The Art Angle

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.

What happens when you pair three-to-six year-old children with esteemed art-world figures to play an art-historical guessing game?
For our final episode of 2020, we decided to find out.
We invited three of the most respected cultural leaders in the world—Naima Keith, the vice president of education and public programs at LACMA; Carolina Miranda, a Los Angeles Times columnist who covers art, architecture, and urban design; and Martin Kemp, the foremost Leonardo da Vinci scholar in the world—to be paired with some really adorable kids for a virtual guessing game.
Over Zoom, each illustrious guest was introduced to their diminutive teammate, who was shown a series of (very) famous artworks from throughout the history of art. The children were asked to describe what they saw in each work—and the grown-ups were responsible for guessing the artist and title.
Have you ever had a four-year-old try to explain a Jackson Pollock drip painting? A Damien Hirst shark sculpture? A Grant Wood piece? We didn't think so.

Jeffrey Deitch is that rare type of creative who has a keen understanding of business: he holds an undergraduate degree in art history from Wesleyan University, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Further blurring boundaries, he launched his career with a lethal one-two punch working at an art gallery before joining Citibank, where he co-managed the art advisory division.
Before long, he rose to prominence as an art advisor and private dealer, while honing his own interests in street art and punk rock bands.
Widely considered to be the first person who bought a work by Jean-Michel Basquiat (he was also the first to write about him in a 1980 essay for Art in America), Deitch continued to evidence prescience in identifying burgeoning talent, as he helped mint the careers of Jeff Koons, Kehinde Wiley, and Cecily Brown in his eponymous gallery space in New York.
After conquering the East Coast art world, Deitch decamped for California, serving (an admittedly rocky term) as the director of MOCA in Los Angeles before returning to New York to run his own gallery, where he remains today.
On the penultimate episode of The Art Angle for 2020, Deitch talks everything from punk rock to pandemic struggles.

Every December for the better part of the past two decades, a throng of well-heeled dealers, collectors, artists, celebrities, publicists, and lookie loos descend on a small stretch of Miami Beach coastline for a final year’s-end bacchanal. Art Basel Miami Beach has long been considered the art market’s Black Friday, when dealers are able to sell enough wares to put them in the black for the year and close the books on a high note.So what happens when it all goes virtual? Despite the fair having called off most in-person activities this year, Artnet News’s intrepid reporter Nate Freeman, best known as the poison pen behind the weekly gossip column Wet Paint, flew down to the sunshine state (after multiple coronavirus tests) to find out.
On this week’s episode, Nate calls in from Miami Dade County to discuss what he calls the “Zombie” Art Basel—a fair somewhere between living and dead. With visits to august Miami museums and private collections, plus tours of the newly established seasonal gallery outposts that alit from New York, Nate attempts to answer the question: If no one is there to see and be seen, does an art fair really matter?

The journey to becoming one of the most acclaimed photographers of his generation—at the tender age of 32—wasn't exactly a straight line for Awol Erizku. Born in Ethiopia and raised in the Bronx, Erizku's early interest in art didn't crystallize until he was punished for a school prank, and, fortuitously ended up in an art room waiting for the principle to dole out his punishment.

From there, Erizku traced a more traditional path, studying at Cooper Union and earning a coveted place in Yale's MFA program where he homed his craft, garnering praise for his contemporary depictions of classical art historical works featuring Black women in place of their predominantly white counterparts in stirring, beautifully framed portraits. Things changed in 2017, when one of the world's most famous women,Beyoncé Knowles, announced her pregnancy on Instagram. The photograph, a beatific portrait of the pop star enshrined in a lush floral backdrop, hands demurely resting on her pregnant stomach, draped in a soft green veil like a blooming Madonna, instantly went viral and remains the most "liked" photograph on the social media platform. Erizku shot the photo, and became a household name overnight.

Granted his own measure of stardom, instead of riding on the success of that image the artist dug deeper into his work, tackling hot-button subjects ranging from the legacy of colonialism and a controversial professor of Black Studies to the recent spate of Black men killed by police officers. A lifelong obsession with music led to his practice of incorporating speeches by the likes of Kerry James Marshall into mixtapes, blending spoken word with contemporary beats, and collaborating to score music to be played in his exhibitions, like the recent show at the FLAG Art Foundation in New York.

