The Art Angle

You know the scene at the end of Bong Joon-ho's 2013 film Snowpiercer where they leave the hellish bullet train and see that the frozen Tundra is starting to melt and nature is coming back to life? That kind of gives you the sense of the relief that the art market is hoping to feel next week when, miracle of miracles, the Frieze New York art fair opens to real in-person audiences. This marks the first major art fair to return to life since the pandemic shut down the international art calendar, along with the rest of the world, in March of last year. After all, art fairs are, for better or worse, the lifeblood of the art industry, a place where collectors and professionals meet, greet, and do a huge chunk of their business. And they have been sorely missed. Marking a new beginning as the pandemic begins to wane, Frieze New York will also be a swan song of sorts for Loring Randolph, who has been overseeing the fair since 2017 and will now be stepping down to become the director of the Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger collection in Dallas this fall. On this week's episode, Randolph joins the podcast to discuss the fair's move from Randall's Island to the Shed, how they're preparing for an influx of art-starved VIPs, and what she has in store for the future.

The second installment of this four-part podcast miniseries features Artnet News senior writer Sarah Cascone's interview with art collector and media executive Catherine Levene. Levene's 25-year career runs the breadth of the media space, beginning at the New York Times Company in both the corporate sales realm and later as part of its burgeoning digital strategy. After obtaining her MBA, Levene ventured into media startups, and ultimately started a new company, Artspace, alongside business partner Christopher Vroom in 2011. Artspace was one of the first platforms to introduce e-commerce to the art market, and in 2014 the publishing house Phaidon bought the company, helmed by Keith Fox. In 2020, Levene was announced as the new head of media organization Meredith Corp., becoming the first female executive to lead the magazine conglomerate that includes People, InStyle, Travel + Leisure, and Cooking Light. Born in Binghamton, New York, Levene has kept a pulse on the art world, beginning a collection that she continues to build year after year.

Welcome to Shattering the Glass Ceiling, a podcast from the team at the Art Angle where we speak to boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond about how art has shaped their lives and careers. In the first episode of this four-part podcast mini series, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to Lauren Haynes, the director of artist initiatives and curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Momentary in Arkansas. In June, she will take on the role of Patsy R. and Raymond D. Nasser senior curator of contemporary art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Haynes, who was born in East Tennessee and grew up in New York, has worked in museums including the Brooklyn Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, curating distinctive and influential shows on artists like Alma Thomas and Stanley Whitney. She has worked at Crystal Bridges since 2016, where she helmed the first U.S. presentation of the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” (2018), which traveled from the U.K.

As we begin to emerge into the new realities of 2021, the challenges of the past year have made vividly clear the importance of having leaders in all areas of society who reflect the true diversity of modern life.Women, in particular, have stepped forward in ways more visible than ever before—from the history-making occupant of the White House to the scientists creating the vaccine and nurses administering it to, yes, the women shaping the art world as well.To celebrate these figures, we at the Art Angle are very happy to introduce a new special mini-series called Shattering the Glass Ceiling where we will be speaking to a group of contemporary women innovators who have become outstanding leaders in their fields, ranging from the trailblazing museum curators Lauren Haynes and Legacy Russell to the game-changing gallery owner Mariane Ibrahim to the entrepreneurial art collector and media powerhouse Catherine Levene, who, in building their impressive careers, are collectively “shattering the glass ceiling” of their chosen industry. 

This month, the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin for the death of George Floyd has brought the racial justice protests of the last summer viscerally back into the public consciousness, reigniting conversations in the news and in households everywhere about the reality of the Black experience in America. This weekend, those same conversations will also have a powerful new point of focus at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where a retrospective of the photographer Dawoud Bey presents his magisterial exploration of the subject, in the form of his penetrating portraits of Black lives from all points on the national compass. Ranging in registers from jubilation to agony, to ingenious self-invention, to blissed-out hope, the show is curated by Elizabeth Sherman and SFMoMA curator Corey Keller. Open through October 3, 2021, the show is titled "An American Project" and it is a project that is very much still in the works. It so happens that this is a very big year for Dawoud Bey. The winner of a 2017 MacArthur "genius" grant and a professor at Columbia College in Chicago, the artist has already been the subject of two other retrospectives in his 46-year career, but this one at the Whitney is not only his largest, it's also one of the largest surveys of a Black American photographer ever. If that's not enough, his work is also currently featured in the New Museum's staging of the final exhibition of the late curator Okwui Enwezor, "Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America." On this week's episode, Bey joins Andrew Goldstein by Zoom to discuss how his childhood and early exposure to work by African Americans informed his interest in photography, his ongoing collaboration with David Hammons, and what he hopes visitors will take away from the Whitney exhibition.

