The Silent Emergency Facing Museums

Museums across the globe are facing unprecedented challenges. In the West, public funding is shrinking, politics is creeping into the galleries, and institutions are asking hard questions about how to stay relevant to their donors and their publics. In an era of increasing scrutiny and diminishing returns, even the most established museums are questioning what long-term sustainability means. Meanwhile in China, the private museum boom that once symbolized cultural ambition and real-estate wealth is cracking, and some of these lavish new museums are having to close or scale back. In short, museums are in crisis. Senior editor Kate Brown recently worked with Margaret Carrigan, our news editor and host of the Art Market Minute, to edit a four-part series examining this issue from different angles. Margaret joins her on the podcast to talk about the takeaways and the financial, political, and ethical pressures reshaping museums. We also discuss whether this breaking point could be the start of a new era of reinvention.

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.   Long before headlines exposed his $86 million fraud, Inigo Philbrick was just another ambitious intern at one of the most powerful galleries in the world. Then a student at Goldsmiths College, Philbrick caught the attention of legendary dealer Jay Jopling and landed a coveted internship at White Cube—the gallery that defined 1990s London, and launched the YBAs (Young British Artists) including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. In this second episode, we explore how Philbrick so quickly ingratiated himself into the upper echelons of the art world that, within just a few years, he was running his own eponymous gallery. With hindsight, were there early warning signs of what was to come that the art world failed to see?

Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick. What happens when you mix staggering sums of money with opaque financial deals in the high-stakes world of art? Welcome to Art World Infamy, a new podcast mini-series about the scandals and larger-than-life figures that have gained industry notoriety. We begin with a four-part investigation into how Inigo Philbrick climbed to the top of the art world—and how it all unraveled. Once hailed as a wunderkind dealer, Philbrick leveraged personal connections and the soaring contemporary art market to build what looked like an unstoppable career. But his fortunes hinged on deception, and once uncovered, the losses were staggering. In this opening episode, we’ll trace the convoluted deals that propelled Philbrick to the top, and would eventually lead to a spectacular collapse that left collectors and investors out of tens of millions of dollars.

It’s September, and the art world is back to business. In this month’s episode of the Art Angle Round-Up, we’re diving into the stories making headlines from Buenos Aires to New York—and even into the fantastical worlds of ⁠Frank Frazetta⁠. We start with a remarkable development out of ⁠Argentina, where a couple has been charged with concealing looted art⁠. Then, we turn to the gallery scene, where art superstar ⁠Jeff Koons is once again on the move, returning to Gagosian⁠ after ditching Pace. And finally, we celebrate a record-breaking sale in the fantasy art market: ⁠Frazetta’s iconic Conan the Barbarian painting⁠ Man Ape fetched $13.5 million, more than doubling his previous auction record. Joining Kate Brown to unpack these stories is co-host Ben Davis, along with returning art market expert Eileen Kinsella.

We’re thrilled to be able to say that the latest edition of Artnet's Intelligence Report: The Mid-Year Report 2025, has been published. It's free for all—head to Artnet News to download it as a handsome PDF. Within its covers, you'll find a bounty of information on the auction world and the art industry, which artists have been having a great year, how various countries' markets are performing, and a great deal more. Surprises abound from the Old Masters to the ultra-contemporary. You'll also find interviews with power players from the field, like the Guggenheim Museum's chief, Mariët Westermann, and the widely admired, now retired art dealer, Jack Hanley. And then there is the cover story by our ace columnist, Katya Kazakina. It's titled The Storm Hits the Art Market: Who's Getting Swept Away? It looks at recent upheavals in the art industry with galleries closing left and right, and everyone spent their summer thinking about how to run an art business now. There are tales of crash-outs and heartening new models; there's something for everyone. Artnet Pro editor Andrew Russeth speaks with Katya about her reporting after she pounded the pavement at openings for exhibitions all over New York City.

Fans of the Art Angle know our monthly Art Angle Round-Up, where Kate Brown and Ben Davis are usually joined by a writer to talk about three topics in art. For the early September week of art fairs in New York, we decided to mix it up with an experiment: a live edition of the Art Angle Round-Up, at Independent 20th Century. Our guest was the curator Matthew Higgs. He’s the director of storied New York alternative art space White Columns; founding curatorial advisor to Independent; and—I’m really not just saying this—someone who's been on my shortlist of people to have on the show for a long time. Higgs is one of the most thoughtful observers of the art scene that you could to have a chat with. The house was packed for the live Saturday recording. Of course, we know that people listen to the show—but to see people actually turn out and to hear from listeners who have thoughts about it and want to talk about art and toss around ideas was very exciting. So, a big thank you to everyone who joined us in the audience. And of course thanks Independent 20th Century, and to Matthew for a lively and serious conversation.

