A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet New...
The filmmaker, artist, and writer Miranda July has worked across such a variety of media over the years, one might say it is almost hard to categorize her work. But there is actually a strong through line that emerges when you consider July's vast oeuvre: an interest in how the remarkable may occur in small everyday moments and interactions—an interest in loneliness, sexuality, and death, and needing each other in our capacity to change and love—all these aspects that really make us human.
With this, July has built a diverse and awe-inspiring body of work. It includes a messaging app she developed called Somebody and an interfaith secondhand shop. Her art has been on view with the Venice Biennale, and she's also made three feature length films, two of which she starred in.
She's published four books and a participatory website called Learning to Love You More that she created with American artist Harold Fletcher that consists of assignments for the general public who make the art. There are instructions like "make a portrait of your friend's desires," or "perform the phone call someone else wishes they could have." One of these assignments is part of her first solo exhibition, a major retrospective on view at Fondazione Prada in Milan until the end of October. It is "Assignment 43: Make an exhibition of the art in your parents' house," and it was completed by a local woman from Milan. It is one piece among many in a show that spans 30 years of July's practice. There is also a new participatory video series in the mix called F.A.M.I.L.Y (Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You).
Her newest novel, All Fours was published in May this year. A New York Times bestseller and long list finalist for the National Book Award, All Fours is an astonishingly candid look at sexuality and transformation, but also at an extremely underrepresented topic in literature: menopause and female aging. When I connected with July, she was in her home, which is also her studio in Los Angeles, a small painting by Louise Bonnet hung just behind her. It's called Miranda, and it's a contemplative portrait of a female figure in what looks like a state of metamorphosis. It suits July's universe quite poetically.
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49:39
Re-Air: Lucy Lippard On a Life In and Out of Art
But Lippard has also been much more than a writer. She curated “Eccentric Abstraction” in 1966, helping to define what would come to be called post-Minimalism in sculpture. Her experimental and traveling card shows helped create the audience for conceptual, minimal, and land art. She curated maybe the first museum show of Second Wave feminist art at the Aldrich Museum in 1971, and was a part of the founding mother-collective behind Heresies, a journal that shaped the field of feminist art history.
Radicalized by sixties activism, she participated in the Art Workers Coalition, a historic activist formation protesting against the Vietnam War and for equality in the museum world. She was part of many, many other collectives and activist groups thereafter, including the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America in the early 1980s, a project she discussed with us on the Art Angle back in 2022. Now Lippard has written a new book called Stuff: Instead of a Memoir. It’s a short-packed tome that surveys an eventful life through photos that catalog the items Lippard finds around her in the home where she has lived since moving from New York to the small town of Galisteo in rural New Mexico in the early nineties. It’s a fitting way to tell the story of a writer who has thought so much about how images and words fit together, and how meaning emerges from place and community.
This week on the podcast, Ben Davis speaks once again to Lucy Lippard about a life in and out of art.
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40:52
The Roundup: 2024—The Year in Art
We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a special guest to parse some of the biggest headlines in the art world. Usually, we look back on the previous month, but as we head into the holidays and close out a busy calendar in the art world, we are doing things differently for the last roundup of the year, reviewing all of 2024 and the trends, themes, and stories that defined it.
It was tough going in the art market, where slumped sales were countered by some big flashy media moments, including one duct-taped banana and a lot of other novelties and masterpieces that tried to grab dwindling attention spans and loosen tightened purse-strings. Did the approach work out for the market? (spoiler: not exactly; the industry experienced a rash of gallery closures). We discuss what that all means for the outlook for 2025.
In the realm of politics, culture workers and artists vocalized frustrations with arts institutions they deemed to be silent or lagging on key global issues. Picket lines continued to proliferate around this, and livewire discussions about aesthetics were ignited by the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennale this year, both of which received mixed reviews.
At the same time, a new era of technology—led by leaps of progress in the realm of artificial intelligence—is being ushered in and changing the way we see and understand art, and other kinds of work (some of the work is arguably not quite art) that is being made. There are also some ridiculous and fun stories in the mix, because this is the art world, a place that is known to be, well, deeply unusual.
To discuss all this and more, senior editor Kate Brown and art critic Ben Davis, jumped on the air with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro editor and art critic. They parsed the headlines and the conversations that stirred the art industry in a year that was anything but ordinary.
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1:00:43
Re-Air: How Warhol’s Handmade Art Shaped His Famed Pop Factory
With his themes of repetition and appropriation, Andy Warhol’s work can seem mass produced. He was prone to say that his assistants did his work for him and often invented different narratives in interviews. In fact, weaving tall tales and shaping his own mythology was another important aspect of his art: he was creating the ultimate persona of an artist every bit as Pop as his paintings, one who specialized in glacial coolness and glib detachment.
Although the paintings might look like they came off of a conveyor belt, that was by design, and Warhol maintained close involvement with his work. In fact, before silkscreen printing became his trademark, Warhol hand-painted the 32 canvasses that make up the iconic 1962 work Campbell’s Soup Cans.
Warhol gained fame in the 1960s as part of the Pop boom, but this was actually the second phase of his career. He spent the 1950s in New York as a successful commercial illustrator, doing advertisements, book and record covers. All the while he made personal work and had a smattering of shows in small galleries, most of which were ignored or poorly received. But the seeds of his subversive repertoire were being slyly developed in his intimate drawings to which Warhol would return in his later life.
For this week’s episode, Artnet editor William Van Meter is joined by the journalist, critic, and author of the 2020 biography Warhol, Blake Gopnik. What more could be said about the artist that the heap of other biographies hadn’t covered? It turns out, plenty. Gopnik spent eight years researching and writing Warhol, and at almost 1,000 pages it is filled with wonderful details and newly discovered data.
On this episode we discuss Warhol by-hand, his pre-Pop era as well as some of his later, less mechanized moments such as his collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat, and how he managed to leave his mark on every aspect of his work, handmade and beyond.
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47:28
Why Is Rococo Art Making a Comeback?
When Madame du Barry, King Louis XV’s last mistress, pleaded for “just a little moment more” before her execution in 1793, in the throes of the French Revolution, she seemed to capture the fleeting pleasures and indulgence of the Rococo age.
My colleague, Artnet Editor Katie White eloquently described this moment before du Barry’s death in the opening of a recent essay, exploring how, centuries later, the aesthetic of whimsy, romance, and unapologetic luxury is making a bold return. She calls it Neo-Rococo.
So what is Neo-Rococo, really? It’s a contemporary movement that merges the delicate pastels, ornamental elegance, and sensuality of 18th-century Rococo with modernist abstraction and feminist perspectives of contemporary art. Artists like Flora Yukhnovich, Michaela Yearwood-Dan, and Francesca DiMattio are key figures in this revival. They draw on the decorative roots of Rococo while addressing the complexities of today’s world.
On this episode of The Art Angle, Katie joins me to discuss this fascinating resurgence of a centuries-old aesthetic sensibility, and how it extends beyond the art world into broader pop culture. What lessons can we learn from this era of late Baroque history? Quite a few as a turns out. And some surprising ones—these artists are actually subverting the escapist art movement to draw out some interesting questions about beauty and femininity.
A weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, Artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more.
Österreich