The Case for M.C. Escher

There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names, figures like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher’s impact on the wider culture may be as big, or even bigger that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist. Born Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artist was a highly skilled maker of woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, bringing a sense of exquisite precision and intricate geometry to his compositions. But as an artist, Escher is almost synonymous with the idea of visual paradox. You will know him for works like Drawing Hands (from 1953), depicting two hands holding pencils, each seeming to emerge from a piece of paper, where they are each being drawn by the other, in a magical loop. Or for Ascending and Descending (from 1960), showing a palace with a looping set of stairs on its roof, which seem, due to Escher’s cleverly realized optical illusion, to be leading tiny pilgrims both upwards and downwards—at the same time. So, is Escher one of the greats, or is he more of a novelty act? My colleague, Jo Lawson-Tancred recently went to see a show currently at Somerset House in London that’s called “M.C. Escher: The Exhibition,” which includes 150 of Escher’s original works from all the major phases of his career. Art Critic, Ben Davis leapt at the chance to talk to Jo about the show, the artist, and the cultural phenomenon that is M.C. Escher.

Doug Aitken’s new installation Lightscape has just landed at the Shed in New York. It is many things at once: a seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music. The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds those worlds and narratives together is sound.  Aitken built Lightscape around an original song cycle he wrote. The soundtrack also incorporates compositions by Minimalist pioneers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last week, the work opened with a live performance by Los Angeles Master Chorale—but they won’t be the only musicians activating the installation. Upcoming performances will feature William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. In that sense, Lightscape picks up on a thread that has long run through Aitken’s practice.  One of his earliest works, Diamond Sea, was set against an ambient soundtrack featuring Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails, among other musicians. His 2012 project SONG 1, a moving-image work projected onto the facade of the Hirshhorn Museum, was built around the song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” And in 2013, for Station to Station, he staged a series of art happenings by transporting artists and musicians by train across America. In an art world that often prefers tidy categories and boundaries, Aitken has built a career out of collapsing them. His works have moved between film, sculpture, performance, and sound, asking viewers to not just look, but to listen, move, and gather. So the ambitious Lightscape felt like the perfect opportunity to speak with Aitken. In his conversation with culture editor, Min Chen, he opened up about working across disciplines, the communal power of live performance, and the role music has played in his life and practice. This episode contains musical excerpts for Lightscape

Some of the most important visual artist working today are sound artists. It seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind of another is everywhere in and around the art. Ben Davis wanted to dig into this “sonic turn” in art, if that’s what it is—and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui’s work often takes the form of environments, with sculptures that double as experimental musical instruments, to be activated by the audience or performers. This form of art is both unique and clearly resonates with a bigger trend of using sound to activate the museum as an event space and a space of gathering. At the current Venice Biennale, Atoui is part of the Qatar Pavilion for a project called “Untitled 2026 (A Gathering Of Remarkable People),” working with a super-group of famous figures from the worlds of art, music, and food to make an environment that evolves for the course of the Biennale. And later this year, Atoui will be the next artist to do the giant Turbine Hall commission for the Tate Modern in London, occupying one of the most highly watched pieces of exhibition space in the international art world. Where does this genre of hybrid art come from? Where is it going? What are its challenges?

This week the art world descends on Basel, a Swiss city on the Rhine River, where the latest edition of the world's most important modern and contemporary art fair is taking place. We're talking about Art Basel, of course. Its 290 exhibitors include all the top galleries of the world. It's a place where you can see and buy museum-quality Picassos and Warhols next to still-wet-paint by emerging artists, though there's not as many of those lately. Major collectors like Don and Mera Rubell are there, and so are celebrities like Kanye West and James Franco. At the center of it all is Noah Horowitz, who has been CEO of Art Basel since 2022. Noah and senior writer, Katya Kazakina, have known each other for years, throughout which he has stood at the helm of various art fairs, starting with the first online art fair called VIP in 2010. In 2011 he became the executive director of the Armory Show in New York and remained in that role for almost four years until 2015. He then advanced to Art Basel, becoming its head of the Americas, which put him in charge of Art Basel Miami Beach, the largest contemporary art fair in the United States. In 2021 Sotheby's hired Noah to lead the gallery and private dealer services worldwide, but he stayed for just a year before returning to Art Basel triumphantly as its chief executive. Noah is also the author of the book Art of the Deal: Contemporary Art in a Global Financial Market, published in 2011. For many years, Art Basel ran three art fairs, the original one in Basel, second one in Miami Beach, and the third one in Hong Kong, but in the last couple of years it added a fourth fair in Paris, and just this year another one in Qatar, raising questions about its expansion model and sustainability. It also introduced a new platform, Zero 10, for digital art, and the Art Basel Awards. Noah and Katya discussed the changing art market, digital art, and the strain art fairs place on mid-tier galleries.

