The Art Angle

The story of the Benin Bronzes is one of the bloodier, more shameful chapters in the history of the Western world’s "encyclopedic" museums. Looted from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897 by the British in a punitive raid whose indiscriminate slaughter and wanton cruelty inspired The Hague Convention two years later, the artworks are today scattered across art institutions and ethnographic museums in Europe and the United States—a stain on the Western conscience that is ensanguined with the sins of colonialism. Recently, the Oxford professor and Pitt Rivers Museum curator Dan Hicks wrote a book about this history called The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution, and last week he joined the podcast to speak about the horrific events that led to the artworks leaving Africa. This week, we present part two of the episode, to discuss the urgency of righting this colonial crime and the status of the Bronzes’ restitution today.

For decades, one of the most urgent moral debates in the museum world has revolved around restitution, with art institutions around the world facing demands that masterworks in their collections be returned, either to countries like Greece and Italy who say that the treasures in question had been looted by tomb robbers, or to descendants of Jews who had been robbed by the Nazis. Today, the restitution question is as hotly debated as ever—what has changed, however, is that now the source countries that are demanding the returns are in Africa, and the looting at issue had been carried out by Britain and other European powers across the bloody years of colonialism, whose horrors remain obscured by the hagiographic official histories of the era. Now, a new book is cutting through the Gordian knot of restitution with an argument of bracing moral clarity, showing the West’s great quote-unquote “universal” museums to be complicit in a history of ongoing atrocities. It’s called “The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution,” and it’s by Dan Hicks, professor of contemporary archeology at Oxford. As its title suggests, the book focuses on a particular incident of looting—the seizure of thousands of artworks from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897—and it is a history that should really be known around the world. To delve into the ongoing saga of the Benin Bronzes, Dan Hicks is on the show today for a two-part episode: first, to discuss the tragic story of the looting of the Kingdom and, second, the fate these magnificent objects are facing today.

Shockingly enough, we are now coming up on the one year anniversary of the lockdown of the United States. At this point last year, a creeping dread had begun to blanket the globe. And then in March it happened: COVID hit the East Coast and fanned out across the country, and within weeks whole areas of society were slammed shut like windows during a hurricane. In the art world, as everywhere else, the costs of the closures were immediately palpable with widespread furloughs and job cuts across the sector, enormous projected financial pain, and predictions of museums and galleries alike going dark for good. Facing this economic catastrophe, many pundits in the art world quickly looked back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, and in particular, the Works Progress Administration for inspiration on how to meet the moment today. With Joe Biden in the White House, hopes for such an ambitious federal project have peaked. But do we really understand the lessons of the New Deal's art projects? And are they really the example we should be looking to today? To discuss, Artnet News's chief art critic Ben Davis joins the podcast to flesh out the triumphs and failures of the past, and help us understand what needs to happen in the future.

In case you’ve forgotten—in which case, shame on you!—Valentine’s Day is right around the corner again, and we here at the Art Angle are all atwitter.We just love love, particularly when it comes to art history, which is about as full of steamy, sensational, and downright scandalous love affairs as your heart could desire. Luckily, Artnet News just so happens to be equipped with an expert on this subject in Katie White, a journalist who knows an alarming amount about the love lives of the artists—the fascinating affairs, marriages, breakups, and obsessions that shaped the course of art history as we know it. From Salvador and Gala Dalí’s tumultuous trip to the enduring admiration between Jacob Lawrence and Gwendolyn Knight, these liaisons helped shape the course of art history. So slip into something more comfortable, I am very happy to have Katie on the show today because to talk about five of the art world’s most riveting romantic entanglements.

It’s no secret that today we live in a world of dizzying, gobsmacking, and ever-intensifying complexity. Everything from the computers we carry in our pockets to the vaccines fighting the pandemic to the global networks that underpin our economies rely on such astonishing labyrinths of complexity that any one element requires a team of experts to really make sense of it—and that’s not even to mention the complexity of our natural universe, which only grows more intricate, not less, the more we learn about it. One way to deal with this very confusing state of affairs is to pretend it doesn’t exist, or reach after comforting conspiracy theories, as people have since the birth of religion at the dawn of time. The artist Perry Chen prefers to take this complexity head on—to really get in there and wrassle with it, making art that looks at this epistemological phenomenon from all angles. He just so happens to be particularly well-versed in the complexity of our digitally networked reality, too, since in addition to being an artist he’s also the founder and now chairman of Kickstarter, the hit crowdfunding company that has given rise to countless new inventions and creative projects, and distributes more cultural funding than the NEA. Now, Perry has a new exhibition of his art that has just opened at the venerable Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi, called “Perpetual Novelty,” and as usual it’s all about complexity. He’s also accompanying the show with a new podcast series on that theme, with the first episode a conversation with Walter Isaacson, the great biographer of Steve Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci. 

