The Art Angle

Next week, the art world will descend into the Venetian Lagoon for the Venice Biennale, the most highly anticipated art event of this year. The Brazilian curator Adriano Pedrosa is at the helm of the prestigious group exhibition, which is now in its 60th edition, and his show includes more than 300 artists and collectives presented in the historic Arsenale and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini....

Every two years, the Whitney Museum of American Art returns with its signature and much-anticipated biennial. Founded in 1931, the Whitney Biennial is one of the most historically important art events in the United States, a survey that brings together artists from throughout the country, and more recently, from around the world. Often controversial, the Whitney Biennial is viewed by art fans as m...

Well, it is the end of March, spring has sprung, and April showers are coming in fast and furious. We're back with the monthly Art Angle Round Up, where we focus our attention on three headline-making stories that have made the rounds in the last month. This week, Art Angle hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by Artnet brand editor William van Meter. First up is the latest from controversy-m...

A few years back, electrifying bidding wars and monumental transactions routinely had us all on the edge of our seats in the auction room, but this sort of in-room excitement now feels a long way off. Although you wouldn't necessarily know it from the triumphant post-sale press releases that are just as routinely put out by the auction houses who are keen to signal confidence in the market and, of...

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...

It has been 17 years since James Fuentes first hung a shingle out under his own name. In the years since, he has carved out a unique position in the contemporary art world, representing an eclectic mix of older, sometimes overlooked artists, alongside younger, buzzier names. Prior to striking out on his own, Fuentes worked for a handful of high-profile gallerists, including Jeffrey Deitch, whose e...

On this week's episode, hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by the newly-minted Artnet Pro editor and veteran art journalist and critic Andrew Russeth. We're thrilled to have him as a part of our team, and he's making his Art Angle debut with another edition of the Round Up, where we discuss three topics making headlines and sparking conversation in and around the art world. The first subjec...

The words the “Harlem Renaissance” have immense magnetism for vast numbers of people. In art history, however, the Harlem Renaissance has often been treated as a footnote to the main story of 20th century art. It’s often been given scant attention in textbooks, and even U.S. museums have historically given more attention to European movements of the 1920s, such as French Surrealism and Russian Con...

Last month, much of the art industry was transfixed on the goings-on in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan, where the Russian businessman Dimitry Rybolovlev and a group of Sotheby’s auction house representatives were taking turns on the witness stand.  The matter at issue was artworks that Rybolovlev had purchased via the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier. The Russian accused Sotheby’s of conspiring wi...

The term “abstraction” gets thrown around a lot in the art world, usually as a vague catchall to describe an otherwise inexpressible style of painting or sculpture. Just going by the dictionary’s definition, “abstract” is described as being disassociated from any specific instance, or having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content. Today, abst...

Artificial intelligence was one of the hottest topics in art in 2023—and we can predict that it will continue to be a major topic in 2024. We can debate whether we should be cautiously optimistic or in an existential panic, but most of us can agree that the impact will be enormous. Way back in May 2022, Art Angle co-pilot, art critic Ben Davis, talked about what A.I. means for art in an episode of...

We are well into 2024 now, coming to the end of January, and looking back at 2023, one of our favorite innovations was this monthly round up here at the Art Angle. Each month, we bring together Artnet News editors and writers to discuss the biggest art news developments of the last month, and take the pulse of what's happening around the world. This week, we have a fully-international cohort, with...

The author Ishmael Reed is known as a major force in literature and has been called one of the key thinkers of multiculturalism. Born in 1938, Reed arrived with a bang in 1972 with Mumbo Jumbo, a vibrant, hard-to-describe novel that blends real historical events with outrageous fantasy, about a plague of dancing that breaks out, spread by Black artists and musicians, and a shadowy international co...

If you like art and are on Instagram, then you probably know the account @freeze_magazine—that's freeze spelled with an E, like "help me, I'm freezing," not with an I, like the popular art magazine and art fair. It's certainly not the first art meme account, but with now more than 160,000 followers, freeze_magazine has gained a particularly large audience by turning the lens of internet humor on t...

Any short list of the most important art critics of the last decades would have to include Lucy R. Lippard. She would also be at the very top of Artnet's art critic Ben Davis's personal list of favorite writers about art. Lippard has written numerous important books, including Six Years: the Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1973, the book that defined what conceptual art was all about for...

If you follow the mainstream art world, you will know that for the last decade, one of the biggest stories has been a boom in new kinds of figurative painting. A visit to the recent spate of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing down, but nothing stays unchanged forever, and trend-watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge. Artne...

At the end of the year, it's become something of a tradition for people in all corners of the Internet to review the last 12 months and take a look to the future with a sort of "micro-forecast." The original idea of an "Ins and Outs" list began at the Washington Post in the 1970s, and is now a global sensation.  Here at Artnet, we decided to try our hand at a sort of list of our own, and tapped se...

"Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness." That's a quote from the great Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers that gets shared a lot, and is especially relevant for this week's episode of the podcast on the subject of art and joy. It's actually a little bit unclear what Albers means when she says that "art is a different kind of happiness," different from what? Whi...

Most loyal Art Angle followers will be familiar with the curator Klaus Biesenbach. The German-born artist made his mark in Berlin in the 1990s, founding the city's biennale and one of its most-beloved art institutions, Kunst-Werke. He moved West, across the water, becoming director of MoMA PS1, and chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before moving even further west in 2021 to ta...

Well, we made it to the end of the year (almost!), and we are back at the Art Angle with our monthly Round Up, where we bring together some of our esteemed reporters to talk about the big stories that are swirling in the air. Joining host Ben Davis this week to chat are senior editor Kate Brown and senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella. As always, there is a lot to talk about this month. First up...

"I was like reborn," the art critic Clement Greenberg once remembered, "it was the most important event in my life." The event in question was his encounter with Sullivanian therapy. His biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, once wrote that it would not overstretch the facts to say that after the late '50s, Clem's comportment in the art world can only be understood in this context. Yet despite how large...

One of the biggest art events of the year is currently up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That, dare we say, once-in-a-lifetime exhibition is “Manet/Degas.” Through more than 160 works of art, including landmark loans from dozens of institutions, it puts into dialogue two of the most famous French painters of the 19th century, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, born two years apart. The...

Marcel Dzama has an immediately recognizable style as a visual artist, but his energy has far exceeded the realm of visual art. Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1974, Dzama got his start with the Royal Art Lodge, a group of students at the University of Manitoba who banded together in the mid-1990s. Their collaborative working method, where one artist would start a work and others finish it, recalled t...

In 2018, Helen Molesworth was unceremoniously dismissed from her position as chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The move proved controversial among industry insiders, many of whom cast it as an example of an institution punishing its employee, a straight talking, strong willed feminist, for refusing to march in line. But for Molesworth, whose resume also includes stints a...

In today's global discourse, “Asia” often takes on an expansive, sometimes oversimplified, identity. Especially within the global art market, this vast continent is frequently painted with broad strokes, overshadowing its rich tapestry of cultures, intricacies, and nuances.  Over the past two decades, major global auction houses have been touting “the Asian market,” highlighting the fact that abou...