
Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
What we talk about when we talk about art. Exceptional makers and thinkers across art, literature, film, fashion, music, and more come together to talk about what it means to make things today.
Latest episodes

Nov 30, 2022 • 42min
On Art and Poetics
Lucas Zwirner returns as host for a conversation with the MacArthur award-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and the renowned critic and scholar of avant-garde poetry, Marjorie Perloff. On the occasion of Peter’s new book of poetry, Draw Me After, which is inspired by the work of Terry Winters and Agnes Martin, they come together for a state of the union of art and poetry. Draw Me After: Poems is available now.

Nov 16, 2022 • 37min
Let’s Talk About Appropriation | With Helen Molesworth
Following recent controversies in the art and fashion worlds, host Helen Molesworth and the artist Steve Locke, a returning guest, sit down to talk about a subject that has been thorny for as long as there have been arguments about art. So, appropriation: When is it strategy and when is it theft? Who gets to claim authorship of what? And what is actually original nowadays?

Nov 2, 2022 • 20min
Seeing the 90’s Everywhere Right Now | With Helen Molesworth
In the premiere episode of a new series hosted by Helen Molesworth, the curator and writer talks with her friend the artist Steve Locke about the re-emergence of art and culture of the 90’s, and why certain ideas, obsessions, and artists of the era—from Wolfgang Tillmans to Marlon Riggs to Friends—are bubbling back up into the mainstream now. This fall, Helen will be hosting regular episodes of the podcast that react to the shifting news and ideas in the art world and culture at large. Please follow Dialogues so you don’t miss an episode. This episode’s guest, the artist Steve Locke, currently has a solo exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates in New York, open through December 17, 2022.

Oct 25, 2022 • 1h 12min
Inside ‘The Red Studio’: Ann Temkin with 6 Artists on Matisse | Special Episode
In this special episode produced and hosted by the painter Lisa Yuskavage, six artists—Joe Bradley, Carroll Dunham, Rashid Johnson, David Reed, Sarah Sze, and Charline von Heyl—give Ann Temkin, Chief Curator of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, their insights on Matisse’s Red Studio (1911) and the elusive nature of creativity. It was inspired by the recent exhibition Matisse: The Red Studio at MoMA, now on view at the SMK Denmark through February 26, 2023.Dialogues is returning soon with new episodes hosted by the writer and curator Helen Molesworth, please stay tuned to this feed.

Sep 23, 2022 • 12min
Death of an Artist: The Ana Mendieta and Carl Andre Story | Special Episode
A special preview of a new podcast miniseries, Death of an Artist, hosted by the curator and art historian Helen Molesworth, who will also be hosting new episodes of Dialogues, coming very, very soon. For more than 35 years, accusations of murder shrouded one of the art world’s most storied couples: Was the famous sculptor Carl Andre involved in the death of his wife, the rising star artist Ana Mendieta? Helen revisits the question of Mendieta’s death, takes a closer look at the incident in which she fell from the window of their 34th floor New York apartment, and interrogates both the silence and protest that have followed this infamous story since 1985. You can hear the full episode and all of Death of an Artist here. Stay tuned to Dialogues for new episodes hosted by Helen Molesworth coming next month.

Mar 30, 2022 • 46min
Episode 48 | Rirkrit Tiravanija and Elizabeth Peyton
The artists and former partners on what it means to be an artist now—and what it meant when they emerged in the New York art world of the 1990s. Tiravanija, who will have his first exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong later this year, is renowned for participatory installations that have a living, social dimension to them. Peyton is one of her generation’s best-known painters, recognized for her intimate paintings of people.

Mar 24, 2022 • 31min
Episode 47 | Edwin Frank
The editorial director of New York Review Books and editor of NYRB Classics explains the origins and cult status of the incredibly popular series. Since its founding by Frank in 1999, NYRB Classics’s mission has been to reintroduce out-of-print gems to a new audience, everything from Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps to a Janet Malcolm work of journalism. Combined with a simple and magnetic design, this model inspired David Zwirner Books’s own ekphrasis series, which focuses on writing about art, and which just celebrated its 20th edition with the publication of Virginia Woolf’s Oh to Be a Painter!. Oh to Be a Painter!, the most accessible collection of Woolf’s writing on art, is available through David Zwirner Books. The entire ekphrasis series is now available as a special collection.

Mar 16, 2022 • 46min
Episode 46 | Jed Perl and Joshua Cohen
A conversation that parses the nuances of the question: Does art have to be political to be important right now? With the art critic Jed Perl, who just published Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and the novelist Johsua Cohen, author of the acclaimed The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes the Israeli family in ways comic and serious.

Mar 9, 2022 • 54min
Episode 45 | Jerry Saltz and Ellie Rines
A conversation about the art of looking. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic and author Jerry Saltz, of New York magazine and the bestselling How to Be an Artist, and the influential young gallerist Ellie Rines, of New York’s 56 Henry, on doing their jobs in unorthodox ways—and how to look at the endlessly proliferating and increasingly uncategorizable art in the world today.And a warning to our listeners: This episode briefly mentions suicide, so please listen with caution or skip 44:34-45:30.

Mar 2, 2022 • 36min
Episode 44 | Amy Sillman
The celebrated artist on the role of art criticism today, and how she probes and ultimately goes beyond the limitations of her painting in her other practice as a writer. This episode with Sillman, who in 2020 published Faux Pas, a new collection of her writings, is guest-hosted by Jarrett Earnest, and is the last of his three-part miniseries on serious artists who are also serious writers. Amy Sillman: Faux Pas is available here. Her work will be featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale, and was recently on view in Toni Morrison’s Black Book, an exhibition curated by Hilton Als at David Zwirner’s 19th Street gallery in New York.