The Art Angle

To say that the last few months have been chaos in the United States would most definitely be an understatement. Since Donald J. Trump's return to office in January, an angry culture war, divisive policies, and a seemingly endless barrage of executive orders has become the new normal. His office has sought to upend the relationship of government to culture, with no signs of slowing down. From cancelling humanities grants to fund a "heroes" sculpture garden, to calling for the decimation of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, to personally making himself the boss of the Kennedy Center, and shuttering DEI offices across the country, Trump is on a mission to upend the cultural landscape as we know it.

It is very hard to keep up with the onslaught of changes, but one person who has is art critic and journalist Brian Boucher, who has written story after story for Artnet about the unfolding events. As we approach the end of Trump’s first 100 days at the end of this month, we asked Boucher to join us on the Art Angle podcast to discuss how this administration has, and will continue to enact changes that put the arts at serious risk.

In a recent essay, Artnet writer Annie Armstrong spotlighted a chaotic new force in the art world: red-chip art. It’s the brash, chrome-dipped, algorithm-boosted cousin of blue-chip art—and it’s booming. In her latest essay, Annie sketches out its archetypal collector: a guy barreling down the highway in a Cybertruck, checking his crypto wallet, queuing up a Joe Rogan episode, and racing to the next art opening—maybe an Alec Monopoly show, maybe a MSCHF drop.

Red-chip art, as Annie defines it, is more than a market category—it’s a mood. On The Art Angle this week, she joins Senior Editor Kate Brown to unpack this sensibility, tracing its fanbase from crypto bros to Kanye West, and its canon from KAWS’s Companions to Daniel Arsham’s sculpture of Mark Zuckerberg’s wife in Tiffany blue. And yes, as Annie points out, red-chip art is not not related to Trumpism.

This week, we’re taking on a subject that affects the majority of the arts workforce— gender inequity in the industry. Women make up the backbone of the art world, but they continue to face barriers when it comes to work-life balance, pay, and career progression. So, what does the data actually tell us about the state of the industry? And, more importantly, what can be done to change things for the better?

To answer those questions, we’re unpacking key findings from a major survey conducted by Artnet News in collaboration with the Association of Women in the Arts (AWITA). More than 2,000 people responded to the call, with an additional 140 participating in a follow-up survey, ultimately providing an informative look at how women experience the art world—from hiring and pay to mentorship and bias.

Joining Editor-In-Chief Naomi Rea, to break it all down is our News Editor Margaret Carrigan, who has been leading this project since last year. Margaret recently moderated a panel discussion on the topic in London with three industry powerhouses who shared their own experiences: gallerist Sadie Coles, India Phillips from Bonhams, and Clarrie Wallis, director of public institution Turner Contemporary. As the editor of our four-part editorial series on the findings, linked below, Margaret is perfectly positioned to break down the statistics and offer actionable advice on how the industry can do better for women, today.

When Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s last mistress, pleaded for “just a little moment more” before her execution in 1793, in the throes of the French Revolution, she seemed to capture the fleeting pleasures and indulgence of the Rococo age.

Artnet Editor Katie White eloquently described this moment before du Barry’s death in the opening of a recent essay, exploring how, centuries later, the aesthetic of whimsy, romance, and unapologetic luxury is making a bold return. She calls it Neo-Rococo.

So what is Neo-Rococo, really? It’s a contemporary movement that merges the delicate pastels, ornamental elegance, and sensuality of 18th-century Rococo with modernist abstraction and feminist perspectives of contemporary art. Artists like Flora Yukhnovich, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca DiMattio are key figures in this revival. They draw on the decorative roots of Rococo while addressing the complexities of today’s world.

On this episode of The Art Angle, Katie joins Senior Editor, Kate Brown, to discuss this fascinating resurgence of a centuries-old aesthetic sensibility, and how it extends beyond the art world into broader pop culture.

What lessons can we learn from this era of late Baroque history? Quite a few as a turns out. And some surprising ones—these artists are actually subverting the escapist art movement to draw out some interesting questions about beauty and femininity.

For the latest edition of the Artnet Intelligence Report, which is now free to download, Artnet columnist Katya Kazakina wrote a wide-ranging cover story about the state of play in the art industry. Titled “New Money, New Taste,” it charts a revolution that is underway in the market, amid what has been dubbed the Great Wealth Transfer.

Economists, Kazakina reports, believe that $84 trillion in assets will change hands over the next 20 years—that's trillion... with a T. Gen Xers will inherit $30 trillion, millennials $27 trillion, and Gen Zers $11 trillion, according to one study. (Huge amounts of money!) She writes, "Their values, taste, and investment decisions will help determine the next cohort of top artists—who’s in and who’s out, who will endure and who will not."

Could longstanding kings of auction houses, like Andy Warhol and Pablo Picasso, be dethroned?

Will new names—and new types of material—arise to take their place? Everyone is guessing, aiming to protect their assets while angling for business.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of an art market marked by intense uncertainty, following some very tough years, as data in the Intelligence Report shows. The whole industry feels unsettled and off-kilter, and firms of all sizes are trying to figure out how to navigate the situation. This week on the podcast, Editor of Artnet News Pro, Andrew Russeth, speaks to Kazakina about her reporting.

The Louvre is among the largest, most-visited, and best-known museums in the world, and for nearly too many reasons to count. It’s home to some of the most celebrated works of art, from the Venus de Milo to the Mona Lisa. Its blended contemporary and historic architecture is astounding. And it also has a truly formidable past, stretching back through time, well before the building became a museum in 1793.

