The Art Angle

Discover the fascinating analysis of the NFT platform Foundation and its implications for crypto art. Explore the intersection of art and scientific research and the importance of visually representing complex networks. Learn about the motivation behind working with crypto and NFTs in the art space. Compare the platforms Super Rare and Foundation for NFT artists. Delve into the transparent process of getting invited to Foundation and the impact of follower count on artist earnings. Explore the fluctuation of prices in the NFT art space and the relationship between an artist's reputation and their artwork prices.

These days as contemporary art continues to pervade pop culture, there are art stars i.e. the talents who captivate the attention of art professionals. And then there are superstars, the handful of figures who have broken through to legitimate actual fame, winning a spot in the minds of the public at large. If you ask me the most appealing of all of these titans is Marina Abramovic. The high priestess of performance art whose unforgettable work plumbs eternal, profound themes of life and death whose impact on art history is huge and undeniable, but who is nonetheless in person just a lovely, brilliant, hilarious, vivacious human being. Given her biography that might not be what you'd expect. Growing up the child of two emotionally Cold War hero parents in Belgrade, she developed a particularly arduous strain of performance art, and fought an uphill battle for most of her astonishing five decade career in an art world that gave practically no support institutional or financial to her chosen medium of performance.Her closest artistic collaborator, her long-time lover Ulay, betrayed her in spectacular fashion in a way that has entered art history and then after they reconciled years later, sued her. But despite all of this, when success came such as with her 1997 Golden Lion win at the Venice Biennale and then her blockbuster, 2010 survey at MoMA, what has been most palpable is her enormous enjoyment of her career and its accomplishments.Now, that career is about to once again be surveyed in an oeuvre spanning show at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York.

Right now at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, there's an exhibition of paintings on view that might remind you of the postwar abstractions of painters like Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin, who made a virtue of empty space and muted palettes.The difference is that the paintings at the Guggenheim today are not just meant to be looked at and admired. No, they are meant to be listened to—and that's because the artist, Jennie C. Jones makes art that is as aural as it is visual, building her compositions directly onto acoustic panels, her signature material in order to shape the sound of the rooms in which they are installed.For Jones, this barely perceptible effect is a way of paying deep homage to the black architects of mid-century avant-garde music, such as free jazz pioneers who turned strategic silence into a statement. "Listening" Jones has said, "is a conceptual practice all on its own." .On the occasion of the exhibition, which is called "Dynamics" and acts as a mid-career survey of the artist's unique body of work, Artnet News’s features writer Taylor Dafoe met Jones at her studio in Hudson, New York, where they talked about embracing gesture, John Coltrane, and the artist’s own upstream path to recognition.

It's Black History Month, and we wanted to take the opportunity to devote this episode to the story of a Black museum leader.We know that people of color have historically been excluded from positions of power in the mainstream art world, but that's not the full story. In many cases, Black people were present, only their contributions were not properly recorded or acknowledged.What if you were told that one of the most famous museums in America was in fact headed by a Black visionary? That's the case with the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, which was founded in 1906 to house the collection of the legendary Wall Street tycoon John Pierpont Morgan. That collection was amassed and overseen by Belle Da Costa Greene, a brilliant scholar and bon vivant, who we now know was Black, and passed as white for her entire adult life.So, how did that happen, and who was Belle DaCosta Greene, the woman who built Morgan's peerless collection, which includes renowned illuminated medieval manuscripts, three Gutenberg Bibles, original scores by Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin, and prints and drawings by Leonardo and other Renaissance artists? To find out, we spoke with Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, the authors of The Personal Librarian, a sensational novel about Belle’s life, on this week's episode.

If you were out and about in 1984, you might have noticed a striking poster wheatpasted everywhere. It featured two heroic silhouettes pulling down a statue, clearly avatars of the People topping the icon of a hated political dictator. But instead of a statue of a man in uniform, they were bringing down an image of a huge banana.If you were an art fan you might also recognize the signature of Claes Oldenburg, one of the most famous Pop artists. But whereas Oldenburg was best known for playful, giant-sized sculptures of everyday objects, this giant banana had a clear and outspoken message of political solidarity: the term “banana republic” comes from the bad governments of Central America that the U.S. propped up at the behest of its fruit corporations. And the U.S. was once again intervening in Central America."Installation view, Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities at Tufts University Art Galleries, 2022. Peter Harris Photography."[/caption]Oldenburg’s memorable lithograph was one image associated with the "Artists’ Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America." And it is one of a huge number of artworks and artifacts relating to this intense early-’80s moment of artist organizing that have just gone on view at Tufts University Art Galleries in the show “Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities.”The ’80s are remembered as a time of political conservatism and yuppie excess. But it was also the height of the late Cold War machinations. The Ronald Reagan administration’s backing of death squads and repression of left-wing movements in places like Nicaragua and El Salvador is one of its darkest chapters. A robust Central American solidarity movement across the United States in the early ’80s organized to defend refugees and decry the U.S.’s backing of the brutality.The Artists Call was inspired and in dialogue with this wave of public activity, an attempt to use art’s clout to raise money and to reach an influential public. Involving figures including the Salvadoran poet and exile Daniel Flores y Ascencio, the curator and artist Coosje van Breuggen, and the famed art critic Lucy Lippard, the Artists Call was an organizing network that brought together, as Lippard remembers, “young and old, Latin, Central, and North American, lefties and liberals, artists working in a broad spectrum of styles.” Emerging from the discussions around a show by the art collective Group Material dedicated to Central American activism in 1982, the Artists’ Call would ultimately inspire participation from thousands of artists, including Vito Acconci, Louise Bourgeois, Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Ana Mendieta, and Cecilia Vicuña.Yet despite the high-profile names it rallied and the recent interest in historical models of artist activism, the Artists’ Call has been little remembered until now. On this week's episode, Ben Davis, Artnet News’s chief art critic, had the chance to talk about the Artists Call with the curators of “Art for the Future”: Erina Duganne and Abigail Satinsky, as well as Lucy Lippard herself.

