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As a novelist, Jonathan Lethem is basically a genre all his own. His books mash up literary fiction and pulp into disorienting but engaging combinations, for which he’s won both a MacArthur Grant and the National Book Award. Since the success of Motherless Brooklyn in 1999, he's published many very well received novels—including The Fortress of Solitude in 2003 and Brooklyn Crime Novel, from last year—as well as many more short stories and essays for places including the New Yorker, Harper’s and Rolling Stone.
And it turns out he's written a lot about art too—enough in fact, to fill an entire volume.
Cellophane Bricks: A Life in Visual Culture, published this summer by ZE Books, is its own type of unexpected hybrid of writing. It spans genres, containing short stories, essays, and criticism, as well as types of art, its essays hopping between his reverence for a Hans Holbein at the Frick and respect for the “scratchiti” artist Pray. Part of the joy of the book is Lethem’s determinedly eclectic and personal taste, giving his attention to both names you know and obscure children’s book authors or indie comics artists.
Among other things, Cellophane Bricks offers Lethem's personal recollections of growing up around artists, including his father, painter Richard Lethem, in the grassroots alternative art world rooted in the collective spaces of a pre-gentrified Brooklyn. He also writes of the ethos of the graffiti-art world around his brother, Blake "KEO" Lethem.
Aside from a spirit of unconventionality, the biographical material may seem to come from another world from the delirious and sometimes fantastic short fictions in the volume, mostly written for artist catalogues for the likes of Nan Goldin, Jim Shaw, and Fred Tomaselli and gathered here for the first time. However, these also embody an ethos that clearly relates to the communal creative scenes of his youth: Lethem insists on only offering short stories as catalogue contributions, paying with his art, while accepting only artworks in return as payment.
There’s more still to Cellophane Bricks: essays on what it means to live with art, and varied reflections on what art and literature, word and image, bring to each other. Introducing Lethem at an event recently at the Brooklyn Public Library, the art critic Dan Fox said that, as a novelist, Lethem had left the same kind of indelible mark on how people see Brooklyn that Warhol had on Manhattan. With Cellophane Bricks, he is leaving his imprint on the art world.
A footnote for the future: The book is nicely illustrated with pictures of the eclectic work it describes, and next year, the art from Cellophane Bricks the basis for a show that will be at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in Southern California. “Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing” is described as “a chronicle of an author who roams among visual artists,” and ill feature art by Gregory Crewdson, Rosalyn Drexler, Charles Long, and others. Look out for it. -
Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is famous for his deep dives into topics of American history, ranging from the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, and the history of baseball, to name just a few. Now Burns is delving into the fascinating life of 15th century genius Leonardo da Vinci, examining his life and his numerous roles as a draftsman, painter, and scientist.
This venture marks the first time the director has tackled a subject that is not American. The film, which is divided into two, two-hour segments was co-written by his daughter Sarah Burns along with Dave McMahon, and was directed and produced by all three. Leonardo's many notable achievements are explored via close examination and analysis of his prolific personal notebooks alongside accounts of his life and on-camera interviews with leading scholars, contemporary artists, engineers, and some famous fans like biographer Walter Isaacson and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.
Leonardo da Vinci also marks a departure from Burns's traditional filmmaking style, in which a pan or zoom added in post-production across a still image gives the illusion of movement. That style of filmmaking has become so closely associated with his material that it has garnered his own filter in iMovie software as what else? "The Ken Burns effect," of course. However, here, the filmmakers use split screens with images, videos, and sound effects from a range of time periods to highlight da Vinci's many achievements through his artistic and scientific explorations, along with the original music commission from celebrated composer Caroline Shaw. It creates a compelling effect and new stylistic approach for the iconic documentarian.
This week, Burns joins Senior Market Editor Eileen Kinsella to discuss the endlessly revelatory and fascinating life of Leonardo. -
Fehlende Folgen?
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Re-Air from August 15,2024
There’s so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole… but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It’s not always clear when you’re in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s.
The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called “Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism.” Across a broad array of culture, both high and low, Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, “immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production.”
She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It’s a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis’s pick for our summer reading list, and we’re not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age.
It’s heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it. -
We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Naomi Rea, newly appointed editor in chief of Artnet News joins the show.