An institution and collection that has been a quiet witness to so much history and change is bound to have stories to tell. Elaine Sciolino, contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, has captured many of these stories in her newest book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, which is out this April with Norton & Company. Sciolino is acclaimed for her chronicles of French history, and she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris, The Seine, and La Seduction. And at the Louvre, she spoke to everyone, from the guards to the lead curators, and received unprecedented access to rooms I didn’t even know existed.

Artnet's Senior Editor, Kate Brown, caught up with Elaine, who is based in Paris, to discuss the enigmatic and ever-enchanting Louvre, and what she learned from her exploration of its many halls, backrooms, and basements.

The artist Gertrude Abercrombie is not someone whose name I knew until very recently. But she’s definitely a name to know now.

Born in 1909 in Austin, Texas and dying in 1977 in Chicago, Abercrombie was a painter of witchy and surreal canvases. They seem like lucid dreams, full of haunted landscapes, lone women, masked figures, barren trees, forked paths, and mysterious towers.

In life, Abercrombie was a remarkable character. She was variously known as the “Queen of Chicago,” for her big presence in Hyde Park where she presided over a vibrant, self-curated social scene at a stately Victorian-era home; and as the “Jazz Witch,” for her enthusiastic support of Chicago jazz musicians in the 1940s and 50s—plus her personal affectation of wearing a peaked witch’s hat.

Abercrombie was long a pretty obscure figure. But in recent years, her art has seen a remarkable upsurge of interest, culminating in an exciting touring exhibition of her paintings titled “Gertrude Abercrombie: The Whole World Is a Mystery" on view now at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

We've run multiple stories on Abercrombie recently, one by Katie White recounting her life and art ("Meet Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie, the ‘Jazz Witch’ Who Captivated the Art World"), and one by Eileen Kinsella, tracking this once nearly forgotten artists’s recent return to the art market spotlight, nearly a half century after her death ("Once a ‘Regional Thing,’ Gertrude Abercrombie’s Enigmatic Art Is Selling for Huge Sums. Here’s Why"). In this episode, We talk to both of them, to get a full picture of this artist's life and legacy.

It’s the end of February 2025, and we are back for our Roundup podcast, talking about some of the news of the month.

Today, we’re going to talk about:

—the Frieze week of art fairs in L.A., which went ahead in the wake of the horrible fires that have mauled the city

—some updates on the disgraced art adviser Lisa Schiff, who is back in the news

—and the debate over whether a painting purchased for $50 at a Minnesota garage sale is actually a Vincent Van Gogh painting worth millions. We’ll give our opinions

At the end, I'll also say a few words about the artist and art critic Walter Robinson, who passed away this month.

Our art critic, Ben Davis opines with Kate Brown, Artnet’s senior editor and co-host of this Art Angle, calling from Berlin, and Annie Armstrong, Artnet’s Wet Paint columnist, in New York.

Caspar David Friedrich is considered one of the most important German painters, and his landscape works live large in the cultural consciousness in Germany and beyond. You have probably seen the 19th-century artist's most famous painting, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, a lone figure that you see from the back looking out over a wide valley of cliffs and mists.

To mark what would have been the 250th birthday of Friedrich, over the last year, major institutions have been celebrating the artist’s works: a vast oeuvre of deeply contemplative, almost surreal landscapes that broke with their times. A string of major exhibitions took place throughout 2024 across Germany, and this month, that roving program reached its final stop with a blockbuster exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. “The Soul of Nature” is on view through May 11, and it is the largest showing of Friedrich’s works to come together in the U.S., including an impressive amount of loans of works that rarely travel (Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is one of them). Shows in 2024 in Europe included "Art for a New Age" at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, "Unending Landscapes" at the Berlin State Museums, and "Where it All Began" at the Dresden State Collections.

Art Critic Ben Davis, recently saw the show at the Met, which opened this month, and Senior Editor, Kate Brown, had the pleasure of seeing the Dresden exhibition in December, which happens to be the city where Friedrich lived and made most of his famous works. Davis joins Brown on the podcast to discuss Friedrich's enduring legacy, and they dive into some of the major currents in his work, as well as the backstory that underpins his serene nature scenes: shifting ideas about religion and the spirit transforming European consciousness and a very tumultuous time in the continent's history.

“Identity politics” is among the most contentious terms in recent debates about art. And now, the most powerful people in the United States are blaming just about everything on “DEI” and “wokeness.” The very concept of diversity as a positive ideal seems to be under threat.

At the same time, so far there has been nowhere near the protest you would expect. Civil society feels stunned. At least part of this seems to be confusion about what has gone wrong to bring us here, with sections of the population now seeming to reject or just tune out progressive ideas that were all but dominant in mainstream culture just a few short years ago.

Maybe backlash was always inevitable. But how do we find a way forward? How do you talk about real criticisms of what may have made the social justice culture of the recent past confusing or alienating—without adopting the terms of a truly destructive culture war that is now all around?

A few weeks ago, we had the art critic Dean Kissick on the podcast to talk about his December cover story for Harper’s magazine, which argued that identity politics had, in his words, “ruined contemporary art.” In Ben Davis' essay for Artnet responding to him, called “Will the Art World Go Post-Woke in 2025?”, Davis concluded by saying that those looking for a constructive way forward should read the theorist Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò book Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else).

Táíwò teaches philosophy at Georgetown University and has written pieces for outlets including Foreign Policy, The Nation, and The New Yorker. He’s written two books of political theory, Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Capture. Davis has found the concepts that he’s developed, which include “elite capture,” “deference politics,” and “being-in-the-room privilege” very useful in thinking about some of these problems, which are some of the most important problems of the day—so Davis brought him on to discuss.