The Art Angle

Over the past few weeks, the long-awaited trial of former Hollywood rainmaker Harvey Weinstein has unfolded in harrowing fashion, with one after another of his accusers taking the stand to allege patterns of sexual and psychological abuse. The grim courtroom proceedings are only the latest shockwave from the #MeToo movement, which grew from accusations against Weinstein into a national reckoning with sexual harassment, sexual assault, and other rampant abuses perpetrated by those in positions of power. The art world has not been a safe haven from this heinous activity. In fact, one of the most notorious predators in the mainstream news cycle also cast a long shadow over this niche industry. This week on the Art Angle, Andrew Goldstein sits down with Artnet News deputy editor Rachel Corbett to discuss a serial predator whose victims inside and outside the arts will never have the chance to confront him: Jeffrey Epstein. Many questions remain to be answered after Epstein, the former financier, arts patron, and convicted sex offender who counted numerous elite figures among his inner circle, was found dead of an apparent suicide in his jail cell while waiting to stand trial for charges of sex trafficking in New York. But his alleged crimes have taken on new life in the art world due to detailed, troubling accusations made by painter and former New York Academy of Art student Maria Farmer, who claims Epstein and his associates leveraged her creative ambitions against her for their own perverse ends. Farmer's disturbing story details how Epstein turned the largely unregulated art world into a hunting ground for new victims. The issues raised by her accusations also loom large over all creative fields, where personal relationships and favors from the top of the hierarchy can make or break the careers of young, talented people striving to make their mark. Please be advised: This episode contains accounts of sexual abuse that some listeners may find disturbing. 

You don't hear the words "witch hunt" much nowadays, unless they are being deployed by a certain US President. But the term is increasingly relevant—in a much more literal sense—to any tour through the art-historical canon, where witchcraft, paganism, and the occult seem to be more important presences every day. This development is in tune with what's happening in mainstream culture, too. More than one million Americans today identify as Neopagans or Wiccans, and many businesses are riding their broomsticks straight to the bank. In the US, more than $2 billion is spent on "mystical services" each year, ranging from tarot card readings to online horoscopes, and you can find a slew of podcasts on the subject with titles like "Hippie Witch," "so you wanna be a witch?" and "The Witch Bitch Amateur Hour," to name just a few. What exactly is driving this spiritualist surge? This week, author and art critic Eleanor Heartney joins the Art Angle to divine the details of this phenomenon in art and culture. Following an article for Artnet News in which she traced the intensifying focus on artists exploring occult practices in recent museum exhibitions—most notably the Guggenheim's attendance-record-breaking retrospective of the Swedish mystic artist Hilma af Klint—Heartney discusses why spiritualism and the occult are on the rise in 2020, how feminism fits into the puzzle, and what her new book, Doomsday Dreams: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art, has to say about breaking through a history of cataclysm-inclined thinking.

After a period of reckoning with a less-than-inclusive art historical canon, it seems increasingly clear that viewers (and dealers) are once again ready to embrace fresh young talent from the land of the living—artists bringing new perspectives and ideas into the sometimes-staid institutional mix. Among this up-and-coming group, one name on almost everyone's lips right now is Nicolas Party. A preternaturally good-natured 38 year-old, Party has won widespread attention not for some technologically savvy mixed-reality experience, but in fact, for the opposite. The Swiss-born artist is actually a proponent of one of the oldest art-making mediums, using pastels to conjure fantastical landscapes, portraits, and still lifes that are just as colorful as the Missoni sweaters he's fond of. On this week's episode of the Art Angle, Party discusses his evolution from a teenage street artist trying (and eventually, failing) to elude authorities in his native Lausanne, to an art-school student working in digital modeling, to a hands-on figurative artist who recently became the youngest-ever member of mega-gallery Hauser & Wirth—a transformation that has propelled his works as high as seven figures at auction.

