The Art Angle

This week’s story begins with an art purchase made like so many others... .A collector notices his peers talking up an artwork on Instagram, so he messages the artist’s dealer and makes a purchase. In this case, there was just one problem: neither the collector peers nor the artist actually exist.That fateful transaction is just the tip of the iceberg of a broader scheme: someone (quite possibly a group of people) created fake social media profiles for jet-setting Italian collectors to promote a fake artist—and ended up making real money in the process.The tale reveals just how easy it is to play the part of an art-world sophisticate, and how little we tend to know about the person on the other end of the line.On this week's episode, Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown joins Executive Editor Julia Halperin to discuss the story she wrote about catfishing collectors, fake artists, and the twisted tale that had her chasing ghosts all over the web.

Yesterday, a sumptuous portrait of a woman with a confident regard and rouged cheeks, porcelain skin, and a powdered up do reminiscent of cool whip, hit the block at Sotheby's auction house. Titled Portrait of a Lady as Pomona by the 18th century French artists Nicholas de Largilliere, the painting was less notable as a market event than for what it sale meant to its sellers. The sellers, in this case, being the twenty heirs of Jules Strauss, a pioneering German art collector.In 2014, one of his great granddaughters Pauline Baer De Perignon began investigating the fate of his beloved artworks during World War II, including pieces by the likes of Renoir, Monet, Degas and Tiepolo. As a Jew living in Paris, Jules Strauss, like so many others of his religion faced persecution under the German occupation. While he avoided deportation, Strauss' forced to hand over a still unknown number of works to the Nazis, an ugly truth that Pauline's family chose to forget for decades.Lady as Pomona, it so happens is the first painting from his collection to be restituted to the family. And that's thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of Pauline, detailed in her new book, The Vanished Collection. In the run-up to this week's auction, we were pleased to welcome Pauline to The Art Angle to talk to Artnet News senior writer, Sarah Cascone about the challenges of tracking downloaded art, sifting through archival records and what the quest for restitution and justice means to the families of those who lost everything during the Holocaust. 

If, perhaps, someone in a trench coat who was smoking a pipe and had a gigantic eyeball for a head were to approach you a street on a particularly sunny night and ask you what surrealism was, you'd probably answer by throwing out a few names—Salvator Dalí, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo—and you wouldn't be wrong.But what if that strange interlocutor were to tell you that everything you know about surrealism is in fact, just the tip of a very large iceberg? And that this lastingly popular movement stretched in fact, far beyond Paris, far beyond Europe, to every corner of the globe, and to countless fascinating artists who you've never heard of before? Well that, in a sense, is exactly what an extraordinary and frankly revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing right now.Titled "Surrealism Beyond Borders," the exhibition, organized by Met curator Stephanie D'Alessandro together with Tate curator Matthew Gale and closing at the end of this month makes it plain that the riveting story of surrealism has hardly begun to be told, and it's lessons are shockingly relevant to a lot of the biggest debates of our present day. To discuss what we should know about the show and what it changes about the history of art, chief critic Ben Davis joins the podcast to discuss this week.

Everyone knows the dirty little secret of the dog-eat-dog art market, which is that while an artist creates the artwork, the vast majority of the value of that artwork is created—and captured—by others, from the 50 percent that goes to the dealer to the multiples made by the collectors who flip if the artist gets hot.But what if there was a way for artists to protect themselves from this kind of exploitation, by banding together and pooling their art together into a fund to provide a safety net against the vicissitudes of the market, where all artists—hot and not alike—benefit from the rising values of rising stars? Well, something like that does exist, and it’s called the Artist Pension Trust, which since 2004 has enlisted hundreds of artists behind this common cause.The only catch? It is apparently too good to be true—at least if you go by the maelstrom of threats of lawsuits, recriminations, and accusations that have sprang up around the trust in recent years. So, what went wrong with the utopian project of the Artist Pension Trust? And who is behind it, anyway?To find out, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to reporter Catherine Wagley about her recent investigation into the one art fund everyone wanted to root for. Enjoy the conversation, and for the full story, check out Catherine’s riveting two-part series on Artnet.

