The Round-Up: 2025’s Highs, Lows, and WTFs

21:43And the important thing is not the market, but the way that the community that forms around art. You know, just the kind of generic boilerplate press release, kind of virtuous academic adjacent. And I thought that is so emblematic that on the one hand, you have this thing that looks like trying to be this new kind of unsettling phenomenon. But at the same time, the common sense like of the art world is like lingering in this zombie form.

22:12Kate Brown:Still a data point. Yeah. Yeah. And he's still trying to ingratiate himself to the same kind of power center. So a long way of saying I think we're just between two worlds. One of the big things in the fall this year was the Anna Imhoff work, which sits in in neither side of the spectrum. Do you guys want to touch on on that quickly before we move on? Because I think that that also has a sort of unsettled nature.

22:36Andrew Russeth:I loved it. For those who are not familiar, this was the great Anne Amhoff who won the Golden Line at the Venice Biennale a few years ago for a kind of fearsome installation of dancers and dogs in the German pavilion, took over the Park Avenue armory for a multi-hour piece where there was a countdown clock. There were, what, a dozen catalog escalades. There were youths giving tattoos to each other, dancing about. It was kind of interminable. It was called doom. boom it was menacing boring kind of funny in a dark weird way i just had the time of my life but it was very divisive i mean ben you wrote about it i think you described it at the time as a very straightforward or obvious take but i actually think it was the right one do you want to walk through you liked it oh oh well i mean i liked it in the sense that i thought that a lot of things people criticized it for were things that were obviously intentionally what it what it's about.

23:35Including like that, boring and durational and arduous and an endurance test that you never knew where to look inside this big stadium space where it was. And then specifically that, it's hard to explain without getting too deep into this and going over time, but you know, it was a riff on American high school lore and a lot of the critics were like, this is like just jocks and cheerleaders? What is this? You know, this is such cliched imagery. There's clearly a German who doesn't know anything about American culture and it's like, Look, she knows what she's doing. I mean, you can criticize her from a lot of angles, but she's referencing American lore of teenage angst and psychosis.

24:14And in this moment, to link it back to the key theme that you were bringing up, Kate, of unsettled culture in America, like very uncertain thing and looking at those archetypes of America and being kind of alienated from them. And I thought really that was the early part of the year when the recent election was still lubing large, you know, really just thinking about the kind of disillusion and like uncertainty about how to, where the culture was going and how you even expressed, you know, your rage, frustration, sense of doom in this moment. I thought that was all really clear. Now, I think that that felt very apt to me then.

24:58I feel like and we'll get into this in the politics section of this conversation that maybe the vibe is changing again

25:06Andrew Russeth:I also want to pivot to kate and just say if we have time I feel like we would be remiss to not Touch on jordan wolfson's piece. Okay. Yeah the foundation by letter which feels related in some ways And you kind of wrote a great first-person account of being in that just psychotic space Oh, yeah. And didn't you go too, Andrew? I did. Yeah, yeah. But I didn't write about it. Yeah, yeah. That is a nice pass at the ball because it does capture the themes of tech, the themes of politics, the themes of taste.

25:36Kate Brown:There's definitely, I think, Jordan Wolfson's work, similar to Anna Imhoff, has this deep, dark, psychological element. I mean, Jordan Wolfson's work, just to mention it quickly, you put on this VR headset and you're both dealing with existential questions and also this very nihilistic kind of voyeurism. It has this double speak to it that I think Anna Imhoff's work achieves well. But one of the criticisms of Anna Imhoff's work was that it wasn't political enough given the situation in the States. Although one would say, is that her role as a German artist? Nevertheless, I do think it's a good pivot point because there has been so much going on in American politics this year.

26:14Kate Brown:And we had a running list that was thousands and thousands of words kind of just updating things as they were happening. I don't even, you know, know where to start with this story of Trump 2.0. Ben, do you want to pick a jump off point? Well, yeah, I mean, I think you did just fine, Kate, because I was also going to start with that running list. I mean, look, for people at home, how you cover this moment, how you talk about it. I mean, we're putting on a show. We're trying to be jovial. It's a very upsetting time period and hard to know how you even talk about art when so much is going on. because in some cases, art is the happy place that people go to, but it's also a place people go to for meaning and stuff.

