The Art Angle

If you follow the mainstream art world, you will know that for the last decade, one of the biggest stories has been a boom in new kinds of figurative painting. A visit to the recent spate of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing down, but nothing stays unchanged forever, and trend-watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge.Artnet News’s European editor Kate Brown has an essay out where she brings together a some recent examples to speculate about a possible new wrinkle in the story of contemporary art right now. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word that Kate uses to describe what she’s seeing is hypersentimentalism.This is art that trades in knowingly-stylized or lightly-romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate connections, and a veiled but also self-conscious attention to the art scene itself as a subject. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to hear about where she sees this new trend at play, and even more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be causing the drift toward this particular direction.

At the end of the year, it's become something of a tradition for people in all corners of the Internet to review the last 12 months and take a look to the future with a sort of "micro-forecast." The original idea of an "Ins and Outs" list began at the Washington Post in the 1970s, and is now a global sensation. Here at Artnet, we decided to try our hand at a sort of list of our own, and tapped senior editor Kate Brown, national art critic Ben Davis, and columnist Annie Armstrong to weigh in on some of the more polarizing trends that came and went in 2023. Our biggest takeaway? There's not a whole lot of consensus out there, but we did our best. From the state of the art market to the new brand of shoes everyone seems to be wearing in our little corner of the art world, here's our take on the much beloved tradition.

"Art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness."That's a quote from the great Bauhaus textile artist Anni Albers that gets shared a lot, and is especially relevant for this week's episode of the podcast on the subject of art and joy. It's actually a little bit unclear what Albers means when she says that "art is a different kind of happiness," different from what? While many websites and even an art fair have borrowed this turn of phrase, it's difficult to find the original source. But the sort of fuzziness of the origins of the quote is perhaps symbolic of the subject itself. Art and happiness seem obvious enough—art gives people pleasure. People like art, looking at art, being surrounded by art, and talking about art. These things are all part of the definition of a life that is rewarding.But if you look closer to idea that art is happiness, it becomes more slippery, because most of what is considered important art is actually quite serious. The notion of art = happiness might even sound low-brow to a lot of listeners, conjuring up the PBS painter Bob Ross cooing that there are "no mistakes, only happy accidents." Comedies, too, rarely make the cut when it comes to awards for best picture or lists of all-time great films, and that's because art that takes emotions like fear, loneliness, or anger, and puts them in a form where we are compelled to look at and reckon with them. After all, that is one classical idea of what good art does—the Greek philosopher Aristotle's idea of art as catharsis. Or maybe the idea of happiness in art is considered lowbrow because it's corrupted by commerce. Getting back to that Anni Albers quote, it turns out to be from a 1968 interview with the artist for the Smithsonian's Archive of American Art, in which she's being asked about the value of craft. She says that she thinks that a lot of the late abstract expressionist painters, the people working in the style that had dominated U.S. art at that time, were trying too hard to go for psychodrama and seriousness. She said: "there's this too-conscious searching of your soul, which very often just turns into this kind of intestinal painting." But that's what Albers is drawing a contrast to, when she says in her full quote: "I have this very, what you call today, square idea, that art is something that makes you breathe with a different kind of happiness. The focus on angst as importance can distract from the pleasures that make art fundamentally valuable." She adds, "I find art is something that gives you something that you need for your life."That's a simple definition, but it means that the kind of happiness Albers is talking about isn't necessarily about art that just shows you happy things, obviously, though it can be that too. It can just be the happiness of an idea, finding its exact right form.This week on the podcast, we're doing something experimental. Artnet News is an art website, and we cover a lot of the stories around the controversies and personalities within the art-world writ large, and the art news is almost always by way of definition, about heavy matters. So as we wrap up this year and look to the next, we asked some of our writers to take some time from their busy work days and tell us about a specific piece of art that delights them.Artworks:Philip Dawe, The Macaroni, a real character of the late masquerade (1773) Edouard Manet, The Balcony (1868–69) Albert Edelfelt, Boys Playing on the Shore (Children Playing on the shore) (1884) William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World (1900–04)Kano Masanobu, Bodhidarma in Red Robes (late 15th century)Gustav Klimt, The Black Feather Hat (1910)Tatsuo Miyajima, Painting of Change (2020)Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All (1997)Florine Stettheimer, The Cathedrals of Art (1942)

