The Art Angle

When artificial intelligence first arrived in the art world in 2017, it was received warmly and with open arms. A.I.-generated works by artists like Obvious and Mario Klingemann were fetching hundreds of thousands at auction, art fairs like Scope in Miami welcomed A.I. art, as did institutions, which eagerly staged exhibitions touting the new technology. Artists working with A.I. were embraced; there was no media outrage or backlash—A.I. art, by and large, was seen as a good thing. Not so much today. The latest chapter in A.I. art's story has seen artists decrying the tool's widespread use and its violation of creators' rights, with generated artworks sparking outrage online and off. More recently, a handful of industry leaders have even warned of A.I.'s extinction-level threat. So what changed? Why has A.I. art fallen so out of favor? That's exactly what pioneering A.I. artist and innovator Ahmed Elgammal discusses in a new op-ed for Artnet News.As an A.I. researcher, professor in the department of computer science at Rutgers University, founder of the A.I. art platform Playform, and the developer of AICAN—one of the earliest art generators—Elgammal is well-placed to observe the trajectory of A.I. art. In his view, the gulf between yesterday's and today's era of A.I. art is down to one thing: the emergence of text-to-image generators. He argues that while these new generators have made it a cinch to generate art, they have flouted ethical considerations, and effectively killed creativity. To dig into his argument, Artnet News's art & pop culture editor Min Chen spoke to Elgammal to learn more about the state of play for A.I. art—why early A.I. art took off, how text-prompting has diminished the creative process, and where artists eager to work with A.I. should go from here. 

Over the past five decades, American artist Jenny Holzer has been engaging in thought-provoking interventions into public space that unflinchingly address politics, power, violence, and vulnerability.The New York-based artist investigates language as both content and form, and she works with unconventional mediums to do this including street signage, T-shirts, and light projections, but also sculptures and painting. Her poetic and often minimalist works are extremely impactful, creating a tension between knowledge and truth and emotion.Last year, Holzer curated an acclaimed exhibition of the work of Louise Bourgeois at the Kunstmuseum Basel. More recently, she received Whitechapel Gallery’s prestigious Art Icon award. She’s also the subject of a major solo exhibition on view until August 6 at a preeminent institution in Germany, the K21 in Dusseldorf.On the occasion of the show, which includes many key works spanning her career, Artnet’s Europe editor Kate Brown caught up with Holzer, one of the foremost artists of her generation.

If you follow the mainstream art world, you will know that for the last decade, one of the biggest stories has been a boom in new kinds of figurative painting. A visit to the recent spate of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing down, but nothing stays unchanged forever, and trend-watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge.Artnet News’s European editor Kate Brown has an essay out this week where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hyper-sentimentalism.This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

In the Covid summer of 2020, the art world was jolted by a very different kind of drama when reports surfaced that MCH Group, the Swiss corporation best known as the parent company of Art Basel, had entered talks to sell a significant equity stake to Lupa Systems, the private investment company founded by none other than James Murdoch.For listeners who haven’t spent years devouring media-sector or political gossip, James Murdoch is the fourth of six children of billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch, now most infamous for presiding over the hard-right coverage beamed out through Fox News in the U.S. and various overseas properties via his News Corp conglomerate.The proximity of the Murdoch family to Art Basel initially sent some people in the art world into hysterics. One conspiracy theory even held that James was acting as a front for his father, who would take control of the planet’s best known, most prestigious art fair and… well, it was never quite clear what he would do, or why he would care, but obviously something dastardly and irreparable was about to happen, and we should all prepare for the worst.Yet people interested in digging soon found out that James Murdoch is very much his own man with his own resources. Although he spent decades in the family business, including prominent roles in some of its satellite TV and entertainment companies, he cut his final tie to the empire when he resigned from the board of News Corp in July 2020.He has been a public critic of Donald Trump as far back as 2017, and through Quadrivium, the foundation James and his wife Kathryn started in 2014, he has funneled substantial philanthropic resources into counteracting climate change, promoting evidence-based solutions in science and health, expanding voting rights, and pushing back against online extremism.He’s also a mogul in his own right. When Disney paid a knee-buckling $71.3 billion in 2019 to acquire nearly all of the Murdochs’ entertainment assets, James received a reported $2.2 billion from the deal. He launched Lupa Systems shortly after, with sources claiming at the time that he would invest up to $1 billion of his wealth through the company.By fall of 2020, MCH Group’s shareholders had approved the deal to make Lupa Systems the company’s new “anchor shareholder,” with the option to buy up to 49 percent of its shares. But in the time since, we’ve heard relatively little from James Murdoch himself about how MCH Group and Art Basel fits alongside the other ventures in Lupa’s portfolio, including media properties like the Tribeca Festival, advanced technology startups, and sustainability projectsAhead of the 2023 edition of Art Basel in Basel, however, Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider, managed to sit down with James at Lupa Systems New York offices to hear his thinking firsthand.

