A Venice Biennale Meltdown, the Prado Is Too Popular, and a $2.7M Speed Painting?!

20:20Ben Davis:It's sort of a points and arms-length body to take an independent process. But it's just interesting to see what happens when it is a challenging work. And I think art is often challenging. And people pretend that the Venice Biennale is not really about politics and sort of presenting your country on the world stage.

20:38Naomi Rea:Yeah, I think presenting your country on the world stage in an apolitical way is probably harder than it's been in our lifetimes at this point. And it's going to be a real serious theme of our coverage, no doubt, which is how the now accelerating breakdown of the world order manifests at what is modeled after a World's Fair and considered the Olympics of art. And all those artists bear the weight of that moment. It'll be very, very interesting to see how all this plays out. That might be understating it, actually. Should we move on to the second item, which is lighter? I mean, it still has to do with the ongoing theme of museums in crisis, I guess, but in maybe a different way than we've talked about on this show before, Kate.

21:32Naomi Rea:What can you tell us about what's going on at the Prado Museum?

21:34Kate Brown:Yeah, and I think it's, you know, you bring up our museums in crisis focus from the end of last year, and I think this is really a story showing that museums are in all kinds of different crises, and some are from too much tourism and too much attention. And I think that the Prado Museum is definitely one of those, while other museums are struggling to get people in the door. So the Prado Museum has basically stated, we do not want a single visitor more. Their visitor numbers for last year have come in, and they had 3.5 million visitors, which was a record high. And for those who don't know, this is a museum in Madrid that has the Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch and Goya's the 3rd of May and Velasquez's Las Meninas.

22:15Kate Brown:It is full of major hits from art history and absolutely crammed full of people. So they are trying to find a way to mitigate this. And I think what's quite interesting is within the statistics that they shared, 65 % of the visitors are overseas tourists. So part of their mitigation efforts are going to involve also trying to figure out how to get a better balance with Spanish and also municipal visitors. It's not the only museum that has complained of this. The Louvre in Paris has had major issues with overcrowding and part of their refurbishment plans were to make a separate area for the Mona Lisa so that other parts of that area of the museum could breathe.

22:55Kate Brown:I mean, there's a bunch of other art in that room, you might be surprised to learn. And there's also the Ephesians in Florence that has had the same issues and dealt with that in interesting ways, which maybe we can talk about. But also in your cities that you live in, right? Like the Met and the British Museum. These are museums that are just full. Do you go to them because of that or avoid them?

23:12Ben Davis:Well, no, I go to the British Museum. I go to the museums. Any of the blockbuster exhibitions, my viewing experience, I just prefer to go during a press view because you're going to get more time with the art and you're not going to be jostled by people taking photos. I mean, the rest of the British Museum, it's usually there's enough space to move around. I'm all for trying to improve the visitor experience when it comes to seeing an exhibition. I think limiting visitor numbers is one way to do that. I think the Prado also tried to ban photos in service of the same aim.

23:47Naomi Rea:Man, back when I lived in Spain, I went to the Prado pretty often just to commune with the art. And I just remember one time like just sitting there. I don't remember what I was looking at, but an American tourist coming in filming and just literally filming every object in the room and not looking up from the camera a single time, just sort of walking around like an image collecting zombie. I'm glad you brought up the example of the Mona Lisa room, you know, the Louvre hiving off the Mona Lisa into a separate thing, because that was my first thought when I was thinking about this story, which is that But I think museum attendance really follows tourism flows.

24:28Naomi Rea:Like tourists just tend to go to museums in cities with big tourist flows already, no matter what. They'll go to the attractions there because you kind of need a reason to have justified your trip. And I really do wonder if everything wouldn't be better if you just took the superstar works and gave them separate museums themselves. I think that would give the people who were going to go to the museum, no matter what, more of a chance to find unknown stuff. And it would give the people who were just there for Las Meninas or the Garden of Ruthly Delights or Goya's black paintings. The Prado has Saturn Devouring His Children, probably one of the most horrifying paintings ever painted, one of the most indelible.