Most loyal Art Angle followers will be familiar with the curator Klaus Biesenbach. The German-born artist made his mark in Berlin in the 1990s, founding the city's biennale and one of its most-beloved art institutions, Kunst-Werke. He moved West, across the water, becoming director of MoMA PS1, and chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, before moving even further west in 2021 to take up a directorship at MOCA, Los Angeles. Biesenbach gained a reputation for leveraging the power of celebrity, working with artists and stars like Marina Abramovic and art-adjacent creatives like Patti Smith and Bjork; he is known for creating and capturing social moments while also rethinking the social nature of museums.Now, he’s back home in Germany, heading up not just one, but two of the country’s most important museum projects, in a post he called “once-in-a-life-time honor.” One museum is a highly symbolic historical treasure, the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which was designed by Mies van der Rohe. The other, is a museum still to come, the massive Berlin Modern, which is set to open next door to the Neue Nationalgalerie in 2026.Artnet News's Berlin-based senior editor Kate Brown checked in with Biesenbach just as he was closing a major retrospective dedicated to Isa Genzken and while the foundation is being laid at the Berlin Modern. 

Well, we made it to the end of the year (almost!), and we are back at the Art Angle with our monthly Round Up, where we bring together some of our esteemed reporters to talk about the big stories that are swirling in the air.Joining host Ben Davis this week to chat are senior editor Kate Brown and senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella.As always, there is a lot to talk about this month. First up, we'll discuss the the state of the art market as evidenced by the recent art auctions in New York, ahead of the final crash of art fairs of the year taking place in Miami. We'll also talk about the state of politics and culture in Italy, which interestingly enough, now involves a conversation about J.R.R. Tolkien, the beloved author of Lord of the Rings. Finally, we discuss artist Anish Kapoor and his Vantablack, ultra-black artworks, which are on view now at Lisson Gallery in New York.

"I was like reborn," the art critic Clement Greenberg once remembered, "it was the most important event in my life."The event in question was his encounter with Sullivanian therapy. His biographer, Florence Rubenfeld, once wrote that it would not overstretch the facts to say that after the late '50s, Clem's comportment in the art world can only be understood in this context. Yet despite how large Clement Greenberg looms as the most impactful U.S. critic of the 20th century, few people know this history.A new book called The Sullivanians, Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune is raising the subject once again, as literally one chapter in a much larger narrative. A lot of other people shared Greenberg's experience of rebirth. From the 1950s to the 1980s, hundreds of bright, educated people looking for purpose and community passed through the doors of the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis on New York's Upper West Side.Formulated into a doctrine by Saul Newton and Jane Pierce, this experimental therapy promised to liberate devotees from both creative and sexual repression. In the course of the 60s, it would evolve into a multi-decade experiment in polyamory, collective living, and group child rearing, before eventually coming apart in scandal when the inner workings of the group were exposed in the 1980s.Recently, the author of The Sullivanians, Alexander Stile, joined Ben Davis to talk about both about the Sullivan Institute's contact with U.S. art at mid-century, and more importantly, about the larger story of what this group became and what it represents now.

Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, two iconic 19th century French painters, are the focus of a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With over 160 works of art, including Manet's renowned painting Olympia, this show has attracted rave reviews. The podcast delves into the unexpected history behind some of the artworks, exploring the contrasting styles of Manet and Degas. It also analyzes the political views and temperaments of these artists, shedding new light on their works. The podcast offers a fascinating look at the exhibition and its historical significance.

