The Art Angle

The Jamaican-born, Harlem-based artist Nari Ward was barely out of his 20s when he exploded onto the New York art scene in 1993 with Amazing Grace, an extraordinary installation of 300 baby strollers he found abandoned around Harlem. The work, installed in a dimly lit former firehouse, resonated with audiences as a startling and humble commentary on the seemingly endless crises plaguing New York: the AIDS and crack epidemics, rampant homelessness, racial violence, and a city on edge after the Crown Heights and City Hall riots.In the nearly 30 years since, Ward has maintained his role as one of our mourners-in-chief, and his latest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin in Chelsea is no exception.The show, titled “I’ll Take You There; A Proclamation,” again taps into musical and cultural history to offer a dignified yet sobering reflection on the Covid pandemic and its devastating fallout of economic inequality, political instability, and profound loss. More than anything, the brilliant new exhibition, which continues Ward’s use of refuse and discarded objects, picked up around the streets of the city, suggests that none of us—not even Ward—knows exactly where we’re headed next.To get a sense of the show, we called in Artnet News managing editor Pac Pobric to get the artist’s take on his remarkable new work.

Get your paddles ready: New York is about to kick off what may be the biggest auction season ever. Over the next two weeks, as much as $2.6 billion worth of art is expected to be sold across glitzy evening sales at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips. The offerings include a sage-blue portrait of Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol that could bring in over $200 million, a billboard-size Basquiat that could fetch $70 million, and Richters, Picassos, and Rothkos galore.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.

At long last, this week the 59th Venice Biennale has officially thrown itself open to the world in Italy. The Biennale is always a big event for the art world. The 2022 edition may be even more anticipated than usual. Because of the pandemic, it was delayed a year—the first time that has happened since World War II. And it emerges in a moment of global turmoil and uneasiness, when everyone is wondering how art might respond to the challenges of the present.The Artnet News team was on the scene last week for the Biennale previews, cranking out news reports from around Venice you can find on the site, including reports from the many national pavilions. But as listeners of the Art Angle will know, the big event of the Biennale is the main show, curated this year by New York-based Italian art curator Cecilia Alemani. Alemani was on the podcast a few weeks ago to talk about her vision. Now we get to see whether she pulled it off.The exhibition carries the dreamy title “The Milk of Dreams,” and it is full of dream-like images, references to myth and magic, beasts and cyborgs, and mystery. It is notable in being almost entirely composed of women or gender non-nonconforming artists. This Biennale is also notable for how it rethinks the past—normally a survey of new trends in art, this year the Biennale includes 5 special mini-exhibitions, shows-within-the-show that look at how female figures from the past explored the themes of "The Milk of Dreams." In effect, Alemani is writing a new art historical timeline to insert her work into.There’s a lot to talk about in this ambitious and complex Venice Biennale. To do so, we have assembled a panel of people who were in Venice. National Art Critic Ben Davis is joined by Emmanuel Balogan and Barbara Calderon, both of who are writing about aspects of the 2022 Biennale for Artnet News. 

So want to buy a Picasso? No, it's too expensive? Want to buy a teensy-weensy, tiny little microscopic flack of a Picasso? That sounds better, doesn't it? Believe it or not, that kind of sales pitch is actually gaining traction in a big way. In the wild world of fractional art sales, where massive new startup companies are buying up the bluest of blue chip art, think Basquiat, Joan Mitchell and Ed Ruscha, and selling what are essentially shares in these pieces to speculative investors.It's rapidly becoming a big business. But what you do you actually get if you buy a share in a painting, how does it work and what is it really worth? Artnet News, Senior Reporter, Katya Kazakina, author of the incredible Art Detective column joins this episode to talk about her new in-depth report on fractional art funds for the spring edition of the Artnet News Pro Intelligence Report, which just dropped last week.

It's biennial season in a big bi-annual year. The Toronto Biennial just opened, the Venice Biennale opens next week, and around the corner are the German heavyweights, the Berlin Biennale and documenta—which is actually a quinquennial, but who's quibbling.This would be an exciting time in any year, but in 2022, it has the added dimension of being the first time that the world's art community will be able to get together with a ton of important new work in person after these past two pandemic years, as Cecilia Alemani, the curator of this years Venice Biennale, recently discussed on this very podcast. This episode is dedicated to another sprawling show near and dear to our hearts that opened earlier this month. Of course, it's the Whitney Biennial, a signature offering of the Whitney Museum of American Art, where it tries to live up to its full name by taking a snapshot of what the country's artists have been making, thinking, and feeling. Artnet News, chief art critic, Ben Davis joins to shed some light on this very ambitious, very interesting show.

