Getty Art + Ideas

By Getty

What's Getty Art + Ideas about?

Join Jim Cuno, president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, as he talks with artists, writers, curators, and scholars about their work. Listen in as he engages these important thinkers in reflective and critical conversations about architecture, archaeology, art history, and museum exhibitions.

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Getty Art + Ideas episodes:

09.26.2023
Recording Artists: Frida Kahlo
Enjoy this episode from season 2 of Getty's other podcast, Recording Artists. This series features materials from Getty's archives. This season, titled Intimate Addresses, highlights artists' letters. To hear the rest of the season, subscribe to Recording Artists on your...
09.12.2023
Trailer—Recording Artists Season 2
In Season 2 of Getty's podcast series Recording Artists, titled Intimate Addresses, each episode unpacks one letter from one artist, including Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, M. C. Richards, Benjamin Patterson, Nam June Paik, and Meret Oppenheim. Anna Deavere Smith reads...
06.28.2023
Art and Poetry: Recording Everyday Life
“I think you can see that from my work, that I try to put everything I know in there and everything I don’t know. I’m looking for stuff that I don’t know, in that pursuit of, like, a daily practice.” Terrance...
06.28.2023
Art and Poetry: How to Witness the World
“What I tell my students—and most of them are writers—is that the only way for them to get to a place where they’re making what they should be making, writing what they should be writing, is to work from a...
06.28.2023
Art and Poetry: Connecting Stories at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
“African American history is American history. You can’t tell it without talking about the contributions, the questions, the very heart of the creativity of African American culture.” As a poet and director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture...
02.15.2023
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: The United Nations and Uyghur China
“Culture isn’t just dead stones and statues; culture is life. Culture is, you know, all the ways in which we move and interact together as peoples.” In 2005, the United Nations agreed to a new framework called Responsibility to Protect (R2P)...
02.01.2023
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Monuments and War Zones
“Protecting cultural heritage, like protecting civilians directly, had strategic import.” How does the presence of a cultural heritage site on the battlefield change wartime decision making? In 1944, as Allied generals postponed an attack on an Axis stronghold—located at the culturally...
01.18.2023
Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Who Defines Heritage?
“The society we now live in has been, in large measure, accomplished by destroying the cultural heritage of previous generations at various moments.” Cultural heritage is made up of the monuments, works of art, and practices that a society uses to...
12.21.2022
Mindfulness in the Museum: Art for Mental Wellbeing
"I know we call them art museums, but I think they’re really wellbeing centers, because people are coming in—maybe they don’t know that’s what’s about to happen—but you are helping them expand who they are, and give them these three...
12.07.2022
Mindfulness in the Museum: Healing through Mindfulness
“The museums give us these just incredible opportunities to have some kind of an encounter with different ways of seeing the world, shining a light on some aspect of our history or aspect of our humanity that opens up a...
11.23.2022
Mindfulness in the Museum: Lessons from a Meditation Guide
“Mindfulness, for me, enables me to experience an art museum as if I’m listening to music. To just listen, attend to how all these objects make me feel.” How can mindfulness change our experience of art? Experienced meditation teacher and guide...
11.09.2022
The Art of Gardening: California Native Plants
“Whenever I take people in there, I say—and it’s not a very large room—I say, ‘You’re now in the presence of millions and millions and millions of living beings. Fortunately, most of them are very small, and most of them...
10.26.2022
The Art of Gardening: Tomatomania!
“I’m after the charm of tomatoes. I’m after the history of tomatoes. Just obviously, appeal and taste and all of that. But if I can tie it up all in one bundle, that’s what I wanna choose.” Tomatoes are a nearly...
10.12.2022
The Art of Gardening: Storytelling with Plants at Disneyland
“What it is that we do at Disneyland is tell stories. And the horticulture is a work of art helping to tell the story.” At Disneyland, elaborate, immaculate gardens spring to life literally overnight—four times a year. While plants might not...
08.31.2022
Reflecting on 25 Years of the Getty Center
“I was there for the groundbreaking of the Getty Center. I was there for opening day of the Getty Center. I think for a lot of people, it said LA has arrived.” After nearly 15 years in the making, the Getty...
08.17.2022
Black Photographers Represent Their World