Above and beyond its well-established status as a global financial center, Hong Kong has spent the 21st century rapidly transforming into an international nexus for the art market: welcoming to both Eastern and Western collectors, appealing to institutions and artists alike for its vibrant economy and cosmopolitan character, and stabilized by its unique embrace of democratic values just a stone's throw from state-dominated mainland China. But since March 2019, Hong Kong has been rocked off its axis by ongoing and increasingly violent political protests, all sparked by what the demonstrators read as aggressive moves by Xi Jinping and his agents to accelerate the so-called "handover" of the former British colony to Chinese control several years earlier than scheduled. With free speech and free governance hanging in the balance, art and journalism have become pivotal forces in the battle for Hong Kong's future. In this episode of the Art Angle, Artnet News contributor Vivienne Chow—a Hong Kong native—gives a moving firsthand account of what it’s like to cover these volatile events from the front lines, where artists fit into the protests, and how the experience has challenged her perception about nothing less than the meaning and importance of art. And all of this while she simultaneously has to process how her home morphed into a place she could not have imagined only a few years earlier, and whether Hong Kong or its art scene will ever be the same.

Whether you ascribe to the centuries-old Georgian Calendar or slept through the clock striking midnight, ushering in a new year is often a time for reflection on what's past, and what is to come. Here at Artnet News, resident business editor and part-time soothsayer Tim Schneider embraces his mystical powers to peer into the future and offer a slew of highly specific predictions for the art world. In this episode, Tim distills some of the broadest issues facing the art world using trend analysis to make concrete statements for 2020, which can (and will) be objectively reviewed as having been right or wrong in 12 months' time. In the days before the calendar page turned to 2020, Tim expounded on seven distinct predictions for the industry, and Andrew Goldstein grilled him about four of the most contentious points, including such thorny issues as ethical decision-making in museums, blue-chip galleries reducing their carbon footprint, the red-hot market for young artists, and whether Instagram will actually change the policies on nudity that have artists up in arms over censorship

As a barrage of retrospective pieces from countless publications (including Artnet News) made clear throughout December 2019, the opening moments of 2020 signal a new decade, not just a new year. Looking back, the 2010s seem to be defined by one intense development after another, including an ever-expanding digital revolution, an ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, the ever-heightening peril of climate change, and so much more.  The art world felt the effects of these changes throughout the decade, but it also sought to grapple with, adjust to, and even counteract them. Artists were at the forefront of this charge, whether the subject at hand was sexism, racism, classism, or any number of other systemic injustices. And the key artworks of the 2010s enhanced our understanding of the era in ways that were unforgettable, even if they weren’t always pleasant.   What were those key artworks, though? With the benefit of hindsight and a ratings system devised to reach past the simple idea of “best” pieces, Artnet News national art critic Ben Davis walks listeners through highlights of his multi-part, 100-work list. Some of his choices are almost guaranteed to surprise you. (They certainly surprised our editors!)

At the start of December, the Art Angle team had other, loftier ideas for the show's first Christmas episode. Maybe we would dig into the most important developments in the art world this past year or examine the growing pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong and their effect on the city's cultural community. But then, we lived through this year's edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, where superstar Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan duct-taped an ordinary supermarket banana to the wall of his gallery's booth at the fair, declared it an artwork, and priced its first edition at the eyebrow-raising sum of $120,000. From there, all hell broke loose. And after the astonishing sequence of events catapulted Comedian (the work's official title) beyond the art world and squarely into the center of pop culture, it became a stone-cold guarantee that, if your job has something—anything—to do with art, the banana will be one of the first topics of conversation your friends and extended family bring up during your holiday celebration. So we caved to the inevitable and made this episode your banana survival guide, covering everything you need to know about this (in)famous artwork in just over 20 minutes. First, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone, who broke the story of the banana's initial sales from the floor of Art Basel Miami Beach, charts how this once-anonymous fruit duct-taped to the wall became an obsession for the world at large. Then, Artnet News national art critic Ben Davis parachutes in to explain what it all means in the context of art history, and why, as a sculpture, Comedian is both slightly more—and much, much less—than meets the eye.