Just around one year ago, two literary bros from Miami decided to launch a business venture. It was a couple weeks after Beeple’s Everydays had sold for $69 million at Christie’s and NFTs were taking the art world by storm. Still, few could have guessed at the time that their little company, called Yuga Labs, would produce a series of cartoon apes that would become some of the most successful—and divisive—characters in the entire NFT universe."It's hard to justify that a Bored Ape NFT is worth $300,000 based on the art... they're cartoon apes" says crypto journalist Amy Castor. "They're cute, you know, but is it worth that kind of money?" For many regular people, and a whole host of celebrities, the answer is yes.Today, Yuga Labs has more than 60 employees and more than $2 billion in total sales. Over the past few weeks, it has gone on a tear announcing new initiatives, from the acquisition of CryptoPunks and Meebits, arguably the two other most popular NFT series, to the launch of Apecoin, its own brand of cryptocurrency. Larva Labs now hopes to create what is essentially a Marvel universe from all this intellectual property—and make a lot of money along the way.But Castor, for one, says that Yuga Labs's recent acquisitions are antithetical to the core tenets that NFT evangelists tout. "The whole idea about NFTs is that they're supposed to be decentralized. It's not supposed to be one outfit having control of the top three most expensive NFT projects" she says. "They've created a perceived value out of thin air so that they can then monetize that brand."Its strategy shows us what the future of the NFT space might look like. But it remains unclear whether this future will benefit everyday NFT collectors and enthusiasts as much as the big investors and founders of companies like Yuga Labs.To unpack the wild and winding story of Yuga Labs and the Bored Ape Yacht Club, executive editor Julia Halperin spoke with Amy Castor, who chronicled the rise of this phenomenon on Artnet News. 

We're sharing a special preview of a podcast I’ve been enjoying, Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso, from Pushkin Industries. Talk Easy is a weekly interview podcast, where writer Sam Fragoso invites actors, writers, activists, and politicians to come to the table and speak from the heart in ways you probably haven't heard from them before. Driven by curiosity, he’s had revealing conversations with everyone from George Saunders and Cate Blanchett to Ocean Vuong and Gloria Steinem. In this preview, Sam talks with visual artist Toyin Ojih Odutola about visiting Nigeria, creating the subjects in her new book, and feeling alive. You can listen to Talk Easy at https://podcasts.pushkin.fm/talkeasyangle. 

This April, after a punishing two years apart during the pandemic, the whole art community will gather together on the magical watery isle of Venice for its periodic ritual assessment of what the world's finest artists have been thinking about and making to grapple with our changing world. They call this climactic event, the Venice Biennale and each time it has presided over by a visionary figure whose role it has been to transmute the work of all these artists into a coherent statement about our time. This year, that exalted figure is named Cecilia Alemani. Cecilia is a professional art curator, whose day job is curating art for New York's Highline. The Venice Biennale is just a big exhibition, but the show always has an aura of the religious about it, where we get to commune with the biggest and best ideas floating around the globe.This time around, the globe is in rare and urgent need of big ideas with existential crises, raging all around us that need to be understood and reckoned with now. So can this year's edition of the Venice Biennale help? To find out, we welcome Cecilia Alemani to the show to talk about her big exhibition, which is beautifully titled the Milk of Dreams.

In August 2021, the world watched in horror as U.S. troops withdrew, and the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan, with over 600,000 displaced people fleeing the country since last January, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency. Among the many groups threatened by the Taliban's rule are artists, with the fundamentalist government viewing freedom of artistic expression as a threat to the Islamic faith. Fearing for their lives, some artists have felt compelled to destroy or censor their own work, or to seek asylum outside Afghanistan.For curators Barbara Pollack and Anne Verhallen, the crisis provided an opportunity for their arts organization, Art at a Time Like This, to help raise awareness of the plight of Afghan artists. The two had started the platform in March, 2020 as a way of staging both online and in-person exhibitions in response to lockdown restrictions following the outbreak of COVID-19.To organize the virtual show "Before Silence: Afghan Artists In Exile," the two partnered with the PEN America affiliated non-profit Artists at Risk Connection to bring together the work of nine Afghan artists now dispersed around the world. To learn more about the situation faced by these brave creatives, Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone spoke with Julie Trebault, director of the Artists at Risk Connection at PEN America; Alexandra Xanthaki, the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights; and Shamayel Shalizi, an Afghan artist currently living in Berlin.https://artatatimelikethis.com/before-silence

On February 24, just three short weeks before this recording the world as we knew it was utterly upended by the Russian army’s invasion of the Eastern European nation of Ukraine.Spurred on by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dream of restoring a quasi-mythical version of the Russian empire, the assault has unleashed devastating carnage, widespread damage, and a complex political and socioeconomic crisis whose effects have been rippling around the globe ever since. Yet stories of breathtaking heroism and selflessness have also emerged from the fog of war, and the indomitable spirit of the Ukrainian people has won hearts and minds across continents, leading millions in the West to stand in solidarity with them.As in any armed conflict, however, culture can become collateral damage. Putin’s war machine has already inflicted irreversible harm on some of Ukraine’s most cherished museums, heritage sites, and it is threatening to do the same to the country’s vibrant homegrown art scene. But as with the rest of the nation, that art scene has much more fight in it than most outsiders knew. To tell this story of resistance, Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown spoke with two key cultural figures who are based in the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv, and who have stayed behind to counter this crisis in the ways that they can.