The Art Angle

Inside the art world, one of the defining narratives of the past decade has been a renewed push for gender and racial equity. Much of the attention in this realm has focused on the dramatic overrepresentation of white male artists in everything from museum collections and exhibition programs, to auction sales and gallery rosters.

Overtures to correcting the imbalance have been so prevalent in trade-media headlines, institutional marketing, and day-to-day conversations that many, if not most, art professionals seem to be confident that the industry is slowly but steadily reversing generations of deeply embedded racism and sexism. But how much has the art world really rebalanced the scales?

It turns out that the answer is much less than we hoped––at least if we look past the hype at the actual data. Enter the latest edition of the Burns-Halperin Report, a multipronged data-led project helmed by Charlotte Burns, the veteran art journalist, podcaster, and founder of Studio Burns, and Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin.

At the core of the Burns-Halperin Report is a one-of-a-kind database encompassing hundreds of thousands of entries painstakingly compiled from U.S. museums, global auction houses, and top commercial galleries. The data quantifies how little has changed for artists in three historically underrepresented demographics since as far back as 2002. It also leaves the rest of us facing a lot of hard questions about why the art trade at large believes it’s doing so much better at neutralizing its biases than it actually is.

On this week’s episode, Charlotte and Julia join Artnet News Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider to walk us through the report itself, how it came together, and what it all means

On October 14, two activists, Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, walked into the National Gallery in London and threw a can of tomato soup on Van Gogh’s Sunflowers while wearing shirts that read JUST STOP OIL. The action was part of a larger cycle of disruptive occupations and direct action by environmentalists in the UK, demanding dramatic action to cut fossil fuels in the face of climate change—but the Van Gogh soup attack by far drew the most media attention. Indeed, the tactic of using attacks on artworks to get their message out has caught on with campaigners this year, with environmentalists in at least half a dozen countries making headlines with spectacular actions in museums—gluing themselves to famous pieces, spray-painting the walls around them, or throwing food at artworks.

These actions have, in turn, touched off a fierce debate among observers and activists alike about the art-attack tactic. Is it the kind of desperate move needed to shock the public into action when nothing else seems to work? Or do the actions repel otherwise sympathetic observers, isolating a movement that needs to scale up dramatically?

London-based art journalist Farah Nayeri is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, and the author of the recent book Takedown: Art and Power in the Digital Age, which looks at how the digitally empowered activism of the last ten years has changed what the public expects from a museum. In an essay for Artnet News responding to these new museum actions, she wrote about the long history of vandalizing art for a cause, from suffragette Mary Richardson slashing Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus more than a century ago, to protests within British museums against oil giant BP’s sponsorship over the last decade.

This week, Artnet News's national art critic Ben Davis spoke to Nayeri about this history, and what the stakes of the new protests truly are.

What does it mean to be an art critic today? How do you choose what to write about and how do you even choose what to look at in an age where seeing art in person, which used to be the most common way people encountered art, has now arguably become the rarest?

In this episode, Andrew Goldstein speaks with Jerry Saltz, the most famous, most lionized, and arguably the most influential art critic we have. A self-described "failed artist" who only became a professional critic at age 41, Jerry wrote for the Village Voice, Artnet Magazine (the predecessor of Artnet News), and other publications before becoming New York's resident art critic in 2006, where he's been on a run of glory that has included winning the 2018 Pulitzer for criticism.

But while he's well known for his exuberant, beautifully wrought criticism, he's even better known as what might be termed an "art critic in the expanded field." He shares his opinions every day with some half a million followers on Twitter and Instagram, alongside frequent TV appearances and a half dozen books, the latest of which, called Art is Life, has just been published by Riverhead Books.

This special episode of the Art Angle is produced in partnership with Belmond. 

Recently, four photographers got a dream assignment. They were dispatched into the Maya Riviera to capture the distinctiveness and beauty of the landscape. But it wasn’t all as tranquil as it sounds. The creators battled hurricane season and extremely tight deadlines to get the shots they wanted.

The result of their hard work is “Fotografía Maroma,” a collection of photographs commissioned by Belmond. The images will go on display at Maroma, Belmond’s hotel in the Riviera Maya, when it reopens in May 2023. Before then, however, they are going on a world tour. It starts with a display in the Miami Design District during Art Basel Miami Beach and continues with presentations at ZonaMaco in Mexico City in February and Photo London in May.

