The Art Angle

Jayson Musson has a unique status in the art world: he has the persona and perspective of an outsider, but he's also something of an artist's artist. Originally from the Bronx, Musson got his creative start in Philadelphia in the 2000s, creating cerebral, satirical street art; penning a column for the Philadelphia Weekly called "Black Like Me"; and performing in the cult hip-hop group Plastic Little, which put out songs like "I'm Not a Thug," "Rap O'Clock," and "Miller Time."Musson again popped up unexpectedly onto the radar in 2010 with "Art Thoughtz," a DIY YouTube series that immediately became a treasured reference in art school and art media. It starred Musson in the persona of "Hennessy Youngman," fusing the styles of art theory lecture and Def Comedy Jam, monologuing about everything from concepts of beauty to Damien Hirst's tendency to make faces in press pics. It was fresh enough to surprise, and knowing enough to be a hit.Musson has worked in a variety of styles in the last decade, from painting to sculpture to children's books to mix tapes. He's back this month with a very different spin on art education at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum. Titled "His History of Art," the new show has a characteristically offbeat premise. It takes the form of a combination of sitcom and PBS edutainment, with Musson starring as Jay, explaining the value of art history to Ollie, a rabbit played by a puppet. And there are lots of other surreal detours along the way.Ben Davis, Artnet News's national art critic and a Jayson Musson fan, recently had a chance to talk to the artist about his unusual career and the idea behind his new riff on art history.

It might be the dog days of summer here in New York, but over in the metaverse, we are firmly in the depths of crypto winter.When NFT NYC, the world’s largest NFT conference, descended on Times Square last month, Bitcoin and ether were down more than 70 percent from where they were in November. That put a damper on the proceedings, and it’s had a ripple effect on the once-ballooning market for digital collectibles. In the first half of 2021, Christie’s had sold $93 million worth of NFTs; this year, they’ve sold just $4.8 million.Meanwhile, NFT players and platforms are being dogged by claims of insider trading and market manipulation, and many in the art world are reconsidering their relationship with the sector.To offer us a micro-history of this fast-changing market, and a recap of how the crypto crash has transformed the NFT space, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Zachary Small, an Artnet News contributor and friend of the Art Angle. Zach is the author of the forthcoming book “Token Supremacy: How NFTs (and a Little Money Laundering) Turned Decentralized Finance Into an Art Form.”

Well, the hot summer season is upon is, and while the Art Angle team is taking some r&r this week we thought we’d offer you some refreshment in the form of re-airing one of our favorite episodes of the year so far—a tale of art-world fakery, double-dealing, and incredibly creative swindling so preposterous it’s worthy of a summer movie. Let’s just say that no one in the story you are about to hear, about jet-setting Italian collectors promoting a favorite artist on Instagram, are who they seem. Kate Brown, who uncovered the story and the brazen theft at its heart, discussed the saga with executive editor Julia Halperin.

This past may New York hosted what is probably the biggest auction season ever selling more than $2.7 billion worth of art. Last week, the traveling circus touchdown in London with multimillion dollar art sales at Phillips, Sotheby's and Christie's.So before the arm market goes into hibernation for the summer, we decided to revisit our episode, decoding the complex sociology of auctions.Auctions are the most public and visible part of the art market—but they are also among the most misunderstood. There’s a ton of behind-the-scenes preparation, psychology, and game theory that goes into pulling off a successful sale. It is a game—and to succeed as both a seller and a buyer, you need to know the rules. We called in Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin to help us decode the complex sociology of auctions.

You're heard quite a bit about biennials on the Art Angle recently—the Whitney Biennial, the Venice Biennial, and, most recently, Documenta, which comes once every five years to Kassel, Germany. On their own, each of these are closely watched events by art mavens looking to spot national and global trends. But they are also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to a circuit of Biennial and Triennial art events that girdle the earth, popping up from Athens to Bangkok to Cuenca to Dakar to, well—you could keep going on down through the alphabet.With the newest Documenta now open, we asked ourselves: What if you could go to every one of these biennials? What kinds of trends would you see? To answer the question, our writers looked at the artists included in hundreds of biennials curated since the last Documenta in 2017, to find out which names came up most. The answers that emerged were surprising, frankly, even to us, revealing a list of Biennial Art superstars who have dominated the conversation among curators in the last five years. These figures make art cut to fit that circuit. They even have their own means of economic support.To talk about the findings of the Biennial Art project, today we have two of our writers who worked on it in conversation: Ben Davis, our National Art Critic, and Kate Brown, our European editor. You can read the full project, which includes an extremely long list of all the artists in our data set and an essay on what it means to be a biennial artist on Artnet News. 

