The Art Angle

Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month. In this episode, will be discussing: — The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here) — The rise of a new art historical art star: the Flemish baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689). — And a new investigation that claims to definitively, absolutely, positively once and for settle the question of who Banksy really is. Do we think they did it? Does it matter?

The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology. It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work “Peace Core” showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a project space, Earth, on the Lower East Side in New York and in Echo Park in L.A. Kulendran Thomas's works are complicated. They often feature paintings, inspired by A.I.-generated images. His video installations at MoMA and the New Museum involve deepfake interviews with celebrities like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or even other artists, together with documentary footage about Sri Lanka, where his family is from. Beneath all these complex parts, Kulendran Thomas is weaving together an ambitious and maybe even unsettling argument, about political systems, philosophy, technology, human creativity, post-human creativity, and where we might be heading in the future—as artists and as a civilization.

Kim Gordon—artist, musician, writer, and co-founder of the iconic rock band Sonic Youth—is one of the most restlessly creative figures in American culture. Over the past four decades moved between mediums with an ease that few can achieve. She published her memoir Girl in a Band in 2015 to wide acclaim. Her visual work has been shown at institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Busan Biennale. Her 2024 solo album The Collective, a record built on trap beats and with sharp cultural commentary, earned her two Grammy nominations, a career first. But Gordon was always an artist first. Now, she is the subject of two concurrent exhibitions now open at Amant, the Brooklyn-based arts organization. The first is her solo survey "Count Your Chickens," which brings together painting, ceramics, film, and readymades spanning nearly 20 years of work. The second is "Folded Group," a group show she co-curated with Bill Nace, her collaborator in the experimental guitar duo Body/Head, featuring 19 artists and artist-musicians many of whom, like Gordon, have never accepted the boundary between making art and making music. Her third solo album, Play Me, is out on March 13. In her conversation with senior editor Kate Brown, Gordon discusses her visual practice, her relationship to the art world and the music world, and what these two universes share and where they diverge. She reflects on album art as a curatorial act, on how the internet has transformed what it means to make and disseminate work, and on what it has meant to spend a career resisting every category people tried to put her in.

The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum’s big curated show which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging "Greater New York." That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taína H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both these shows at once. For the Whitney, she is even, in a way, the face of the show: a work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child, called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, art critic, Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise— that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.

It’s time for our monthly news roundup where we discuss some of the biggest stories emerging in the art world. On the heels of the first-ever Art Basel Qatar, we will be discussing the Middle Eastern art market and the regional art scenes. Is this simply another fair on the global circuit, or something more structural—an attempt to recalibrate where cultural power sits? We will doing a vibe check on the Ultra-Contemporary art scene’s current obsession with Old Masters, art history, and dead artists. As market pressures mount and institutions increasingly turn toward estates and historical figures, we’ll ask whether this is a genuine intellectual reckoning or a marketing strategy dressed up as scholarship. Maybe it is both? Finally, we will rove over to Rome, Italy, where where a church fresco featuring an angel that bore a striking resemblance to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was abruptly removed, sparking debate within and well beyond the church about restoration, iconography, and the politics of sacred imagery. We reminisce about the great many botched art restorations of years past. To discuss these topics, Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined this month by London-based Artnet News editor Margaret Carrigan. Carrigan is the host of our sister podcast, the Art Market Minute, and co-author of our weekly Artnet Pro market newsletter, The Back Room.

Katya Kazakina, senior reporter known for investigative coverage of collectors and auction houses. She walks through how the DOJ’s Epstein files reveal art market strategies, from valuation and 1031 exchanges to using collections as loan collateral. Short, sharp takes on Leon Black’s holdings, auction-house spreadsheets, and the financial mechanics that shape high-end collecting.

Ryan McGinness, a contemporary artist known for colorful, layered abstractions and immersive installations, discusses his decades-long psilocybin journals compiled in Trip Advisor. He talks about ritualized approaches, recurring visual motifs, translating inner voyages into art, microdosing versus high-dose work, and creating a mushroom-centered community and practice.

Aria Dean, critic, artist, and theorist whose writing on digital culture and race appears in Bad Infinity, discusses shifts in digital art and debates about race. She traces net art and post-internet scenes, the centralizing power of social media, and how her practice moves between writing, sculpture, and a hybrid performance The Color Scheme set in 1923 Berlin.

Here we are, already at the end of the first month of the new year. That means it’s time to do the first Art Angle Round-Up of 2026, where, as is custom, we’ll review some of the art news stories that people are talking about, and what they might tell us something about the forces shaping the year to come. Today art critic Ben Davis, senior editor Kate Brown and editor in chief Naomi Rea talk about three stories: —The big controversy over the South Africa pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which Artnet News has had multiple pieces about. —The Prado Museum in Madrid, which has a good problem: it has too many visitors. It also has a plan to deal with overcrowding. —The mini-genre of "speed painting," specifically the painter Vanessa Horabuena. She sold a painting of Jesus for almost $3 million dollars that she made in 10 minutes at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser—a sign of the world out of control, though perhaps a slightly more fun one to talk about than some of the other things in the news. Or maybe not.

David Marx, a Tokyo-based culture and fashion writer, discusses the cultural stagnation of the 21st century, as explored in his book, Blank Space. He argues that commercialization and technology have stifled innovation across the arts, creating a 'blank space' where creativity once thrived. Marx highlights the rise of kitsch, nostalgia, and cultural omnivorism, illustrating how they influence art today. He proposes five strategies to revive cultural inventiveness, aiming to shift focus back to radical innovation and genuine artistic expression.