The Art Angle

It’s no secret that today we live in a world of dizzying, gobsmacking, and ever-intensifying complexity. Everything from the computers we carry in our pockets to the vaccines fighting the pandemic to the global networks that underpin our economies rely on such astonishing labyrinths of complexity that any one element requires a team of experts to really make sense of it—and that’s not even to mention the complexity of our natural universe, which only grows more intricate, not less, the more we learn about it. One way to deal with this very confusing state of affairs is to pretend it doesn’t exist, or reach after comforting conspiracy theories, as people have since the birth of religion at the dawn of time. The artist Perry Chen prefers to take this complexity head on—to really get in there and wrassle with it, making art that looks at this epistemological phenomenon from all angles. He just so happens to be particularly well-versed in the complexity of our digitally networked reality, too, since in addition to being an artist he’s also the founder and now chairman of Kickstarter, the hit crowdfunding company that has given rise to countless new inventions and creative projects, and distributes more cultural funding than the NEA. Now, Perry has a new exhibition of his art that has just opened at the venerable Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi, called “Perpetual Novelty,” and as usual it’s all about complexity. He’s also accompanying the show with a new podcast series on that theme, with the first episode a conversation with Walter Isaacson, the great biographer of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

Right now, one of the most talked-about issues at hand for members of the international workforce is: what comes next? For those of us fortunate enough to work from home, will we persist in our pajama-wearing state forever? When, and how, will we ever return to high-rise offices, riding elevators packed like sardines, and casually sharing the same air as thousands of other commuters on public transportation?This question, among many others, is on the mind of the Italian-born curator Paola Antonelli, who currently serves as senior curator of the department of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In her position, Antonelli has organized exhibitions that run the gamut from using nontraditional materials to imagine a more sustainable world, as in the forward-thinking show “Neri Oxman: Material Ecology,” and probed the use and meaning of clothing in “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” She’s also acquired video games, including Pac-Man and Tetris for the museum, and displayed a vial of sweat as part of a show titled “Design and Violence.” On this week’s episode, Antonelli calls in from her home in Manhattan to discuss everything from augmented reality to outdoor dining, and offers an invaluable perspective on how design theory and objects can help us survive, and even thrive, in the future.

When he was just 12 years old, Daniel Arsham had a near-death experience. Living in Florida with his parents, Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, careening across the coastal state and taking with it Arsham's family house—ripping the roof off, tearing the walls apart at the seams, and sending pink fluffy insulation flying. The house was rebuilt soon after, but the traumatic experience and ensuing weeks of living in a "pre-civilization" state left an indelible imprint on Arsham. The idea of collapsing the past and present, and the formative role architecture played in his understanding of the world, has helped shape Arsham's creative practice, which he describes as fictional archaeology. In his most celebrated series, "Future Relics," Arsham casts objects of commercialism and contemporary society as fragments of an already obsolete time. Along with Alex Mustonen, Arsham founded the irreverently titled group Snarkitechture, and began collaborating with fashion brands like Dior (working with both Hedi Slimane and Kim Jones), KITH, and Adidas, as well as Merce Cunningham and illustrator Hajime Sorayama. Having successfully skated across the boundaries that define genres of art, Arsham's newest gig as creative director of his hometown basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, signaled his supremacy in pop culture. On this week's episode of the Art Angle, Arsham called in from his New York studio to discuss his unlikely story, and what comes next.

No one could have foreseen the giant boomerang of a year that was 2020. With its trifecta of health, financial, and social crises, it could not have been predicted by even the most studied of sages. No, not even Artnet News's resident forecaster, art business editor Tim Schneider. But that didn't stop Tim from embarking on his annual tradition, formulating highly specific predictions for the art market in the coming 365 days. In the early days of 2021—before the angry mob of protestors stormed the Capitol, inciting a riot and leading to the historic second impeachment of President Trump; before we knew Kim and Kanye were heading toward divorce—Tim peered into his crystal ball to make some informed prognostications about the art market. On this week's episode, Tim joins Andrew Goldstein to discuss everything from museum deaccessioning to the biggest changes in store for galleries.

Right now, more than 2 million people are living behind bars in prisons across America. California's San Quentin Prison is currently at 117 percent capacity. And with the coronavirus pandemic running rampant, many prisoners are in immediate danger. These problems are a major preoccupation of Rahsaan "New York" Thomas, the co-host of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Ear Hustle podcast, co-founder of Prison Renaissance (which connects prisoners to people outside), contributor to multiple national news outlets, and staff writer at the San Quentin News. Thomas has also just curated his first exhibition, “Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice From Prison," an online exhibition on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. He is also serving a sentence of 55 years to life in San Quentin. On this week's episode, Thomas calls in from San Quentin to discuss how art and empathy can transform perspectives on the penal system, from inside and out.

