Whitney Biennial Trends, a New Baroque Art Star, and Banksy Unmasked

0:00The latest Artnet Intelligence Report is out, and now we're taking it live. On April 8th, Editor-in-Chief Naomi Rae joins award-winning senior reporter Katya Kazekina for a virtual conversation unpacking the report's key findings. Tap the link in the show notes to reserve your spot. I have to say my first vibe about it was that it's like giving zombie trombly. Ben, I'm sure you're... You have to explain this. I don't know what that is. Yeah, okay.

0:28Kate Brown:It's a deep art reporter term right there.

0:37I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:48Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events, the true start of a busy year. And we've picked out a few of its big topics to talk about. In this episode, we will be talking about the 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who's in and who's out and what's on curators' minds. We'll be talking about the rise of a new art historical art star, the Flemish Baroque painter, Michalina Wotier. And then we'll talk about a new investigation that claims to definitively, absolutely positively, once and for all, settle the question of who Banksy really is.

1:28Do we think they did it? Does it matter? With me to talk is Kate Brown, ArtNet Senior Editor and Art Angle co-host in Berlin, as usual.

1:37Kate Brown:Hi, Ben. And here in New York with me is Eileen Kinsella, Senior Market Editor. Hi, Ben. Thanks for having me. So to get things going, let's talk a little bit about art we've seen before we get into the big topics. Eileen, you're our special guest today. What have you seen lately in art? I went to the Outsider Art Fair, which I know is like its own sort of institution in New York. It's been running for a long time. I have to be honest and admit, I don't always get there and get to see it. But I made a point to go to the opening day on Thursday. and I caught the work of an outsider artist named Sam Doyle, who's from a remote island in South Carolina known as St.

2:21Helena. And it's a community called Gullah. They were descended from African Americans who were enslaved. And this guy, he was such an interesting character. He just kind of picked up a paintbrush on his own using house paint, would paint on found materials like wood and do all these portraits. So over the years, he's actually been known since the 80s. He does these very engaging portraits. He actually caught the eye of Jean-Michel Basquiat and ended up in some really famous collections like Andy Warhol and Fab Five Freddy and some museums. But he's getting a really closer look now and had a solo show at the Gallery of Everything from London.

3:02That's fascinating. I've never actually heard of this artist. I'm ashamed to say, what does the work look like specifically? Very raw sort of portraits. The owner of the Gallery of Everything who was showing the work said to me, and I totally identified with this, was that he put celebrities like Jackie Robinson and Ray Charles on the same level as he did like the local undertaker or the local root doctor who would like issue powders and hexes and things like that. So very colorful depictions of the locals and some like really big figures in society at the time. He passed away in the mid-1980s, but I'm happy that, you know, he wasn't completely unknown.

3:43He got some attention during his lifetime, clearly with the Basquiat recognition and had a solo booth, really beautiful, well-laid booth. It was great. So there's one portrait I focused on in particular was the Root Doctor that I mentioned.

3:58Kate Brown:Cool. I feel like a lot of our colleagues really resonate with what some view at the Outsider Art Fair. It's so many fascinating stories come out of that fair. So hopefully we'll make it one day. Very true. Yeah. Fairly often considered one of the best art fairs in New York, or at least the most enjoyable or revelatory, if you want to put it like that. I guess that might be a little bit of a cliche when it comes to outsider art. But in any case, people like the fair. Kate, what about you in Berlin? Anything interesting? Anything worth reporting? Well, I just, a couple weekends ago, was at the Hamburger Bahnhof, which is this contemporary art museum in Berlin's first ever gala, which was quite interesting.

4:37Kate Brown:There was an artwork there that I thought I might mention. It was kind of hilarious. It was an Elmgren and drag set piece. They're a duo that's based here. And it was called Performing Yourself. And basically, the gala started. 500 of these VIPs that had been invited or purchased expensive seats had sat down. And then this curtain fell back and revealed a second audience watching them. And they proceeded to sit there and basically just watch us for the rest of the night. And it was really amazing. And like maybe like a couple dozen people in this like mini theater. Some of them were dressed up like Galloway.

5:11Kate Brown:Some of them were just, you know, sitting there chatting with each other. Like occasionally you'd see one get up and go to the bathroom. Pippalati Rist went over at one point and tried to offer someone some cake. They said, no, thank you. It was such a great piece of art to kind of create this self-awareness of the performativity of these events. Anyway, and then at one point when the main course came, which was like at 10 p.m. or something, because it was, you know, a slow evening, they just did a standing ovation and applauded for everybody. And then they like wandered off into the night themselves.