“There was a lotta negativity because there was just pictures of Black people. That was one of the critiques, that we just photographed Black people. Said, ‘Yeah. You photograph just white people.’ That was the argument.” In New York City in...
08.03.2022
Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles
"You know, everything is not just red, yellow, blue, and coming from a tube. It can be anything out there in the world. Grab it and use it." In 1956, artist Ed Ruscha left his home in Oklahoma and drove with...
07.20.2022
Uta Barth’s Atmospheric Photographs
“The camera sort of teaches you to see in a really different way and to experience your environment in a different way, and to pay attention to the act of looking.” Photographer Uta Barth’s photographs focus on the act of looking....
07.06.2022
Imagining the Afterlife through Ancient Vases
“The underworld, the afterlife, is fairly dank, dark, shadowy; quite frankly, it’s a bit boring. Somewhat like waiting at a bus depot.” Homer’s Odyssey depicts an afterlife that is relatively dull, with heroic actions and glory reserved for the living. Nonetheless,...
06.22.2022
Damaged de Kooning on Display at Last
“I had heard the tale and knew what to expect, but it was by far the most damaged painting I had seen. When it arrived, it came into the studio and the damage was almost all that you could see.” In...
06.08.2022
Galley Slavery in 17th-Century France
"There’s been an assumption that any person who stepped foot on French territory in the metropole went free. In fact, enslaved Turks did not go free; they often spent their entire lifetime in servitude." Since the Middle Ages, France’s legal tradition...
05.25.2022
Art, Luxury, and Power in Ancient Iran
“This interconnection between Greek tradition and science and mathematics, and the Babylonian traditions in astronomy and all these other very technical and very advanced sciences, this was a moment which really created the basis for science, mathematics, and so on...
05.11.2022
Photographer Imogen Cunningham Gets Her Due
“When Cunningham passed away, I think in part her reputation was based on her personality, the fact that she had lived so long, the fact that she was full of witty quips, and she wouldn’t let anyone boss her around....
04.27.2022
The Art of Anatomy from the 16th Century to Today
"Berengario’s books show animated cadavers and skeletons set in a landscape, often so animated that they’re displaying their own dissecting bodies to the viewer.” For centuries, doctors and artists have relied on renderings of the human body for their training. Until...
04.13.2022
Reflecting on Feminist Curator Marcia Tucker’s Boundary-Breaking Career
"It’s why she started a museum, because people said, 'You’re crazy. You can’t do that. Nobody does that without a collection, without money. You can’t.' And if somebody said, ‘No, you can’t do something,’ that made her wanna do it...
03.30.2022
Gala Porras-Kim Makes Art of Interrogation
"When I look at the law and also museum policy, it’s just so close to conceptual art making. You have a lot of material and you’re just trying to define how it lives in the world, except with the law,...
03.16.2022
Poussin and the Dance Shines New Light on French Painter
"One of the hopes of this exhibition was really to try to enlist visitors’ bodily experience in their understanding of these works of art that can sometimes seem a little bit like they live entirely in our heads, a little...
03.02.2022
Protecting Modernist Architecture for Generations to Come
"You look at the thinking behind the creation of the building, but then also at the material needs. And you merge the two to really build an in-depth understanding of the building, and a path forward to preserving it." From the...
02.16.2022
California Leisure Sites Pioneered by African Americans
"The reason why African Americans began these places of leisure and relaxation in the outdoors was because they were excluded from going to the white establishments." Around the turn of the 20th century, African Americans seeking to escape racism in the...
02.02.2022
The Extraordinary Career of Artemisia Gentileschi
“If anything, a sense of self, a sense of destiny, the fact that she belonged among the greats, was a defining mark of Artemisia’s personality.” Artemisia Gentileschi was an acclaimed Baroque painter whose life was as compelling as her art. Born...
01.19.2022
The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Maya Carving
“Lamb’s objective was essentially to do Kon-Tiki in the Chiapan Rainforest. And he needed a lost city as a selling point.” In 1950, American adventurers Dana and Ginger Lamb traveled to the jungles of northern Guatemala looking for Maya ruins and...
12.22.2021
Peter Paul Rubens and the Arts of Antiquity
"I think it just shows very well how Rubens worked, how he got the inspiration from antiquity, but he transforms it into something completely new and very alive." The Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens is most famous for his dynamic,...
12.08.2021
Conserving Bagan in a Time of Uncertainty
“Bagan is actually a splendid site. You can imagine in only in this, like, fifty square kilometers, they have more than 3,000 monuments. And then all the monuments have different styles and different architecture.” The ancient past of Bagan, Myanmar, is...