Kate and Naomi just returned from reporting on the ground at Art Basel Paris, which came just one week after Frieze London and Frieze Masters, where a clearer picture of the art market was taking shape. Before we get to that, speaking of London, there was big news that activists were sentenced to prison time for the souping of a very famous Vincent Van Gogh painting. The trio discusses what the implications of this punishment are for the activists using soup-throwing and other tactics to get their message across, and if it's working at all. Next, we dive into the state of the art market, which has been the subject of many think pieces, often providing contradictory views.
Finally, we dig into the man of many controversies: Elon Musk. He has been the subject of multiple accusations of alleged plagiarism in the past couple of weeks. First, Alex Proyas, who directed the 2004 adaptation of the short story I, Robot, called out Musk's Tesla on social media, writing simply: “Hey Elon, can I have my designs back please?” and shared a side-by-side image of his work on the film next to those of newly-released prototypes of Optimus, Cybercab, and Robovan at a long-awaited October 10 event intended to showcase Tesla’s future products to investors.
Just days later, the producers of Blade Runner 2049 filed a lawsuit suing Tesla for using imagery from that film without permission. In fact, Alcon Entertainment denied a request from Tesla and Warner Bros Discovery to use images from its film, and then Musk went ahead and used A.I.-generated references anyway. Alcon Entertainment called it “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit.” -
Contemporary art comes in many shapes and forms, but close your eyes and think of what an artist looks like and nine times out of 10, I bet you are still thinking of a painter in front of a canvas. If recent interest for museums and galleries is any indication, however, that image should be joined by another one: the fiber artist.
Think of a weaver seated at the loom or a quilt-maker laboriously stitching together layers of fabric. The textile arts have experienced a quiet but steady groundswell of interest in the last decades, and recently I've noticed that it feels as if it is kicked into a new, even higher level, from the many kinds of textile based art throughout the most recent Venice Biennale to the major show "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," which is on a tour of some of North America's most important museums right now.
As many textile scholars will tell you, tapestry was once as exalted as painting as an art form, and it may be so again. This surge of interest is bringing new audiences, new histories, and new vocabularies into the center of the action that are worth getting familiar with, and to unravel all the different threads, I turned to Elissa Author, a scholar who looked at the tangled history of fiber art in her book String Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art. More importantly, she's been closely observing and encouraging the contemporary boom in textile art as the chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. This week she joins me on the podcast to discuss what's behind the resurgence of interest in this medium.
—Ben Davis
Fiber Art Is (Still) Having a Moment
Artists working in fiber and textile are increasingly visible at art fairs, museums and galleries, and there's no sign of a slowdown.
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Few creative works ever managed to get the weird pathologies and unique characters of the art world quite right. But journalist and author Hari Kunzru's newest novel Blue Ruin is definitely one of those works. Set in the early stages of the pandemic, Kunzru's novel looks at how wealth and privilege function and fester in the art world.
It's an astonishing and incisive exploration of the power dynamics and value creation in art by an author who has been keenly observing the art world's odd rituals for decades. Blue Ruin moves between lockdown in upstate New York where some art professionals are hiding out on a very nice property, and then moves back in time to the optimistic art scene of the 1990s in London. Between these places, we follow Jay, a British artist who makes a grand gesture of quitting art in his twenties, only to find himself ramped back into the art world and the people who haunted it, all of which he had tried to leave behind.
Originally from Britain and based in New York. Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including White Tears and Red Pill. Blue Ruin is the third of this trilogy. He's also a regular contributor to the New York Review of books in the New York Times and writes a column for Harpers. Kunzru also teaches in the creative writing program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone. -
Over the past 200 years, a museum in New York has quietly grown to become one of the city's most esteemed cultural institutions. You might think I'm talking about the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the MoMA, but no, it's the Brooklyn Museum.
Founded in 1823 as a community library which later merged with the Brooklyn Institute, the Brooklyn Museum is now firmly fixed on the city's cultural landscape. Its James Polshek-designed glass facade is immediately recognizable. It comes backed by a collection spanning historical artifacts and contemporary art, and it remains dedicated to reflecting the diversity of the borough it calls home.