26:55You look at this running list, which is how one way we decided to keep track of what was happening this year in the new political era, there is stuff in there that I totally missed. It is such a barrage of stuff. I missed that the president has proposed making a Trump-themed silver dollar that he's going to launch next year with a picture of himself raising his fist on the top of it. I think the place that we should start, just because we've talked about it extensively on the podcast before, and it's very directly at the center of the art conversation, and it captures a lot of the sense of what was disorienting and weird about this year, is that after the government shutdown, the Trump administration finally did announce its pick for the Venice Biennale, which we've talked in the past about how this was a delayed process and it wasn't even clear if they were going to do a thing.

27:51It's way delayed, so it's going to be hard. And they've been attacking DEI initiatives and gender ideology and wokeness in museums. Trump actually came out with a tweet. I think he says the museums throughout Washington, but all over the country are essentially the last remaining segment of woke. And the Venice Biennale needs a museum sponsor or an institutional sponsor. So it was unsure who was going to take this, but they made the announcement and it's going to be an artist named Alma Allen. Did you guys know Alma Allen before? I was familiar.

28:24Andrew Russeth:Seen at the Kasman Gallery, seen at the Blum Gallery. Perfectly fine sculptor. Who lives in Mexico? I mean, I sort of cheat, but that's like the thing everyone's talking about. Like an art, you know, given the centrality of antagonizing Latin American migrants. Yeah, the fact that it's an American artist who has moved to Mexico City is something people are chattering about.

28:47Kate Brown:And he reportedly didn't even apply for the commission. He was contacted, right, by curator Jeff Uslip.

28:52Andrew Russeth:Yeah, that's an essential part of it. What a strange, remarkable thing to receive a phone call. Another proposal had reportedly been picked and had fallen through because of complicated negotiations around the budget. I mean, funding the Venice project is always a complicated thing. The State Department kicks in a very small amount of money. So yeah, got the phone call and said yes. And who can blame the guy? That's my viewpoint. I posted this on social media and people really came at me. You know, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity. You absolutely are not going to get another crack at this.

29:24Andrew Russeth:you know, go for it. I was also, I will say, I felt, I'm a little embarrassed saying this, but I felt a real sense of relief in the sense that God knows what could have been picked to fill that pavilion, depending on who's in the room when those discussions are getting made. You know, not an exciting figure to me, not someone who I would have ever remotely thought of on a short list or a semi-finalist list, but sure, why not? I mean, museums are really under attack. I mean, Okay, so people will say that during the first Trump administration, Mark Bradford and Martin Puryear and, you know, very distinguished black American artists, they played ball, you know.

30:06But it's different. I mean, I was looking through that list, Kate, and like the director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Kansas was let go because he refused to give a sword that Trump wanted to give to King Charles. That's one of the most bizarre stories and upsetting, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's not like a joke. And then this stuff about it's going back and forth in the courts. But, you know, like trying to mandate that anything that is deemed to be DEI, whatever they broadly mean, that makes you ineligible for any grant. This is scary stuff. So I don't know where all this goes. In any case, I did write a piece about the American Arts Conservancy, which is the group that is officially partnering with the U.S.

30:47Andrew Russeth:This was an incredible investigation. I mean, I was astonished by the things you dug up in this. Well, I'm glad you think so, because it's like, to me, it's like poking around on the internet, but it's amazing what you could turn up. Yeah, I mean, the head of this group, she's based in Tampa, and before this, her big job experience was in the pet food industry. You know, she's a pet food entrepreneur. She was selling natural pet foods. You can still find the Yelp page for her business. I mean, it is just an unbelievably quickly thrown together institution that is literally placing artworks in the White House after being in business for just a couple of months.

31:29And the people on its board of directors are just this very garbled collection of people in the construction business. And then its advisors are like NFT people. It really is like looking into an alternate universe of Palm Beach axis of art.

31:48Kate Brown:It'll be interesting to see what galleries, if any, come forward to work with Alma Allen. Because, you know, as you said, Andrew, notwithstanding all the political stuff that is going on right now, which is absolutely devastating, it is an opportunity that you can understand why an artist would take. And similarly, you can understand why an artist would need gallery support and it's an opportunity for the market as well. But his two galleries, Olney Gleason and Mendez Wiediem, discouraged him from taking the commission on. And now he's, I think, doesn't really have a gallery. So it'll be interesting to see what blue chips, if any, join in with this conservancy that you wrote about, Ben.