In the studio of Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno, there’s an expected sound—vibrations of a spider working on its web—a sound normally imperceptible to the human ear, but that doesn’t make it any less real.The recent technological feat of capturing and recording the sound of a spider is just one of the many pursuits undertaken by the Berlin-based artist. Saraceno is known for working with experts from the field of science, engineering, and architecture among others, to create works that exist beyond the traditional bounds of the art world.These research intensive, often groundbreaking installations and projects render visible our interconnectedness with one another and the ecosystems in which we exist. They’ve even earned him some world records.It’s an ambitious undertaking and it has solidified him as one of the most impactful artists of our generation. For Saraceno’s first major U.K. solo exhibition, which opens on June 1 at Serpentine in London, Saraceno and his collaborators are moving beyond the walls of the museum of Serpentine South, from the Royal Parks in London all the way to the rural communities of Argentina where people are fighting to stop lithium extraction in their lands, to Cameroon where Spider Diviners challenging our notions about knowledge.At the Serpentine, “Web(s) of Life” delves into critical and urgent questions about how we as people coexist with other life forms and how technology intersects with the climate emergency itself. As the last of his works were en route to London, Artnet News’s Europe editor Kate Brown joined the artist in his bright and beautiful Berlin studio.

The landscape of technological advancement in the art and design world is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of groundbreaking concepts like the Metaverse, NFTs, and easily accessible A.I. available to anyone with an Internet connection. Amid this rapidly changing landscape, it is crucial to evaluate the success and relevance of these platforms as they exist now, and how they might evolve in a future we are just beginning to comprehend.To delve into the significance of these technologies, Artnet and Morlach Whiskey organized a captivating panel discussion titled “Offscreen: The Current and Future State of Art, Design, and Technology.” Moderated by Artnet News’ executive producer, Sonia Manalili, this engaging conversation brought together multi-disciplined artists, Trevor Paglan, Khyati Trehan, and Sebastian Errazuris, each with their diverse expertise, to share their insightful perspectives on the evolving digital domain.

What is connoisseurship, and what does it mean in the present day when Chat-GPT or even plain old Google can answer nearly any art historical question with a single keystroke?It’s a question that lies in the heart of the art world and was the topic of an enlightening panel discussion titled aptly, “The Art of Connoisseurship: Cultivating Expertise in the 21st Century” at the 2023 edition of TEFAF New York last week, which was recorded live for the Art Angle podcast.On this week’s episode, a very special live recording of the conversation, moderated by Artnet News’s editor in chief Andrew Goldstein and featured Dominique Lévy, collector, advisor, gallerist, and co-founder of the newly launched gallery venture LGDR; Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director and COO of the Design Leadership Network, and author of the forthcoming book, “The New Antiquarians: Young Collectors at Home” published by Phaidon/Monacelli in June 2023; and Dr. Thomas S. Kaplan, co-founder of the Leiden Collection—the world’s largest private collection of Rembrandt and Dutch Golden Age art—and chairman of the Electrum Group.

The arrival of A.I. will profoundly change the art world—if it hasn't already. A.I.-generated works have proliferated with the rise of A.I. art generators and large language models from DALL-E to ChatGPT, making their way into galleries and in some cases, winning prestigious awards. But the question remains: is it art, if it's been dreamed up by an algorithm? Or do our existing definitions of art and art-making require rethinking in the age of machine intelligence?To help us answer these questions and more, the Art Angle looked up K Allado-McDowell, a leading voice in a rapidly evolving field.As a long-time A.I. researcher at Google A.I., K founded the Artists + Machine Intelligence program, which since 2016 has nurtured artists including Refik Anadol. And as an artist, K has created works—from an opera to numerous books—alongside the language model GPT-3. In a conversation with Artnet News' Art & Pop Culture editor Min Chen, K shed light on their practice, their experiences with machine intelligence, and their view on how A.I. is changing the face of art.

One of the most exciting things about being an art journalist is that art as a subject is ridiculously protean: what it looks like is always changing, how we engage with it is always changing, and the role it plays in society is always changing too.What that means is that you constantly need to shift your perspective in order to see it properly.Searching for the correct lens on art, if you’re really good and really lucky, sometimes you even get to name that lens, like Pop Art, for instance. Artnet News’s national art critic Ben Davis has written an essay that illuminates a recent shift in art that has been making big waves among the cognoscenti. It’s a new tendency that he calls quantitative aesthetics, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein on the Art Angle podcast to discuss it.

February 2023 marked the 20th anniversary of photographer Ryan McGinley’s seminal exhibition “The Kids Are Alright” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which ran from February through May 2003. It was the 26-year-old’s solo exhibition debut, and the 20 photographs captured a particular place and time in New York City, in the shadow of September 11th, 2001 and the AIDS crisis; before the invention of Instagram and TikTok. It wasn’t just the latest downtown-meets-uptown youthquake salvo that reverberated around in the art world, but a photo exhibition that made McGinley a bona fide, post-millennial star—and shifted the culture.At that time the Whitney was still in its Upper East Side location and “The Kids Are Alright” was the most talked about photo show at the museum since Nan Goldin’s exhibition “I’ll Be Your Mirror” in 1996. Overnight, Ryan became the superstar art photographer of his generation, documenting his decadent world. After him, this bohemian lineage basically slams shut with the onset of social media.This week, the Art Angle presents an oral history of the exhibition and its influence featuring Artnet News style editor William Van Meter in conversation with McGinley himself, as well as artists Marc Hundley and Jack Walls; photography critic Vince Aletti, and the show’s original curator Sylvia Wolf.