Recently, the museum has grabbed headlines for high-profile shows from "Giants," a very starry showcase of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz's collection, to "It's Pablo-matic," the Picasso retrospective curated by comedian Hannah Gadsby, which caught a lot, a lot of heat.
But behind those headlines, the museum has been programming for its community. It has staged crowd-curated exhibitions, hosted pop-up markets, and served as a polling station. Its Spike Lee exhibition last year was accompanied by events including ASL and stroller tours intended to engage the community with a filmmaker who was also born and bred in the borough.
For almost a decade, the Brooklyn Museum has been led by director Anne Pasternak. She has sought to balance the needs of its audience as well as the evolving role of a cultural institution. It's a position that's been rewarding as much as it has been challenging. Ahead of the museum's 200th anniversary, I caught up with Anne, who shared more about the opportunities and headwinds facing the Brooklyn Museum today and what it means to lead the institution into its third century. -
The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and needing each other in our capacity to change and love—all these aspects that really make us human.
With this, July has built a diverse and awe-inspiring body of work. It includes a messaging app she developed called Somebody and an interfaith secondhand shop. Her art has been on view with the Venice Biennale, and she's also made three feature length films, two of which she starred in.
She's published four books and a participatory website called Learning to Love You More that she created with American artist Harold Fletcher that consists of assignments for the general public who make the art. There are instructions like "make a portrait of your friend's desires," or "perform the phone call someone else wishes they could have." One of these assignments is part of her first solo exhibition, a major retrospective on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan until the end of October. It is "Assignment 43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house," and it was completed by a local woman from Milan. It is one piece among many in a show that spans 30 years of July's practice. There is also a new participatory video series in the mix called F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You).
Her newest novel, All Fours was published in May this year. A New York Times bestseller and long list finalist for the National Book Award, All Fours is an astonishingly candid look at sexuality and transformation, but also at an extremely underrepresented topic in literature: menopause and female aging. When I connected with July, she was in her home, which is also her studio in Los Angeles, a small painting by Louise Bonnet hung just behind her. It's called Miranda, and it's a contemplative portrait of a female figure in what looks like a state of metamorphosis. It suits July's universe quite poetically. -
It is time once again for our Round Up episode for the month of September, where we talk about some of the most interesting and timely art news stories of the last month with our writers here at Artnet. This month, Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined by senior writer Sarah Cascone, and the three stories they discuss all center around museums.
The first is the announcement that longtime director of New York's Museum of Modern Art Glenn Lowry will retire after 30 years, which marks the end of an era, and perhaps the beginning of something new. Artnet's Katya Kazakina wrote an article speculating on who might replace Lowry, and the panel discusses what this means for the future of one of the world's most famous museums. There's been a lot of leadership around New York museums, with the news of Alex Rüger taking over the role of director at the Frick Collection from Ian Wardropper, who is stepping down in 2025; plus the departure of Klaudio Rodriguez from the Bronx Museum, which has seen three directors in just seven years.
Next up, the trio takes a deep dive into an article penned by Ben Davis that shares the result of an analysis he did looking at the shows on view at over 200 museums across the United States to see which artists are cropping up most frequently. The results were surprising, and give us all a window into the cultural zeitgeist. Finally, we talk about the news of a rediscovered painting by beloved Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi that is going on view in Texas, based on a story written by Sarah Cascone. -
At the start of September, a massive chunk of the international art world descended on South Korea for a bounty of high-profile art offerings. The marquee event was Frieze Seoul, in its third edition, at the Coex convention center in the luxe Gangnam district, running alongside the long-established Korea International Art Fair. But they represented just one element of the action.
All over Seoul, museums and galleries were opening big shows, angling for attention. Samsung’s Leeum museum hosted an Anicka Yi blowout and a superb show of young artists curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija. The beauty giant Amorepacific welcomed Elmgreen & Dragset at a museum in the basement of its David Chipperfield–designed headquarters, while Gagosian set up shop with a Derrick Adams exhibition on the ground floor. Up above, local heavyweights came out swinging—PKM with Yoo Youngkuk, Pace with the potent pairing of Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko, and Jason Haam with Urs Fischer. Celebrities were everywhere. Parties were everywhere. No one seemed to be sleeping. Everyone was on the move.
