The Art Angle

It used to be that the art news slowed down in the summer months, but these days, it seems like the art news never takes a break. So we're trying something a little different this week.With so much going on, instead of interviewing just one person for the podcast, we have three of our best writer-editors together to chat about some of the stories that have been in the air in July. This week, Artnet News global art critic Ben Davis speaks to Europe editor Kate Brown and business editor Tim Schneider about three stories.The first item is the news that Frieze, the international art fair chain, has acquired New York's flagship fair Armory Show and Expo Chicago, and what that means for the state of the art market. The second item covers recent developments in the world of NFTs, including a drop from the Jackson Pollock Studio that sold out within the first few hours, and Melania Trump's skirmish with NASA about some space-themed NFTs, plus the state of crypto in the art world at large. Finally, the trio discuss how artists have dealt with Barbie in the past, as a subject of inspiration and satire, and the release of both Greta Gerwig's film based on the Mattel doll and Christopher Nolan's opus on Robert Oppenheimer are filtering through the culture—and which side the art world comes down on in the big Barbie versus Oppenheimer face off.

It’s every art lovers dream. To be alone, after hours, inside one of the world’s most august art museums. Away from the throngs of selfie-stick-wielding tourists and the din of the crowd, it’s just you and the masterpieces.That dream was a reality for the ten years that author Patrick Bringley spent as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s sharing that experience (and a lot more) in his new book. Titled All The Beauty In The World (The Metropolitan Museum and Me), the book chronicles the daily realities of working at one of the most popular and busiest institutions in the world, and is also a deeply personal story and love letter to the Met.From getting to know virtually every corner of the sprawling institution, having a front-row seat to the installation and display of the world’s premiere art collection, to learning to identify and commune with all types of visitors, and forging relationships with the tribe of fellow blue-suited guards he came to know and love.This week on the podcast, Bringley speaks candidly with senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella about how his time at the museum intertwined with his personal life, starting with the tragic loss of older brother to cancer, and ultimately finding love and starting a family, all against the backdrop of his second home at the museum.

The company’s origins are the stuff of legend. A scrappy band of Santa Fe artists with a penchant for building fantastical installations from mounds of trash each write down random words on slips of paper. They draw two from a hat, thus christening themselves Meow Wolf. That was 15 years ago.This weekend marks the opening of the fourth permanent Meow Wolf exhibition, located at the Grapevine Mills shopping mall outside Dallas, Texas. Featuring a story conceived by Wisconsin sci-fi and fantasy author LaShawn Wanak, and work by 30 Texas artists who collaborated with in the in-house artist team, "The Real Unreal," as the exhibition is titled, transforms a former Bed Bath and Beyond into an expansive art playground.Like the House of Eternal Return, Meow Wolf’s first permanent location, the new exhibition appears to begin in the real world, in an ordinary suburban house—but the mundane trappings of family life quickly give way to the strange and unfamiliar, the boundaries between reality and fantasy blurring and disappearing.Since the 2016 opening in Santa Fe, Meow Wolf has amassed a devoted following for its interactive, immersive exhibitions, which use art to open portals into unknown realms. Obsessive fans have taken to Reddit to unravel all the secrets of the Meow Wolf universe. The Real Unreal is the company’s first step in tying together the disparate sites and their inter-dimensional narratives in a more readily apparent way.And while you still may not have heard of Meow Wolf, the company is poised for even more explosive growth. Under the guidance of CEO Jose Tolosa, who came over from Viacom in 2022, the punk art collective-turned art and entertainment production company has plans to bring its spectacular artistic vision to a city near you, and to create new ways for you to engage with its unique, otherworldly storyline from the comfort of your own home. What started out as a crazy art funhouse, fueled by maker culture, has struck upon a business model that is primed to become an entertainment juggernaut.Ahead of the public opening in Grapevine, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone spoke with Tolosa not only about the company’s epic, world-building ambitions, but about staying true to its roots. So forget about the metaverse—Meow Wolf’s handmade universe, at once artisanal and high-tech, is about to blow your mind.

Just about everyone who works in the New York art world knows Lisa Schiff, an art advisor to the rich and famous who worked with celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio for many years. She was a highly visible presence at art fairs, on museum boards, and generally around town, running her glamorous boutique firm from a first floor gallery space in Tribeca whose entry wall was covered with a memorable floor to ceiling plant installation.So media savvy that she had a PR firm on retainer, Schiff was frequently quoted as an expert in the art press, and she had longstanding relationships with journalists in town, including here at Artnet News, where she even wrote an op-ed last summer on the scourge of "meme art." That's why it came as such a shock to a lot of us this past May when a lawsuit dropped accusing her of essentially using her advisory firm to run a pretty extravagant Ponzi scheme.So what exactly happened with Lisa Schiff? What is she accused of doing, and where do things stand today? This week, Artnet News's ace market reporter Eileen Kinsella dives into the saga.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Pablo Picasso. To mark the occasion, an international event called Picasso Celebration has been organized, with 50 museums throughout the world running 50 different shows looking at the legacy of Picasso, among the most well-known artists of the 20th century.Certainly the most unusual and most talked about of these is not a “celebration” of Picasso at all. The Brooklyn Museum is hosting “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby.” Brooklyn Museum curators Catherine Morris and Lisa Small have worked with the famous Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby to create an art show that takes its cues from Gadsby’s 2018 blockbuster Netflix comedy special Nanette.That show was, among other things, a blistering argument about the sexism of art history, the art industry, and, specifically, of Picasso.“It’s Pablo-matic” has itself been at the center of a wave of criticism in recent weeks. Rachel Corbett, Artnet's deputy editor, speaks to Ben Davis, Artnet’s national art critic, who wrote a long essay about the show, the reaction to the show, and what both mean for the site.