32:22You know, culture is so incredibly polarized right now. And it's very difficult to do anything. It's not political. I mean, the Pantone declared its color of the year yesterday, which was Cloud Dancer, which is a white. And there's a ton of political discussion about that. It's like, is that a dog whistle? You know, is this like Pantone, Sidney Sweeney, jeans commercial moment? And I mean, it is very hard to make any statement that is considered outside of the political conversation. I don't know if Alma Allen codes as kind of explicitly ideological enough or for the taste. I mean, they're begging for money on the American Arts Conservancy website.

33:03I mean, they have very little time to assemble the money for this. And so it requires finding people who care about this as a cultural project to ratify the cultural project of Trumpism on the world stage. And I mean, they're abstract sculptures, right?

33:21Andrew Russeth:Am I wrong about what he does? That aspect of it, I think, is fascinating that you get this group together and they say, you know, let's do something that kind of backs the agenda of the administration or is kind of palatable less. The best I can make of it is that those abstract Alma Allens, some of them are coated in nice metal and they're grand. And you just picture they would look good in like a Palm Beach lawn, a Hampton. Yeah, but it ain't red shit. It's kind of... It ain't red shit. Yeah. It's not red shit. I mean, the people on the advisory board of this are NFT people. Like, one of them is this artist who does, like, a diamond-studded sculpture of a spaceman for four seasons in Riyadh, you know?

34:06And an NFT collection that popped and then left everybody holding the bag. I mean, it's a real bomb. Yeah. But, I mean, like, the Trump revamp of the White House, it ain't. I mean, that is this grand statement, another art and politics story of the year, this ripping down the East Wing of the White House to put up an enormous Trumpy ballroom and his general redecoration of the White House with gold and a lot of paintings of himself. I mean, it ain't that. It ain't that. So, you know, like I say, if just the color white is political from one direction now, maybe abstract sculptures are political from the other direction now.

34:42But I don't know.

34:43Kate Brown:Yeah, you mentioned the White House revamp, and that's been happening while also there's been major funding cuts to museums and to the NEA this year. Also big stories. The attack on the Sassonian was another big story. And I think that's like maybe a good segue to our last section on institutions, which is, you know, inevitably also quite political at this time. there's been so much uncertainty about what comes next for them, especially in the wake of Trump in the States. But, you know, Western museums in general are facing a funding crisis. I mean, the Louvre heist this year was, you know, indirectly an effect of a lack of funding that the museum had been begging for.

35:23Kate Brown:There was a memo that leaked earlier this year, I believe it was, you know, saying how much the museum was in dire need of a renovation and upping of security. So, yeah, it just it seems like institutions are also in a really strange transition time where there's fighting for relevance on the public side of things, you know, in terms of discourse. And then they're also, you know, in an existential crisis when it comes to the basics of like keeping the lights on. You can almost say that the museums are in crisis. One could say the museums are in crisis. Yeah, we did a whole podcast about that with me and Margaret Kerrigan from this package we did earlier in the fall.

35:58Kate Brown:Yeah, no, I'm curious. There's been some museum openings, though, this year. Did you guys go by the Frick or the Studio Museum? And what's the tone? Yeah, we didn't get a chance to talk about that. And then maybe we wanted to end on a little bit of a positive note after all the melted Trump stuff and economic uncertainty. But, I mean, there have been, yeah, some really significant new institutions.

36:20Andrew Russeth:That's a happy thing. And I would say the big ones in the U.S., at least along the eastern seaboard, have been really positive. I mean, the Frick expansion by Annabelle Selldorf is fantastic. There's a great new restaurant there. Just immaculate, beautiful. I mean, it's such an Andrew Rutherford. The most important thing is that you can get a nice slice of cake. No, I mean, they just poured money into this thing. I mean, every artisan in Europe seems to have been tapped to make this thing immaculate. Down in Philadelphia, we have Calder Gardens that Jacques Herzog did. Yeah. Little jewel box of place with loans from the Calder Foundation.

36:55Andrew Russeth:the Princeton Museum by David Ager. I was just down there last week. Fantastic. Enormous 80 ,000 square feet of gallery space stocked with a great collection. It's up there with Harvard and Stanford certainly as one of the great university art museums in America and the Studio Museum here at home. That's the one I want to ask you about that because I know you've been and I have not. Yeah. I mean, it's remarkable achievement by Thelma Golden, the longtime director there. It's a seven-story hulking building on 125th Street. They demolished the old one, which, as anyone can remember, was small, was cramped.