11.24.2021
Inside LA’s Most Iconic Modernist Home, Case Study House #22
"Buck wanted to stand in every room from his house, turn his head, and see every view. Even the bathroom. And so that was kind of what inspired the design of the house." Among the most famous photographs of modern architecture...
11.10.2021
Hans Holbein the Younger’s Captivating Portraits
“Holbein was able to combine his ability to create a very believable likeness with these strong design sensibilities, and also an ingenuity, a cleverness, a creativity to create individual portraits of specificity and complexity.” Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98–1543) depicted some...
10.27.2021
The Trailblazing Career of Spanish Baroque Sculptor Luisa Roldán
“She was not afraid. She wasn’t daunted. I think that’s one of the key differentiators about her and her career.” Sculptor Luisa Roldán (1652–1706) followed a rare path for women in 17th-century Spain. Like other female artists, she trained and worked...
10.13.2021
The Recovery and Conservation of a Stolen de Kooning
“We hear the security guards talking to one another on the walkie-talkie, saying that there’s a man on the line saying that he has a stolen painting. And I wish somebody could’ve seen us, because we just stopped our conversation...
09.29.2021
A Century of Change for Latin American Metropolises, 1830–1930
“The metropolis is not just the city; it’s the mother city. It has a fundamental role in defining the history of these countries that we discussed in the book.” The period between 1830 and 1930 was one of global change, particularly...
09.15.2021
Fluxus, Change, and the Nature of Art
"Everything was made of the most familiar objects. It could’ve been taken off a desk or a kitchen counter or something, and put into action. They were inert, but their meaning wasn’t. I thought to myself, this isn’t art; it’s...
09.01.2021
Japanese Calligraphy Albums as/and Fragments
“To really read into the fragment that you have in front of you and to imagine the rest of what was the whole text is really romantic and an enjoyment of tekagami viewing.” The rise of tea drinking ceremonies during the...
08.18.2021
Riffing on Rubens in the Spanish Americas
“You could easily say ‘I can’t believe Rubens held such sway deep into the 18th century in Latin America as a touchpoint. Wow. That’s profound.’ But that, to me, is much less important than rethinking fundamental categories of picture making.” One of...
08.04.2021
Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo
“When you pick an object up, not only do you begin to understand how it was made, it’s facture, the people who made it, but you can also, I think, begin to start to tell the story about the people...
07.21.2021
New Narratives by LA Photographers of All Ages
“Photography, historically, has been used to pin people of color in a particular location to a particular identity or stereotype, and the artists in this exhibition work to unpin that.” Photography is a uniquely accessible and flexible medium today, encompassing everything...
07.07.2021
A Walk in Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden
“He often said is that this was a garden not for the visitors. He was happy if visitors enjoyed it; it was a garden for the people who worked here, who every single day, would see the slight changes and...
06.23.2021
William Blake’s Eccentric Arts
"For Blake, visionary art is not mysterious or fuzzy or soft. Visionary art is something which actually very precise and crisp." Painter, poet, draftsman, and printmaker William Blake was born in London in 1757, a time when England’s art scene was...
06.09.2021
Photographer Dorothea Lange’s California, Then and Now
"It was really powerful to be on the road following her footsteps. It just gave me an incredibly profound respect for her grit." In the 1930s and ‘40s, photographer Dorothea Lange drove up and down California and across the American West,...
05.26.2021
Art and Writing in Early Mesopotamian Cities
"From what we know, the earliest form of true writing was that invented in Mesopotamia in the late fourth millennium BC. Closely followed by Egypt, not long after. It’s probably only a matter of a couple of hundred years, if...
05.12.2021
Rescuing Art by Women in Florence
"They were rather shocked that we were interested specifically in restoring art by women. And I remember one specific curator said, 'Well, if you would just open your base to men as well, we would have a lot of worthy...
04.28.2021
The Legacy of European Art and Curiosity Cabinets
“Schlosser could be described as the least-known famous art historian.” In the 16th and 17th centuries, Central European nobles gathered and displayed art and natural wonders side by side in spaces known as art and curiosity cabinets, or kunst- und Wunderkammer....
04.14.2021
The Buddha’s First Sermon in Sarnath
"There is, and appropriately so, a tension between Sarnath as an archaeological monument, a historical monument, but also a highly sacred one." After reaching enlightenment, the Buddha began attracting followers—and founding a religion—by preaching. He delivered his first sermon at Sarnath,...

