The Art Angle

What is connoisseurship, and what does it mean in the present day when Chat-GPT or even plain old Google can answer nearly any art historical question with a single keystroke? It’s a question that lies in the heart of the art world and was the topic of an enlightening panel discussion titled aptly, “The Art of Connoisseurship: Cultivating Expertise in the 21st Century” at the 2023 edition of TEFAF...

The arrival of A.I. will profoundly change the art world—if it hasn't already. A.I.-generated works have proliferated with the rise of A.I. art generators and large language models from DALL-E to ChatGPT, making their way into galleries and in some cases, winning prestigious awards. But the question remains: is it art, if it's been dreamed up by an algorithm? Or do our existing definitions of art...

One of the most exciting things about being an art journalist is that art as a subject is ridiculously protean: what it looks like is always changing, how we engage with it is always changing, and the role it plays in society is always changing too. What that means is that you constantly need to shift your perspective in order to see it properly. Searching for the correct lens on art, if you’re re...

February 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of photographer Ryan McGinley’s seminal exhibition “The Kids Are Alright” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which ran from February through May 2003. It was the 26-year-old’s solo exhibition debut, and the 20 photographs captured a particular place and time in New York City, in the shadow of September 11th, 2001 and the AIDS crisis; before the inventi...

Today in the spring of 2023, it feels almost impossible to escape news, rumors, debates, think pieces, open letters, diatribes, scandals, lawsuits, or almost any other form of human exchange about artificial intelligence. Whether the specific focus is on large language models like Chat-GPT or text-to-image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney, the discourse around A.I. technology has only gotten...

When you hear the name Roy Lichtenstein, an artistic style immediately comes to mind. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s use of comic books as an inspiration for his brightly-colored Pop Art painting was groundbreaking, and even shocking. Today, he is one of the most instantly-recognizable and widely known of all painters, and yet a quarter of a century after his death, the subject of Roy Lichtens...

The art market of today is a thriving global industry with a diverse community of buyers and sellers from all over the world who compete privately, and often (very) publicly in the race to acquire art, decorative objects, and even sneakers and watches. That’s why having an edge when it comes to data and information is so crucial, and why Artnet’s Price Database is an indispensable tool for any ser...

In recent months, headlines around the world have blared the news of a startling new trend of activism where protesters physically attack famous artworks with paint, food, and glue. The activists are trying to draw attention to global issues of climate change and museum ethics, and agree or disagree, you can’t argue that their tactics are making waves and fines or jail time aren't stopping them. T...

Next to the Mona Lisa, Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring is quite possibly the most famous portrait of all time. The 17th-century painting inspired a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and last year, was the target of climate activists protest, and it’s on view right now as part of the Rijksmuseum’s once-in-a-lifetime exhibition of works by the Dutch master. This week, while the Art Angl...

In a new feature film called Inside, an art heist goes terribly wrong for a thief named Nemo. Nemo is played by the world-renowned actor Willem DaFoe, well-loved by the art world already for his performance in the 2018 film At Eternity’s Gate, where he played Vincent van Gogh. In the ultra-contemporary plot of Inside, Dafoe’s character Nemo is not a world famous artist, but rather an anonymous rob...

All around Europe, there are small brass bricks inlaid into the ground before the front doors of apartment buildings and houses. These bricks are like a decentralized memorial—they are known as Stolpersteine—which means stumbling stones—and engraved on each one is the name of a citizen who was persecuted or exterminated by the Nazis during World War II. At an apartment building in Berlin that stan...

Given the manifold political, climate, and technological crises unfolding just two months into 2023, one wonders if that ominous future our species so fears is much closer than we anticipated. It is a tense and dramatic time, but it does further underscore the importance of the cultural figure Hito Steyerl. The German filmmaker’s bold artworks investigate emerging technologies and media, and she o...

In ancient mythology, figures like Athena and Aphrodite were exalted as paragons of virtue, strength, and beauty. Artnet and Cadillac invited three artists to interpret the goddess theme through their individual lenses and to create new work to celebrate the return of the brand’s Goddess hood ornament on the new ultra-luxury EV CELESTIQ. These images will be offered through an online auction prese...