Art shows are a thing again! At least in New York, at least for now, and at least in the socially distanced way that we've come to see as normal. But it's really great news for the art museum-going crowd. And it's even better news that some of the shows on view are really, really good. Without question, one of the buzziest shows of the season is the Brooklyn Museum's sweeping survey of the street artist and late capitalism prodigy known as KAWS, one of the most popular artists in the world. So, is his show really, really good? What's the deal with KAWS anyway? We decided to ask Artnet News chief art critic Ben Davis, who saw the show and wrote a review of it with the arresting title "Why KAWS’s Global Success May Well Be a Symptom of a Depressed Culture, Adrift in Nostalgia and Retail Therapy." On this week's episode we dive into the social-media, fast-fashion, luxury-object, street-artist fever dream that helped propel Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, to superstardom.

Amazingly enough, it's now the spring of 2021. That means the weather is warming, the grass is greening, and the little buds are drinking in the cool rain. But more to the point, it means that we've made it through the terrible pandemic winter and are emerging into a strange new world that is very much changed after a full year under the shadow of the coronavirus. In the art industry, normality is still far in the distance, but we've learned a whole slew of lessons that have perhaps made us better adapted for the future ahead. What those changes have been and what those lessons might be are the subject of Artnet News's brand-new spring edition of the Intelligence Report, which mines reams of auction results from the Artnet Price Database, along with dozens of interviews with art professionals, to explain the state of the art world, from auction houses to galleries, appraisers, and collectors. So what did we learn? This week, esteemed editor of the Intelligence Report Julia Halperin joins us for an analysis of the data, and what that means for the future.

As we all now know, NFTs are the talk of the art world these days—they're everywhere. It's gotten to the point where you can't have a simple conversation with someone without them bringing up NFTs, or trying to turn the conversation in that direction. Due to an unusually hectic few weeks on the work and home fronts, our illustrious host, Andrew Goldstein, has been hunkered down at home with his wife as they prepare to welcome their first baby to the world, and has managed to drown out the oceanic wave of NFT news, and came into this week's episode cold. Fortunately, here at Artnet News, we are blessed with an able Virgil to guide our dimwitted Dante through the purgatory of NFTs in the form of art business editor Tim Schneider, who has become something of an expert on the subject. Tim will help break down what exactly an NFT is, why we should care, and what it could mean for the future of the art market.

This month, as the world limps its way toward spring and, hopefully, a gradual return of normality, the Brooklyn Museum has opened a show called “Lorraine O’Grady: Both/And” that provides valuable fodder for thought in the year ahead. As the title suggests, it’s a career retrospective of the venerated performance and experimental artist Lorraine O’Grady, who for more than 40 years has created poetic, hard-to-classify works that probe questions of inclusion and identity in a way that has had a deep, orienting impact on a whole rising generation. Admirers are quick to point to the power of her writing as well, perhaps particularly “Olympia’s Maid," her classic 1992 essay considering the flattening of Black female sexuality in art history. It so happens that Ben Davis, our chief art critic, has been one of these admirers for a long time, and he recently sat down with the artist in the run-up to her retrospective to discuss her career, how her upbringing in Boston’s Caribbean-American community shaped her art, what it was like to go viral when the Biden administration paid homage to her work in a post-election ad, and much more.

In fall 2019, a new app called ImageNet Roulette was introduced to the world with what seemed like a simple, fun premise: snap a selfie, upload it to a database, and wait a few seconds for machine learning to tell you what type of person you are. Maybe a "teacher," maybe a "pilot," maybe even just a "woman." Or maybe, as the app's creator warned, the labels the system tagged you with would be shockingly racist, misogynistic, or misanthropic. Frequently, the warning turned out to be prescient, and the app immediately went viral thanks to its penchant for slurs and provocative presumptions. Long since decommissioned, ImageNet Roulette was part of a larger initiative undertaken by artist Trevor Paglen and artificial intelligence researcher Kate Crawford to expose the latent biases coded into the massive data sets informing a growing number of A.I. systems. It was only the latest light that Paglen's work had shined onto the dark underbelly of our image-saturated, technology-mediated world. Even beyond his Ph.D. in geography and his MacArthur "Genius" grant, Paglen's resume is unique among his peers on blue-chip gallery rosters. He's photographically infiltrated CIA black sites, scuba-dived through labyrinths of undersea data cables, launched art into space, and collaborated with NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden, all as a means of making innovative art that brings into focus the all-but-invisible power structures governing contemporary life. On this week's (re-aired) episode of The Art Angle, Paglen joins Andrew Goldstein by phone to discuss his adventurous career.