate in Europe about women’s rights, intellect, and place in society. One of the first to take it up was Christine de Pizan, the Italian-French court writer who, in 1405, published The Book of the City of Ladies. At a time when most women...

Nigerian modern art is having a moment. In London, the Tate has opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, called “Nigerian Modernism,” featuring more than 50 artists who experimented with vibrant new styles in the mid 20th century in the giant and influential West African nation. More generally, the artists of this era have become more recognized outside of their home country in recent decades, fr...

It’s been a really dizzyingly busy October, and as is customary, we are ending the month by talking about three of the biggest topics. We have a palette of stories that gives a sense of how head-spinning it was. First, we are going to talk about one of the biggest stories in the world, the $102 million jewel heist at France’s Louvre museum, which has transfixed the public. Second, it’s been a busy...

One of the things Ben Davis likes about contemporary art is that he is always learning new things, because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, Jeanette Andrews. Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that’s something new, exp...

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick. After months on the run, U.S. authorities finally tracked Inigo Philbrick to a remote island nation in the South Pac...

Manga is surely one of the most beloved and influential types of culture in the world. And while there’s long been a thriving international fandom around Japanese graphic novels, in the last 5 years in particular, there’s been a huge surge of popular interest, with manga impossible to miss in book shops and comic stores—and now in museums too. The big exhibition “Art of Manga” at the De Young Muse...

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.   After a bombshell $13 million lawsuit from angry collectors, Inigo Philbrick vanished. What followed was a cascade...

Museums across the globe are facing unprecedented challenges. In the West, public funding is shrinking, politics is creeping into the galleries, and institutions are asking hard questions about how to stay relevant to their donors and their publics. In an era of increasing scrutiny and diminishing returns, even the most established museums are questioning what long-term sustainability means. Meanw...

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.   Long before headlines exposed his $86 million fraud, Inigo Philbrick was just another ambitious intern at one of t...

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick. What happens when you mix staggering sums of money with opaque financial deals in the high-stakes world of art? Welc...

It’s September, and the art world is back to business. In this month’s episode of the Art Angle Round-Up, we’re diving into the stories making headlines from Buenos Aires to New York—and even into the fantastical worlds of ⁠Frank Frazetta⁠. We start with a remarkable development out of ⁠Argentina, where a couple has been charged with concealing looted art⁠. Then, we turn to the gallery scene, wher...

We’re thrilled to be able to say that the latest edition of Artnet's Intelligence Report: The Mid-Year Report 2025, has been published. It's free for all—head to Artnet News to download it as a handsome PDF. Within its covers, you'll find a bounty of information on the auction world and the art industry, which artists have been having a great year, how various countries' markets are performing, an...

Fans of the Art Angle know our monthly Art Angle Round-Up, where Kate Brown and Ben Davis are usually joined by a writer to talk about three topics in art. For the early September week of art fairs in New York, we decided to mix it up with an experiment: a live edition of the Art Angle Round-Up, at Independent 20th Century. Our guest was the curator Matthew Higgs. He’s the director of storied New...

Most of us can agree: we are living through a cultural crisis. It doesn’t come from a single source—it isn’t just algorithms, aesthetics, politics, or the economy. It’s the convergence of all these forces, and beneath them, the erosion of institutions that once anchored collective life. Over the past decade, digital platforms, like social media, promised to be a new kind of connective tissue—a dem...

 This is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year. Have you ever asked yourself: What do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not—but the question is at the heart of the work of Miriam Simun, who currently has an exhibition about her Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at the art space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer is mind-expanding. Almost lit...

If you want to know which artist is having the biggest year in museums, there is one name that springs to mind for me: Cara Romero. Since her first big breakout a decade ago at Santa Fe Indian Market, Romero has been steadily growing in influence. If you don’t know it yet, her photo-based art is full of color, drama, and detail. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical. And it moves between a v...