Six decades ago, an editor at Newsweek magazine summoned a young journalist named Calvin Tomkins out of the foreign-news department to interview the legendary conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, who had allegedly left art-making in favor of playing chess and... simply breathing. Although it would be years before Tomkins discovered Duchamp had in fact already been at work on his magnum opus, Étant Donnés, for years before their first meeting, this chance encounter altered the trajectory of his career and life. Duchamp was the gateway to what would become a prolific collection of artists—many of them eccentric or otherwise challenging, all of them great (or at least noteworthy)—that Tomkins went on to profile in the pages of the New Yorker beginning in 1962. Dozens of those profiles have now been compiled into a lavish new multi-volume set, titled The Lives of Artists, published by Phaidon. The collection joins 18 other books that Tomkins has previously published on artists and the art world, including an essential biography of the man who started it all for him: Marcel Duchamp. In the process, Tomkins has arguably become known as the world's authority on not only many of the most consequential postwar and contemporary artists in the canon, but also on the art of profiling itself. To celebrate the release of The Lives of Artists, Tomkins joined Artnet News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein in studio to discuss his one-of-a-kind journey, what David Hammons shares with Duchamp, and even the editioned banana that took over the world, AKA Maurizio Cattelan's Comedian.

For our latest episode, team Art Angle traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach to examine a much thornier and more urgent issue than the glamorous trade show's business: the art world's impact on Mother Earth. From thousands of deep-pocketed collectors flying in to south Florida for the week's festivities, to the hundreds of black cars and Ubers ferrying attendees from event to event, to the (literal) tons of artworks shipped by air, land, and sea to Miami's convention centers for a scant five days of exposure, the ecologically punishing realities of the art fair demand that we take a hard look at their sustainability for the planet—and ask bigger questions about the art world's responsibility to address the climate crisis. The need for action only intensifies in light of the fact that Art Basel Miami Beach is just one of nearly 300 art fairs held around the globe every year, and that many of these events take place in the coastal destinations most imperiled by climate change. Art Basel Miami Beach is held just a few blocks from the waterfront where the sea level has tripled over the past decade, causing the city to ship in imported sand to keep its coastline from disappearing entirely. And this is just a prelude of things to come in other crucial art hubs like Hong Kong, London, New York, and Los Angeles. Given the art world's cherished progressive reputation, how long can it justify the extraordinarily outsize habits of its fairs, institutions, and jet-setting elites? In what ways could the various players in the global art market minimize the damage they do to Mother Nature? And how are artists, as well as climate-activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, foregrounding the need for change in the cultural sphere? In the middle of Miami Art Week, Artnet News's European editor Kate Brown joined Andrew Goldstein by phone from Germany to tackle these urgent questions, and more.

This week, what seems like the entire art industry, every luxury company, and every celebrity or status-seeker available will be traveling to south Florida for the 18th edition of Art Basel Miami Beach, the final stop on the annual art-market calendar—as well as a champagne-soaked playground for the rich and famous. And while people love to complain about this particular fair, Art Basel matters to the art business in an enormous, almost existential way. Since its founding in 1970, Art Basel has evolved from a bespoke trade fair for German-speaking art collectors near its namesake Swiss city into a commercial Colossus linking Europe, Asia, and the Americas via three supersized fairs. Each event doesn't only draw buyers and sellers of art who regularly transact in the millions of dollars, or even just the broader constellation of curators, journalists, and art lovers. It has also become a beacon for almost anyone hoping to ride the cultural wave that is contemporary art and its clientele, from major corporations to micro-influencers. And in its wake, literally hundreds of other art fairs have risen up around the world hoping to do something similar. But have Art Basel and its competitors done more to help the art world, or to hurt it? How have trade fairs warped the way we value artists and their work? And if big fairs have become a big business, why are so many starting to either branch out... or die off? Just in time for Art Basel Miami Beach 2019, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin weighs in on the past, present, and future of art fairs.