The Art Angle

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, abstract art is not in and of itself considered particularly revolutionary, it is just one of many approaches artists take in pursuit of their vision. But this wasn’t always the case, and the history and tradition of abstraction and abstract art is still rather new in comparison to the long stretch of art history. And there is a lot that can still be mined by looking back to the roots of the movement, to learn about what inspired artists' departure from traditional figurative and representational modes of art making—as well as by looking at how the reverberations of early abstraction can still be felt today.To delve into what abstractionism is, and highlight some of the most important historical practitioners, Artnet's Gallery Editor Annikka Olsen spoke to Artnet’s Co-Head of Post-War and Contemporary Art Martina Batovic, and curator, collector and partner at Leslie Feely Gallery Dakota Sica. 

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 the Art Angle in his book, Art in the After-Culture—just when the world was first being transfixed by images generated by Dall-E 2, and before ChatGPT took the world by storm in November 2022. The year and a half after that conversation brought a huge wave of fascinating—if unnerving—developments around the fields of art and creativity—the most human of pursuits.As we head deeper into 2024, what forms and aesthetics could emerge or take precedence? Recently, Ben put together a new essay, offering 10 speculative predictions about how generative A.I. might transform how art is made, how artists work, and what an audience expects from art. We found them very persuasive. Some are unexpected. Some are alarming. We will have to wait and see if he’s right, but things are moving pretty quickly, so we may not have to wait long.In a wide-ranging conversation, senior editor Kate Brown and Ben review some of the most memorable touchstones around A.I. and art from last year, before going in depth about a few of Ben’s predictions that jumped out from his article—if you want to read all 10, you can check out the full essay, “10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 1 of 2) and 10 Predictions About Unexpected Ways A.I. Will Reshape Art (Part 2 of 2).

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 Ben Davis in New York, Kate Brown in Berlin, and Jo Lawson-Tancred in London. We also have a very diverse set of talking points today, including performance artist Marina Abramović's new skincare line (which may or may not actually be a work of art in itself); a spate of controversies dogging the national pavilions gearing up for the Venice Biennale; and some predictions from art advisors about what to expect in the art market this year.

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 conspiracy to contain its disruptive power.Reed’s storied career has included novels, essays, and polemics, as well as plays. And he has recently come out with a work for the stage that looks at how we tell the story of another giant of the late 20th century: Jean-Michel Basquiat.Basquiat is today among the most widely known painters, and his life story is almost as famous as his art itself. He burst into the spotlight in the early ‘80s, first as a savvy street artist and then with his vibrant style of painting. By 1985, he was on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the symbol of the 1980s art boom. By the end of the decade, he was dead of an overdose of heroin, at the age of 27.Reed’s play, titled The Slave Who Loved Caviar, is sharply critical of how Basquiat’s story gets told as one of self-destruction instead of exploitation. It homes in on Basquiat’s famous relationship with the edler Andy Warhol, which has been told and retold, in the painter Julian Schnabel’s famous 1996 film Basquiat, as well as more recently Anthony McCarten’s Broadway play, The Collaboration, soon to be a film, and in many other places.Like Mumbo Jumbo, The Slave Who Loved Caviar tackles the serious subject of how Black culture is treated in society, in a fantastic way. It features police investigators literarily reviewing the evidence that the white art world failed Basquiat. But it also has a Vampire aristocrat character, depicted as a present-day, Andy Warhol-like figure out to collaborate with a young Black artist, who goes by the name Young Blood.The play was performed in 2021 and 2022 at the Theater for the New City. It has just been published in a text by Archway Editions, with a forward and afterward where Reed responds to some of the criticism his take on Basquiat’s story stirred up then. This week on the podcast, Reed joins Artnet's chief art critic Ben Davis to discuss his work.

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 the foibles of the art world.Sometimes it pokes fun at inscrutable art speak, or vents relatable artist insecurities. Other times it uses the meme format to more cutting effect, criticizing the poor treatment of artists and workers who are at the lower rungs of the art world hierarchy. Importantly, in the years since the account blew up, the creator behind it, who goes by Cem A., has done something fairly unlikely. He's made the jump from meme-making to real-world exhibition making, based on his unique Instagram voice."If you just have this good guy-bad guy dynamic in a meme, it's not really funny. It's more about creating something in between that shows different aspects" Cem says. "Beyond that, the one function of a meme is to just say, that 'the emperor has no clothes on' when that needs to be said."Cem has been tapped by high profile institutions, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark and the Barbican in London to realize IRL projects that toe the line between digital culture, museum outreach, and conceptual art, in clever ways.Though best-known for a funny and witty internet persona, Cem has some quite serious things to say about what it means to use memes as a venue for criticism, as well as what it means to take memes seriously as a creative form of their own, and the strange evolving relationship between social media and art institutions.