When artificial intelligence first arrived in the art world in 2017, it was received warmly and with open arms. A.I.-generated works by artists like Obvious and Mario Klingemann were fetching hundreds of thousands at auction, art fairs like Scope in Miami welcomed A.I. art, as did institutions, which eagerly staged exhibitions touting the new technology. Artists working with A.I. were embraced; there was no media outrage or backlash—A.I. art, by and large, was seen as a good thing. Not so much today. The latest chapter in A.I. art's story has seen artists decrying the tool's widespread use and its violation of creators' rights, with generated artworks sparking outrage online and off. More recently, a handful of industry leaders have even warned of A.I.'s extinction-level threat. So what changed? Why has A.I. art fallen so out of favor? That's exactly what pioneering A.I. artist and innovator Ahmed Elgammal discusses in a new op-ed for Artnet News.As an A.I. researcher, professor in the department of computer science at Rutgers University, founder of the A.I. art platform Playform, and the developer of AICAN—one of the earliest art generators—Elgammal is well-placed to observe the trajectory of A.I. art. In his view, the gulf between yesterday's and today's era of A.I. art is down to one thing: the emergence of text-to-image generators. He argues that while these new generators have made it a cinch to generate art, they have flouted ethical considerations, and effectively killed creativity. To dig into his argument, Artnet News's art & pop culture editor Min Chen spoke to Elgammal to learn more about the state of play for A.I. art—why early A.I. art took off, how text-prompting has diminished the creative process, and where artists eager to work with A.I. should go from here. 

Over the past five decades, American artist Jenny Holzer has been engaging in thought-provoking interventions into public space that unflinchingly address politics, power, violence, and vulnerability.The New York-based artist investigates language as both content and form, and she works with unconventional mediums to do this including street signage, T-shirts, and light projections, but also sculptures and painting. Her poetic and often minimalist works are extremely impactful, creating a tension between knowledge and truth and emotion.Last year, Holzer curated an acclaimed exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois at the Kunstmuseum Basel. More recently, she received Whitechapel Gallery’s prestigious Art Icon award. She’s also the subject of a major solo exhibition on view until August 6 at a preeminent institution in Germany, the K21 in Dusseldorf.On the occasion of the show, which includes many key works spanning her career, Artnet’s Europe editor Kate Brown caught up with Holzer, one of the foremost artists of her generation.

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 this week 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 hyper-sentimentalism.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.

In the Covid summer of 2020, the art world was jolted by a very different kind of drama when reports surfaced that MCH Group, the Swiss corporation best known as the parent company of Art Basel, had entered talks to sell a significant equity stake to Lupa Systems, the private investment company founded by none other than James Murdoch.For listeners who haven’t spent years devouring media-sector or political gossip, James Murdoch is the fourth of six children of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, now most infamous for presiding over the hard-right coverage beamed out through Fox News in the U.S. and various overseas properties via his News Corp conglomerate.The proximity of the Murdoch family to Art Basel initially sent some people in the art world into hysterics. One conspiracy theory even held that James was acting as a front for his father, who would take control of the planet’s best known, most prestigious art fair and… well, it was never quite clear what he would do, or why he would care, but obviously something dastardly and irreparable was about to happen, and we should all prepare for the worst.Yet people interested in digging soon found out that James Murdoch is very much his own man with his own resources. Although he spent decades in the family business, including prominent roles in some of its satellite TV and entertainment companies, he cut his final tie to the empire when he resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020.He has been a public critic of Donald Trump as far back as 2017, and through Quadrivium, the foundation James and his wife Kathryn started in 2014, he has funneled substantial philanthropic resources into counteracting climate change, promoting evidence-based solutions in science and health, expanding voting rights, and pushing back against online extremism.He’s also a mogul in his own right. When Disney paid a knee-buckling $71.3 billion in 2019 to acquire nearly all of the Murdochs’ entertainment assets, James received a reported $2.2 billion from the deal. He launched Lupa Systems shortly after, with sources claiming at the time that he would invest up to $1 billion of his wealth through the company.By fall of 2020, MCH Group’s shareholders had approved the deal to make Lupa Systems the company’s new “anchor shareholder,” with the option to buy up to 49 percent of its shares. But in the time since, we’ve heard relatively little from James Murdoch himself about how MCH Group and Art Basel fits alongside the other ventures in Lupa’s portfolio, including media properties like the Tribeca Festival, advanced technology startups, and sustainability projectsAhead of the 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel, however, Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, managed to sit down with James at Lupa Systems New York offices to hear his thinking firsthand.

In the studio of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s an expected sound—vibrations of a spider working on its web—a sound normally imperceptible to the human ear, but that doesn’t make it any less real.The recent technological feat of capturing and recording the sound of a spider is just one of the many pursuits undertaken by the Berlin-based artist. Saraceno is known for working with experts from the field of science, engineering, and architecture among others, to create works that exist beyond the traditional bounds of the art world.These research intensive, often groundbreaking installations and projects render visible our interconnectedness with one another and the ecosystems in which we exist. They’ve even earned him some world records.It’s an ambitious undertaking and it has solidified him as one of the most impactful artists of our generation. For Saraceno’s first major U.K. solo exhibition, which opens on June 1 at Serpentine in London, Saraceno and his collaborators are moving beyond the walls of the museum of Serpentine South, from the Royal Parks in London all the way to the rural communities of Argentina where people are fighting to stop lithium extraction in their lands, to Cameroon where Spider Diviners challenging our notions about knowledge.At the Serpentine, “Web(s) of Life” delves into critical and urgent questions about how we as people coexist with other life forms and how technology intersects with the climate emergency itself. As the last of his works were en route to London, Artnet News’s Europe editor Kate Brown joined the artist in his bright and beautiful Berlin studio.