The Swedish painter Hilma af Klint died nearly 80 years ago in relative obscurity, but you might not immediately realize this if you look her up today. Her paintings, large-scale, vivid, symbolic, and abstract masterpieces infused with mysticism and spirituality, seem uncannily contemporary. But that is not the only reason; af Klint is also now a bonafide star, an art-world household name. In the...

One art movement has become a household name in a way that few recent art movements can match. This is Afrofuturism. From the Metropolitan Museum of Art, installing an Afrofuturist period room to the blockbuster movie Black Panther and its sequel to an upcoming survey of the movement at the National Museum of African American history and culture, Afrofuturism is being canonized in art and beyond....

For Art Basel, the most well known art fair in the world, the fourth quarter of 2022 marked the end of one era, and the beginning of another. In early November, leadership of the company transitioned to Noah Horowitz, who returned after a roughly year-long stint at Sotheby’s to become the first ever CEO of the same fair brand where he served as director of the Americas from 2015 to 2021. But clear...

Born in Norilsk, an industrial Siberian town inside the Arctic Circle, Nadya Tolokonnikova was just 18 when she moved to Moscow and became a founding member of the Russian street art and performance art collective Voina in 2007. It was her strong feminist leanings that then inspired her to cofound Pussy Riot, known for playing incendiary highly political punk music while wearing balaclava head cov...

Here at Artnet, we typically look to thorough data and the hard facts to tell us what to make of the wily, unpredictable art world. But every now and then, it’s important to remember that ours is an industry based on unorthodox minds and a reverence for avant garde expression, so magical thinkers ought to remain a legitimate resource to our team of reporters. To that end, our Artnet News Pro Wet P...

Well, it's happened again. Tim Schneider has gone prophetic, again. At the beginning of every year, our trusted art business editor goes through the Sisyphean task of assessing his predictions for the most recently-wrapped year in the art world, and lays down his prophecies for the next 365 days to come. As is now tradition, for his first Gray Market column of the year, Soothsayer Schneider makes...

Anyone who's driven by a car dealership in the U.S. has probably seen them: Inflatable nylon figures with smiley faces, bending and twisting in the breeze. These roadside attention getters are known in the marketing world as "tube men" or "sky dancers." Paul Chan calls them "Breathers," and they have played a central role in the artist's practice since he debuted his own uncanny renditions of the...

Well, what do you know? The year of 2022 has officially come to a close, and here at The Art Angle, we are in a reflective. It was an amazing year for the show. We interviewed luminaries like Venice Biennale curator to Cecilia Alemani, artist Marina Abramović, critic Jerry Saltz; we delved deep into the scandalous history of Documenta as well as the whole Board Ape Yacht Club phenomenon, and the n...

Well, the end of the year is upon us and it is also the end of an era here at Artnet News. Our fearless executive editor, Julia Halperin, is leaving her post. As a sendoff for Julia, we thought we'd in the year, as we usually do with something lighthearted, The Artnet News Year End Quiz. Given the fact that no one has spent more time editing news digests early in the morning, editing art news thro...

Inside the art world, one of the defining narratives of the past decade has been a renewed push for gender and racial equity. Much of the attention in this realm has focused on the dramatic overrepresentation of white male artists in everything from museum collections and exhibition programs, to auction sales and gallery rosters. Overtures to correcting the imbalance have been so prevalent in trad...

On October 14, two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, walked into the National Gallery in London and threw a can of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while wearing shirts that read JUST STOP OIL. The action was part of a larger cycle of disruptive occupations and direct action by environmentalists in the UK, demanding dramatic action to cut fossil fuels in the face of climate change—bu...

What does it mean to be an art critic today? How do you choose what to write about and how do you even choose what to look at in an age where seeing art in person, which used to be the most common way people encountered art, has now arguably become the rarest? In this episode, Andrew Goldstein speaks with Jerry Saltz, the most famous, most lionized, and arguably the most influential art critic we...