The Art Angle

The Art Angle team is taking this week off, but we'll be back July 9 with a new episode. In the meantime, here's one of our favorite recent episodes, featuring photographer Dawoud Bey on the occasion of his retrospective, "An American Project," on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

After former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison for the murder of George Floyd, the racial justice protests of last summer viscerally came back into the public consciousness, reigniting conversations in the news and in households everywhere about the reality of the Black experience in America.

These issues take new 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.

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.

Today one of the swiftest rising stars in the art world is a 26-year-old wunderkind photographer who is equally comfortable shooting heads of state for magazine profiles as he is putting together shows for the gallery context. Of course, we’re talking about Tyler Mitchell, who gained international fame when Beyoncé tapped him to be the first black photographer to shoot a cover for Vogue and has now moved on to having surveys at the International Center of Photography and, beginning last month, a show at the very buzzy Jack Shainman Gallery. Adding to the excitement around that show is the fact that it was curated by none other than Helen Molesworth, one of the most prominent curators in the country who is known in particular for her groundbreaking reinstallation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles's collection and her ongoing mission to highlight artists of color.

So what’s going on with this gallery show? To find out, Artnet News Art & Design Editor Noor Brara sat down with both Tyler Mitchell and Helen Molesworth to discuss how the show, entitled Feedback, came to be; how they grew to trust each other while working together; and what advice they’d give aspiring youngsters hoping to have careers in the art world one day.

Unless you are living under a particularly out of touch rock, you’ve probably heard of the immersive Van Gogh craze that is currently sweeping the globe. In a sign of our strange times, the nineteenth century Dutch painter best-known for the vibrating intensity of his paintings and the tragic circumstances of his life, including what one Washington Post writer called “the whole ear thing.” He has now become the man of the hour.

As we begin to limp our way out of a pandemic, with high-tech glorified light shows dedicated to his legend popping up everywhere from Naples to Paris and New York City, to places like Las Vegas and Kansas City, where you might not naturally expect the post-impressionist to draw a frenzy crowds.

So what is going on and what does this all mean? To discuss, Artnet News Chief Art Critic, Ben Davis, is back on the show to demystify things in classic Ben Davis fashion. But before that, there is a very special guest. Possibly, the most special guests to have ever graced the show.

We’ve all seen the movie with the glamorous art dealer, maybe a villain who lives in a cutting edge palatial home, drives an impressive car and speaks with an impressive accent. That pretty much is the image of the art dealer in the popular consciousness, a sophisticated suave, sexy, probably ruthless, strikingly dressed person who is conspicuously rich.  But how well does this image match up with reality? Recently, Artnet News  senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella teamed up with the ace investigative art journalist, Zachary Small to find out just how much art dealers actually do make from their jobs.  And what they found is pretty surprising.

We wanted to make sure you had a chance to check out a very special new podcast miniseries we’ve rolled out. It’s called Shattering the Glass Ceiling, and its dedicated to spotlighting boundary-breaking women in the art world and beyond who have build extraordinary careers around—and inspired by—art. Today, we’ll be re-airing an episode of the series that is of special significance, it’s an interview with the art collector Catherine Levene, whose day job is running the megawatt Meredith media company, publisher of such titles as People Magazine, Travel & Leisure, Entertainment Weekly, and many others. Before that, however, she was the co-founder and CEO of Artspace, the online art marketplace startup. Here, in the following episode, Artnet News’s senior writer Sarah Cascone talks to Catherine about how she started collecting art, her road to Meredith, and why powerful women leaders in the workplace are so very important.

For the past couple of weeks, we’ve been running a little experiment here at the Art Angle—namely our first-ever breakout mini-series, called Shattering the Glass Ceiling, dedicated to remarkable women in the art world who have succeeded in changing the game in their respective arenas.

