The Art World: What If...?!

Ian Cheng wants to change the way you think. "I really want to make art that taps into some part of a viewer's neurology and gets them into a different state," Cheng says to host Charlotte Burns during this  In Other Words  podcast. The wide-ranging conversation covers topics from the freedom afforded humans by AI, to the genius of  The Real Housewives  television show. Cheng creates art with a ne...

In the words of the   Los Angeles Times , the artist Mickalene Thomas "is to contemporary painting what Daft Punk is to music: acclaimed as one of the more original remix artists working today." Her genre-busting work takes many forms, and grapples with bodies and their desires, with power, equity and identity. In today's episode, she talks about community and collaboration—both essential to her p...

Produced in partnership with Frieze Los Angeles, this live recording is a conversation with major Californian institutional leaders  Naima J. Keith  (Deputy Director, California African American Museum),  Michael Govan  (CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art),  Andrew Perchuk , (Deputy Director, Getty Research Institute),  Megan Steinman  (Director, The Underground Mu...

The man credited with reinventing the museum and changing British culture, Sir Nicholas Serota joins us for a special extended episode of  In Other Words . Now Chair of Arts Council England, Serota was the director of Tate for 28 years. More than anybody else, he helped shift attitudes in Britain, making the country more comfortable with contemporary art while he oversaw the growth of Tate both ph...

From ticketing scandals and the implications of Brexit, to a major £35m museum renovation, this episode of  In Other Words  features a frank conversation with Nicholas Cullinan, the director of London's National Portrait Gallery, on a broad range of topics. Cullinan discusses a recent attendance crisis at the museum, when faulty counters reported that visitor figures had fallen by 35% between 2017...

"Being an artist was a great excuse for anything you wanted to do that was 'different'," says the artist, photographer and filmmaker Laurie Simmons, whose work is the subject of a major retrospective survey on show now at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (until 27 January). In this episode, she talks to host Charlotte Burns about everything from Internet culture to egalitarian art and the conce...

What were the hot topics of 2018? Host Charlotte Burns looks back on the year in this special episode, breaking down key moments in conversation with Julia Halperin (executive editor of artnet News). The broadening of the canon across markets and museums—from African American artists to outliers, from women artists to conspiracists—was a major topic for In Other Words guests last year. Another key...

For this special live recording from Washington, D.C., we were invited to interview Jerry Saltz, the senior art critic at  New York  magazine, in front of an audience as part of the "Critics in Conversation" talks program organized by the Hirshhorn National Museum of Modern Art. Jerry has previously appeared as a guest on  In Other Words —an intimate and introspective conversation in which he talk...

Named "the most powerful woman in the New York art world" by The New York Times, Lisa Phillips has been the director of the New Museum of Contemporary Art since 1999. On today's show, she talks about the future of the museum—from the current $85m capital campaign to the ways in which Phillips sees the institution moving beyond bricks and mortar—with host Charlotte Burns (executive editor, In Other...

Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the non-profit FLAG Art Foundation in New York was founded by Glenn Fuhrman. On this episode of  In Other Words , Fuhrman talks how he began collecting art ("I lived in a one-room studio apartment for the first eight and a half years I lived in New York, and spent all my disposable income on art."), and discusses philanthropy (he and his wife sponsored...

More than $2B was spent on Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art during the recent round of auctions in New York. On today's podcast, Nicholas Maclean (of the London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean) and Allan Schwartzman (co-founder of AAP) discuss with our host Charlotte Burns (editor of  In Other Words)  what happened. They talk about the successes and the surprises of the sales, as w...

In this episode, we go down the rabbit hole with Ian Alteveer and Doug Eklund, the co-curators of "Everything is Connected: Art and Conspiracy" at the Met Breuer (until 6 January 2019). The show deals with the ways artists have imagined the forces that control their lives, presenting 70 works created between 1969 and 2016 by around 30 artists and artist collectives. It is the first major exhibitio...