And the festivities were not confined to Seoul. The esteemed Gwangju Biennale inaugurated its 15th edition in that southern city the day after the fairs opened, a sharp, tough show curated by the Frenchman Nicolas Borriaud that ran alongside more than 30 national pavilions. And along the country’s southern coast, the latest Busan Biennale also drew crowds, with more than 60 artists selected by its curators, Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte.
There was so much happening that it was impossible to see it all—even with a dedicated driver—which many VIPs had—and even if you were willing to forgo moments of rest. This week, Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth is joined by London-based reporter and co-author of the Asia Pivot newsletter Vivienne Chow to discuss the art, the food, and everything in between. -
If you've been keeping an eye on the art market, you know that the industry has been going through some turbulent times... there's really no other way to say it: It's been a tough year, as the frothy post-pandemic surge in the art business has fully retreated. Amid this market slowdown comes our latest data-packed and information-rich issue of the Mid-Year Intelligence Report, which is appropriately titled The Art Market Reset: Riding the Waves of Change.
This Fall issue looks at the numbers behind the mood, and it is packed with relevant insights that will help buyers, sellers, and spectators make informed decisions in the months ahead. Katya Kazakina, Artnet's award-winning columnist who pens a weekly art market column called The Art Detective is joining Art Angle co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week to discuss her must read cover story for the new Intelligence Report.
In it, she investigates what led to the sharp drop in the demand for art, as well as resale values for once coveted pieces. They discuss how the data reveals a market in free fall, where galleries have been faced with cost-cutting measures, or are shuttering altogether. There are some silver linings in her story, as Katya examines the smart responses that are being made across the industry, revealing how sales tactics are evolving and why some people actually believe that a slowdown in art production is not a bad thing altogether.
Before we get to that, a few more words about the rest of the report. Our illuminating By the Numbers section details how, as compared with last year, there has been a substantial drop in money being spent on Ultra Contemporary art, a downturn in the sales generated by the big three auction houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips), fewer artworks selling publicly for over $10 million, and the average price of art at auction is also going down. You can find specific breakdowns in the actual report. What does it all mean though? News editor Margaret Carrigan, gives a spin-free analysis of the auction stats.
Also in this issue, our Editor in Chief Naomi Rea, spoke with Art Basel Paris Fair Director Clément Delépine about what to expect at the revamped art fair, which is moving back into the Grand Palais next month. Our market reporter, Eileen Kinsella, spoke to Sotheby's Phyllis Kao about how the secondary market is adjusting its working processes amid the flux, and our marketplace section brings you the stories behind the top selling works, and the scoop on artists whose markets are on the rise. Even amid this slump, Artnet's esteemed reporters and editors have worked hard and put together an excellent issue that will help you navigate the current art market season, where the road ahead feels anything but clear. -
Thurston Moore is one of the most famous names in rock. With Kim Gordon and Lee Ronaldo, he formed Sonic Youth, one of the definitive art rock bands... yes, ART rock. Sonic Youth album covers famously spotlighted artists, from Gerhard Richter’s candle on the cover of 1988’s Daydream Nation to Raymond Pettibon’s cartoon couple on the cover of 1990’s Goo to Mike Kelley’s stuffed animal on the cover of 1992’s Dirty to Marnie Weber’s collage for 1998’s A Thousand Leaves.
Well, now Moore is back, putting out a new dreamy solo album titled Flow Critical Lucidity, and true to form, the cover is another literal work of art: a photo of a sculpture of what appears to be metal helmet, studded with tuning forks. This is a work called Samurai Walkman, by the artist Jamie Nares.
Nares is a figure of major cachet herself. She only just had a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York in the summer. Back in 2020, her fantastic 2011 video Street was the first film to be projected on the exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Thurston Moore, in fact, did the soundtrack to that film. Nares and Moore have a fruitful history of collaboration together, having both come up in the chaotic, experimental No Wave scene of the 1970s, and this week they join Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss.
We're also thrilled to announce the launch of Art Market Minute, our new micro-podcast, hosted by news editor Margaret Carrigan. It offers a weekly snapshot of essential art market news, expertly compiled by the Artnet PRO editorial team. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts every Monday. -
We are back this week with our monthly roundup, where we talk through some of the big stories that are making waves in the art world. Today co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by Artnet's art and pop culture editor, Min Chen.