In partnership with Belmond, the Art Angle spoke with the curators behind the project. Fariba Farshad is co-founder and director of Photo London and Patricia Conde is the founder of Patricia Conde Galeria in Mexico City. Together, they gave us the lowdown on why they chose these four photographers, how the project came together in record time, and what it shows us about Mexico’s vibrant photography scene.

What do Sterling Ruby, Oscar Murillo, Kennedy Yanko, and Aomoako Boafo have in common? Beyond being some of the most sought-after contemporary artists of the last decade, they are all veterans of the prestigious Rubell Museum Residency program. Helmed by its namesake founders, the mega-collecting duo Don and Mera Rubell, the residency program is something of a hit-maker—call it "the Rubell effect." Beyond minting art-market stars, the Rubells now have two museums, a 100,000 square-foot campus with more than 50,000 square-footage dedicated to galleries in Miami's Allapattah, and a newly opened 32,000-square-foot outpost in Southwest Washington D.C.

The Rubell's art collecting began when they were newlyweds\ who would squirrel away $25 from Mera's teaching salary to put toward acquisitions while Don was in medical school. Now, along with their son Jason and daughter Jennifer, they own one of the largest private collections of contemporary art in the world, with more than 7,400 works of art by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Catherine Opie.

On the heels of their DC museum's grand opening, and just weeks before they will hold court at Art Basel in Miami Beach, Artnet News's senior reporter Katya Kazakina caught up with Don, Jason, and Mera to discuss the origins of their collection, the symbiotic relationship between art and real estate, and their famous Midas touch for sussing out the hottest emerging artists.

You've seen it. A woman in a blue turban set against a black background looking over her shoulder like you just called her name. She's wearing a heavy pearl earring in one ear, and her skin is so luminous it looks like she swallowed a light bulb. Yes, I'm talking about Girl with a Pearl Earring, one of the most famous paintings in the world. It's been reproduced countless times on mugs, t-shirts, and pillows. It has inspired poems, novels, and movies. But the artist who created Girl with a Pearl Earring, he remains shrouded in mystery.

Strangely little is known about Johannes Vermeer. He lived in Holland in the 17th century and died in 1675 at the age of 43. He made fewer than 36 paintings. And audiences around the globe are fascinated by his portrayals of quiet domesticity. It's always been assumed he worked in the same kind of solitude that he often depicted in his paintings. But new research is challenging that assumption. Over the past several years, museums have used cutting edge technology to get under the surface of Vermeer and learn more about how he actually worked. To discuss Vermeer's many secrets and the artist we thought we knew, Executive Editor, Julia Halperin, spoke with Kriston Capps, a Washington DC based contributor to Artnet News.

It’s been a challenging few years for art museums. But Sandra Jackson Dumont, the director and CEO of the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, has never felt more energized about their potential. And that feeling is infectious.

At the most recent American Alliance of Museums conference, Jackson-Dumont opened her keynote speech with a love song by ’70s soul singer Donny Hathaway. Then she asked the audience: “Don’t you want people to see your institutions that way?” 

For more than 20 years, Jackson-Dumont has been a force in education and public programming, launching enormously popular initiatives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Seattle Art Museum. She has spent her career blurring distinctions between fine art and popular culture, and creating alternative ways for the public to interact with art and museums. This mission has followed her to the Lucas Museum. Slated to open in 2025, the museum founded by George Lucas and Mellody Hobson prioritizes art and audiences that have not always been taken seriously by the elite art world.

 It’s clear Jackson-Dumont has a long track record of breaking new ground. That’s why we chose her as one of Artnet News’s New Innovators for 2022. The Innovators List will be published in full later this month. Ahead of the release, Jackson-Dumont spoke with Artnet News contributor Janelle Zara about how she is challenging the museum model as we know it. 

A glittering forest with a floor covered in leaves by Gustav Klimt. A country road painted with psychedelic purples, greens, and pinks by David Hockney. A tangle of loping lines against a gray background by Brice Marden.