Most of us can agree: we are living through a cultural crisis. It doesn’t come from a single source—it isn’t just algorithms, aesthetics, politics, or the economy. It’s the convergence of all these forces, and beneath them, the erosion of institutions that once anchored collective life. Over the past decade, digital platforms, like social media, promised to be a new kind of connective tissue—a democratizing force to replace more slow-moving institutions. But while platforms have transformed our economies and society, they’ve also hollowed out the very structures that once gave us shared ground. Mike Pepi has long been a sharp voice in this particular debate. Straddling both the tech industry and the worlds of art criticism and cultural theory, he brings a rare perspective. His writing, which has appeared in Frieze, e-flux, Artforum, and The Brooklyn Rail, also takes the form of a compelling new book called Against Platforms: Surviving Digital Utopia that was published earlier this year. In it, Pepi dismantles some of Silicon Valley’s most enduring myths, and it’s a bracing argument about what we have lost and what’s at stake as we hand over so much power, diminishing along the way some of our core institutions. But he also looks at how we might begin to rebuild them. For the art world in particular, the implications of Pepi's ideas are profound.

This is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year. Have you ever asked yourself: What do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not—but the question is at the heart of the work of Miriam Simun, who currently has an exhibition about her Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution at the art space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer is mind-expanding. Almost literally. Simun’s unusual art practice can be seen as part of a serious trend in recent years of artists exploring non-human thought of all kinds in the hopes of shifting our troubled relationship to the natural world. The centerpiece of Simun's show at Recess is a series of workshops titled “How to Become an Octopus (and sometime squid).” For these, the artist guides participants through a two-hour program of “psycho-physical” exercises she has developed over many years through collaborations with marine biologists, engineers, dancers, and synchronized swimmers. She’s taught the method all over the world, and the description says the classes are “open to anyone curious about cephalopods, new ways of sensing, and expanding the definition of self”—an audience which included national art critic Ben Davis. He got in there to explore my cephalopod side, and for this week's Art Angle, we talk about Simun’s art and what he took away from my experience in her workshop.

If you want to know which artist is having the biggest year in museums, there is one name that springs to mind for me: Cara Romero. Since her first big breakout a decade ago at Santa Fe Indian Market, Romero has been steadily growing in influence. If you don’t know it yet, her photo-based art is full of color, drama, and detail. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical. And it moves between a variety of themes that are extremely important in museums right now: Indigenous identities, environmental concern, science fiction, and staged or set-up photography, to name a few. For that reason, Romero finds her work part of many surveys and touring exhibitions at the moment. She had this year a mid-career retrospective at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, “Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai,” meaning “Living Light.” She also has a two-person spotlight with her husband, the artist Diego Romero, called “Tales of Future Past,” currently at the Crocker art Museum in Sacramento. For someone who has risen to the very top of the museum circuit, Romero has had a unique career path and story. Join The Art Angle hosts Ben Davis and Kate Brown for a special live edition of The Round-Up with special guest Matthew Higgs at Independent 20th Century Art Fair on Saturday, September 6, at 5 p.m. in New York. Purchase your tickets at Independenthq.com, and learn more about Independent 20th Century’s full programming here.

In art history, the pastoral has long offered a vision of nature as sanctuary—Arcadian meadows, idyllic countrysides, and timeless landscapes painted as if untouched by human conflict or change. It is a mode steeped in longing, often idealizing rural life as a place of harmony, simplicity, and beauty. From the verdant backdrops of Renaissance allegories to the sunlit fields of 19th-century landscape painting, the pastoral tradition has provided generations of artists and their audiences a gentle escape from the turbulence of urban and political life. You can still see these scenes in their full, romantic bloom at institutions like the Met in New York or the Louvre in Paris, where they stand as visions of a perfect, almost mythical world. Today, however, a different strain of pastoral is taking root—one that resists the urge to smooth over complexity. My sharp-eyed colleague Katie White has spotted a cohort of contemporary artists who are engaging with pastoral imagery in ways that raise the stakes, bringing the countryside into conversation with the crises and contradictions of the present. She’s dubbed this approach the para-pastoral, a genre that does not retreat into a calm and untroubled countryside but instead ventures into ambiguous, layered, and sometimes unsettling terrains. According to Katie, this new approach reframes the landscape not as a static refuge but as a charged space, marked by ecological urgency, political tension, and social change. Rather than romanticizing, the para-pastoral interrogates: Who has access to land? What histories does it conceal? How do rural spaces fit into the global story of climate and capitalism? Katie joins senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to trace the history of pastoral art and explore the tense, resonant present of the para-pastoral. Together, we’ll look at what’s fueling the genre’s resurgence, the social and environmental urgencies shaping it, and how artists are reimagining the natural landscape—not as a refuge from reality, but as a mirror of it. Episode artwork: Samantha Joy Groff, Backwoods Diana the Huntress (2024). Photograph: Sofia Colvin. Courtesy of the artist.