The Art Angle

This month, the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd has brought the racial justice protests of the last summer viscerally back into the public consciousness, reigniting conversations in the news and in households everywhere about the reality of the Black experience in America. This weekend, those same conversations will also have a powerful new point of focus at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of the photographer Dawoud Bey presents his magisterial exploration of the subject, in the form of his penetrating portraits of Black lives from all points on the national compass. Ranging in registers from jubilation to agony, to ingenious self-invention, to blissed-out hope, the show is curated by Elizabeth Sherman and SFMoMA curator Corey Keller. Open through October 3, 2021, the show is titled "An American Project" and it is a project that is very much still in the works. It so happens that this is a very big year for Dawoud Bey. The winner of a 2017 MacArthur "genius" grant and a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, the artist has already been the subject of two other retrospectives in his 46-year career, but this one at the Whitney is not only his largest, it's also one of the largest surveys of a Black American photographer ever. If that's not enough, his work is also currently featured in the New Museum's staging of the final exhibition of the late curator Okwui Enwezor, "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America." On this week's episode, Bey joins Andrew Goldstein by Zoom to discuss how his childhood and early exposure to work by African Americans informed his interest in photography, his ongoing collaboration with David Hammons, and what he hopes visitors will take away from the Whitney exhibition.

Art shows are a thing again! At least in New York, at least for now, and at least in the socially distanced way that we've come to see as normal. But it's really great news for the art museum-going crowd. And it's even better news that some of the shows on view are really, really good. Without question, one of the buzziest shows of the season is the Brooklyn Museum's sweeping survey of the street artist and late capitalism prodigy known as KAWS, one of the most popular artists in the world. So, is his show really, really good? What's the deal with KAWS anyway? We decided to ask Artnet News chief art critic Ben Davis, who saw the show and wrote a review of it with the arresting title "Why KAWS’s Global Success May Well Be a Symptom of a Depressed Culture, Adrift in Nostalgia and Retail Therapy." On this week's episode we dive into the social-media, fast-fashion, luxury-object, street-artist fever dream that helped propel Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, to superstardom.

Amazingly enough, it's now the spring of 2021. That means the weather is warming, the grass is greening, and the little buds are drinking in the cool rain. But more to the point, it means that we've made it through the terrible pandemic winter and are emerging into a strange new world that is very much changed after a full year under the shadow of the coronavirus. In the art industry, normality is still far in the distance, but we've learned a whole slew of lessons that have perhaps made us better adapted for the future ahead. What those changes have been and what those lessons might be are the subject of Artnet News's brand-new spring edition of the Intelligence Report, which mines reams of auction results from the Artnet Price Database, along with dozens of interviews with art professionals, to explain the state of the art world, from auction houses to galleries, appraisers, and collectors. So what did we learn? This week, esteemed editor of the Intelligence Report Julia Halperin joins us for an analysis of the data, and what that means for the future.

As we all now know, NFTs are the talk of the art world these days—they're everywhere. It's gotten to the point where you can't have a simple conversation with someone without them bringing up NFTs, or trying to turn the conversation in that direction. Due to an unusually hectic few weeks on the work and home fronts, our illustrious host, Andrew Goldstein, has been hunkered down at home with his wife as they prepare to welcome their first baby to the world, and has managed to drown out the oceanic wave of NFT news, and came into this week's episode cold. Fortunately, here at Artnet News, we are blessed with an able Virgil to guide our dimwitted Dante through the purgatory of NFTs in the form of art business editor Tim Schneider, who has become something of an expert on the subject. Tim will help break down what exactly an NFT is, why we should care, and what it could mean for the future of the art market.

This month, as the world limps its way toward spring and, hopefully, a gradual return of normality, the Brooklyn Museum has opened a show called “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” that provides valuable fodder for thought in the year ahead. As the title suggests, it’s a career retrospective of the venerated performance and experimental artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for more than 40 years has created poetic, hard-to-classify works that probe questions of inclusion and identity in a way that has had a deep, orienting impact on a whole rising generation. Admirers are quick to point to the power of her writing as well, perhaps particularly “Olympia’s Maid," her classic 1992 essay considering the flattening of Black female sexuality in art history. It so happens that Ben Davis, our chief art critic, has been one of these admirers for a long time, and he recently sat down with the artist in the run-up to her retrospective to discuss her career, how her upbringing in Boston’s Caribbean-American community shaped her art, what it was like to go viral when the Biden administration paid homage to her work in a post-election ad, and much more.