Most of us have encountered art like this on the walls of a museum. As a matter of fact, these particular works have been shown at LACMA, the Guggenheim Bilbao, and the Serpentine in London. But after those shows closed, they were all packed up and sent back to the same owner. The owner’s name was Paul Allen.

Paul Allen is a bit of a legend in art collecting circles. Part of that was because of his fortune. When he died in 2018, Allen was the 44th richest person in the world. Another part of that legend was his secrecy. Allen was notoriously private about the art he collected. Although he did lend works to museums around the world, he was not always identified as the owner and he never appeared in an auction room holding a paddle.

Allen was born in 1953 in Seattle and became friends with Bill Gates in high school. They cofounded Microsoft in 1975 and ushered in the microcomputer revolution. But Paul had a lot of other interests, too. At the age of 35, he became the youngest owner the NBA when he bought the Portland Trailblazers. He also owned the Seattle Sea Hawks and founded museums in his hometown dedicated to vintage computers, military aircraft, and pop culture.

For most of his life, art remained a more private passion. But four years after Allen’s death from Hodgkin lymphoma in 2018, Allen’s estate is selling a portion of his art collection—more than 150 lots, to be exact—at Christie’s. And for the first time, the public is able to get a brief glimpse at the many treasures Allen acquired altogether, before they likely disappear into private hands again for who knows how long. The collection is estimated to fetch more than $1 billion, with all the money going to charities he supported during his life. It’s pretty much guaranteed to become the most valuable collection ever sold at auction. So how does one man assemble such a valuable trove of art in a relatively short amount of time? And how does that kind of collector track down, evaluate, and live with art? What makes someone a good art collector in the first place? Artnet News Executive Editor, Julia Halperin spoke with the Director of the Paul Allen Collection, Mireya Lewin, and the Vice Chairman, 20th and 21st Century Art, Americas at Christie's, Max Carter, to find out.

In the borderlands between art and technology, no single development has sucked up more oxygen this year than the rise of image generators powered by artificial intelligence. Not so long ago, projects like these were a fringe experiment whose results were usually more intriguing for what they got wrong than for what they got right.

But in 2022, A.I.-driven image generators have made a quantum leap in quality, speed, and affordability. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, thanks to these tools, never in the history of civilization has it been easier, faster, or cheaper to produce professional-looking visuals of anything a person could dream up, even if they have no artistic training whatsoever.

This is both extremely cool, and extremely concerning, especially if you happen to be a human who makes a living as a commercial illustrator. This October, a strange saga that played out on the live-streaming platform Twitch showed how the tension between flesh and blood image-makers and A.I. is getting stronger and weirder every day, with serious consequences for age-old debates about plagiarism, ownership, and the value of making art in the first place.

Thankfully, knowledgeable and intrepid Artnet News contributor, Zachary Small, joins Art Business Editor, Tim Schneider to discuss the initial scandal and the murky future of commercial art in the age of A.I. Buckle up, because this is going to get a little surreal...

"Flipping" was once a dirty word in the art market. But that is no longer the case. Over the past decade, speculative reselling has become big business as the market for ultra-contemporary art has soared. Sales of art sold within three years of its creation date have grown 1,000 percent over the past decade, to almost $260 million. (For context, over the same period, the S&P 500 rose just about 200 percent.)

Historically, only collectors have been able to benefit from this practice—not artists or their dealers. In the U.K. and France, artists receive a small resale royalty when their work is resold at auction. In the U.S., they get nothing.

That’s why, over the past few years, artists, gallerists, and entrepreneurs have started to take matters into their own hands, engineering new ways to either stamp out flippers or create systems so that artists can benefit more directly when their work is resold for a big profit.

This shift is the subject of our fall 2022 Artnet News Pro Intelligence Report. Ahead of the report’s release, we gathered together an expert panel at Cromwell Place in London during Frieze moderated by our own executive editor Julia Halperin.

We spoke with Max Kendrick, co-founder and CEO of Fairchain, a company that is using the blockchain to create new ways of conducting art sales; Rachel Uffner, owner and director of Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York; and Lucien Smith, an artist and director of the Cultural Innovations Lab at the art management platform Lobus.

As you’ll see, there is little consensus about what to do about flipping. If you want to learn more, subscribe to Artnet News Pro for the full Artnet News Intelligence Report, out soon.