25:13Naomi Rea:So if you just gave them their own space, you would have more room to enjoy all of those things with maybe spaces that were set up for the crowds that they draw. And you would also give the other art the breathing room. And they wouldn't have the competition with these things that have so much media attention around them baked in. Maybe you'd have a chance to grow new hits.

25:41Kate Brown:I think that's an interesting point. And it's very much in line with what Eike Schmidt was trying to do with the Uffizi galleries, because a few years ago, there was a similar kind of media moment where they were really suffering from overcrowding in the Florence Museum. And what they did was they did the Uffizi di Fuzzi, the diffused Uffizi, and they took some of its famous works and they peppered them around towns in Tuscany to sort of diffuse out. I know. It sounds like a dish. I hate to say it. To diffuse the tourism into smaller economies that are outside of Florence. I can say for Berlin, there's a bunch of fantastic smaller museums that don't get the same amount of attention as the big ones.

26:21Kate Brown:So yeah, you could diffuse it within the gallery spaces, like you say, but also across Madrid maybe. But again, logistical nightmare, surely.

26:28Ben Davis:I guess the one thing or two things, actually, that this story makes me think about. The first is kind of the obvious one. If you do limit entry, presumably you're going to have to lean on other sources of revenue. The Spanish government, I think, funds the Prado and must have signed off on this idea to cap visitor numbers with some sort of commitment to supporting the Prado. So as we know, all sorts of expenses have risen and just keep rising for keeping a museum going, as you talked about actually on this podcast last year. And then the other question is really the mission of a museum. If a mission of a museum is to actually get the art in front of as many people as possible, what does a decision like this do to that?

27:12Ben Davis:And I think it requires some thought, like if you're going to limit the number of people you're allowing in to see artworks, than thinking about how to get those artworks in front of people in other ways. For example, investing in social media, storytelling around the work outside of the museum.

27:27Naomi Rea:Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting what you said about the smaller museums, Kate, because museum attendance is really asymmetrical. Like there's a handful of superstar museums and then there's like everybody else. And that kind of tracks to the problem of over-tourism versus under-tourism. Actually, it exactly tracks to that. And it corresponds to the idea of these superstar works of art, which are all great works of art, you know, but they're just a handful of them. And I think that's partly because there are great works of art that have accumulated a fandom over time and lots of scholarship and people have seen them in posters and riffed on and so on.

28:14Naomi Rea:But it's also kind of a circular thing. I would hope that art history can produce new interest over time, that there can be new hits made. I think Hilma Afklint is a good example of an artist who has been around for a long time as a peripheral figure in art history and then got a new attention on her and now is a big star. so I just really feel like if you're talking about what you're talking about Naomi which is like how do you better do the education the public mission of the museum I do think it kind of helps to separate out you know that they're really different visitors there are visitors who are there to see the hits and there are visitors who are there to kind of dig into the art history and those might be just totally different audiences at this point and yeah in terms of the funding I think with separate institutions, you could, you have separate revenue streams, I guess, if you want to think about it like that.

29:13Ben Davis:Yeah, you could probably charge more for the Mona Lisa ticket. I'm sure they will.

29:17Naomi Rea:Almost certainly. I mean, I mean, practically, I think what it means, it's just got to be time ticketing or something like that. And I believe that the director of Prado said that they wanted to focus specifically on, on local audiences.

29:34Ben Davis:Yeah, local, local

29:34Naomi Rea:audiences. Like they feel like that things are out of balance. I mean, Spain does depend very heavily on tourism. It's a tourist economy, like so many European capitals. But I think there is a sense that they would like to not have their museums be just for that guy with the camera that I saw so many years ago.

29:55Kate Brown:Well, speaking of taking pictures and highly viral moments, we should talk about speed painting, which is the greatest art there ever was, according to some politicians in power.

