The Art Angle

The 90-year-old Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is an international sensation. Exhibitions featuring her ongoing series of “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” consistently draw tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of visitors from all walks of life, with many enduring multiple-hour wait times for the opportunity to spend as little as a single minute inside the installations (and almost undoubtedly using much of that hard-won time to snap an obligatory selfie).  Now, the Kusama phenomenon is electrifying New York once again this holiday season—and at an unprecedented new scale. David Zwirner is currently in the midst of “Every Day I Pray for Love,” a solo show by the artist that has been magnetizing nearly 2,000 visitors a day to its West 20th Street gallery in Chelsea. And later this week, Kusama’s work will be beamed to an estimated 23 million viewers around the globe in the form of a monumental artist-designed hot-air balloon that will soar through the streets of Manhattan as a part of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.  Yet such widespread popularity seems even more incredible to the much smaller group of aficionados familiar with Kusama’s artistic and personal trials, as well as the often challenging, even unsettling, themes under the Instagram-friendly surface of her works.  So how did a career that began with guerrilla performances and protest pieces wind its way through voluntary commitment to a psychiatric facility and crescendo in family-friendly social-media ubiquity? Artnet News national art critic Ben Davis unwinds the unlikely history and undeniable resonance of Kusama’s groundbreaking practice.

Normally, the week following Art Basel in June sees the art market begin its downshift into the summer doldrums. But this year, on what nearly everyone expected to be a quiet Monday, the usual cycle was disrupted by a breaking-news earthquake: Sotheby's, the world's oldest auction house, had struck a deal in principle to be acquired for $3.7 billion by a mysterious telecom magnate named Patrick Drahi. Even more jarring than Drahi's status as a largely unknown quantity in the art world was the announcement that he planned to return Sotheby's, which had been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange for the previous 31 years, to private control. News of the deal triggered an avalanche of questions among art-world observers: Who exactly was Drahi, as a man, an entrepreneur, and a patron of the arts? What did his entrance portend for CEO Tad Smith and the rest of the house's existing leadership structure? What would it mean for the market to lose access to the detailed financial information that Sotheby's was required to regularly disclose to the public by Uncle Sam? And what were the larger implications for the art industry overall? Roughly five months later, Drahi's acquisition of Sotheby's is official, and an elite group of his trusted confidantes can now be found in the house's C-suite. But with so many big changes still so fresh—and with so many questions still left to be answered—Artnet News art business editor Tim Schneider came on the Art Angle to make sense of this seismic event in auction history.

Hans Neuendorf had already built a storied career as an art dealer by the late 1980s, helping to bring Pop art from the United States to Germany, co-founding the first-ever art fair (Art Cologne), and putting his resources behind homegrown star-to-be Georg Baselitz when the artist was still roundly dismissed.  But nothing Neuendorf did earlier changed the art market as drastically or irreversibly as when he founded Artnet in 1989, on the belief that a shared database of the prices achieved by artworks at auction would bring transparency and newfound efficiency to the opaque, antiquated art market. Today, as we know, the once-quaint art business has evolved into a global art industry. Even as purists continue to cry out that any thought toward money destroys the bridge art can build to transcendence, data-driven art flippers chase astronomical returns on investment, as if paintings were just a prettier asset class—and none of it would have been possible without Artnet’s data.  Is this what Neuendorf had in mind? And either way, how have the past three decades at the helm of Artnet altered his viewpoint on where the art market might go in the next 30 years? Artnet News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein sat down with Neuendorf to find out these answers and much more.

Already one of the world's most renowned and visible artists, Anish Kapoor is entering new territory by opening multiple major exhibitions on opposite ends of the Earth within a few weeks of each other this fall. On October 25, he debuted twin shows of new work at Lisson Gallery's two spaces in New York. And on November 10, he unveils a significant solo exhibition split between Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Taimiao Art Museum of the Imperial Ancestral Temple, making him only the second non-Chinese artist to show at the threshold of the Forbidden City. In the midst of this historic whirlwind, Artnet News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein sat down with Kapoor inside Lisson's New York headquarters to discuss his newest perception-defying sculptures, the relationship between his activism for human rights and his decision to exhibit in the heart of China, and the ongoing controversy around his work with "the blackest material in the universe," Vantablack.  Special thanks to Lisson Gallery for hosting this episode of the Art Angle.

To mark the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci's death, the Louvre pulled out all the stops to present a blockbuster exhibition of some of the Old Master's greatest works, along with a few technological surprises to help viewers see his contributions in a whole new way. But do these moves manage to contextualize Leonardo in our contemporary moment? And what role is—or isn't—played by Salvator Mundi, the painting sold at Christie's for a record-annihilating $450.3 million before disappearing from view for almost two years? Associate editor Naomi Rea phones host Andrew Goldstein to discuss the masterpieces on view, the Louvre's attempt to take Leonardo into virtual reality, and the seemingly never-ending intrigue around Salvator Mundi.

After over $400 million in renovations and a multiple-month closure to the public, the Museum of Modern Art is back. National art critic Ben Davis sits down with host Andrew Goldstein to address the curators' attempts to decenter the Western canon, what the changes might mean for MoMA's hordes of tourists, and whether a museum this hallowed can ever be a sanctuary from the larger cultural conversation.