He was featured in Antwaun Sargent's exhibition “The New Black Vanguard: Photography Between Art and Fashion,” and beginning on February 24, 2021 in New York and Chicago, 13 of Erikzu's photographs will grace some 350 JCDecaux bus shelters in his a public exhibition with the Public Art Fund. The sprawling two-city exhibition is titled "New Visions for Iris," in honor of his newborn daughter.

The Art Angle team is taking this week off for Thanksgiving, but we thought we'd share one of our favorite episodes from the past year to see you through this unconventional holiday weekend. 

Picture this: a doughy, apple-cheeked infant nestled in between the soft petals of a dew-kissed flower, sound asleep, like the start of a real-life fable. Almost everyone who conjures that mental image will do so using a nearly identical aesthetic—and whether you realize it or not, that’s almost entirely because of the work of legendary baby photographer Anne Geddes.

After her debut photography book, Down in the Garden, soared to number three on the New York Times Bestseller list in 1996, Geddes’s wholesomely surreal infant images became inescapable. Oprah went on air to declare Down in the Garden the best coffee-table book she’d ever seen, and by late December 1997, Geddes’s publishing partners had sold more than 1.8 billion (yes, with a “b”) calendars and date books of her photography for the upcoming year. Her dizzying success soon spurred the artist to ramp up production, with a standard Geddes shoot requiring six-to-eight months of planning and a budget between $250,000 and $350,000. But who could blame her for going big? Geddes’s empire of adorable infants seemed unstoppable.

Cut to 2020, however, and the picture has changed dramatically—not just for Geddes, but for an entire creative economy driven by analog photography, print publishing, and the high barriers to entry formerly associated with both. Years after smartphones first began putting increasingly high-quality cameras in nearly everyone’s pocket, and Instagram began providing masses of self-trained shutterbugs a free and wide-reaching distribution platform for their images, it’s not hyperbole to say that the pillars on which Geddes built her career have crumbled. So what’s the Queen of Baby Photography to do when her kingdom becomes unrecognizable?

Back in May, Andrew Goldstein chatted with Noor Brara, Artnet’s art and design editor, about her recent profile of Geddes. Together, they discussed the artist’s rise, fall, and reckoning with culture’s digital evolution.

The news cycle for the past seven months has been dominated by staggering data points that seek to quantify the scope of the pandemic's effects on the United States and beyond. Within the art world, statistics detailing layoffs and furloughs, museums facing imminent closure, and galleries struggling to make ends meet add to the collective fear and anxiety gripping the world at large.

But there have also been bright spots in both the broad economy, and, surprisingly, within the art market itself.

A new study commissioned by the Independent art fair and Crozier Fine Arts, carried out by data guru Clare McAndrew lays out one aspect that is not just surviving amid the turmoil—it's actually thriving. For the inaugural NYC Art World Report, an analysis of dozens of private art collectors living in New York shared insights about their buying practices, interests, and disdains within the new, largely virtual art ecosystem.

On this week's episode, Elizabeth Dee, veteran gallerist and founder of Independent, joins the podcast to put the report into context, and shares her thoughts on its conclusion: that New York City remains the epicenter for committed art collectors, and will continue to reign supreme across the international landscape.

As a coda to Elizabeth's observations, Artnet News's business editor Tim Schneider provides a layman's analysis of the data within the report, and helps make sense of what to do with this new wealth of information.

Well, it finally happened. Former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, have won the United States presidential election. They ran on the promise of a return to democracy and decency—as well as a repudiation of the past four years under Donald Trump.

After all of the hand-wringing, punditry, and poll watching, we're now left to consider what this regime change actually means. For artists and art workers, the jubilation of a Biden win is tempered by a healthy dose of skepticism. Both Biden and Harris have expressed general appreciation for the arts, but it remains to be seen if and how they will act on it. The inhabitants of the art world's historically liberal bubble are also facing the reality that they, like the pollsters and so many others, were entirely wrong about the margin of victory and the extent to which they live in a deeply divided country.

On this week's episode, Artnet News contributor Brian Boucher, market reporter Eileen Kinsella, and chief art critic Ben Davis join the podcast to discuss the seismic changes afoot—and what it could mean for the future of culture.