Inside Central Asia’s Big Art Boom

Central Asia has a deep artistic heritage, from Silk Road craft traditions to a vibrant early 20th century avant-garde. But Soviet rule left a legacy that included the repression of artistic expression, and for decades after independence, the region was often defined by that past. That’s changing now, in a big way, and the international art world has started paying more attention to the five countries colloquially known as “the Stans.” The region is seeing a ton of growth. Young populations, diversifying trade, and rapid digital adoption are turning its cities into serious markets and destinations. Cities like Tashkent and Almaty are modernizing, while heritage sites like Bukhara and Samarkand are taking on bigger economic and tourism roles. Last year, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development said the region is expected to grow faster than China. Amid this economic momentum, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan in particular seem keen on building soft power, pouring major money into culture both at home, in new museums and biennials, and abroad, in pavilions at Venice and collaborations with international institutions. So today, we’re looking at the region through the lens of institution building and cultural infrastructure, with governments leading in some places and private collectors in others. And we’re coming at it as newcomers, the way many visitors will: curious, and keen to know where to start. News Editor, Margaret Carrigan just made her first trip to the region this fall, and she is joined by Annikka Olsen, Artnet’s Galleries Editor, who made a few journeys there in the last year. Artwork: Batima Zaurbekova, Waiting (1980). Courtesy of Abylkhan Kasteyev National Museum of Arts of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Almaty.

Iris van Herpen is a fashion designer, but it’s a title that barely captures the scope of her imagination. Her practice reaches far beyond the runway, drawing on everything from the natural sciences to astronomy. The results are extraordinary garments that seem to belong to some otherworldly ecosystem. You might know Van Herpen’s work from her groundbreaking 3D-printed dress, or her biomorphic creations for Bjork or Lady Gaga, or the bubble dress that Eileen Gu wore to the Met Gala. She’s even created a garment that incorporates living, bioluminescent algae. These couture designs take their cues from the natural world, and use cutting-edge technology to bring to life often overlooked forms like the intricate structures of fungi or the undulations of the ocean. And while we tend to think of biology and technology as two separate realms, van Herpen sees them as much more closely intertwined. In fact, she believes the distinction between them may not be so clear-cut. That’s something we explored when Culture Editor, Min Chenm caught up with her at the Brooklyn Museum, which is currently hosting “Sculpting the Senses.” It’s a retrospective featuring more than 140 of her designs. The exhibition opened in May and has been so popular that it's been extended through January 2027. In their conversation, we talked about her lifelong fascination with nature, her discovery of technology, and the curiosity that continues to power her practice. We also explored a question that lies at the heart of her work: What happens when technology doesn't take us further away from nature, but brings us closer to it?

It has been a whirlwind few weeks for the art industry in Europe. First, Frieze London and Frieze Masters alighted in Regent’s Park, and a bevy of satellite fairs opened all over the British capital. There were big-league openings, auctions, and a great deal more. Then the art crowd decamped for Paris for Art Basel, right after large-scale protests in the city and around France gave way to looting and police clashes. Student protesters shuttered the Louvre for a day, but the fair went ahead as planned, with some 200 exhibitors offering work at the Grand Palais. With another protest looming, the fair decided to cancel its weekend run, closing on Friday evening. To talk about it all, Andrew Russeth hopped on The Art Angle with Margaret Carrigan, our London-based News Editor, and Katya Kazakina, our Art Detective columnist, who is currently based in Rome.

It is not a happy time to be an arts advocate in the United States. The last year has seen the real threat of eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts, and the spectacle of the head of Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hauled in front of Congress to be publicly grilled about her programming by Republicans. For many observers, all this is very alarming, but also gives the sinking feeling of having seen this story play out before. You often hear that we are living through a return of the “culture wars,” the turbulent period of very public, very bruising battles over decency and public funding for the arts from the late 1980s and early 1990s. In many ways, what happened back then set the template for the politics of today. This is the story told in the recently published book, The Perfect Moment: God, Sex, Art, and the Birth of America's Culture Wars. In it, author Isaac Butler revisits the various battles over the National Endowment for the Arts from of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He joins Ben Davis today to go through this history, and to ask what it can tell us about the present. Images: Projection of a Robert Mapplethorpe self-portrait during a protest at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Photographed June 30, 1989 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Carol Guzy/The Washington Post via Getty Images) Christians protest outside the Ziegfeld Theater in Manhattan, at the portrayal of Christ in Martin Scorsese's film 'The Last Temptation of Christ', New York City, 13th August 1988. One of the placards reads: 'God Damns Blasphemy'. (Photo by Barbara Alper/Getty Images) Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, (1987). Courtesy Andres Serrano.

If you are in New York this month, I have to insist that you make it over to the 41 Cooper Gallery at Cooper Union in the East Village, where an absolutely thrilling group show is on view through October 31. The exhibition looks at the history and continued resonance of Guild & Greyshkul, a storied gallery that operated from 2003 to 2009 in SoHo. It features work by more than 70 artists, famous and obscure, younger and older, including Mariah Robertson, Dana Schutz, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Ryan Johnson, B. Wurtz, Ryan Muller, and Valerie Hegarty. Some exhibited at the gallery, and others were part of its extended network. The show was organized by Guild & Greyshkul’s three intrepid artist founders, Anya Kielar, Johannes VanDerBeek, and Sara VanDerBeek, at the invitation of Adriana Farmiga, the dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, and Yuri Masnyj, its associate dean. All five have work in the show. Sara VanDerBeek recently came by the Artnet News offices to discuss how she and her colleagues built Guild & Greyshkul as young artists in New York. She spoke with Andrew Russeth about how they made ends meet (spoiler alert: it was not always easy), why they decided to pull the plug, and the advice she would offer to someone opening a space today. It’s a conversation about a brief moment in time that I think gets at issues that many artists, curators, and dealers are confronting as New York becomes increasingly expensive and its art scene in some ways becomes more and more averse to risk.