37:31Andrew Russeth:And this is a place that has an astonishing collection, incredible works from throughout the past hundred odd years. And finally, it's on view. There's a beautiful rooftop. My one complaint, this might be on me as someone just encountering the museum for the first time. Some of the spaces felt awkward to me. There's a lot of work displayed in kind of, I would just say hallways, narrow spaces. It also strangely doesn't feel big enough. I mean, it's 80 ,000 square feet across seven floors. I think there's a little under 20 ,000 square feet of exhibition space. I mean, that's a lot of numbers, but 18, 19 ,000 square feet of exhibition space, that's not a ton of exhibition space.

38:08Andrew Russeth:So I'd wish there was more, but it is beautiful. One great feature is the auditorium, the event space with step seating is right effectively on 125th Street. So you just think about that as a lively thoroughfare with people selling things, people coming to and from work, from schools. You can look in and you can see events taking place. You can see Glenn Ligon on the wall, his famous MeWe neon. It's kind of a great building for that space. And I'm excited to see what they do with it, but a little awkward in some places for me.

38:41Kate Brown:Yeah, I think it's important to mention that there is a whole new frontier that opened up in Central Asia with the Amalti Museum and the Bukhra Biennial. And, you know, we'd be remiss not to talk about the new energy that is coming out of the Middle East and also the art market and the institutional world turning its eyes onto the Middle East. Given all this disruption that we've been talking about for the past 45 minutes in the West, this seems like a new sort of opportunity. But I think it's also really positive, you know, these are kind of have been dubbed in some cases flyover countries like these locations, especially the ones in Central Asia, where the the Multimuseum of Arts is in the Bukhara Biennialist.

39:17Kate Brown:And the Bukhara Biennial was actually, you know, backed by some Saudi-linked corporations. So they're not even with the same kind of ties to the West. So there's been this rearrangement that I think is quite interesting in institutions as well. And of course, there's a Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opening next year.

39:32Andrew Russeth:Totally. I mean, I think the Central Asian development has been one of the huge stories of the past year. And I'd shout out a number of our colleagues, including Vivian Chow and Kathy Phan in the Asia Pivot, doing a lot of reporting on that. The Bukhara Biennial in Uzbekistan, I saw just closed. It reported something like 1.8 million attendees, I think. Wow. What? You know, who knows how they're slicing it? That could be visits to various venues. But there was tremendous energy. A lot of people flew in or got flown in. I mean, my social media was blowing up over it. And so you see just tremendous excitement there.

40:06Andrew Russeth:And then, yeah, the Middle East, of course, huge, huge story spilling into next year. Well, look, the story, well, at least of Saudi money is very similar to the story of tech money in the sense that there was a moment when people were like, this is a savory stuff over there. Do we really want to be associated with that? It really just feels like there's a moment where people are like, no, no, we can work with this. This is existential. That's what it feels like to me, at least. Is that accurate to you? I think that's a good parallel. I mean, we saw Sotheby's get a massive investment from Abu Dhabi.

40:40Andrew Russeth:You're reported about a billion dollars. You see people just, I think, seeing this as the next place, maybe one of the only places that is new that has money that could potentially flow in. We'll have Art Basel Doha. Next year, we'll have Frieza Abu Dhabi. Yeah. Before we go to the final round, let's just say what's happening next year. The new LACMA is opening, correct? The new, new museum, I believe, was supposed to open this year, but is hopefully going to open next year. And then two things I wanted to flag because they fit with some of the conversation. The other institutions or para-institutions that are opening, Dataland, which is an AI-focused institution from, I don't know if you want to call them this, AI artist, Rafiq Anadol, who's known for these algorithmic screensaver -like installations.

41:32Sorry, that's my critical voice coming in there. But bound to be a very popular institution opening in Los Angeles. And then in New York, we talked about this in the podcast, the Canyon, which is a new digital art focused museum or Kunsthall like space. It's going to open in downtown New York. So, yeah, again, that's a vibe of like, you know, some very traditional kinds of museums advancing and expanding in very traditional ways. and then some people trying to get a new kind of thing going that looks to kind of change the aesthetic vibe in this more present or future-focused tech orientation.

42:17Kate Brown:Certainly a bid to bring in new audiences amid declining football. Like, a lot of these museums haven't made their numbers back since the pandemic. But let's do our quickfire round before we close out. I am curious.

42:27Andrew Russeth:You know, we talked about a lot.

42:28Kate Brown:Lightning round. Lightning round. We've talked about a lot, but what were those other stories that you think we missed that we cannot miss mentioning? Okay, I got a shout out one. Andrew, just because I did the edit on it, maybe. But also just because it's a cool story and a weird story that you kind of uniquely picked up on. This Richard Prince artwork, Deposition, like a seven-hour video artwork that you wrote a piece about. I love that story.