It’s such a good group of interviews, and we want to make sure you have a chance to hear it. We also, it so happens, are taking a little Memorial Day vacation to rest up after the launch of Artnet News Pro, our brand-new members-only offering for participants in the art trade. And so, without further ado, please enjoy this re-air of the first installment of Shattering the Glass ceiling, featuring Artnet News executive editor talking to the powerhouse curator Lauren Haynes, who recently took a prominent post at Duke Museum’s Nasher Museum. Here’s the conversation.

It’s a cliche to say that going to greater China is a bit like visiting the future, where technology is threaded into every aspect of daily life in ways that are both wondrous and scarily dystopian. But it’s totally true!

And it was certainly the case for collectors and dealers who went to Art Basel’s revitalized art fair in Hong Kong last week. A little more than a year after the pandemic forced the cancellation of the 2020 edition, the fair was back in a cutting-edge new format that might sound like something out of science fiction.

Here are three words to give you the idea: hologram art dealers. So what was it like inside the fair? And did all of the high-tech bells and whistles actually help anyone sell art? To find out, Artnet News executive editor Julia Halperin spoke to our redoubtable Hong Kong correspondent Vivienne Chow.

As much of the art world is beginning to rebound from the pandemic, the art market got a major shot in the arm itself: in little more than a week, New York’s big three auction houses held a spate of absolutely mammoth art sales, bringing in a cumulative $1.3 billion and showing, pretty unequivocally, that the art business is back, baby.

But, to me at least, one of the most remarkable things about these historic sales was that Artnet News’s veteran market columnist Kenny Schachter didn’t seem to care, or even pay them much mind. That’s because his mind has been transported to a distant planet, far away. That planet is called NFTs.

Yes, Kenny has become obsessed with non-fungible tokens, and perhaps more to the point, the possibilities that they open up for the hidebound way the art world works.

Since earlier this year, he has written a series of columns on NFTs that have been pretty astonishing, and, in inimitable Kenny fashion, he’s made some significant money off this novel marketplace along the way. This week, we just published the latest of this series as Kenny’s big debut behind our new premium Artnet News Pro membership, which we launched to provide analyst-calibre coverage for people who want to participate in the art market.

On this week's episode, Kenny joins the show, in all his glory, to discuss (among other things) his career trajectory, his latest column, and how NFTs have changed his life.

Right now, there's an exhibition at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, that is gaining international attention for a tragic reason. That’s because the show, titled “Promise, Witness, Remembrance,” is dedicated to the memory of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old Black woman who was killed by police during a raid of her Louisville home on March 13, 2020.

A former emergency medical technician whose unjustified slaying led to widespread protests and the nationwide "Say Her Name" campaign, Taylor has become something of an inspiration to some of the country’s most prominent socially engaged artists, whose tributes to her have made her a symbol of the protest movement.

Those tributes, by artists like Hank Willis Thomas, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Theaster Gates, now fill the exhibition at the Speed, where the centerpiece is the already iconic portrait of Taylor by the artist Amy Sherald that originally graced the September cover of Vanity Fair.

The show, celebrated for its emotional power, was organized by the Alison Glenn, associate curator of contemporary art at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

So how did a museum exhibition dedicated to a victim of police violence come to be? To find out, we're pleased to have Allison Glenn on the show today.

In the final installment of our mini-series Shattering the Glass Ceiling, Artnet News's art and design editor Noor Brara spoke with pioneering gallerist Mariane Ibrahim, founder of her eponymous gallery. Ibrahim opened her first outpost in Seattle, later launching another outpost in Chicago's West Town neighborhood. Now, as the last year's turbulence begins to level off, Ibrahim is taking another giant leap—this time, overseas—to open a location in Paris.

Ibrahim is known within the industry for nurturing an exceptional roster of artists, all of whom she retains a fiercely close relationship with. Though many consider her to be a dealer of African artists, Ibrahim told Artnet News in 2019, "I don’t see artists as ‘African artists,'" adding that reducing individuals with diverse cultural backgrounds would be "very dangerous and opportunistic."

This dedication is evident in the strength of the exhibitions and near-universal acclaim that follows in the wake of many artists she introduces to the market and continues to represent, from Amoako Boafo to Clotilde Jiménez.