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 many; as well as volumes like Mixed Blessings: New Art In a Multicultural America, The Pink Glass Swan: Selected Essays on Feminist Art; and The Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society—each helping set the agenda for a different art historical moment.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 the founding mother-collective behind Heresies, a journal that shaped the field of feminist art history.Radicalized by sixties activism, she participated in the Art Workers Coalition, a historic activist formation protesting against the Vietnam War and for equality in the museum world. She was part of many, many other collectives and activist groups thereafter, including the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in the early 1980s, a project she discussed with us on the Art Angle back in 2022. Now Lippard has written a new book called Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. It's a short-packed tome that surveys an eventful life through photos that catalog the items Lippard finds around her in the home where she has lived since moving from New York to the small town of Galisteo in rural New Mexico in the early nineties. It's a fitting way to tell the story of a writer who has thought so much about how images and words fit together, and how meaning emerges from place and community.This week on the podcast, Ben Davis speaks once again to Lucy Lippard about a life in and out of art.

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.Artnet News’s European editor Kate Brown has an essay out where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hypersentimentalism.This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

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 senior editor Kate Brown, national art critic Ben Davis, and columnist Annie Armstrong to weigh in on some of the more polarizing trends that came and went in 2023. Our biggest takeaway? There's not a whole lot of consensus out there, but we did our best. From the state of the art market to the new brand of shoes everyone seems to be wearing in our little corner of the art world, here's our take on the much beloved tradition.

"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? While many websites and even an art fair have borrowed this turn of phrase, it's difficult to find the original source. But the sort of fuzziness of the origins of the quote is perhaps symbolic of the subject itself. Art and happiness seem obvious enough—art gives people pleasure. People like art, looking at art, being surrounded by art, and talking about art. These things are all part of the definition of a life that is rewarding.But if you look closer to idea that art is happiness, it becomes more slippery, because most of what is considered important art is actually quite serious. The notion of art = happiness might even sound low-brow to a lot of listeners, conjuring up the PBS painter Bob Ross cooing that there are "no mistakes, only happy accidents." Comedies, too, rarely make the cut when it comes to awards for best picture or lists of all-time great films, and that's because art that takes emotions like fear, loneliness, or anger, and puts them in a form where we are compelled to look at and reckon with them. After all, that is one classical idea of what good art does—the Greek philosopher Aristotle's idea of art as catharsis. Or maybe the idea of happiness in art is considered lowbrow because it's corrupted by commerce. Getting back to that Anni Albers quote, it turns out to be from a 1968 interview with the artist for the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art, in which she's being asked about the value of craft. She says that she thinks that a lot of the late abstract expressionist painters, the people working in the style that had dominated U.S. art at that time, were trying too hard to go for psychodrama and seriousness. She said: "there's this too-conscious searching of your soul, which very often just turns into this kind of intestinal painting." But that's what Albers is drawing a contrast to, when she says in her full quote: "I have this very, what you call today, square idea, that art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness. The focus on angst as importance can distract from the pleasures that make art fundamentally valuable." She adds, "I find art is something that gives you something that you need for your life."That's a simple definition, but it means that the kind of happiness Albers is talking about isn't necessarily about art that just shows you happy things, obviously, though it can be that too. It can just be the happiness of an idea, finding its exact right form.This week on the podcast, we're doing something experimental. Artnet News is an art website, and we cover a lot of the stories around the controversies and personalities within the art-world writ large, and the art news is almost always by way of definition, about heavy matters. So as we wrap up this year and look to the next, we asked some of our writers to take some time from their busy work days and tell us about a specific piece of art that delights them.Artworks:Philip Dawe, The Macaroni, a real character of the late masquerade (1773) Edouard Manet, The Balcony (1868–69) Albert Edelfelt, Boys Playing on the Shore (Children Playing on the shore) (1884) William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1900–04)Kano Masanobu, Bodhidarma in Red Robes (late 15th century)Gustav Klimt, The Black Feather Hat (1910)Tatsuo Miyajima, Painting of Change (2020)Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All (1997)Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art (1942)

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 take up a directorship at MOCA, Los Angeles. Biesenbach gained a reputation for leveraging the power of celebrity, working with artists and stars like Marina Abramovic and art-adjacent creatives like Patti Smith and Bjork; he is known for creating and capturing social moments while also rethinking the social nature of museums.Now, he’s back home in Germany, heading up not just one, but two of the country’s most important museum projects, in a post he called “once-in-a-life-time honor.” One museum is a highly symbolic historical treasure, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe. The other, is a museum still to come, the massive Berlin Modern, which is set to open next door to the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2026.Artnet News's Berlin-based senior editor Kate Brown checked in with Biesenbach just as he was closing a major retrospective dedicated to Isa Genzken and while the foundation is being laid at the Berlin Modern.