30:08Naomi Rea:Well, if you're just going to judge it by price, speed painting is having a moment. We're talking about this because on New Year's, there was a fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago where Trump introduced a painter named Vanessa Orabuena, who painted an image of Jesus's face. You can watch the footage online. She sort of paints a cross on the canvas and then the cross is built out to be his nose and eyeline and sort of in 10 minutes conjures an image of Christ. Well, there's bombastic music playing and she's sort of pauses from painting the canvas to sort of throw her arms open like she's worshiping. The painting was sold for$2.7 million or something, like a huge amount of money to an anonymous couple.

31:09Naomi Rea:And it's just kicked the profile of this painter up a notch. She's maybe Donald Trump's favorite painter. She already has at least one work that I know of in the White House that she painted, which is a painting of him striding towards the viewer surrounded by American flags against a very disturbing looking orange sky. You can find her on Artnet News last year when there was this very bad painting, a painting that Donald Trump didn't like of himself at the Colorado Capitol. And he had her come in and do a new painting that he preferred to replace it. She really is a big figure in his orbit, but is most known for what she calls worship painting, where she on stage is painting live and usually constructing an image while surrounded by music and so on.

32:03Naomi Rea:It's a very mega church vibe. And a lot of people are talking about speed painting now. On a minute-by-minute basis, that's a lot of money per minute. Maybe the most valuable time per art made that I can think of. So what do you guys think?

32:23Kate Brown:Well, I mean, it makes sense that a painting that you can make under 10 minutes would be appealing to people generally right now, given like virality and social media feeds for sure. It fits so well in the real form. Yeah. And it was Trump who said, I think that she's one of the greatest artists anywhere in the world right now. So that is his opinion on record. Yeah, I think that the whole thing about her painting as like live worship is quite interesting because it's a very like pre-enlightenment idea of like the artist having the hand of God pass through them to like make it work. Like this was sort of in the classical times what people used to think happened when people make art.

33:01Kate Brown:And obviously some people still believe it. And I mean, no disrespect there at all, but it's, you know, referencing surely that. And then I also think it's quite interesting, this kind of motif of Jesus sort of appearing within 10 minutes, because, of course, there's in the Christian religion, the sort of Shroud of Turin, like that Jesus's face appears on fabric. And so it's not really a far stretch to see this happen on canvas, right?

33:26Naomi Rea:Oh, yeah. This was a painting inspired by the Shroud of Turin. I should say that. Oh, OK. There we go.

33:30Kate Brown:Yeah.

33:31Naomi Rea:Good connection, Kate. Well done. Well done. But Naomi, did you know about speed painting? Was this on your radar?

33:39Ben Davis:Oh, yeah. I mean, speed painting, for whatever reason, has infiltrated my algorithm. And it's only gotten worse since we started talking about this. But I mean, I think that's one of the reasons that Donald Trump likes it so much, because he's always been, you know, ratings guy and social media virality. And obviously there's something about speed painting that is conducive to video format, as Kate mentioned, and it does really well. There's a whole genre, all sorts of speed painters, and there's kind of different kind of communities of them. There's this kind of like battle rap adjacent community of speed painters who battle each other on stage.

34:18Ben Davis:And then there's also this kind of like pageants, like beauty pageants talent competition as well. and I was trying to figure out like what is it about it that is so successful and it seems to be like doing anything and then doing it in a short amount of time is obviously some sort of like superlative form of the thing here's so a painting's impressive but I can paint this in 90 seconds and that's even more impressive there's just something it doesn't actually really matter how good it is it's like the speed and then I think the second element is like it being a recognizable figure so as you're watching it, you figure out what's happening and then you watch it happen, which is kind of satisfying.

35:01Ben Davis:So you start to see, you know, Marilyn Monroe or Bob Marley or Jesus Christ.

35:09Naomi Rea:It's so schmaltzy. Just to say, I agree with all that. I find it sort of fascinating as a genre because it's at once this kind of conservative realist aesthetic. It's like, yeah, a painting of a bald eagle. That's real art. And at the same time, it's so postmodern, for lack of a better word. I mean, it's just all spectacle. I mean, it's like she's dressed in a cocktail dress and this bombastic music, just a total made for social media, what you called in an article, realism, R-E-E-L-I-S-M, Kate, made for social media. It's an interesting hybrid, natural hybrid of all that stuff. And then I think there's also something in here.

