Podcast · Arts & Books

The Art Angle

A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more. 

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 40 min
Latest: 8 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

8 Oct 2026 · 53 min

Let’s Talk About Lee Krasner (and Jackson Pollock)

One of the major museum events of the fall is called "Krasner and Pollock, Past Continuous," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It brings together 120 artworks by two of the titans of 20th-century American painting: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. The two famously were a couple, and this show claims to be the first to look at their artworks specifically together as a dialogue. Jackson Pollock was, and is, known as the indispensable abstract expressionist. His expansive style of drip painting, made by throwing paint across a canvas on the ground, caught the media and the public's…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

1 Oct 2026 · 40 min
The Past, Present, and Future (??) of Website Art
What does it mean to make art on the internet? It's not a new question, but it's far from a settled question. From very early on in the history of the World Wide Web, artists leapt in to start experimenting, and very shortly after that, the organization Rhizome was born. Dedicated to digital art, it quickly became one of the most important advocates and keepers of its history. Last week, Rhizome celebrated its 30th birthday with a gala that brought together the luminaries of online art, both present and historical, and an art show titled "WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!" showing web-based work…
24 Sep 2026 · 45 min
NYC Gallery Blitz, the Lucas Museum Arrives, a Messy Art Divorce
For many, many reasons, it has been several months since we have done one of our Art Angle chat-casts, where we assemble writers to talk about a few different news stories on the site. But it's September, and we're finally back at it. Today we'll be talking about three topics: First, here in New York, the fall art season kicked off with literally hundreds of gallery openings, followed by a bunch of fairs this week. The fall openings are always an event. This year, they're even more closely scrutinized, given how uncertain business has felt behind the scenes. We'll talk about highlights and…
17 Sep 2026 · 47 min
Re-Air: Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art
This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen. Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went vertical in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.…
11 Sep 2026 · 42 min
Why Are Museum Wall Texts So Bad?
The humble wall label at an art exhibition has a funny status. It feels, on the one hand, like a side note or an afterthought. On the other, it is a first point of contact and literal guide for a visitor looking to know more. There is an entire undersung discipline, Visitor Studies, which has put a lot of time into thinking about how museums communicate. And yet, even so, some of the most prestigious exhibitions in the world are crawling with texts that I can barely understand. As a matter of fact, I’ve griped so much about bad text at art biennials and shows that I try not to do it anymore,…
3 Sep 2026 · 36 min
The Etruscans Made Astonishing Art. Why Aren't They Better Known?
The ancient Romans called the Mediterranean mare nostrum, "our sea." But before the Romans rose to power, the Etruscans had extensive trade networks in the area and controlled much of the Italian peninsula, the future heart of the Roman Empire. Between around 900 B.C.E. and the first century B.C.E., the Etruscans lived in city-states, developing beguiling artworks and making technological advances that are the subject of an astonishing show at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. "The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy," which runs through September 20, tells the story of people who…
27 Aug 2026 · 37 min
Why Artists Keep Turning to Tarot
Artists and creatives have been fascinated with tarot for over 600 years. Recently, that fascination has resurfaced in a big way, showing up everywhere from museum walls to fashion runways. That's not surprising. As a sweeping universal narrative language small enough to fit in your pocket, tarot's archetypal imagery is built for rediscovery and reinterpretation. Once a medieval royal court game, tarot drifted into the realms of the occult, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 21st, it's entered the pop culture zeitgeist—accessible, affordable, and able to offer insight into the…
20 Aug 2026 · 38 min
Welcome to the World of Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez
Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez share a knack for building worlds and characters that operate on their own wonderful, absurdist logic. Throw them together, add some sea water, and you get Marina, their new performance commissioned by the Whitney Biennial. Marina begins with a construction worker tossing a smartphone into the ocean and ends with a sea wench possibly discovering the internet. It’s like the Little Mermaid, but filtered through the flights of imagination that Torres and Gutierrez have become known for. Torres first came to prominence as a writer for Saturday Night Live, but…
13 Aug 2026 · 38 min
What's New in New York Art?
We’re in the hot dog days of August, awaiting the new art season to kick off in September. In the meantime, I thought we might take the temperature of art in New York, looking at two big museum shows that opened earlier ruin the year, and that seek to highlight new voices from the city. So, we will be talking about “Greater New York,” the important show at MoMA PS1 in Queens that once every five years. This time out it has over 53 artists and collectives from the Big Apple, stretched across several floors of the museum, and is certainly worth checking out before it closes its several months…
