The One Word That Explains Art Now

At the start of September, a massive chunk of the international art world descended on South Korea for a bounty of high-profile art offerings. The marquee event was Frieze Seoul, in its third edition, at the Coex convention center in the luxe Gangnam district, running alongside the long-established Korea International Art Fair. But they represented just one element of the action. All over Seoul, museums and galleries were opening big shows, angling for attention. Samsung’s Leeum museum hosted an Anicka Yi blowout and a superb show of young artists curated by Rirkrit Tiravanija. The beauty giant Amorepacific welcomed Elmgreen & Dragset at a museum in the basement of its David Chipperfield–designed headquarters, while Gagosian set up shop with a Derrick Adams exhibition on the ground floor. Up above, local heavyweights came out swinging—PKM with Yoo Youngkuk, Pace with the potent pairing of Lee Ufan and Mark Rothko, and Jason Haam with Urs Fischer. Celebrities were everywhere. Parties were everywhere. No one seemed to be sleeping. Everyone was on the move. And the festivities were not confined to Seoul. The esteemed Gwangju Biennale inaugurated its 15th edition in that southern city the day after the fairs opened, a sharp, tough show curated by the Frenchman Nicolas Borriaud that ran alongside more than 30 national pavilions. And along the country’s southern coast, the latest Busan Biennale also drew crowds, with more than 60 artists selected by its curators, Vera Mey and Philippe Pirotte. There was so much happening that it was impossible to see it all—even with a dedicated driver—which many VIPs had—and even if you were willing to forgo moments of rest. This week, Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth is joined by London-based reporter and co-author of the Asia Pivot newsletter Vivienne Chow to discuss the art, the food, and everything in between.

If you've been keeping an eye on the art market, you know that the industry has been going through some turbulent times... there's really no other way to say it: It's been a tough year, as the frothy post-pandemic surge in the art business has fully retreated.  Amid this market slowdown comes our latest data-packed and information-rich issue of the Mid-Year Intelligence Report, which is appropriately titled The Art Market Reset: Riding the Waves of Change. This Fall issue looks at the numbers behind the mood, and it is packed with relevant insights that will help buyers, sellers, and spectators make informed decisions in the months ahead.  Katya Kazakina, Artnet's award-winning columnist who pens a weekly art market column called The Art Detective is joining Art Angle co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week to discuss her must read cover story for the new Intelligence Report. In it, she investigates what led to the sharp drop in the demand for art, as well as resale values for once coveted pieces. They discuss how the data reveals a market in free fall, where galleries have been faced with cost-cutting measures, or are shuttering altogether. There are some silver linings in her story, as Katya examines the smart responses that are being made across the industry, revealing how sales tactics are evolving and why some people actually believe that a slowdown in art production is not a bad thing altogether. Before we get to that, a few more words about the rest of the report.  Our illuminating By the Numbers section details how, as compared with last year, there has been a substantial drop in money being spent on Ultra Contemporary art, a downturn in the sales generated by the big three auction houses (Sotheby's, Christie's, and Phillips), fewer artworks selling publicly for over $10 million, and the average price of art at auction is also going down. You can find specific breakdowns in the actual report.  What does it all mean though? News editor Margaret Carrigan, gives a spin-free analysis of the auction stats. Also in this issue, our Editor in Chief Naomi Rea, spoke with Art Basel Paris Fair Director Clément Delépine about what to expect at the revamped art fair, which is moving back into the Grand Palais next month.  Our market reporter, Eileen Kinsella, spoke to Sotheby's Phyllis Kao about how the secondary market is adjusting its working processes amid the flux, and our marketplace section brings you the stories behind the top selling works, and the scoop on artists whose markets are on the rise. Even amid this slump, Artnet's esteemed reporters and editors have worked hard and put together an excellent issue that will help you navigate the current art market season, where the road ahead feels anything but clear.