42:55Andrew Russeth:That man's just firing on all cylinders. Yeah, big year for Richard Prince. He's got to show up in Gaujin right now. Crazy new paintings, very weird sculptures. And yes, at Gavin Brown's space in Rome earlier this year, he showed a deposition from one of the times that he was sued for appropriating imagery from notable photographers, as is his practice, his want. And yeah, I mean, he is in a blazer and stoned face. He looks extremely unhappy to be there, but he just kind of duels and plays dumb. But that's not even fair. He just he has a lot of fun kind of playing the straight man to kind of explain it to step back to trying to nail him down by getting him to just effectively say that he'd use this work without permission.

43:42Andrew Russeth:So they ask him, did you request permission from these photographers to use this imagery in your work for the Instagram paintings that he made? And he says, I give myself permission. Quite menacing in some moments as well. There's moments where the lawyers really lose their cool even. They have to like take breaks because the lawyers are dueling back and forth passive aggressively. There's also one great moment that I did not have time and space to fit into my article, which at the end, Prince, I can't remember exactly, he's done a drawing or he's written something on a piece of paper. And one of the members of the council begins joking about how much the paper's worth and how they should keep the paper and maybe sell the paper.

44:24Andrew Russeth:So even as he's kind of on the hook here for potentially tens of millions of dollars, he's still viewed and saying it's like this kind of commodity maker. It's dark. It's hilarious. You can find it online if you Google around. It's dark. It's hilarious. It's turning his deposition into a work of video art. And you watched all seven hours of it, which is like, which is crazy. It goes by quickly. I broke it up. Amazing. Yeah, that's, again, something only Andrew Russeth would say. Kate, what about you?

44:50Kate Brown:I wanted to bring up the Nazi looted painting that appeared above the couch in Argentina. Do you guys remember that? Oh, yeah.

44:58Andrew Russeth:Oh, man. Yeah.

44:59Kate Brown:So this painting appeared in a real estate ad for a house and a very eagle eyed journalist spotted it. And then authorities went to the house and the painting was just not there anymore. In my imagination, there was like a nail kind of like in a wire still hanging. It was so. Oh, no, I think there was a very unsightly. Oh, yeah. They put a rug up. They put a rug up. Yeah. So this was just a wild story. But spiritually, it's a nail in the wall. It was spiritually a nail on the wall. But I think it is a testament to the fact that there's still so much going on in the realm of restitution. These stories just keep popping up.

45:37Kate Brown:And that one was just particularly outrageous in terms of how it transpired. What about you, Andrew?

45:42Andrew Russeth:Andrew, what about you? The only thing I would mention is this was a great year for lawsuits. Our colleague Eileen Kinsella is great at doing the deep dives on this, as well as a number of people. and we saw Abigail Asher and Barbara Guggenheim trade quite aggressively worded lawsuits about their behavior kind of behind the scenes of the art market. You know, the saying is always when there's a downturn, people start suing and people start breaking up in the art market because suddenly individual dollars and pennies and private jet trips and so forth start to add up and start to count. That's also been the case with Spironi-Westwater, where the partners Angela Westwater and Genenzo Spironi have traded allegations about what's been going on behind the scenes.

46:24Andrew Russeth:From Spironi's suit, he alleges all sorts of misbehavior behind the scenes, which Angela Westwater has denied. He writes that the gallery of which he's a partner is unprofitable and, quote, unfortunately, no longer a leading gallery of contemporary art. Kind of an amazing thing to write about your own gallery. Wow. That's a burn. That's a burn. Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. And so you see people being a little bit more candid or aggressive in legal documents.

46:53Kate Brown:Mm-hmm. Well, I feel that there will be some more of those lawsuits to come next year. There's still much more fallout, I guess, from some of these other galleries that have closed. You know, we covered a lot of ground. I'm exhausted. It seems that times remain uncertain, but I do feel that we're shifting into a new gear. There's a little bit of optimism on the horizon, and it's ever interesting. It's been great to have you both on. Thanks for joining us, Andrew. That was a ball. Thanks for having me, Kate and Ben. Thanks for joining Ben, as usual. Great, as usual, to talk to you, Kate, even on a day like today when there's way too much to talk about.

47:29Kate Brown:That's it for this week's episode. If you like what you 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 will help other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from myself, Ben Davis, Carolyn Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening and see you next week.