6 Aug 2026 · 44 min
Here's Where the Art World Eats
At the end of last year, Annie Armstrong stepped down as Artnet's gossip columnist after filing 198 Wet Paint columns over the span of more than four years. Gabi Vidal-Irizarry has picked up the mantle. Annie departed the art world for the food world to write for Caper Media, an enterprising new startup that aims, in its words, "to tell the inside story of the restaurant business in New York." While Annie is on a new beat, she's found that the art and restaurant worlds are closely intertwined in New York, and her must-read weekly column regularly charts the goings-on of promising artists,…
30 Jul 2026 · 44 min
An Untold History of the Art Market
The art market is a famously opaque place, a world of handshake agreements and big-dollar private deals. How does it actually operate, and how has it changed over the centuries? In a richly researched new book titled Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, Valentina Castellani provides surprising answers, drawing on a long and storied career in the industry. She's worked at Sotheby's and Gagosian, where she helped organize landmark exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso and Piero Manzoni. Now, she's an adjunct professor at New York University's Steinhardt School,…
23 Jul 2026 · 29 min
Re-Air: The Magic of ‘The Artist’s Way’
In this re-air of an episode from last year. Ben Davis speaks with Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way. It is a somewhat unusual subject for us, but it's also been an episode that's been very meaningful to a lot of listeners. And in case you're wondering, Ben started doing morning pages to prepare for the interview, and six months later, and he has stuck with it. Millions of people know The Artist’s Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or, as she sometimes prefers to call it, “creative…
16 Jul 2026 · 47 min
Welcome to the Society of the Psyop
It is a time of disorienting, sometimes surreal shifts in the worlds of politics and technology. There aren’t too many artists who you might trust as a guide, but Trevor Paglen is one of them. Paglen has long functioned as an artist-researcher, with a fascination for pushing to the outer limits of what is seen or known. His work has often not just responded to but anticipated major conversations around government surveillance, conspiracy theory, and the politics of Silicon Valley. And he has an important new book just out from Verso, How to See Like a Machine: Images After A.I. It collects…
9 Jul 2026 · 28 min
The Case for M.C. Escher
There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names, figures like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher’s impact on the wider culture may be as big, or even bigger that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist. Born Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artist was a highly skilled maker of woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, bringing a sense of exquisite precision and intricate geometry to his compositions. But as an artist, Escher is almost…
2 Jul 2026 · 28 min
How Doug Aitken Thinks in Music
Doug Aitken’s new installation Lightscape has just landed at the Shed in New York. It is many things at once: a seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music. The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds those worlds and narratives together is sound. Aitken built Lightscape around an original song cycle he wrote. The soundtrack also incorporates compositions by Minimalist pioneers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and…
25 Jun 2026 · 36 min
How to Make a Sculpture With Sound
Some of the most important visual artist working today are sound artists. It seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind of another is everywhere in and around the art. Ben Davis wanted to dig into this “sonic turn” in art, if that’s what it is—and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui’s work often takes the form of environments, with sculptures that double as experimental musical instruments, to be…
18 Jun 2026 · 49 min
What Does It Take to Keep Art Basel on Top?
This week the art world descends on Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine River, where the latest edition of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fair is taking place. We're talking about Art Basel, of course. Its 290 exhibitors include all the top galleries of the world. It's a place where you can see and buy museum-quality Picassos and Warhols next to still-wet-paint by emerging artists, though there's not as many of those lately. Major collectors like Don and Mera Rubell are there, and so are celebrities like Kanye West and James Franco. At the center of it all is Noah…
11 Jun 2026 · 40 min
Roberta Smith Still Has Notes
Roberta Smith is the exemplar of popular art criticism. For almost four decades, Smith was a familiar voice on the arts pages of the New York Times, serving for many of those years as co-lead art critic. Both feared and revered, she is known above all for close looking, precise description, and a style that’s accessible but serious. In 2019, she won the Rabkin Award for Lifetime Achievement. Smith moved to New York in the late 1960s, studying at the Whitney’s Independent Study Program and meeting her first mentor, the sculptor Donald Judd. In the early 1970s, she worked at the Museum of…
4 Jun 2026 · 39 min
Re-Air: How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance
