The Art Angle

Before the idea of feminism took shape, there was what writers once called “the woman question.” The phrase comes from the querelle des femmes—a centuries-long debate in Europe about women’s rights, intellect, and place in society. One of the first to take it up was Christine de Pizan, the Italian-French court writer who, in 1405, published The Book of the City of Ladies. At a time when most women were excluded from education and public life, de Pizan challenged misogyny head-on, laying some of the earliest groundwork for what we now understand as feminist thought. That question—what is a woman’s place in culture and history?—has echoed ever since. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin famously reframed it by asking: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” We have a clear answer: there had been great women artists all along, but their stories were often overlooked, dismissed, or erased. A new exhibition at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw hones in on that conversation. "The Woman Question: 1550–2025," curated by Alison M. Gingeras, gathers nearly five hundred years of women’s creative production—from Renaissance pioneers like Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, to Baroque heroines such as Elisabetta Sirani and Artemisia Gentileschi, and contemporary artists including Betty Tompkins and Lisa Brice. With more than 200 artworks, the exhibition focuses on how women saw and depicted themselves and the world, and how the represented power, resistance, desire, and violence. Through portraits, allegories, and bold depictions of female experience, these artists reveal how women have long claimed creative agency despite the structures built to contain them. On this episode of The Art Angle, Gingeras joins senior editor Kate Brown from Warsaw, Poland, to talk about early women art stars, recent rediscoveries, and why, after all this time, we still need all-women exhibitions.

Nigerian modern art is having a moment. In London, the Tate has opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, called “Nigerian Modernism,” featuring more than 50 artists who experimented with vibrant new styles in the mid 20th century in the giant and influential West African nation. More generally, the artists of this era have become more recognized outside of their home country in recent decades, from early figures who laid the groundwork like Aina Onabolu to a towering figure of the 1950s like Ben Enwonwu to younger innovators of the 1950s and 1960s such as Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, with many more important names to know and bodies of work to discover. This was an earth-shaking time in Nigerian history, when a near-century of British colonial domination was shed and the many problems of a fragile new independent nation had to be faced. These artists were part of figuring out how to express that new sense of identity in images. But their art was not always so celebrated, sometimes dismissed as derivative of European art. The scholar and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu has been important to the recent re-estimation of Nigeria’s art history. He teaches at Princeton, and is the author of, among many other things, of Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, a book that personally excited me very much when I first found it. With the Tate show drawing a fresh wave of interest, art critic Ben Davis thought Okeke-Agulu would be an excellent guide to what this art was, what it meant, and why it still demands attention today.

It’s been a really dizzyingly busy October, and as is customary, we are ending the month by talking about three of the biggest topics. We have a palette of stories that gives a sense of how head-spinning it was. First, we are going to talk about one of the biggest stories in the world, the $102 million jewel heist at France’s Louvre museum, which has transfixed the public. Second, it’s been a busy few weeks in the European art world on top the Louvre heist, with both Art Basel Paris and Frieze London. Our reporters were there so we are going to check in on what the news from the art biz is. And third, we’ll talk about the new Sora 2 app, an all-A.I. TikTok clone that isn’t public yet but is at the top of the app charts. I got a chance to try it out and looked at it. An artist I know called it “the death of video art.” Is it that bad or that good? What does it mean for art? We’ll talk about that too. Ben Davis is joined as is custom by Artnet’s senior editor and Art Angle co-host Kate Brown, in Berlin, alongside European news reporter Jo Lawson-Tancred.

One of the things Ben Davis likes about contemporary art is that he is always learning new things, because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, Jeanette Andrews. Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that’s something new, exploring magic as an expressive medium. Her works usually bring together the science of perception, the intrigue of coded messages, and the history of illusion as a craft. Andrews has performed parlor tricks dreamed up by an algorithm to investigate human versus machine creativity; re-performed the earliest documented magic trick from 1584; and made art inspired by the use of sleight of hand in actual CIA espionage in the 1950s. And her explorations of this unusual creative space are actually getting their first dedicated museum exhibition soon, at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois—that’s a little bit of news we’re breaking on the Art Angle, as a matter of fact. Earlier this month, Ben went to see one of Jeanette Andrews’s most recent commissions in Boston, "The Attestation," at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology. He describes it as a hybrid of stage magic and social experiment. The questions of why, if, and how magic fits in in the museum seem fascinating to me, so he was happy that Andrews agreed to talk about how she pulled off her biggest trick of all: making magic art.

