The Art Angle

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.

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.

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.

If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been at the center of both these conversations. As a theorist, her essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity, from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important venues advocating for digital art. As as an artist, Dean has been in many important shows, from the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial to the Whitney Biennial here in New York. Recently, for the Performa biennial of performance art, Dean staged The Color Scheme, a two-person theatrical work, which is also set to tour to Berlin later this year. The Color Scheme focuses on an imagined meeting in the 1920s in Berlin, between two Black intellectuals, one called The Poet and the other called The Philosopher. It may be as close as Dean has come to totally fusing her work as a thinker with her work as an art maker. It literally stages a conversation about Black culture, politics, and art. Yet The Color Scheme also plunges us a century back in time, very much away from the world of digital culture she has written so much about. It felt to me like a continuation of the important debates Dean has been a part of, but also an attempt to find new perspective. And that seemed a good cue to talk with her about how she’s viewing art now, why she’s looking to art history, and how her views have evolved over a tumultuous decade.

The first quarter of the 21st century is now behind us. Yet a pervasive sense of cultural stagnation persists: many observers and participants feel that creativity across the arts, media, and popular culture has slowed, leaving society with a muted sense of innovation and excitement. David Marx’s new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, provides an incisive guide through the cultural touchstones that have defined the last twenty-five years. Marx examines how commercialization gradually came to dominate contemporary culture, propelled by rapid technological advancements and a shifting cultural mindset that favors profit-driven formulas over experimentation. He argues that these dynamics—spanning art, literature, music, film, and fashion—have stymied radical innovation, making the opening decades of the new century some of the least transformative since the invention of the printing press. As Marx observes, there is now “a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” In Blank Space, Marx also proposes five strategies to help restore a society that values and nurtures cultural inventiveness. He joins the Art Angle to discuss the pressures and developments that slowed the emergence of radical new formats in art and broader culture over the last 25 years, and he outlines potential paths forward. Topics explored include the rise of kitsch, nostalgia, cultural omnivorism, and poptimism, all of which, he suggests, have contributed to the current climate of creative inertia. Marx is a Tokyo-based American critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He is also the author of several previous books, including Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century was published in November 2025 by Penguin Random House.

At the top of 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak, and art insiders' worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market you have been hearing the drumbeat of bad news: Galleries shuttering, a lot of the buying energy drying up, some fairs shriking operations, and the secondary market stuttering. But the picture is, as usual, quite nuanced depending on how you look at it. There were some upsides to the slowdown in the hype and the speculation gamification of art seems to be over, which some art insiders say is not the worst thing. Things seemed to turn a corner in the closing months of 2025, which included a successful fall New York auction week and a stronger-than-expected edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. Following two years of a down market and declining sales, the world’s two leading auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s reported at the close of the year, upticks in total projected revenue for 2025. So is the wind back in the sails? After years of downturn, has the art market changed in permanent ways? What major shifts can we expect in 2026? Senior editor Kate Brown is joined by Marc Spiegler to consider these questions. For those who don’t already know, Spiegler led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, and the brand saw a major expansion under his tenure. Currently, he works on a portfolio of cultural strategy projects with major foundations, private corporation, including digital and experiential endeavors. Spiegler has long been a visiting professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and launched the Art Market Minds Academy.

We love to do deep dives into trends that we are noticing in painting and the trend of “Bordercore” was one of our best-loved from the year, so we decided to revisit it this holiday season. We take a look at the emergent trend in art which is wild and inventive takes on frames, suddenly front and center for many painters of the moment as a way to push new boundaries in painting. Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice. But if you go to the art galleries to look at paintings now, you might get a very different sense of what a frame can or even should do. Weird and wild frames that very much draw attention to themselves seem to be having a moment. Recently, Artnet writer and editor Katie White penned a piece titled “Bordercore: Why Frames Became the New Frontier in Contemporary Art,” in it, she writes: A new wave of contemporary art is reconsidering the frame as a central character, one that is surreal, sculptural, and symbolic. Artists are using the border not just to contain, but to comment, disrupt, or extend the work beyond itself. This is driven by an embrace of more bespoke, historic artistic processes, but also, as a rebuttal to the superflat virtual age. More and more, paintings have been appearing at fairs and in exhibitions with statement frames, after a long era of often-frameless display. If for previous generations, the frame was a liability that could detract from the cerebral, intellectual, and aesthetic experience of the canvas, artists today are creating frames that attempt to pull us back into bodily reality, a haptic experience of art. In her essay, she looks both at the history of framing styles, and talks to a number of contemporary painters to figure out what is causing so many to treat something that was literally considered peripheral to what they do as very much part of the main attraction. This week she joins art critic Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss this new frontier in art.