Roberta Smith is the exemplar of popular art criticism. For almost four decades, Smith was a familiar voice on the arts pages of the New York Times, serving for many of those years as co-lead art critic. Both feared and revered, she is known above all for close looking, precise description, and a style that’s accessible but serious. In 2019, she won the Rabkin Award for Lifetime Achievement. Smith moved to New York in the late 1960s, studying at the Whitney’s Independent Study Program and meeting her first mentor, the sculptor Donald Judd. In the early 1970s, she worked at the Museum of Modern Art and Paula Cooper Gallery, then began writing for various art magazines. In the 1980s, she began writing for larger audiences at the Village Voice, and then for the Times starting in 1986. Smith retired two years ago. This week, she is back because a film, called House of Criticism, about her and her husband, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz, is making its debut at the Tribeca Film Festival. Ben Davis took that as his cue to interview someone who has shaped the worlds of art-making and art-writing so deeply. Smith was nice enough to talk to him about her method, what she thinks people get wrong about the art world, and what she’s looking at now.

This week we're re-airing a favorite episode featuring Kate Brown interviewing Ben Davis about the “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. Curated by Carmen C. Bambach, it took 17 years to assemble. No one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did. But what is the story within the story of this artist who left indelible mark on western art? This week, we find out.

Arthur 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 viral 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 agreed to talk to Artnet's Ben Davis about his art, his view of art history, and what comes next.

During fair week in New York in mid-May, Andrew Russeth had the high pleasure of moderating a panel about the state of arts philanthropy at TEFAF New York. Joining him on stage at the Park Avenue Armory were two leading figures in American patronage, Sarah Arison and Michi Jigarjian. Arison was named president of the board of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2024 at the age of only 39, making her the youngest person to ever hold that position. The president of the Arison Arts Foundation, she also chairs the board of YoungArts and serves on a variety of boards, including those of MoMA PS1 and American Ballet Theatre. Jigarjian is CEO of Work of Art Holdings and a partner at 7G Group. She is the force behind the culturally rich Rockaway Hotel out in Queens, and for 15 years led the Baxter St at CCNY as its president. A first-generation Mexican American, she is on the boards of the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1. During the panel, which was titled “Who Supports Art Now? Patronage in a Shifting Cultural Landscape,” Arison and Jigarjian charted how arts philanthropy has changed in recent decades and described how they and their peers are leading institutions and supporting artists in a period of tremendous uncertainty—and potential.

Los Angeles has a new museum. Or a new vision for an old one. One of the most important museums in the country, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has just debuted a long-awaited new building. It’s designed by the revered Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It cost three quarters of a billion dollars to realize. And long before it opened to the public last month, it has been controversial, for a whole host of reasons. It debuts with LACMA’s charismatic director Michael Govan promising not just a new LACMA, but a new vision for how museums show art and relate to the public. Ben Davis went out to Los Angeles to see the new building last month, and spoke to culture critic Carolina Miranda. Miranda has the gift of being both a sharp observer or L.A. art and a gifted translator of sometimes esoteric museum and architecture debate. She has published an analysis of Zumthor and Govan’s vision means for CityLab, called “For Better or Worse, the New LACMA Is an Instant LA Icon,” and she is here with me today to talk about what LACMA means for the city and for museums now.

At the Venice Biennale, every two years, we expect big things from the artists picked to represent their countries. But I'm not sure anyone can quite prepare themselves for the universe of Florentina Holzinger. After years becoming a titan of the theater world, Holzinger is now getting one of the most visible slots in the art world, a national pavilion in the Giardini. She’s representing Austria this year for what is surely going to be one of the most talked about pavilions. Known for feminist performances that push the human body—and, by extension, the viewer—to their absolute limits, she does not shy away from nudity or sexuality. Flesh hooks, stunt artistry, live tattooing, bodily fluids, heavy machinery—all of it is in play, and none of it is trying to be polite. The physicality of her practice is not for the faint of heart, nor for her performers. Her work tends to divide a room, something Holzinger seems entirely unbothered by. Opening May 9th, her exhibition called “Seaworld Venice” fills the Austrian Pavilion with water, turning it into an underwater theme park and a fully functional sewage treatment plant. Audiences can be part of the work: they can urinate in the onsite portable toilets, and their fluids will get cleaned and cycled back into the tanks. The work is about the human body, but it's also about ecology and about Venice itself, a city that is sinking, built on water it cannot drink, overwhelmed by the waste of mass tourism. Kate Brown spoke with Holzinger about what went into building her trailblazing project for Venice, about the move from theater and dance into the art world, and about what it means to make genuinely uncompromising work.