5:40Kate Brown:It was an incredible work. Oh, amazing. I like Elm Green and Dragset. They're a duo. They're hard to classify in terms of medium, but they have a very good eye for the, I don't know, if you want it to be uncharitable, you call it stunt art or something like this. But it's an art that creates some kind of social situation that creates like a moment to talk about. Yeah, it's quite witty often, you know, like, and a little bit sentimental, but it's really like crowd pleaser and it does work. Like, I think they're good artists. They have this monument to Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid that is just a statue of it, and then it just blinks once every so often, very subtly.

6:19So I have to give people an idea of what I'm talking about. I mean, it just looks like one thing, and if you stick around, there's this very subtle thing that happens that's half joke and half, I don't know, paranoia will make you second guess what you're seeing.

6:35Kate Brown:yeah yeah they also had a work at freeze london last year that was an inversion of this audience piece and basically it was like there was a video work and you walked in and looked at this theater again but then you were kind of staring at it because there was a bunch of wax figures and every once in a while like you realize that there was just a visitor there watching the video that they were watching so you realize you were just like staring at some person um anyway they're good at social estrangement but uh what have you been seeing what have you been up to ben you've been writing quite a few reviews of all these shows opening in New York.

7:03Oh yeah. Well, like I said, March, you know, it's March Madness in art. Um, well, um, the big event, like the major event in the New York art world right now is that the new museum has opened its new building. and I guess we talked about that a little on last week's episode when we interviewed Christopher Calendron Thomas but I got a chance to see their opening show which is called New Humans, Memories of the Future and wrote a review of it I think it's a great show I think people are going to really like it the architecture press is still weighing in on the new building which is by OMA Rem Koolhaas' firm.

7:56But in terms of my piece of the coverage, which is looking at this show, which mixes the old and the new in a very interesting way, I thought the show was really memorable. I think people should check it out. It's a real event show.

8:16Kate Brown:In your piece, I was really interested in how you say that it signals in some ways the end of the contemporary and this kind of turn back to modernism? Well, yeah. I mean, there's sort of grandiose title to my piece, which is, yeah, the long, slow death of contemporary art or something like that. Well, I guess I really thought that the show would be really about future shock or the present. I mean, it had a theme about artists engaging with technology and figuring out, you know, ways to be through technology. And there's so much technological anxiety on people's minds right now because of artificial intelligence and a whole host of other things.

9:00So that seemed very of the moment and right for the new museum. But that's not really what the show is. I mean, Massimiliano Gioni, for folks who don't know, who's the lead curator of this show and the curator associated with the new museum, has become known for this very specific style of curating, cabinet of curiosity curating where you have like cutting edge contemporary art or or famous contemporary artists and then mixed with older art and curiosities like it's hard to call it anything other than that like in this show there are these drawings of neurons from the brain by an early brain scientist and there are some of the first images of pictures ever taken of the fetus So it really looks to the past.

9:46There's also just a lot of modern art in it. So I just think, I guess, to make a complex thesis and to compress it down to a little bit, I do think there's a lot of anxiety about the digital right now. I think it's very notable that the new museum is this institution that was, when it was founded in 1977, a new kind of institution that was all about thinking about what was now, what was contemporary, what was experimental now. And then now I think it's just very difficult for a physical institution to move fast as the digital. And I think this, by their own description, this show, this way of seeing things, which mixes the past and the present, is somehow very digital.

10:35Like that's how history appears to you is all mashed up online. But also it's just not a show that's really about digital art at all. It's really running away from that and trying to find different things to do that feel very physical, tangible, look back to the past, make you feel like you're in a space. I just think that's a very notable thing. I think art is, in one sense, running away from the digital right now as fast as it can because it has its own version of anxiety about digital culture that affects all of us.

11:07Kate Brown:It's interesting seeking kind of friction in a very frictionless moment. But that's maybe an interesting pivot point, because from what I've been reading, the Whitney Biennial is quite different. Lots of people have been saying it's moody. It also has no title. So maybe we should move on to talk about that exhibition. the 82nd Whitney Biennial, which opened in March and runs through August 23rd at the Whitney Museum, which is in New York. And yeah, there's 56 artists, duos and collectives, and it's curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer. And both of you guys went to it. So I'm curious, you know, you've had some time to digest it now.

11:42Kate Brown:You know, what's your big take? And maybe we can start with the fact that the show doesn't even have a title. Like it's really got this loose thematic, right? Yeah, Ben, I love both of your reviews. And I especially love the second one because the first thing I thought when I walked in and I walked around and I'll talk more about it was that I like it. I'm really interested, but I got to come back. I got to come back another day, spend a lot more time. The first takes are great that the whole Artnet team did, but there's so much to think about. I, for one, particularly enjoyed this year, the lack of a title because I found myself in editions past trying to fit everything that I saw into the theme of the title and trying wondering sort of like how it relates.