This week’s story begins with an art purchase made like so many others... .A collector notices his peers talking up an artwork on Instagram, so he messages the artist’s dealer and makes a purchase. In this case, there was just one problem: neither the collector peers nor the artist actually exist.That fateful transaction is just the tip of the iceberg of a broader scheme: someone (quite possibly a group of people) created fake social media profiles for jet-setting Italian collectors to promote a fake artist—and ended up making real money in the process.The tale reveals just how easy it is to play the part of an art-world sophisticate, and how little we tend to know about the person on the other end of the line.On this week's episode, Artnet News Europe Editor Kate Brown joins Executive Editor Julia Halperin to discuss the story she wrote about catfishing collectors, fake artists, and the twisted tale that had her chasing ghosts all over the web.

Yesterday, a sumptuous portrait of a woman with a confident regard and rouged cheeks, porcelain skin, and a powdered up do reminiscent of cool whip, hit the block at Sotheby's auction house. Titled Portrait of a Lady as Pomona by the 18th century French artists Nicholas de Largilliere, the painting was less notable as a market event than for what it sale meant to its sellers. The sellers, in this case, being the twenty heirs of Jules Strauss, a pioneering German art collector.In 2014, one of his great granddaughters Pauline Baer De Perignon began investigating the fate of his beloved artworks during World War II, including pieces by the likes of Renoir, Monet, Degas and Tiepolo. As a Jew living in Paris, Jules Strauss, like so many others of his religion faced persecution under the German occupation. While he avoided deportation, Strauss' forced to hand over a still unknown number of works to the Nazis, an ugly truth that Pauline's family chose to forget for decades.Lady as Pomona, it so happens is the first painting from his collection to be restituted to the family. And that's thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of Pauline, detailed in her new book, The Vanished Collection. In the run-up to this week's auction, we were pleased to welcome Pauline to The Art Angle to talk to Artnet News senior writer, Sarah Cascone about the challenges of tracking downloaded art, sifting through archival records and what the quest for restitution and justice means to the families of those who lost everything during the Holocaust. 

If, perhaps, someone in a trench coat who was smoking a pipe and had a gigantic eyeball for a head were to approach you a street on a particularly sunny night and ask you what surrealism was, you'd probably answer by throwing out a few names—Salvator Dalí, Man Ray, Frida Kahlo—and you wouldn't be wrong.But what if that strange interlocutor were to tell you that everything you know about surrealism is in fact, just the tip of a very large iceberg? And that this lastingly popular movement stretched in fact, far beyond Paris, far beyond Europe, to every corner of the globe, and to countless fascinating artists who you've never heard of before? Well that, in a sense, is exactly what an extraordinary and frankly revelatory exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is doing right now.Titled "Surrealism Beyond Borders," the exhibition, organized by Met curator Stephanie D'Alessandro together with Tate curator Matthew Gale and closing at the end of this month makes it plain that the riveting story of surrealism has hardly begun to be told, and it's lessons are shockingly relevant to a lot of the biggest debates of our present day. To discuss what we should know about the show and what it changes about the history of art, chief critic Ben Davis joins the podcast to discuss this week.

Everyone knows the dirty little secret of the dog-eat-dog art market, which is that while an artist creates the artwork, the vast majority of the value of that artwork is created—and captured—by others, from the 50 percent that goes to the dealer to the multiples made by the collectors who flip if the artist gets hot.But what if there was a way for artists to protect themselves from this kind of exploitation, by banding together and pooling their art together into a fund to provide a safety net against the vicissitudes of the market, where all artists—hot and not alike—benefit from the rising values of rising stars? Well, something like that does exist, and it’s called the Artist Pension Trust, which since 2004 has enlisted hundreds of artists behind this common cause.The only catch? It is apparently too good to be true—at least if you go by the maelstrom of threats of lawsuits, recriminations, and accusations that have sprang up around the trust in recent years. So, what went wrong with the utopian project of the Artist Pension Trust? And who is behind it, anyway?To find out, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to reporter Catherine Wagley about her recent investigation into the one art fund everyone wanted to root for. Enjoy the conversation, and for the full story, check out Catherine’s riveting two-part series on Artnet.

Here we are, at the beginning of a new year, a time that, at least in the past, used to be full of hope and anticipation, but after the last two years requires a deep breath and a brace for impact. But, there are still many fascinating and encouraging developments underway all around us, and there's an awful lot to be grateful for. We're all grateful to work alongside an authentically magical human being, known to mere mortals as Tim Schneider, Artnet News's art business editor.As longtime listeners know, Tim undergoes a mystical transformation at the beginning of every new year to become a soothsayer capable of peering into the future to see what the months ahead hold for the art industry. Tim recently published his prognostications on Artnet News Pro, and this week he joins Andrew Goldstein to break out a few of the most pressing predictions he made, from Beeple's potential gallery representation to the future of art fairs amidst the ongoing pandemic.