As 2020 draws to a close, the Art Angle team is taking some time off to reboot for the new year and prepare for a lineup of exciting new episodes. In the meantime, we've prepared this throwback from April, which is one of our favorite episodes of the year. In his 2019 essay "The Art of Dying," acclaimed critic Peter Schjeldahl describes Patsy Cline's voice as "attending selflessly to the sounds and the senses of the words... consummate." The same could be said about Schjeldahl's incomparable writing about art, most notably during his 22 years (and counting) as the art critic for the New Yorker. And no one expected this outcome less than Schjeldahl himself. A Midwest native who beamed to New York at the dawn of the 1960s with little more than a high-school diploma, Schjeldahl was an aspiring poet who began reviewing exhibitions to pay the bills. More than five decades later, he is almost universally regarded as one of the most respected and beloved art critics alive. His signature first-person reckonings with art—several examples of which were recently collected in his latest book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018—balance accessibility, lyricism, and wit in a style that he has been painstakingly refining for nearly six decades. Schjeldahl hasn't always led a charmed life. Over the course of the past year, he experienced an almost unbelievable series of misfortunes. First, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given just six months to live; next, the apartment in the East Village he shared for 47 years with his wife, Brooke, caught fire and took his papers with it; and most recently, of course, the Schjeldahls were forced into lockdown along with much of the rest of humanity by the global health crisis. Yet the tide recently turned in Schjeldahl's favor: miraculously, his cancer is in remission thanks to treatment. His brush with the end has also enriched his perspective on art and life in new ways, which the inimitable writer was gracious enough to discuss in a phone conversation with Artnet News's own renowned critic, Ben Davis, from his country home in the Catskills. On this week's episode, Andrew Goldstein gives the floor to the critics for a free-wheeling, candid, and refreshingly upbeat conversation about subjects ranging from the intellectual gymnastics of art reviewing, to the chaotic '60s art scene in New York, to why you can't really understand Rembrandt before age 40. It's an indelible reminder of why no one else has ever done it quite like Schjeldahl—and why no one else ever will.

What happens when you pair three-to-six year-old children with esteemed art-world figures to play an art-historical guessing game? For our final episode of 2020, we decided to find out. We invited three of the most respected cultural leaders in the world—Naima Keith, the vice president of education and public programs at LACMA; Carolina Miranda, a Los Angeles Times columnist who covers art, architecture, and urban design; and Martin Kemp, the foremost Leonardo da Vinci scholar in the world—to be paired with some really adorable kids for a virtual guessing game. Over Zoom, each illustrious guest was introduced to their diminutive teammate, who was shown a series of (very) famous artworks from throughout the history of art. The children were asked to describe what they saw in each work—and the grown-ups were responsible for guessing the artist and title. Have you ever had a four-year-old try to explain a Jackson Pollock drip painting? A Damien Hirst shark sculpture? A Grant Wood piece? We didn't think so.

Jeffrey Deitch is that rare type of creative who has a keen understanding of business: he holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Wesleyan University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Further blurring boundaries, he launched his career with a lethal one-two punch working at an art gallery before joining Citibank, where he co-managed the art advisory division. Before long, he rose to prominence as an art advisor and private dealer, while honing his own interests in street art and punk rock bands. Widely considered to be the first person who bought a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat (he was also the first to write about him in a 1980 essay for Art in America), Deitch continued to evidence prescience in identifying burgeoning talent, as he helped mint the careers of Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley, and Cecily Brown in his eponymous gallery space in New York. After conquering the East Coast art world, Deitch decamped for California, serving (an admittedly rocky term) as the director of MOCA in Los Angeles before returning to New York to run his own gallery, where he remains today. On the penultimate episode of The Art Angle for 2020, Deitch talks everything from punk rock to pandemic struggles.

Every December for the better part of the past two decades, a throng of well-heeled dealers, collectors, artists, celebrities, publicists, and lookie loos descend on a small stretch of Miami Beach coastline for a final year’s-end bacchanal. Art Basel Miami Beach has long been considered the art market’s Black Friday, when dealers are able to sell enough wares to put them in the black for the year and close the books on a high note.So what happens when it all goes virtual? Despite the fair having called off most in-person activities this year, Artnet News’s intrepid reporter Nate Freeman, best known as the poison pen behind the weekly gossip column Wet Paint, flew down to the sunshine state (after multiple coronavirus tests) to find out. On this week’s episode, Nate calls in from Miami Dade County to discuss what he calls the “Zombie” Art Basel—a fair somewhere between living and dead. With visits to august Miami museums and private collections, plus tours of the newly established seasonal gallery outposts that alit from New York, Nate attempts to answer the question: If no one is there to see and be seen, does an art fair really matter?

The journey to becoming one of the most acclaimed photographers of his generation—at the tender age of 32—wasn't exactly a straight line for Awol Erizku. Born in Ethiopia and raised in the Bronx, Erizku's early interest in art didn't crystallize until he was punished for a school prank, and, fortuitously ended up in an art room waiting for the principle to dole out his punishment. From there, Erizku traced a more traditional path, studying at Cooper Union and earning a coveted place in Yale's MFA program where he homed his craft, garnering praise for his contemporary depictions of classical art historical works featuring Black women in place of their predominantly white counterparts in stirring, beautifully framed portraits. Things changed in 2017, when one of the world's most famous women,Beyoncé Knowles, announced her pregnancy on Instagram. The photograph, a beatific portrait of the pop star enshrined in a lush floral backdrop, hands demurely resting on her pregnant stomach, draped in a soft green veil like a blooming Madonna, instantly went viral and remains the most "liked" photograph on the social media platform. Erizku shot the photo, and became a household name overnight. Granted his own measure of stardom, instead of riding on the success of that image the artist dug deeper into his work, tackling hot-button subjects ranging from the legacy of colonialism and a controversial professor of Black Studies to the recent spate of Black men killed by police officers. A lifelong obsession with music led to his practice of incorporating speeches by the likes of Kerry James Marshall into mixtapes, blending spoken word with contemporary beats, and collaborating to score music to be played in his exhibitions, like the recent show at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York. He was featured in Antwaun Sargent's exhibition “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion,” and beginning on February 24, 2021 in New York and Chicago, 13 of Erikzu's photographs will grace some 350 JCDecaux bus shelters in his a public exhibition with the Public Art Fund. The sprawling two-city exhibition is titled "New Visions for Iris," in honor of his newborn daughter.