12:23And sometimes that just wasn't successful. And so this time when I walked in, I felt like I had an open mind. There's so much great stuff, but it's also so thought provoking without like making my brain think too much. I just sort of was taking it in. And, you know, you mentioned this focus on the digital at the new museum, I felt like there was a very big emphasis on the handmade, a lot of found objects, things that were sort of thought provoking on their own. I can get more into like myself and Sarah and Bill, who we all saw it together. And Ben, you were there, our first takes. But yeah, my first take was that I really enjoyed kind of taking it all in and not trying to cram it into some category in my brain.

13:02Yeah, I think the lack of the title, yeah, sort of the dog that didn't bark in the night or whatever is interesting. I did a little earlier a piece about looking at the Whitney Biennial, Greater New York, and the Carnic International. Those last two shows are opening later this year. Just looking at the artists in them, trying to think about common themes between them. And I do think there is a real retreat from labels. I mean, I do think, to be fair to the curators, I do think a title just gives the critics a big, juicy target to hit, to beat up on. Maybe, yeah. But I think in a way that's sort of significant.

13:44I really do think there's this sense, maybe this is just my own headspace as an online writer, but I do think there is a sense of just being bombarded by information and takes. And you even see that in just how fast the takes come in around a show now. So, you know, these curators work for two years to curate a show and then people are there. And you have two hours of the press preview and the opinions are kind of already hardening. And I almost feel like not having a title was like a retreat from defining it too much in advance so that it just like forces you to kind of like find your own way through it.

14:26Kate Brown:That reminds me of how the Berlin Biennial, I think it was the last year, that they didn't release the artist list until the day before the opening. There were multiple reasons for that, I think, given the political situation here, but also was maybe to not let people get too organized in their kind of opinions before they went in. Another thing that really interested me when I was reading reviews about that show was how few artists are talking about America in specific, and it is really like an American biennial. What was your guys' take on that? One thing that myself and my colleagues talked about when we just had a moment to kind of recap was how broad the definition of an American artist is.

15:05You know, it's supposedly the biennial of American art. And I don't know if this had ever happened before. I think maybe it didn't, but they also had labels for people that lived in areas that were like occupied by America at some point. Like there was a reference to Okinawa and like post-World War II American occupation, which this is another thing that happens. when you're reading things, sometimes you're reading labels and things strike you. And Ben, I don't know if this happens to you. My immediate reaction for myself is like, oh, I didn't know that. I probably should have known that. And I didn't know that.

15:35Then I talked with other colleagues and it's like, oh no, that was a standout, a noteworthy thing. And that was sort of my reaction to some of the descriptions of the artists, who they are, why they might be linked to America, whether they were born here and then moved abroad or vice versa. And to me, that felt like kind of a widening of the definition of who can be in this biennial. I think that's true. I think that's a little bit part of the pitch of this show. Obviously, it's a time of great anxiety about America. But at the same time, I personally feel like this is almost a cliche of the Whitney Biennial.

16:09They've been like, I feel like the first one I went to, which is like in 2006, during the Iraq War, they were talking about the need to rethink American identity. And, you know, the last one had artists from Mongolia in it. and Isaac Julian, who's a British artist. I mean, I think that they're always trying to expand and toy with this idea and come up with a way to try and not make sure the American artist identity is too confining to them. I mean, I do have a suspicion that I said in my second follow-up piece, which is that despite the fact that it's very non-American centered, the other way you could look at that, if you were being ungenerous is that look the art world is just a coastal phenomenon and is it is like the knock on liberals from like your uh your steve bannon types is that like a liberal in new york is much more connected to people in london or berlin than they are to people in you know cleveland or iowa and there is like very scant representation for the middle of the country in this show whereas at least four of the artists in the show live in berlin where you live

17:20Kate Brown:Yeah, that's interesting. So can you say a bit more about like what was on view and what it looked like? Because, you know, I know that they were leading with this idea of mood and texture as sort of the driving idea. One of the most recognizable features, because it's one of the first thing that you see, and Bill, my colleague, called it the poster child. He compared it to the poster child of the previous biennial, was these dog toys. And it's by this artist, Emily Louise Gassio, called Kong Play. He said that it may initially read as whimsical, but it's actually like an elegy and how it moved him because it was so much about the depth of the relationship between a human and their service dog, including drawings showing them both as like bipeds.