Min commissions and edits a lot of our news coverage including a couple of the stories that we're going to be talking about today. It's August, and despite the fact that this is supposed to be the month where art and culture tends to gear down and the professional art world goes to Greece or the Hamptons, increasingly with every passing summer it seems that the news doesn't stop at all, and in fact sometimes actually ramps up.
This week we're going to discuss the abruptly halted auction of artworks allegedly made by Michael Jackson, the art stories on both sides of a prisoner exchange that occurred this month between Russia and the West, and finally the artist who just can't quit: Banksy. He dropped nine animal-themed art pieces this month around London and many are wondering if the world's most famous street artist has slightly lost his touch. Tune in to find out. -
There is a lot to unpack—literally and figuratively—in the Metropolitan Museum’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” which closes on September 2.
It’s about nature and the cycle of life (and as it turns out, there is a lot about death). It also touches on chemistry, biology, mythology, and so much more, all told through the lens of fashion. Added to this litany of themes, the show also tells the story of The Met itself, and the goings-on behind the scenes. It’s about how archived garments are preserved and how they are disintegrating. It’s not just about clothes, but about how they were worn and who wore them. It tells the story of us.
It’s a visceral exhibition of over 400 years of fashion that engages the senses. It can be a heady experience. There are the sounds of waves crashing, and birds calling, and poems being read aloud. There is textured wallpaper you can touch—and courtesy of the German artist Sissel Tollas, wallpaper you can scratch and sniff and tubes you can snort. Frankly, this portion of the exhibit kicks like a mule and is unforgettable, with scent being such a powerfully triggering memory force.
“Sleeping Beauties” was curated by this week’s guest Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who previously helmed such blockbusters as “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” “China Through the Looking Glass,” and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which were some of the most visited exhibitions in the museum’s entire history. Today’s fashion-exhibit-heavy museum landscape has a lot to do with Bolton’s successes, but with his trained anthropologist’s eye, he never fails to zero in on the intellectual and human connotations in the garments.
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There's so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole... but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It's not always clear when you're in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s.
The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called "Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism." Across a broad array of culture, both high and low Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, "immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production."
She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It's a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis's pick for our summer reading list, and we're not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age.
It's heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it. -
What is the future of an art career? Where do you look to find relevant new culture? And as an artist, where do you find collaborators and fans in art as in so much else? A lot has changed in the last decade, and the answers to all of these important questions feel tenuous and up for grabs.
On the one hand, traditional art institutions seem both dominated by wealth and starved for resources. On the other, there's an explosion of Internet culture full of subcultural energy, but also terrible incentives with a race-to-the-bottom quest for attention that hardly seems ideal for supporting art. The artist Joshua Citarella is someone who's been thinking hard about these problems, and above all, about how to steer a course in between these different, often competing worlds.
His artwork has been exhibited in illustrious places including Berlin's KW Institute for Temporary Art in its recent "Poetics of Encryption" show, which attracted a lot of buzz, but he's also been cited as an authority on the ideologies and aesthetics of Internet subcultures by the New York Times, the Guardian, and many other outlets.
This week, Citarella joins Artnet's Ben Davis to talk about his position as a figure in a new hybrid type of internet era, moving between art maker, podcaster, micro influencer, and community manager of the heady online platform Do Not Research, and theorizing how all these strands fit together. On the podcast, the two discuss the evolving demands on artists in the digital era, the changing art audience, and a lot more. -
It is mid-summer and as always there a lot of exciting things going on in Paris, but this year is special as it sets the stage for the Summer Olympic Games. Now in full swing, there are scores of events and performances around iconic landmarks of the city, from equestrian racing on the grounds of Versailles to swimming in the Seine. While at first blush it may not seem like the place for an art publication, art and the Olympics have a long and storied history from the ancient to modern games, artists used to compete in various media as Olympic events, in fact.
And so this month we turned the lens of our popular Three Things column—an article that looks at three (or more) fascinating aspects of a well-known and well-loved work of art, often illuminating lesser-known backstories—to a hallmark of the Olympics. This week we're focused on one of the most famous pieces of art that is about the Olympics, the Discobolus, which depicts an ancient Greek athlete at the exact moment of tension before hurling the discus, which is one of the oldest events in the Olympics.