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. After months on the run, U.S. authorities finally tracked Inigo Philbrick to a remote island nation in the South Pacific: Vanuatu, a tropical archipelago more than 9,000 miles from London and a world away from the art fairs and galleries where he once thrived. What followed was a scene straight out of an action thriller: a dramatic arrest, a secretive extraction by private jet—at the height of the pandemic, no less—and a return to face justice, along with tens of millions in claims from furious investors and collectors. In this fourth and final episode, we uncover what happened in the months after Philbrick disappeared and how his high-flying double life came to an abrupt end. Law enforcement officials and art-world insiders weigh in on how they found him, what it takes to prosecute art fraud—and whether a man like this could ever make a comeback in the art world.

Manga is surely one of the most beloved and influential types of culture in the world. And while there’s long been a thriving international fandom around Japanese graphic novels, in the last 5 years in particular, there’s been a huge surge of popular interest, with manga impossible to miss in book shops and comic stores—and now in museums too. The big exhibition “Art of Manga” at the De Young Museum in San Francisco is proving to be a real event. As the title suggests, the show looks at manga not just as a cultural phenomenon but as visual art, digging into the history of the medium and celebrating its dynamic graphic and storytelling style. Specifically, “Art of Manga” focuses on 10 Japanese creators, selected to show the breadth of what manga has meant, and can be. They are: Akatsuka Fujio, Araki Hirohiko, Chiba Tetsuya, Oda Eiichiro, Tagame Gengoroh, Takahashi Rumiko, Taniguchi Jiro, Yamashita Kazumi, Yamazaki Mari, Tanaami Keiichi, and Yoshinaga Fumi. What is the connection of manga to Japanese art history? What does a museum have to add to the story of manga? And what can the popularity of manga, in turn, teach museums? The show’s curator, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, agreed to talk to us about all of this.

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.   After a bombshell $13 million lawsuit from angry collectors, Inigo Philbrick vanished. What followed was a cascade of international claims from clients who had entrusted him with millions, drawn in by his supposed Midas touch in the art market. From art fairs to gallery openings to gala dinners, the question on everyone’s lips was the same: Where’s Inigo? In this third episode, we examine the fallout from Philbrick’s fraudulent deals, and the frenzy that erupted in the art world after his sudden disappearance.

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.

While we are on summer break, this is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year. Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can—and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver, or sent a chill up your spine. This is the phenomena that is called “Aesthetic Chills.” It’s tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it’s also associated with some of our most memorable art encounters. What does it mean for an artwork to be literally “spine-tingling?” Why does it happen when it happens, and why is it so rare? Ben Davis wrote a two-art essay last year on this fascinating phenomena. Ben’s essay argued that this was more than just a technical subject. He thought that it might even point towards some vital parts of what make art important in our lives that don’t get enough attention. Based on the reaction of readers, many seem to agree—we also published an essay of readers responding with their own examples of artworks that had the effect on them.

It may be the dog days of summer, but the art world doesn’t take a break, and there’s plenty to talk about for our monthly roundup episode, where we parse and analyze the biggest headlines shaping the art world and industry. In this episode, we take a look at what is going on in the art scenes across London, New York, and Berlin, including some of the biennials going on this summer. Then, we get into the headlines: including a dive into a long-gestating biopic by actor Johnny Depp, called Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness. The new film is Depp's first directorial effort in nearly three decades, and it dramatizes 72 chaotic hours in the artist Amedeo Modigliani’s life as he chases around early 20th-century Paris with artists Chaim Soutine and Maurice Utrillo. We also talk about Depp's new art drop. Is it all a rebranding exercise? After that, we break down the intrigue swirling around the U.S. pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale and what it might reveal about American cultural diplomacy in 2025. Within that fold, we take stock of a proposal from controversy-loving artist Andres Serrano and another idea from far-right American blogger Curtis Yarvin. Last but not least, we analyze the Labubu mania, a craze for these mischievous little dolls that has finally made its way into the art world and into the market. National art critic Ben Davis and our editor-in-chief, Naomi Rea joined senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to talk about it all.

If you’ve been around art in the last several decades or so, you likely have heard the term “institutional critique.” This is a genre of art that turns the lens back  onto the world around the art object as its subject, finding playful or polemical ways to provoke thought on art’s unspoken rules and expectations and links to the wider world. Andrea Fraser is one of the artists who has most helped define “institutional critique” as a genre and as a practice. She has done this in artworks that sometimes look like performances, or lectures, or works of research—but also in her essays and theoretical writings. One of her recent essays, “The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,” published over at e-Flux Notes, is an attempt literally to map out how contemporary art is not one thing but a landscape of different competing camps and value systems, so that you might figure out where you stand within it. She calls this theory “a resource to make sense of a field that makes no sense,” and she agreed to talk to art critic Ben Davis about it.