What's Getty Art + Ideas about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

Getty Art + Ideas episodes:

Recording Artists: Frida Kahlo

Trailer—Recording Artists Season 2

Art and Poetry: Recording Everyday Life

Art and Poetry: How to Witness the World

Art and Poetry: Connecting Stories at the National Museum of African American History and Culture

Cultural Heritage Under Attack: The United Nations and Uyghur China

Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Monuments and War Zones

Cultural Heritage Under Attack: Who Defines Heritage?

Mindfulness in the Museum: Art for Mental Wellbeing

Mindfulness in the Museum: Healing through Mindfulness

Mindfulness in the Museum: Lessons from a Meditation Guide

The Art of Gardening: California Native Plants

The Art of Gardening: Tomatomania!

The Art of Gardening: Storytelling with Plants at Disneyland

Reflecting on 25 Years of the Getty Center

Black Photographers Represent Their World

Ed Ruscha’s Los Angeles

Uta Barth’s Atmospheric Photographs

Imagining the Afterlife through Ancient Vases

Damaged de Kooning on Display at Last

Galley Slavery in 17th-Century France

Art, Luxury, and Power in Ancient Iran

Photographer Imogen Cunningham Gets Her Due

The Art of Anatomy from the 16th Century to Today

Reflecting on Feminist Curator Marcia Tucker’s Boundary-Breaking Career

Gala Porras-Kim Makes Art of Interrogation

Poussin and the Dance Shines New Light on French Painter

Protecting Modernist Architecture for Generations to Come

California Leisure Sites Pioneered by African Americans

The Extraordinary Career of Artemisia Gentileschi

The Life and Afterlife of an Ancient Maya Carving

Peter Paul Rubens and the Arts of Antiquity

Conserving Bagan in a Time of Uncertainty

Inside LA’s Most Iconic Modernist Home, Case Study House #22

Hans Holbein the Younger’s Captivating Portraits

The Trailblazing Career of Spanish Baroque Sculptor Luisa Roldán

The Recovery and Conservation of a Stolen de Kooning

A Century of Change for Latin American Metropolises, 1830–1930

Fluxus, Change, and the Nature of Art

Japanese Calligraphy Albums as/and Fragments

Riffing on Rubens in the Spanish Americas

Edmund de Waal’s Letters to Camondo

New Narratives by LA Photographers of All Ages

A Walk in Robert Irwin’s Getty Garden

William Blake’s Eccentric Arts

Photographer Dorothea Lange’s California, Then and Now

Art and Writing in Early Mesopotamian Cities

Rescuing Art by Women in Florence

The Legacy of European Art and Curiosity Cabinets

The Buddha’s First Sermon in Sarnath