Right now, one of the most talked-about issues at hand for members of the international workforce is: what comes next? For those of us fortunate enough to work from home, will we persist in our pajama-wearing state forever? When, and how, will we ever return to high-rise offices, riding elevators packed like sardines, and casually sharing the same air as thousands of other commuters on public transportation?This question, among many others, is on the mind of the Italian-born curator Paola Antonelli, who currently serves as senior curator of the department of architecture and design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In her position, Antonelli has organized exhibitions that run the gamut from using nontraditional materials to imagine a more sustainable world, as in the forward-thinking show “Neri Oxman: Material Ecology,” and probed the use and meaning of clothing in “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” She’s also acquired video games, including Pac-Man and Tetris for the museum, and displayed a vial of sweat as part of a show titled “Design and Violence.” On this week’s episode, Antonelli calls in from her home in Manhattan to discuss everything from augmented reality to outdoor dining, and offers an invaluable perspective on how design theory and objects can help us survive, and even thrive, in the future.

When he was just 12 years old, Daniel Arsham had a near-death experience. Living in Florida with his parents, Hurricane Andrew struck in 1992, careening across the coastal state and taking with it Arsham's family house—ripping the roof off, tearing the walls apart at the seams, and sending pink fluffy insulation flying. The house was rebuilt soon after, but the traumatic experience and ensuing weeks of living in a "pre-civilization" state left an indelible imprint on Arsham. The idea of collapsing the past and present, and the formative role architecture played in his understanding of the world, has helped shape Arsham's creative practice, which he describes as fictional archaeology. In his most celebrated series, "Future Relics," Arsham casts objects of commercialism and contemporary society as fragments of an already obsolete time. Along with Alex Mustonen, Arsham founded the irreverently titled group Snarkitechture, and began collaborating with fashion brands like Dior (working with both Hedi Slimane and Kim Jones), KITH, and Adidas, as well as Merce Cunningham and illustrator Hajime Sorayama. Having successfully skated across the boundaries that define genres of art, Arsham's newest gig as creative director of his hometown basketball team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, signaled his supremacy in pop culture. On this week's episode of the Art Angle, Arsham called in from his New York studio to discuss his unlikely story, and what comes next.

No one could have foreseen the giant boomerang of a year that was 2020. With its trifecta of health, financial, and social crises, it could not have been predicted by even the most studied of sages. No, not even Artnet News's resident forecaster, art business editor Tim Schneider. But that didn't stop Tim from embarking on his annual tradition, formulating highly specific predictions for the art market in the coming 365 days. In the early days of 2021—before the angry mob of protestors stormed the Capitol, inciting a riot and leading to the historic second impeachment of President Trump; before we knew Kim and Kanye were heading toward divorce—Tim peered into his crystal ball to make some informed prognostications about the art market. On this week's episode, Tim joins Andrew Goldstein to discuss everything from museum deaccessioning to the biggest changes in store for galleries.

Right now, more than 2 million people are living behind bars in prisons across America. California's San Quentin Prison is currently at 117 percent capacity. And with the coronavirus pandemic running rampant, many prisoners are in immediate danger. These problems are a major preoccupation of Rahsaan "New York" Thomas, the co-host of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated Ear Hustle podcast, co-founder of Prison Renaissance (which connects prisoners to people outside), contributor to multiple national news outlets, and staff writer at the San Quentin News. Thomas has also just curated his first exhibition, “Meet Us Quickly: Painting for Justice From Prison," an online exhibition on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. He is also serving a sentence of 55 years to life in San Quentin. On this week's episode, Thomas calls in from San Quentin to discuss how art and empathy can transform perspectives on the penal system, from inside and out.

As 2020 draws to a close, the Art Angle team is taking some time off to reboot for the new year and prepare for a lineup of exciting new episodes. In the meantime, we've prepared this throwback from April, which is one of our favorite episodes of the year. In his 2019 essay "The Art of Dying," acclaimed critic Peter Schjeldahl describes Patsy Cline's voice as "attending selflessly to the sounds and the senses of the words... consummate." The same could be said about Schjeldahl's incomparable writing about art, most notably during his 22 years (and counting) as the art critic for the New Yorker. And no one expected this outcome less than Schjeldahl himself. A Midwest native who beamed to New York at the dawn of the 1960s with little more than a high-school diploma, Schjeldahl was an aspiring poet who began reviewing exhibitions to pay the bills. More than five decades later, he is almost universally regarded as one of the most respected and beloved art critics alive. His signature first-person reckonings with art—several examples of which were recently collected in his latest book, Hot, Cold, Heavy, Light: 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018—balance accessibility, lyricism, and wit in a style that he has been painstakingly refining for nearly six decades. Schjeldahl hasn't always led a charmed life. Over the course of the past year, he experienced an almost unbelievable series of misfortunes. First, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and given just six months to live; next, the apartment in the East Village he shared for 47 years with his wife, Brooke, caught fire and took his papers with it; and most recently, of course, the Schjeldahls were forced into lockdown along with much of the rest of humanity by the global health crisis. Yet the tide recently turned in Schjeldahl's favor: miraculously, his cancer is in remission thanks to treatment. His brush with the end has also enriched his perspective on art and life in new ways, which the inimitable writer was gracious enough to discuss in a phone conversation with Artnet News's own renowned critic, Ben Davis, from his country home in the Catskills. On this week's episode, Andrew Goldstein gives the floor to the critics for a free-wheeling, candid, and refreshingly upbeat conversation about subjects ranging from the intellectual gymnastics of art reviewing, to the chaotic '60s art scene in New York, to why you can't really understand Rembrandt before age 40. It's an indelible reminder of why no one else has ever done it quite like Schjeldahl—and why no one else ever will.