One of the major museum events of the fall is called "Krasner and Pollock, Past Continuous," at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It brings together 120 artworks by two of the titans of 20th-century American painting: Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock. The two famously were a couple, and this show claims to be the first to look at their artworks specifically together as a dialogue. Jackson Pollock was, and is, known as the indispensable abstract expressionist. His expansive style of drip painting, made by throwing paint across a canvas on the ground, caught the media and the public's imagination in the early 1950s. The sensation around these paintings remade U.S. art. For many years, Krasner's reputation was in his shadow. Pollock died tragically in a car crash in 1956. Krasner lived on until 1984, and the Met show illustrates how she continued to experiment. These days, museums are featuring Krasner's inventive and varied paintings as much as Pollock's. A rebalancing, this show seems bound to continue. The title of the show even comes from a collage painting by Krasner from the 1970s. Having just returned from the exhibition, Ben Davis was inspired to talk specifically about Lee Krasner, who she was, where she came from, and what makes her art unique and lasting. And so we reached out to the art historian Mary Gabriel, author of the very engaging 2018 bestseller, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler, Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art.

What does it mean to make art on the internet? It's not a new question, but it's far from a settled question. From very early on in the history of the World Wide Web, artists leapt in to start experimenting, and very shortly after that, the organization Rhizome was born. Dedicated to digital art, it quickly became one of the most important advocates and keepers of its history. Last week, Rhizome celebrated its 30th birthday with a gala that brought together the luminaries of online art, both present and historical, and an art show titled "WEBSITES WEBSITES WEBSITES!" showing web-based work by Lorna Mills, Rafaël Rozendaal, Maya Man, Kim Asendorf, Luke Shannon, and many other names you either know or should know. This was the perfect time to talk to Michael Connor, longtime co-director of Rhizome. Ben Davis speaks with him to get the history of art online in all its chaos, and to asks him where he thinks it might be going next.

For many, many reasons, it has been several months since we have done one of our Art Angle chat-casts, where we assemble writers to talk about a few different news stories on the site. But it's September, and we're finally back at it. Today we'll be talking about three topics: First, here in New York, the fall art season kicked off with literally hundreds of gallery openings, followed by a bunch of fairs this week. The fall openings are always an event. This year, they're even more closely scrutinized, given how uncertain business has felt behind the scenes. We'll talk about highlights and observations from the galleries. Second, on the other side of the country, in Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has finally debuted. The brainchild of Star Wars maestro George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, the long-in-the-works, billion-dollar institution has its own quirky vision of art. We'll talk about what that is and whether it works. And finally, we'll talk about developments in the truly epic divorce of Libbie and David Mugrabi, which touches on hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of art. I don't know if we'll even get to all the details, but the story involves a very important Jean-Michel Basquiat painting, allegations of someone hiring a Russian hitman, and a dog named Botox.

This is a re-air of my interview with the artist Arthur Jafa. It came out earlier in the year, but with his much-anticipated career retrospective, Arthur Jafa, I Am Tony, now about to open at the New Museum in New York. It's very much worth another listen. Jafa is probably the most revered artist of the last decade. Born in 1960, in Tupelo, Mississippi, he came up through the world of cinema. But Jafa also found his way into the art world with his difficult video work and strange objects. In art, his reputation went vertical in 2016 with the video, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. It is a collage of found footage from social media that included police violence against Black people and also moments of viral celebration and joy. It was both experimental and accessible, and drew huge crowds when it was first shown at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York. A follow-up film, called The White Album, won the Golden Lion for Best Artist as part of the main show of the Venice Biennale back in 2019. And this month, Jafa is back in Venice, this time in a two-person show called “Helter Skelter,” curated by Nancy Spector, pairing him with the famous artist Richard Prince, also known for using found and appropriated imagery to disorienting effect. That show opened alongside the Venice Biennale at the Prada Foundation, and was one of the few things during the opening weekend that everyone could agree was a must-see event. Jafa has also curated a show currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, called “Less Is Morbid,” a deliberately packed display of his favorite art. He is also one of the winners of this year’s Art Basel Award, to be honored at that fair. In the middle of all this intense activity, Jafa sat down with Ben Davis to discuss his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.

The humble wall label at an art exhibition has a funny status. It feels, on the one hand, like a side note or an afterthought. On the other, it is a first point of contact and literal guide for a visitor looking to know more. There is an entire undersung discipline, Visitor Studies, which has put a lot of time into thinking about how museums communicate. And yet, even so, some of the most prestigious exhibitions in the world are crawling with texts that I can barely understand. As a matter of fact, I’ve griped so much about bad text at art biennials and shows that I try not to do it anymore, just to avoid repeating myself. But recently, I decided I would get it out of my system for good and be constructive and write an essay about where I think these texts go wrong and what I think works. Katherine Whitney thinks about museum texts professionally, she has worked with a number of museums and with Beverly Serrell on the 2024 edition of Serrell’s Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, a standard resource on this subject. So, let’s talk about texts. This is a nerdy topic, maybe, but it’s also an essential topic, one that helps clear your mind about what you want from a museum in the first place. Unlike a lot of problems facing art right now, the problem of bad texts is one that can be fixed.