Kennedy Yanko is not afraid to take up space this week. This week, the Brooklyn-based sculptor unveiled her largest work yet at Art Basel, a 20 foot tall hanging sculpture titled By Means Other Than The Known Senses. The title describes how Yanko often creates her work through exploration and a whole lot of intuition. The apricots green and gray work is a tornado of cascading metal forms. At first glance, it's impossible to tell just how much it weighs since it's suspended in the air. As it turns out, it weighs a lot. It's created from a monumental shipping container that Yanko scrunched, reformed and selectively covered in paint skin. When she's done, the sculpture looks so alive, it almost feels like it's breathing.Yanko's star has been steadily rising over the past few years. Last year, she became the first sculptor to earn the coveted residency at the Rubell museum in Miami. Now she's unveiling her work at Art Basel Unlimited, the section dedicated to large scale projects at the world's most prestigious art fair ahead of the fair, which runs through Sunday. Artnet News Executive Editor Julia Halperin spoke with Kennedy from her hotel room in Switzerland.

How much can an art show do?That’s a question at the heart of documenta, the sprawling exhibition that touches down in Kassel, Germany every five years. Sometimes called a “museum in 100 days,” the show regularly draws millions of visitors from around the world. But it is far from a neutral celebration of contemporary art.Founded in 1955, the show was conceived as a way to regenerate Kassel, which was still in ruins after World War II. But it had broader political aims, too: to project West Germany’s alliance with liberal values and help spread those values to nearby East Germany during the Cold War.Since its inception, documenta has melded art and politics more than almost any other exhibition in the world. So it’s not surprising that its history has been marked by controversy. From hidden Nazi ties to funding crises, the show has stirred up dispute after dispute. And this year is no different, as the show’s curators, the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, face allegations of anti-Semitism due to the political affiliations of some of the artists included in the show.When the 15th documenta opens next week, it will present the work of more than 50 artists and collectives. Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin sat down with Europe editor Kate Brown to explore this essential show’s turbulent history—and perhaps even more turbulent present.

Not too long ago, Inigo Philbrick was one of the best-connected dealers in the art world. The son of a museum director and the protege of legendary gallerist Jay Jopling, he was often spotted at VIP previews of major art fairs and in a prominent seat at auctions around the globe. Then, in late 2019, he disappeared.As it turns out, Philbrick was the subject of mounting civil lawsuits and, ultimately, a criminal case that found he conned clients out of $85 million. Prosecutors say he committed “one of the most significant frauds in the art market in history.” He stood accused of selling shares amounting to more than 100 percent in artworks he did not own, falsifying contracts, forging signatures, and inventing fictitious clients. He pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of wire fraud in November.Last week, Philbrick’s case finally came to a close when the former wunderkind was sentenced to seven years in jail, one of the harshest sentences we’ve seen in an art-fraud case in recent memory. Artnet News senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella, who has followed this case from the very beginning, was on the scene reporting from the courtroom. She spoke with executive editor Julia Halperin about Inigo's extraordinary rise and fall.

As we all know, there's a tremendous amount of attention that's being paid lately to NFTs and their whiplash market oscillations. Are NFTs good? Bad? A flash in the pan? Here to stay? Well, there's an argument to be made that NFTs are actually at best a distraction from the real mind-blowing, totally profound technological revolution that is poised to change art as we know it forever. And that of course is the rise of AI art. So what is AI art and is artificial intelligence here to help artists or to make them obsolete?It's a big thorny question and it just so happens that there is a brilliant essay on the topic in the heart of the brand new book, by my favorite thinker on big thorny questions, Artnet News, Chief Art Critic, Ben Davis. Titled Art in The After-Culture, Ben's new book is a combination of traditional critical essays and speculative fiction. And to my mind, it is an instant classic, the kind of book filled with deep insights that will become a touchstone for future generations curious about how art functions in our. I can't overpraise it, but I can tell you that it's available from Haymarket books and that you should buy Art in The After-Culture and read it for yourself.This episode is really focused on the book’s ideas on AI art, which are a lot to chew on on their own. Ben Davis joins the show to break them down a little bit.

Today, Jean-Michel Basquiat is unquestionably one of the most recognizable and beloved artists on the planet. A native New Yorker of Haitian and Puerto Rican descent, Basquiat first attracted attention as a teenage graffiti writer in the late 1970s, before rapidly transitioning into the role of international sensation in the newly glamorous, increasingly global gallery world of the 1980s. Although the main draw was his inimitable artistic practice, which merged cryptic poetry and symbology with antic, Expressionistic figures, Basquiat quickly became a downtown celebrity of the first order, walking the runway, collaborating with musicians, and famously dating Madonna.Tragically, Basquiat died from an overdose at the age of 27. His short artistic career makes it all the more remarkable that his work and his visage seem to be everywhere in the 21st century. Of course, I’m not just talking about his actual paintings, which reliably sell for tens of millions of dollars at auction. Licensed reproductions of Basquiat’s work now fuel a wide range of products and branding opportunities, from affordable t-shirts and keychains, to an unprecedented collaboration with the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets resulting in a Basquiat-inspired home court design and team uniform.But as licensing has become a lucrative revenue stream for contemporary artists and estates, it has also intensified age-old criticisms about the corrosive powers of commercialization on creative integrity. The Basquiat estate’s approach has made Jean-Michel’s work one of the focal points of this tension, especially after the opening of “King Pleasure,” a major exhibition about the artist’s life and work now on view in Manhattan. To sort through this tangled web, Artnet News art business editor Tim Schneider spoke to market guru Katya Kazakina about her look into Basquiat and the increasingly big business of artwork licensing.