Episode 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…
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Artnet News · Arts & Books · English
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.
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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…
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2 Jul 2026 · 28 min
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25 Jun 2026 · 36 min
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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…
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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…
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14 May 2026 · 39 min
Does L.A's Bold New LACMA Museum Work?
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