Artnet's Galleries Editor Annikka Olsen wrote a very compelling article fleshing out this symbolic artwork, and she joins co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week. The duo talk about the amazing and complex history of the discus thrower in all of its many iterations from the before-Christ era right up to today. -
It is time, once again for our monthly roundup where we talk about three of the big stories of the month. In the summer sometimes the art news slows down, but the news news has not slowed down at all, of course. And we have three stories that we're going to talk about that are very much about where art and the news collide.
Today we're going to talk about the critical reaction to the instantly famous photo of Donald Trump with his fist raised in the air immediately after the attempted assassination on him two weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. A lot of art critics said that this photo was so powerful, it could define the race. Art critic Ben Davis had his doubts.
Obviously, the news cycle moves very fast. This past weekend, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris, and there's a whole new round of uses of the word "unprecedented" floating around. So we are going to talk about what, if anything, the lasting impact of this photo might be.
Why it got such a reaction, and what the perils of decoding news images through the lens of art are. Then we're gonna talk about the defacement of a goddess statue by the artist Shahzia Sikander in Texas, which had been protested as satanic, and the artist's decision to leave it in its damaged form rather than repair it as a statement.
And finally, we go down under to Australia for a story that has made international headlines. An artist created an art installation in the ladies' bathroom of a museum as a statement about sexism and gender discrimination, filling the washroom with Picasso paintings. But in a twist that has brought the story back into the news, the Picassos have now been revealed to be fake.
Is this a serious story? Is it silly? It's a question that Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown tackle along with this week's guest, our hardworking news correspondent Adam Schrader. -
The Gladstone gallery director Alissa Bennett was one of a legion to fall under the thrall of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History. A years-spanning mystery told in reverse, the book has sold some five million copies and remains a cult fan favorite. It details a small cadre of college students studying ancient Greek at an isolated North East campus. Myth, reality, and ritual overlap and ultimately Dionysian rites collide with hubris.
Here is how Bennett sums up the protagonists: "while their fantasies ricochet around a technicolor past filled to overflowing with gods and mysteries and the seismic tragedies of Homer, their bodies remain tethered to a Taco Bell present."
The book has yet to be seen on the big screen, but Bennett has managed to find a super-low-budget obscure video art adaption from 2006, which is now on view as part of the "The Secret History," (on view through August 2) a group art exhibition she curated, on view now at Gladstone 64, the gallery’s upper east side outpost in a converted townhouse. The artists featured in the fascinating show range from familiar names like Matthew Barney, Rachel Rose, and Hope Atherton to younger artists like Matt Hilvers and Karyn Lyons, and her own personal astrologer (and former Art Angle guest) Micki Pellerano.
Bennett joined Artnet editor William Van Meter to discuss the show, and her meandering path in life that includes a stint as a runway model, a co-host alongside Lena Dunham of the acclaimed podcast The C-Word, a teacher at the Yale School of Art, and author of the zine "Dead is Better." Now, she holds a post as a gallery director, and along the way she remembers her mentor, Barbara Gladstone, the legendary gallerist who passed away last month. -
Art and psychoanalysis have had a very long and intense relationship over the years, and it makes sense that these two fields would be drawn to one another. Critics have long looked at psychoanalysis as offering a sophisticated model of decoding images and fantasies. Artists have made productive use of ideas like the unconscious and the uncanny, and of course, are very concerned with the questions of self-expression and desire that are at the core of analysis.
One figure who has gained quite a bit of attention in art lately for her ideas on all these things is Jamieson. Webster. Webster is an analyst and a teacher, and is among the founders of Pulsion, a new school for psychoanalysis here in New York City. She's also the author of essays for places including The New York Times and the New York Review of Books, as well as books of her own, including the Life and Death of Psychoanalysis from 2019 and Disorganization and Sex from 2022.
Recently Webster spoke with art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis about the fresh uptick of interest in psychoanalysis among artists now, the uses and abuses of therapy in art, and her new pamphlet titled The Psychoanalyst and the Artist, where she writes about what analysts can learn from two artists in particular, the sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the painter Carroll Dunham. - Mehr anzeigen