Thurston Moore is one of the most famous names in rock. With Kim Gordon and Lee Ronaldo, he formed Sonic Youth, one of the definitive art rock bands... yes, ART rock. Sonic Youth album covers famously spotlighted artists, from Gerhard Richter’s candle on the cover of 1988’s Daydream Nation to Raymond Pettibon’s cartoon couple on the cover of 1990’s Goo to Mike Kelley’s stuffed animal on the cover of 1992’s Dirty to Marnie Weber’s collage for 1998’s A Thousand Leaves. Well, now Moore is back, putting out a new dreamy solo album titled Flow Critical Lucidity, and true to form, the cover is another literal work of art: a photo of a sculpture of what appears to be metal helmet, studded with tuning forks. This is a work called Samurai Walkman, by the artist Jamie Nares. Nares is a figure of major cachet herself. She only just had a film retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York in the summer. Back in 2020, her fantastic 2011 video Street was the first film to be projected on the exterior of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—Thurston Moore, in fact, did the soundtrack to that film. Nares and Moore have a fruitful history of collaboration together, having both come up in the chaotic, experimental No Wave scene of the 1970s, and this week they join Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss. We're also thrilled to announce the launch of Art Market Minute, our new micro-podcast, hosted by news editor Margaret Carrigan. It offers a weekly snapshot of essential art market news, expertly compiled by the Artnet PRO editorial team. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts every Monday.

We are back this week with our monthly roundup, where we talk through some of the big stories that are making waves in the art world. Today co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by Artnet's art and pop culture editor, Min Chen. Min commissions and edits a lot of our news coverage including a couple of the stories that we're going to be talking about today. It's August, and despite the fact that this is supposed to be the month where art and culture tends to gear down and the professional art world goes to Greece or the Hamptons, increasingly with every passing summer it seems that the news doesn't stop at all, and in fact sometimes actually ramps up. This week we're going to discuss the abruptly halted auction of artworks allegedly made by Michael Jackson, the art stories on both sides of a prisoner exchange that occurred this month between Russia and the West, and finally the artist who just can't quit: Banksy. He dropped nine animal-themed art pieces this month around London and many are wondering if the world's most famous street artist has slightly lost his touch. Tune in to find out.

There is a lot to unpack—literally and figuratively—in the Metropolitan Museum’s Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion” which closes on September 2. It’s about nature and the cycle of life (and as it turns out, there is a lot about death). It also touches on chemistry, biology, mythology, and so much more, all told through the lens of fashion. Added to this litany of themes, the show also tells the story of The Met itself, and the goings-on behind the scenes. It’s about how archived garments are preserved and how they are disintegrating. It’s not just about clothes, but about how they were worn and who wore them. It tells the story of us. It’s a visceral exhibition of over 400 years of fashion that engages the senses. It can be a heady experience. There are the sounds of waves crashing, and birds calling, and poems being read aloud. There is textured wallpaper you can touch—and courtesy of the German artist Sissel Tollas, wallpaper you can scratch and sniff and tubes you can snort. Frankly, this portion of the exhibit kicks like a mule and is unforgettable, with scent being such a powerfully triggering memory force. “Sleeping Beauties” was curated by this week’s guest Andrew Bolton, the Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, who previously helmed such blockbusters as “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” “China Through the Looking Glass,” and “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” which were some of the most visited exhibitions in the museum’s entire history. Today’s fashion-exhibit-heavy museum landscape has a lot to do with Bolton’s successes, but with his trained anthropologist’s eye, he never fails to zero in on the intellectual and human connotations in the garments.

There's so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole... but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It's not always clear when you're in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called "Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism." Across a broad array of culture, both high and low Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, "immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production." She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It's a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis's pick for our summer reading list, and we're not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age. It's heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it.

What is the future of an art career? Where do you look to find relevant new culture? And as an artist, where do you find collaborators and fans  in art as in so much else? A lot has changed in the last decade, and the answers to all of these important questions feel tenuous and up for grabs. On the one hand, traditional art institutions seem both dominated by wealth and starved for resources. On the other, there's an explosion of Internet culture full of subcultural energy, but also terrible incentives with a race-to-the-bottom quest for attention that hardly seems ideal for supporting art. The artist Joshua Citarella is someone who's been thinking hard about these problems, and above all, about how to steer a course in between these different, often competing worlds. His artwork has been exhibited in illustrious places including Berlin's KW Institute for Temporary Art in its recent "Poetics of Encryption" show, which attracted a lot of buzz, but he's also been cited as an authority on the ideologies and aesthetics of Internet subcultures by the New York Times, the Guardian, and many other outlets. This week, Citarella joins Artnet's Ben Davis to talk about his position as a figure in a new hybrid type of internet era, moving between art maker, podcaster, micro influencer, and community manager of the heady online platform Do Not Research, and theorizing how all these strands fit together. On the podcast, the two discuss the evolving demands on artists in the digital era, the changing art audience, and a lot more.