This week we're re-airing a favorite episode featuring Kate Brown interviewing Ben Davis about the “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe.…
28 May 2026 · 47 min
Arthur Jafa's Radical Theory of Readymade Art
Arthur Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went viral in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible, and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown’s…
21 May 2026 · 38 min
How Is Arts Patronage Changing?
During fair week in New York in mid-May, Andrew Russeth had the high pleasure of moderating a panel about the state of arts philanthropy at TEFAF New York. Joining him on stage at the Park Avenue Armory were two leading figures in American patronage, Sarah Arison and Michi Jigarjian. Arison was named president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024 at the age of only 39, making her the youngest person to ever hold that position. The president of the Arison Arts Foundation, she also chairs the board of YoungArts and serves on a variety of boards, including those of MoMA…
14 May 2026 · 39 min
Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?
Los Angeles has a new museum. Or a new vision for an old one. One of the most important museums in the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has just debuted a long-awaited new building. It’s designed by the revered Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to realize. And long before it opened to the public last month, it has been controversial, for a whole host of reasons. It debuts with LACMA’s charismatic director Michael Govan promising not just a new LACMA, but a new vision for how museums show art and relate to the public. Ben Davis went out…
7 May 2026 · 50 min
The Most Provocative Performance in Venice
At the Venice Biennale, every two years, we expect big things from the artists picked to represent their countries. But I'm not sure anyone can quite prepare themselves for the universe of Florentina Holzinger. After years becoming a titan of the theater world, Holzinger is now getting one of the most visible slots in the art world, a national pavilion in the Giardini. She’s representing Austria this year for what is surely going to be one of the most talked about pavilions. Known for feminist performances that push the human body—and, by extension, the viewer—to their absolute limits, she…
30 Apr 2026 · 31 min
What Biennials Reveal About the Art World
We talk a lot about biennials. Art is in some ways a very local, in-person thing. Yet artists and creators and writers are also part of a global conversation, looking at and thinking about each other across borders, and these big, recurring art festivals can serve as an opportunity or a prompt to think about what that bigger conversation. One of the biggest, the Venice Biennale, is coming up next month. It’s centered around a show called “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. My colleague Jo Lawson-Tancred recently had an article looking at the artists in that show,…
23 Apr 2026 · 41 min
Re-Air: The Young Painter Curators Are Rushing to Work With
This interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and on the occasion of the opening of Greater New York at MoMA PS1, where Cruz is also featured, we're resurfacing it. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young (born in 1998), and who just earned her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions…
16 Apr 2026 · 37 min
One of the Art Market's Biggest Secrets, Revealed
What a difference 12 months makes! After years of declining sales in the auction realm, there are finally signs of life. The Artnet Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2026 reveals that global auction totals were up 13.3 percent in 2025 versus 2024. The full report, rich with new findings, is now available as a crisp PDF. The price? Free. (We hope that its contents will inspire you to subscribe to Artnet Pro, and to partake of the Artnet Price Database.) In the report’s cover story, “Dark Mode,” Artnet’s Art Detective columnist, Katya Kazakina, delves into the intriguing and shadowy world of…
9 Apr 2026 · 44 min
The Philosopher Who Predicted Our Post-Literate Art Moment
The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a…
2 Apr 2026 · 39 min
How Raphael Made—and Unmade—the Renaissance
Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He is the prince of painters, a master of the High Renaissance. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given him the full blockbuster treatment in a highly anticipated exhibition called "Raphael: Sublime Poetry." The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according…
26 Mar 2026 · 43 min
Whitney Biennial Trends, a New Baroque Art Star, and Banksy Unmasked
Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month. In this episode, will be discussing: — The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here) — The rise of a new art historical art star: the Flemish baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689). — And a new…
19 Mar 2026 · 45 min
Are We Entering a Post-Individual Era of Art?
The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology. It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work “Peace Core” showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a project space, Earth, on the…

About The Art Angle

The Art Angle is a English arts & books podcast from Artnet News. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Artnet News
Language: English
Category: Arts & Books
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 40 min
Latest episode: 8 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1484445852

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