In fall 2019, a new app called ImageNet Roulette was introduced to the world with what seemed like a simple, fun premise: snap a selfie, upload it to a database, and wait a few seconds for machine learning to tell you what type of person you are. Maybe a "teacher," maybe a "pilot," maybe even just a "woman." Or maybe, as the app's creator warned, the labels the system tagged you with would be shockingly racist, misogynistic, or misanthropic. Frequently, the warning turned out to be prescient, and the app immediately went viral thanks to its penchant for slurs and provocative presumptions. Long since decommissioned, ImageNet Roulette was part of a larger initiative undertaken by artist Trevor Paglen and artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford to expose the latent biases coded into the massive data sets informing a growing number of A.I. systems. It was only the latest light that Paglen's work had shined onto the dark underbelly of our image-saturated, technology-mediated world. Even beyond his Ph.D. in geography and his MacArthur "Genius" grant, Paglen's resume is unique among his peers on blue-chip gallery rosters. He's photographically infiltrated CIA black sites, scuba-dived through labyrinths of undersea data cables, launched art into space, and collaborated with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, all as a means of making innovative art that brings into focus the all-but-invisible power structures governing contemporary life. On this week's (re-aired) episode of The Art Angle, Paglen joins Andrew Goldstein by phone to discuss his adventurous career. 

The story of the Benin Bronzes is one of the bloodier, more shameful chapters in the history of the Western world’s "encyclopedic" museums. Looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by the British in a punitive raid whose indiscriminate slaughter and wanton cruelty inspired The Hague Convention two years later, the artworks are today scattered across art institutions and ethnographic museums in Europe and the United States—a stain on the Western conscience that is ensanguined with the sins of colonialism. Recently, the Oxford professor and Pitt Rivers Museum curator Dan Hicks wrote a book about this history called The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution, and last week he joined the podcast to speak about the horrific events that led to the artworks leaving Africa. This week, we present part two of the episode, to discuss the urgency of righting this colonial crime and the status of the Bronzes’ restitution today.

For decades, one of the most urgent moral debates in the museum world has revolved around restitution, with art institutions around the world facing demands that masterworks in their collections be returned, either to countries like Greece and Italy who say that the treasures in question had been looted by tomb robbers, or to descendants of Jews who had been robbed by the Nazis. Today, the restitution question is as hotly debated as ever—what has changed, however, is that now the source countries that are demanding the returns are in Africa, and the looting at issue had been carried out by Britain and other European powers across the bloody years of colonialism, whose horrors remain obscured by the hagiographic official histories of the era. Now, a new book is cutting through the Gordian knot of restitution with an argument of bracing moral clarity, showing the West’s great quote-unquote “universal” museums to be complicit in a history of ongoing atrocities. It’s called “The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution,” and it’s by Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archeology at Oxford. As its title suggests, the book focuses on a particular incident of looting—the seizure of thousands of artworks from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897—and it is a history that should really be known around the world. To delve into the ongoing saga of the Benin Bronzes, Dan Hicks is on the show today for a two-part episode: first, to discuss the tragic story of the looting of the Kingdom and, second, the fate these magnificent objects are facing today.

Shockingly enough, we are now coming up on the one year anniversary of the lockdown of the United States. At this point last year, a creeping dread had begun to blanket the globe. And then in March it happened: COVID hit the East Coast and fanned out across the country, and within weeks whole areas of society were slammed shut like windows during a hurricane. In the art world, as everywhere else, the costs of the closures were immediately palpable with widespread furloughs and job cuts across the sector, enormous projected financial pain, and predictions of museums and galleries alike going dark for good. Facing this economic catastrophe, many pundits in the art world quickly looked back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and in particular, the Works Progress Administration for inspiration on how to meet the moment today. With Joe Biden in the White House, hopes for such an ambitious federal project have peaked. But do we really understand the lessons of the New Deal's art projects? And are they really the example we should be looking to today? To discuss, Artnet News's chief art critic Ben Davis joins the podcast to flesh out the triumphs and failures of the past, and help us understand what needs to happen in the future.

In case you’ve forgotten—in which case, shame on you!—Valentine’s Day is right around the corner again, and we here at the Art Angle are all atwitter.We just love love, particularly when it comes to art history, which is about as full of steamy, sensational, and downright scandalous love affairs as your heart could desire. Luckily, Artnet News just so happens to be equipped with an expert on this subject in Katie White, a journalist who knows an alarming amount about the love lives of the artists—the fascinating affairs, marriages, breakups, and obsessions that shaped the course of art history as we know it. From Salvador and Gala Dalí’s tumultuous trip to the enduring admiration between Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight, these liaisons helped shape the course of art history. So slip into something more comfortable, I am very happy to have Katie on the show today because to talk about five of the art world’s most riveting romantic entanglements.