The Lonely Palette

"Art isn't what you see. It's what you help others see." - Edgar Degas | "Close your eyes/sometimes it helps." - Rhianna A little over ten years ago, on May 4th, 2016, I swallowed hard and hit publish on my very first episode of The Lonely Palette. I had the domain, I had the website, I had a mic and closet, and I had a dream. Public radio, someday, but for now, speak the art history lecture I'd always wanted to hear in school, the one that would remind people that artists were human beings too, and that art history and art museums weren't only for the snootiest amongst us. That first episode led to a second, and a third, and here I am, a decade later, millions of downloads under my belt, feeling that same pressure, curiosity, excitement, dread, and magic, every single day. Milestones are both arbitrary and quite useful. It matters to stop, look around, look back. And it feels good to talk, and to be listened to. So I asked my friend and colleague, Julie Shapiro, the best listener in the biz, to sit down with me and talk about art, craft, the changing industry, failure, and success. Ten years of making a show entirely by myself - and entirely for the love of it. Enjoy. Music used: The Blue Dot Sessions, "Helado," "Red City Theme," "Paper Feather" Haas, Kowert, Tice, "The Decade" Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian SmeeSebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his prose and his love of the work leaps off the page and into your lap, offering a guiding hand past the velvet rope, not just for his readers, but for himself: he’s a critic who is constantly looking inward, curious about his own responses to artworks, and what it can teach him about teaching us.Sebastian joined me to discuss his latest book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,” as well as writers on writing, becoming an expert about a movement on deadline, how looking back at the muddiness of a historical moment can help us understand the muddiness of ours, and what happens when art critics are themselves at a loss for the words to express why they just love this or that painting so darn much.See the images.Music used:The Blue Dot Sessions, “Town Market,” “Night Light,” “Brass Buttons”Episode sponsor:The Art of Crime PodcastSupport the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This season, we've got a stellar line-up: Cy Twombly, Lawren Harris, Käthe Kollwitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name just a few. We've got interviews with the Washington Post's Sebastian Smee, the artist and composer Annea Lockwood, and more. We've got a whole National Gallery residency! So listen and subscribe, rate and review, and fire up your earbuds for another season of looking with your ears.If you support the work we do, consider becoming a patron, or simply leaving us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going.This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what if a monument was human-scaled? What if it made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold.This episode takes us to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to Shreveport, Louisiana, to the South Side of Chicago, to Navajo Nation in Arizona. It explores how many American monuments to slavery took inspiration from Holocaust memorials in Germany. And it looks at decentralized memorials that are using technology to help bring monuments to the past into the future. Listen to the Monumental podcast series. See the images. Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Since her arrival on the art scene in the 1960s, legendary art writer Lucy Lippard’s work - searing, novelistic, crisp, and endlessly curious - as well as her insights, activism, entrenchment in the art world, and friendships have secured her role as one of the most important minds in art criticism of her generation.Now, at 86 years old, all of the stuff that she’s collected along the way – photographs, drawings, relationships, grandchildren – is the subject of her new memoir, or, actually, what she calls “Stuff (Instead of a Memoir).” She joined me to talk about the book, but also more than 60 years of writing about art in the way that centered life. After all, “art,” she often quotes, “is what makes life more interesting than art.” Art is the artists, the world they inhabit, their shared cultural references, their shared understanding of the art world and art history. Their human experiences rendered in paint. The stuff they leave behind. Music Used:The Blue Dot Sessions, “Lacquer Groove,” “Hardwood Lullaby” Episode Webpage Support the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Taking a break from writing about astronauts, Tom Wolfe donned his white suit and strolled to the art museums of New York City, letting the incomprehensible literary works of the movement wash over him like a warm bath of clam broth, and producing what, in the words of art critic Rosalind Krauss, "hit the art world like a really bad, MSG-headache-producing, Chinese lunch." For you, dear listeners, here is the headache-inducing introduction to "The Painted Word," read aloud, as was always intended. This free preview is available to all listeners, but the full chapter, and all future chapters, will be going to $2 (and above) per episode patrons, so pledge that support to find out just what in the heck Wolfe defines as an "apache dance." It's so not what you think it is that it might just be what you think it is. The next chapter will be released on Tuesday, October 17. Don't miss a word, painted or otherwise, by becoming a patron.

I can't help the way I'm feeling/Goddess of love, please take me to your leader/I can't help, I keep on dancing. - Lady GagaThe neoplatonic ideal of beauty, the girl on the half-shell, the naked chick riding a clam. Her tilted head and fluttery hair are recognized by everyone and their grandma, but no one - experts included - can explain just why in the heck this painting is so iconic. Shell we take on the challenge?See the images.Music used:Django Reinhardt, “Django’s Tiger”Joan Baez, “Diamonds and Rust”The Blue Dot Sessions, “TwoPound,” “Coulis Coulis,” “Delmendra,” “No Smoking,” “Belle Anette,” “Rue Severine,” “Ranch Hand,” “Pastel de Nata,” “Khfett”Lady Gaga, “Venus”Episode sponsor:The Art of Crime PodcastSupport the show by becoming a patron or by just sending us a tip. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Whether for his critics, his friends(...?), or his canvases, the Victorian-era, Gilded-age Aesthetic ex-pat painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler had one motto: float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.