The Art Angle

Caspar David Friedrich is considered one of the most important German painters, and his landscape works live large in the cultural consciousness in Germany and beyond. You have probably seen the 19th-century artist's most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure that you see from the back looking out over a wide valley of cliffs and mists. To mark what would have been the 250t...

“Identity politics” is among the most contentious terms in recent debates about art. And now, the most powerful people in the United States are blaming just about everything on “DEI” and “wokeness.” The very concept of diversity as a positive ideal seems to be under threat. At the same time, so far there has been nowhere near the protest you would expect. Civil society feels stunned. At least part...

Art comes in all shapes and sizes, of course—but recently it has been getting smaller. Or at least that is what is argued in an article by Kate Brown, Artnet Senior Editor and Art Angle co-host. It's called "Why is Small Art So Big Right Now?" Not so long ago, the trend was in the other direction. Gigantism and grandiosity were the rage, and artwork stretched to environmental scale. There's still...

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to discuss some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Caroline Goldstein, acting managing editor of Artnet News, joins the show. It’s been quite the January. Though it is typically a slow month, some major stories have transpired. We’ll be talking about...

We don’t need to tell anyone listening that it is a difficult and alarming political moment. You may be asking, How will art weather the storm? To answer that question, you probably need to take stock of how art has navigated the political storms of the recent past. And there’s been a lot of debate about this recently, centered on the critic Dean Kissick’s long essay for Harper’s magazine from lat...

Last weekend, warnings to evacuate were issued to the suburban westside neighborhood of Brentwood, which includes the esteemed Getty Center, home to one of the city’s most prized art collections. After more than a week of burning, L.A.’s devastating wildfires, which began on January 7, are still not fully contained, forcing ongoing evacuation orders around the coastal city. It is the worst fire ev...

Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can—and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver, or sent a chill up your spine. This is the phenomena that is called “Aesthetic Chills.” It’s tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it’s also associated with some of...

The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and need...

But Lippard has also been much more than a writer. She curated “Eccentric Abstraction” in 1966, helping to define what would come to be called post-Minimalism in sculpture. Her experimental and traveling card shows helped create the audience for conceptual, minimal, and land art. She curated maybe the first museum show of Second Wave feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in 1971, and was a part of th...

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a special guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. Usually, we look back on the previous month, but as we head into the holidays and close out a busy calendar in the art world, we are doing things differently for the last roundup of the year, reviewin...

With his themes of repetition and appropriation, Andy Warhol’s work can seem mass produced. He was prone to say that his assistants did his work for him and often invented different narratives in interviews. In fact, weaving tall tales and shaping his own mythology was another important aspect of his art: he was creating the ultimate persona of an artist every bit as Pop as his paintings, one who...

When Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s last mistress, pleaded for “just a little moment more” before her execution in 1793, in the throes of the French Revolution, she seemed to capture the fleeting pleasures and indulgence of the Rococo age. My colleague, Artnet Editor Katie White eloquently described this moment before du Barry’s death in the opening of a recent essay, exploring how, centuries la...

Say the words "artificial intelligence" or simply, "A.I." in an art setting, and people think of either cutting-edge, new media art, or of misinformation., hallucination, and plagiarism. But there's a case to be made that those words should prompt you to think about very old art and about very new technology's use in finding out what's real. My colleague at Artnet, Jo Lawson-Tancred has a new book...

The contemporary art world is nothing if not confusing. It is simultaneously deeply frivolous, and takes itself way too seriously. Its business dealings combine total mystification with conspicuous consumption, and the exact mechanisms by which one type of art gets celebrated above another are very often impossible to figure out. If you've ever struggled to make sense of it all, the journalist, Bi...

In the early 1900s, art movements within the then-burgeoning category of modern art were exploding in multiple directions, and among them was a strand called Orphism. What was it? In some ways, it is hard to say. Relatively short-lived and debated even as soon as it was coined around 1912, Orphism was a form of abstract art, informed by motion, radial shapes of vibrant colors. Most known and neatl...

As a novelist, Jonathan Lethem is basically a genre all his own. His books mash up literary fiction and pulp into disorienting but engaging combinations, for which he’s won both a MacArthur Grant and the National Book Award. Since the success of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, he's published many very well received novels—including The Fortress of Solitude in 2003 and Brooklyn Crime Novel, from last...

Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is famous for his deep dives into topics of American history, ranging from the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, and the history of baseball, to name just a few.  Now Burns is delving into the fascinating life of 15th century genius Leonardo da Vinci, examining his life and his numerous roles as a draftsman, painter, and scientist. Thi...

Re-Air from August 15,2024 There’s so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole… but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It’s not always clear when you’re in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surf...

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Naomi Rea, newly appointed editor in chief of Artnet News joins the show. Kate and Naomi just returned from reporting on the ground at Art Basel Paris, which came just one week after Frieze London and...

Contemporary art comes in many shapes and forms, but close your eyes and think of what an artist looks like and nine times out of 10, I bet you are still thinking of a painter in front of a canvas. If recent interest for museums and galleries is any indication, however, that image should be joined by another one: the fiber artist. Think of a weaver seated at the loom or a quilt-maker laboriously s...

Few creative works ever managed to get the weird pathologies and unique characters of the art world quite right. But journalist and author Hari Kunzru's newest novel Blue Ruin is definitely one of those works. Set in the early stages of the pandemic, Kunzru's novel looks at how wealth and privilege function and fester in the art world. It's  an astonishing and incisive exploration of the power dyn...

Over the past 200 years, a museum in New York has quietly grown to become one of the city's most esteemed cultural institutions. You might think I'm talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MoMA, but no, it's the Brooklyn Museum. Founded in 1823 as a community library which later merged with the Brooklyn Institute, the Brooklyn Museum is now firmly fixed on the city's cultural landscape...

The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and need...

It is time once again for our Round Up episode for the month of September, where we talk about some of the most interesting and timely art news stories of the last month with our writers here at Artnet. This month, Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by senior writer Sarah Cascone, and the three stories they discuss all center around museums. The first is the announcement that l...

At the start of September, a massive chunk of the international art world descended on South Korea for a bounty of high-profile art offerings. The marquee event was Frieze Seoul, in its third edition, at the Coex convention center in the luxe Gangnam district, running alongside the long-established Korea International Art Fair. But they represented just one element of the action. All over Seoul, m...