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...
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.
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36:30
Can Machine Vision Replace Art Expertise?
Say the words "artificial intelligence" or simply, "A.I." in an art setting, and people think of either cutting-edge, new media art, or of misinformation., hallucination, and plagiarism. But there's a case to be made that those words should prompt you to think about very old art and about very new technology's use in finding out what's real.
My colleague at Artnet, Jo Lawson-Tancred has a new book out called A.I. and the Art Market, that serves as an accessible guide to a range of ways that artificial intelligence and machine learning are impacting the art market.
There's a lot in the book about valuing art, about selling art, and about navigating the intellectual property challenges around A.I., but we thought we'd drill down into the question of art authentication, which has drawn plenty of headlines and controversy in recent years, all on its own. After all, huge amounts of money hinge on the question of whether a given piece of paint on canvas is actually considered to be by a particular old master painter.
The art market has an entire robust world of art historical expertise built up around art authentication, which is revered, but sometimes also viewed with suspicion as corruptible and subjective. Then, here come various forms of A.I. art authentication with its own jargon and new kinds of suspicion aimed at it. So who should you trust? Jo has spent a lot of her time talking to various players to help begin to answer that question, and today we dig into the thorny question.
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35:36
Re-Air: A Reporter Goes Undercover in the Art World
The contemporary art world is nothing if not confusing. It is simultaneously deeply frivolous, and takes itself way too seriously. Its business dealings combine total mystification with conspicuous consumption, and the exact mechanisms by which one type of art gets celebrated above another are very often impossible to figure out.
If you've ever struggled to make sense of it all, the journalist, Bianca Bosker's new book is worth picking up. It's called Get the Picture, A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends who Taught Me How to See, and it joins books like Anthony Hayden Guest's classic True Colors from 1998 and Sarah Thornton's Seven Days in the Art World from 2008, as an entertaining behind-the-scenes chronicle of art, though in a very different and maybe even more confusing moment. Bosker previously wrote Original Copies (2013) about architecture in China that replicates famous world monuments, and Cork Dork (2017), where she went inside the world of fine wine to try to decode its rituals.
For Get the Picture, Bosker inserted herself in the striving, less-visible layers of the art industry, just beneath the glamorous images. She works the booth at a satellite fair in Miami where a gallery's very survival hinges on a few sales. And as a studio assistant for a painter whose success becomes a major headache as speculators start flipping her work.
In some ways, Get the Picture will confirm all of the worst stereotypes about the contemporary art industry, and in others is the story of someone who slowly learns how to look past the caricatures by throwing herself into the thick of it, finding her own way to appreciate some of art's more eccentric values.
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48:51
What Is Orphism, History's Most Enigmatic Art Movement?
In the early 1900s, art movements within the then-burgeoning category of modern art were exploding in multiple directions, and among them was a strand called Orphism.
What was it? In some ways, it is hard to say. Relatively short-lived and debated even as soon as it was coined around 1912, Orphism was a form of abstract art, informed by motion, radial shapes of vibrant colors.
Most known and neatly associated with Orphism are Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who thought colors could be used to create visual harmonies, where form and hue worked on a canvas in the same way that notes worked to build a piece of music. The artist could be thought of as composer.
And yet the contours movement is still somewhat vague. In fact, there were debates about what Orphism was or meant from within the group that was most often associated with it. It remains elusive. My co-host, the art critic Ben Davis, recently went to a major showing of Orphist works, an exhibition called “Harmony & Dissonance: Orphism in Paris, 1910–1930” at the Guggenheim, in New York that opened earlier this month and will run until March 2025.
We discussed about the art form and its impact as well as some of the the unanswered questions he left the show with.
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.
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