18:02And again, it was just very, to me, kind of like about a found object and very direct drawings that reference that. And that was a little surprising to be the first introduction to the show. And it felt very simple and very direct and emotional. And I felt like I saw a lot of that throughout the show. Yeah, on the next floor, on the floor above that, there's an installation by Michelle Lopez, which is what introduces you to that floor called Pandemonium, which is essentially a film on the ceiling that puts you inside a tornado or a vortex where it's just all these swaths. whirling documents and papers and American flags.

18:44And the message is pretty obvious. It's about America coming apart, about being inside of an America that is just being blown apart. But the two notable things are, it's about making you feel that. I mean, there's not a subtle message. It's just like, that's on the surface. And then here, we're going to try and like, create a thing that translates that into a feeling. It's almost like a manifesto about that particular move. And then the second thing is just, because it's all these documents blowing around, it really does seem to be about, you know, the bombardment of, of like I said, takes and, you know, information moving around.

19:19And a lot of this focus on mood seems to me like to be trying to extract the art from this. I mean, to me, and this was true of the last biennial too, and, and a few past, there's just this kind of like low level paranoia or just sense of like real fragile subjectivity. A lot of the art seems really small and has lots of little bits of things that are charged with some kind of personal meaning but doesn't quite disclose that. When they say mood, I really think they mean this kind of retracted or retreated subjectivity that a lot of things are about that seems kind of wounded by the state of the world, the state of communication, the state of having to perform yourself as an artist and all that.

20:06Yeah, the fact that you flagged that, that was a great work that really captured my attention. I walked in and it has that very haunting, urgent, dystopian soundtrack to it, that violin. I'm not sure exactly what it is. I'm sure I could nail it down if I looked. And just watching all these papers flying around and kind of like almost hitting you in the face, even though they're from the ceiling. I thought everything about that installation was jarring, but fascinating and also so true. And there's a prime example of another one that I'm like, I got to go back and sit with that one for like probably another good stretch of time to analyze what the messages are that are blowing at you and also just that sense of urgency and paranoia that it imparts.

20:45Kate Brown:It's interesting that like gentleness and like side long feeling to the work that you guys described. Like, do you think the show takes enough risks? You know, it is a really high stakes moment. Yeah. And I mean, it's such a hard question because I think, yeah, like the last one, I think there's a kind of a I can't go on, I must go on kind of energy to it where it's like now is the time to say something important. We need to like have some sense of urgency or really make the case for art in this context. But at the same time, like I don't want that burden. I don't want to have to speak my personal truth against this background.

21:27I mean, that's how I read a lot of this is as a sort of a compromise or trying to find a way between those. And I think the curators, to give them credit, I think are trying to push in that direction. They're trying to to find some thing that feels like a little bit risky. It's very, in my opinion, sort of cautious. But I think of this video by a filmmaker named Jordan Strafer called Talk Show, which I sat through a couple times in the show. It's very hard to describe. It's very David Lynchian. And I say that because David Lynch specifically is a filmmaker who says, don't interpret my work in terms of meaning.

22:17And that is very much to the vibe of this show. He's like, the ideas come. You don't interpret the ideas. You just put them out there. And this video talk show is this very disturbing, weird, historical nightmare of some kind where there is what seems to be some sort of demonic, haunted memory talk show where men dressed as, I think, soldiers, some sort of U.S. military figures are brought on in a talk show format to talk with women that they have sexually assaulted. and the women are kind of showing their scars. It's very unsettling. And it doesn't like reduce to some kind of neat little lesson about this.

23:03It just is like this is a kind of poisonous bit of American culture that's out there that very much unsettles you because you don't know exactly what's going on. Yeah. I had a kind of similar reaction to Cooper Jacoby, the work called Estate. I just found myself asking so many questions to myself. I'll tell you the description of the work is it's sculptures that look like door intercoms and they're fitted with cameras that kind of look around their environment. The thing I found most curious was the reactive AI models, the reactive artificial intelligence models that were trained on social media posts from people who formerly worked in creative industries but are no longer alive.

23:44and like the legal reporter aspect of my brain was like, well, did he get permission to do that? How did he identify that? And then there was another aspect of it where they were talking about how they have LED screen counters that track the time since the death of the respective people down to the minute. Ben, I feel like that fits exactly with what you just said about the talk show video, which I also saw, which is like, there wasn't to me like a takeaway. It wasn't saying like, oh, you know, you should think this or you should know this. It was just like maybe some thought-provoking statements trained on AI models about, I don't know what they were observing or the fact of like, there was such an emphasis on that, that they were creative people, that they were artists.