35:52Naomi Rea:This is a big genre in the MAGA world. In a way, it's what they should have sent to the Venice Biennale. There's another painter named Scott Lobaito, who's from Staten Island, who did a live speed painting when Trump during the last election did his Madison Square Garden rally. I mean, it is a populist aesthetic in a lot of ways. And I think there's something about the idea of something that looks like a painting, the kind of thing that's celebrated in a museum as very important, being done very fast that appeals to people. In The Art of the Deal, there's a section where Donald Trump talks about a day in his life.

36:34Naomi Rea:And one incident is he goes to an abstract painter's studio and the painter says to him, you know, I can't meet, give me a second. And then in his telling or the telling of his ghostwriter, pours a bunch of paint randomly on the canvas and says like, I just made $100 ,000, Donald. And Donald's like, well, now that's great art. So I think there's something about just making money out of nothing. That's also part of this. Yeah.

37:02Kate Brown:Especially though, I think I agree with you, but I do think that the Christian speed painting is particularly David Garibaldi, another of these probably 12 speed painters in America, he performed live for an Obama fundraiser in 2008. And of course, there is graffiti art being a very apolitical kind of anti-establishment, no matter what your political spectrum is, of just painting something really quickly. But I just want to shout out my favorite of all of these people is Nico Nicolaitis, who's a shamanic performance artist of this genre. Oh, I don't know this one. I sent it to you over Instagram and he punches the canvas.

37:40Kate Brown:He like pummels it. He tenderizes it. It's really something. So he paints it, but then he also like beats it up. It's crazy.

37:47Naomi Rea:I remember the exact first time I saw this genre, which was an artist named Michael Israel back in 10 years ago or something like this, who is like a ripped guy with like long hair, sometimes performed shirtless. And I went back to just now to look at that trailer that at first grabbed my attention because I had all these same thoughts. This is so schmaltzy. This is so showbiz, but but also kind of this conservative aesthetic. what's going on and um i was not delighted but like i got a a shiver of recognition to say that the trailer shows him performing and you know uh surrounded by dancing like sexy dancers and uh music and then it says you know he's worked with celebrities like uh warren buffett and then donald trump is like the very second person person that had mentioned that was 10 years ago you know So 2015, before Trump's rise to the permanent, unfortunately, center of political conversation.

38:54Naomi Rea:So long time interest in this kind of art spectacle.

38:58Ben Davis:Yeah, I think that what you said about it being very megachurch vibes made me think about that must really be what it feels like to be at a Donald Trump rally, like a megachurch and this kind of like circus feeling. Yeah, I do think the Christian component, it does, I don't know, Europeans tell me, it feels like a really American Christian component.

39:18Naomi Rea:I mean, Vanessa Orebena first went viral for this performance. She did the Liberty Ball for Donald Trump where she was performing and painting an image of him. And there was this bombastic Christian music singing and the camera cuts to people with tears in their eyes. And that went viral from, I think, a Reddit post where it was European Christians looking in and saying, like, what is this, Americans? This looks like total idolatry. Like, how is this not idolatry? So I just want to say, you know, it's not an anti-Christian thing. I just think there's a very particular kind of thing happening in a certain corner of U.S.

40:05Naomi Rea:evangelical world. Aesthetically, politically, all that stuff.

40:10Ben Davis:It's so Trump to have the worship painter paint him.

40:16Naomi Rea:Well, on that note, I think we should wrap it up. Naomi, thank you so much for being here.

40:22Ben Davis:Thank you. Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

40:23Naomi Rea:And Kate, always a pleasure to talk to you.

40:26Ben Davis:Yeah, always a pleasure, Ben. Thanks.

40:27Naomi Rea:That's it for this week's episode. If you like what you've heard, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, take a moment to rate and review us. It helps other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manolili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening and see you next week.