Here we are, at the beginning of a new year, a time that, at least in the past, used to be full of hope and anticipation, but after the last two years requires a deep breath and a brace for impact. But, there are still many fascinating and encouraging developments underway all around us, and there's an awful lot to be grateful for. We're all grateful to work alongside an authentically magical human being, known to mere mortals as Tim Schneider, Artnet News's art business editor.As longtime listeners know, Tim undergoes a mystical transformation at the beginning of every new year to become a soothsayer capable of peering into the future to see what the months ahead hold for the art industry. Tim recently published his prognostications on Artnet News Pro, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein to break out a few of the most pressing predictions he made, from Beeple's potential gallery representation to the future of art fairs amidst the ongoing pandemic.

We did it, 2021 is in the can. We are about to finally make the transition into what is hopefully going to be a great, exciting, and healthy 2022. Here at The Art Angle, we are very excited to celebrate this milestone and we also want to give everybody a little bit of a year end bonus. So here is an episode that we think is maybe going to be relevant for what's coming around the bend. Obviously it is about NFTs. NFTS were the big revelation of 2021 and everybody is kind of getting a little bit of an education about what they are, but there's no harm in getting a refresher course. So please enjoy an episode with Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, from earlier this year about NFTs, what they are and why they're important. 

’Tis the season, once again, it's The Art Angle Christmas episode. Can you believe we made it through another one of these incredibly intense pandemic years? It's almost hard to believe and so we figured we would craft this festive little holiday-cast as something soothing and reflective, some old fashioned balm for the soul. No NFTs here.So what is the antithesis of NFTs? Why archeology of course and it just so happens that this year was filled with all kinds of fascinating revelations that continue to shape, and sometimes radically rewrite our understanding of the ancient world. On this episode Artnet News Senior Writer, Sarah Cascone, discusses what happened this year in the world of old news.

The art market is a notoriously woolly place where deals are done with hushed shakes behind closed doors. This of course applies to auctions, art sales and art fairs, but it's also true of something even more fundamental to the art business, artist representation. How exactly does a gallery nab a hot new artist? And how does an artist ultimately decide to join them and to stay on during moments of skyrocketing success or to leave at any given time? There are no rules to this game, but there are definitely some trends and some are almost too strange to believe.On this episode Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown is joined by European Market Editor Naomi Rea to untangle the secretive art of wooing artists on to rosters. 

Last week, fresh panic spread around the globe as a new COVID variant of unknown power called Omicron came into view, threatening to potentially plunge society back into lockdown just as we were beginning to emerge from pandemic. Also last week, throngs of art loving party animals from 72 countries around the world converged on Miami for a week long bacchanale of art collecting, champagne-soaked soirees, nonstop-socializing, and celebrity-studded VIP events that stretched into the night.Very weirdly, both of those things are actually true. The latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach was by all counts of massive success with 60,000 people in attendance, booths selling out in nanoseconds amid boundless enthusiasm about both traditional art (remember that?) and NFTs.And that's just the main fair. The entire city was lit up with art events from the fairs to incredible museum shows to crypto art conferences galore that were filling the air with revolutionary fervor.So what was it like to hit Miami art week for this totally surreal discombobulating affair? To answer that question, we're thrilled to be joined on the show by none other than Annie Armstrong, author of Artnet News's beloved gossip column Wet Paint, who tackled the whole party thing down there with an almost alarming degree of gusto.

The NFT market exploded this spring and has kept on exploding all year long. Artnet News Editor-In-Chief Andrew Goldstein is joined on the show by one of the guys who lit the fuse on NFTs, Noah Davis, the head of digital sales at Christie’s, who listeners may know best as the guy who sold the Beeple NFT this spring for $69.3 million, waking up the world to the dizzying potential of crypto art. It's a busy time for Noah. Right now. Christie’s first on-chain NFT sale on the crypto platform OpenSea is taking place with some of the coveted works on offer also being displayed in an immersive art exhibition down in Miami, during Art Basel, Miami Beach, which is turning into a giant coming out party of sorts for crypto art. This is also a very exciting time for Artnet as well, which is about to hold its own first on-chain auction of major NFT works on December 15th in conjunction with the launch of our new Artnet NFT platform.