How do curators find art, and decide to show it? Joining our host Charlotte Burns for a conversation about the future of biennials, triennials and other group shows are Cecilia Alemani (director and chief curator of High Line Art and the artistic director of Art Basel Cities) and Ingrid Schaffner (curator of the 57th Carnegie International, which recently opened in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). They...

In today's episode of In Other Words, we are joined by Richard Armstrong, who has been the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation since 2008. A frank and insightful thinker who once considered a career in politics before entering the arts, Armstrong shares his thoughts on topics from censorship to deaccessioning. He also talks about how museums can cope with being the targets...

The first major survey show of the 75-year-old artist Howardena Pindell opened earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and is now on show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts ("Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen" until 25 November). Pindell was one of the first black curators at the Museum of Modern Art and a cofounder of pioneering feminist gallery A.I.R. She worked in...

Just 2.3% of all purchases and gifts at 30 prominent US museums over the past ten years have been of work by African American artists, according to a joint investigation by In Other Words and artnet News. Meanwhile, the total auction value of work by African American artists over the same period represents a mere 1.2% of global auction sales. Working together in an unprecedented three-month partne...

Joining us for our 38th episode is Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation—that much beloved organization so associated with the great land artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Pilgrimage, place and change of pace are important aspects of any visit to Dia—which has 11 sites in places as diverse as Utah, Bridgehampton, Beacon, New Mexico and New York City. Morgan talks to host Charlotte B...

  Where is the great art being made in America today? In this episode, our guests Chrissie Iles (Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American art), Carolyn Ramo (executive director, Artadia) and Hamza Walker (executive director, LAXART) join our host Charlotte Burns to discuss the subject. They talk about art being made throughout the United States in places outside the major...

"By now, I'm kind of an opinion machine," says Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic for The New York Times in this special podcast recording with our host Charlotte Burns. "I would say all art that's middling-to-great is a strike for freedom; is an expression of liberty," Smith says. "It's somebody asserting themselves in a new way. And that kind of newness, you can hear it in jazz, you can see it i...

The American artist Joel Shapiro has been pioneering new forms in sculpture for more than five decades. He joins our host Charlotte Burns today to talk more about his art and his influences; his hopes and motivations; and about what, for him, defines great art. "I'm not talking magical thinking—but some level of rapture or depression or some level of emotionality that is not matter of fact, and I...

"Because Sylvio is courageous, I was able to buy more hamburgers to keep up my strength, and more paint to continue painting," said artist Robert Ryman about collector Sylvio Perlstein, who was a patron of his at a time when few others were interested. Born in Belgium, Perlstein grew up in Rio de Janeiro, where his family moved when fleeing the Nazis in 1939. Perlstein bought his first work of art...

"When people ask me how to describe the work or describe myself, I always just start by saying artist," says Glenn Kaino. "Everything stems from the art practice." The visionary American conceptual artist's work has led him to become an off-Broadway producer, a performer, a magician, a social activist and the technological innovator who helped legalize the music download platform Napster.  A "horr...

Huge sums of money—more than $2.6bn—have been spent on Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art over the past two weeks in New York. On today's podcast, Nicholas Maclean (of London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean) and Allan Schwartzman (co-founder of AAP), discuss with our host Charlotte Burns (editor of  In Other Words) , what happened: what the surprises were; what trends we can detect;...

"There's no goal to being an artist—you keep doing it and then, in theory, one dies," says Carroll Dunham, who Allan Schwartzman describes as one of the greatest painters of the past 40 years. Art is a "kind of lustful driving forwards" for Dunham, who has moved from abstraction to figuration over the course of his varied career. Works from his "Wrestlers" series are currently on show at Gladstone...

One of the most talked about exhibitions this year, "Outliers and American Vanguard Art", closes next week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (13 May), after which it will travel to the High Museum in Atlanta and then to LACMA.  Our guest today is Lynne Cooke, the senior curator of special projects at the NGA who spent five years researching the exhibition. Talking to our host Charlo...