Marcel Dzama has an immediately recognizable style as a visual artist, but his energy has far exceeded the realm of visual art. Born in Winnipeg, Canada in 1974, Dzama got his start with the Royal Art Lodge, a group of students at the University of Manitoba who banded together in the mid-1990s.Their collaborative working method, where one artist would start a work and others finish it, recalled the "Exquisite Corpse," a parlor game associated with the Surrealists. As Dzama developed his own independent practice, moving to New York in 2004, he continued to explore the surreal in watercolor and ink.His work is replete with dancers and masked figures, whimsical animals, groovy monsters, human-plant hybrids, and grinning moons, all in an intricate but deliberately naive style. Dzama has permuted these offbeat interests into a variety of other media as well, from zines to dioramas to films. He's done album art for They Might Be Giants and Beck, made films starring Kim Gordon and Amy Sedaris, and created costumes for both a Bob Dylan music video and the New York City Ballet.Now, he's expanding his list of collaborations even further. New York's performance art biennial, PERFORMA, is returning, with a roster of artists commissioned to do new work in experimental performance of various types. Marcel Dzama's piece, titled To live on the Moon (For Lorca), is among the highlights promised by the 2023 program.In it, the artist fuses multiple threads of his practice, blending costume, dance, drawing, and film. And he also returns to his surrealist inspirations. Specifically, this work is Dzama's tribute to the life and work of Spanish Surrealist poet Federico Garcia Lorca. It incorporates both Lorca's tragic life story and an obscure, unproduced, Surrealist screenplay called A Trip to the Moon, which Lorca wrote while he was living in New York in 1929.It's fascinating material to dig into on many levels. Ahead of the opening of his show at the Abrons Art Center, Dzama came into the Art Angle studio to talk with critic Ben Davis about his work and interests, the impact of Federico Garcia Lorca, and about what surrealism does and doesn't mean today."Marcel Dzama: To live on the Moon (For Lorca)" is on view at the Abrons Art Center from November 11–14, 2023. 

In 2018, Helen Molesworth was unceremoniously dismissed from her position as chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The move proved controversial among industry insiders, many of whom cast it as an example of an institution punishing its employee, a straight talking, strong willed feminist, for refusing to march in line.But for Molesworth, whose resume also includes stints at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Wexner Center for the Arts, The backlash didn't change the facts. For the first time in years, she was a curator without a home. Since then, Molesworth has struck out on her own, and she's been as active as ever.She's guest curated critically acclaimed exhibitions of at David Zwirner, Jack Shainman, and International Center of Photography. She's also hosted a hit podcast, Death of an Artist, about Anna Mendieta, led a series of filmed artist interviews, and been profiled by the New York Times. The forward momentum has given the curator little cause to look back.That is, until now. This month, Phaidon will release Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art, a career spanning collection of Molesworth's essays, all previously published in exhibition catalogs and art journals. Most of the written pieces are about artists, people like Kerry James Marshall, Catherine Opie, and Lisa Yuskavage. But the real subject of the book, of course, is Molesworth herself, and it's a rich text in that regard."I trained as an art historian" Molesworth explains, "I really believe in art objects as knowledge producers, and for better or for worse, in the history of the 20th century, museums are the institutions that allow and convey that knowledge.Ahead of the book's release, Artnet News senior writer Taylor Dafoe sat down with Molesworth to talk about the project and the period of deep personal reflection it inspired.

In today's global discourse, “Asia” often takes on an expansive, sometimes oversimplified, identity. Especially within the global art market, this vast continent is frequently painted with broad strokes, overshadowing its rich tapestry of cultures, intricacies, and nuances.  Over the past two decades, major global auction houses have been touting “the Asian market,” highlighting the fact that about one-third of its sales go to Asia. But exactly where and to who? We always hear about sales of blue-chip western galleries at art fairs in Asia, but little on their counterparts from the region. Is the art fair frenzy even sustainable in Asia as the art fair roster is getting more crowded? What about the region’s homegrown talents who are raved by local players but getting little attention in the rest of the world? And what is the future of Asia’s art market amid the economic uncertainties and geopolitical tensions? These are some of the questions we aim to address with The Asia Pivot, our latest bi-weekly newsletter focusing on the art market of the Asia-Pacific region available to Artnet PRO subscribers. The Asia Pivot will bring exclusive market data, analysis, and insights about the region, breaking this big cluster into bite-size takeaways, while shining a spotlight on the local market and rising stars. We'll also trace the growing presence of the Asian diaspora and Asian market players’ increasing outreach in the western market. To mark the launch of the newsletter, Artnet, in partnership with Asia Now in Paris, presents “New Frontiers and Fresh Challenges: The Future of the Art Market in Asia and the Asian Diaspora." Taipei and New York-based art advisor Gladys Lin and Seoul-based collector JaeMyung Noh joined Artnet News's Vivienne Chow at Asia Now in Paris to discuss current market trends and challenges, as well as the hopes and fears of those living in the region. Drawing their various experiences and observations, Lin and Noh shared their insights that are rarely heard beyond the region.