It is mid-summer and as always there a lot of exciting things going on in Paris, but this year is special as it sets the stage for the Summer Olympic Games. Now in full swing, there are scores of events and performances around iconic landmarks of the city, from equestrian racing on the grounds of Versailles to swimming in the Seine. While at first blush it may not seem like the place for an art publication, art and the Olympics have a long and storied history from the ancient to modern games, artists used to compete in various media as Olympic events, in fact. And so this month we turned the lens of our popular Three Things column—an article that looks at three (or more) fascinating aspects of a well-known and well-loved work of art, often illuminating lesser-known backstories—to a hallmark of the Olympics. This week we're focused on one of the most famous pieces of art that is about the Olympics, the Discobolus, which depicts an ancient Greek athlete at the exact moment of tension before hurling the discus, which is one of the oldest events in the Olympics. Artnet's Galleries Editor Annikka Olsen wrote a very compelling article fleshing out this symbolic artwork, and she joins co-host Kate Brown on the podcast this week. The duo talk about the amazing and complex history of the discus thrower in all of its many iterations from the before-Christ era right up to today.

It is time, once again for our monthly roundup where we talk about three of the big stories of the month.  In the summer sometimes the art news slows down, but the news news has not slowed down at all, of course. And we have three stories that we're going to talk about that are very much about where art and the news collide. Today we're going to talk about the critical reaction to the instantly famous photo of Donald Trump with his fist raised in the air immediately after the attempted assassination on him two weeks ago in Butler, Pennsylvania. A lot of art critics said that this photo was so powerful, it could define the race. Art critic Ben Davis had his doubts. Obviously, the news cycle moves very fast. This past weekend, Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed vice president Kamala Harris, and there's a whole new round of uses of the word "unprecedented" floating around. So we are going to talk about what, if anything, the lasting impact of this photo might be. Why it got such a reaction, and what the perils of decoding news images through the lens of art are. Then we're gonna talk about the defacement of a goddess statue by the artist Shahzia Sikander in Texas, which had been protested as satanic, and the artist's decision to leave it in its damaged form rather than repair it as a statement. And finally, we go down under to Australia for a story that has made international headlines. An artist created an art installation in the ladies' bathroom of a museum as a statement about sexism and gender discrimination, filling the washroom with Picasso paintings. But in a twist that has brought the story back into the news, the Picassos have now been revealed to be fake. Is this a serious story? Is it silly? It's a question that Art Angle co-hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown tackle along with this week's guest, our hardworking news correspondent Adam Schrader.

The Gladstone gallery director Alissa Bennett was one of a legion to fall under the thrall of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History. A years-spanning mystery told in reverse, the book has sold some five million copies and remains a cult fan favorite. It details a small cadre of college students studying ancient Greek at an isolated North East campus. Myth, reality, and ritual overlap and ultimately Dionysian rites collide with hubris. Here is how Bennett sums up the protagonists: "while their fantasies ricochet around a technicolor past filled to overflowing with gods and mysteries and the seismic tragedies of Homer, their bodies remain tethered to a Taco Bell present." The book has yet to be seen on the big screen, but Bennett has managed to find a super-low-budget obscure video art adaption from 2006, which is now on view as part of the "The Secret History," (on view through August 2) a group art exhibition she curated, on view now at Gladstone 64, the gallery’s upper east side outpost in a converted townhouse. The artists featured in the fascinating show range from familiar names like Matthew Barney, Rachel Rose, and Hope Atherton to younger artists like Matt Hilvers and Karyn Lyons, and her own personal astrologer (and former Art Angle guest) Micki Pellerano. Bennett joined Artnet editor William Van Meter to discuss the show, and her meandering path in life that includes a stint as a runway model, a co-host alongside Lena Dunham of the acclaimed podcast The C-Word, a teacher at the Yale School of Art, and author of the zine "Dead is Better." Now, she holds a post as a gallery director, and along the way she remembers her mentor, Barbara Gladstone, the legendary gallerist who passed away last month.