In Other Words

The first major survey show of the 75-year-old artist Howardena Pindell opened earlier this year at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and is now on show at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (“Howardena Pindell: What Remains To Be Seen” until 25 November). Pindell was one of the first black curators at the Museum of Modern Art and a cofounder of pioneering feminist gallery A.I.R. She worked in a mainly abstract style until an almost-fatal car accident in 1979 caused a shift in her art, which became more political and personal.    In the late 1980s, Pindell began researching the demographics of artists represented in New York museums and commercial galleries, presenting her findings in a 1987 paper called Statistics, Testimony and Supporting Documentation and then in a follow-up paper Commentary and Update of Gallery and Museum Statistics 1986-1997. In many ways, this work was a precursor to the research In Other Words recently published with artnet News, so we invited Pindell onto the show to talk about wh

Just 2.3% of all purchases and gifts at 30 prominent US museums over the past ten years have been of work by African American artists, according to a joint investigation by In Other Words and artnet News. Meanwhile, the total auction value of work by African American artists over the same period represents a mere 1.2% of global auction sales. Working together in an unprecedented three-month partnership, Charlotte Burns (executive editor, In Other Words) and Julia Halperin (executive editor, artnet News) have captured and analyzed market and museum data which, coupled with conversations with more than 30 prominent curators, collectors, dealers, museum directors, academics and philanthropists, reveals that progress is much more recent—and benefits far fewer artists—than popularly perceived. In today's podcast, they discuss the data and its implications with Allan Schwartzman (co-founder, Art Agency, Partners) and Valentino Carlotti (global head of business development at Sotheby’s; board member of the Pennsylva

Joining us for our 38th episode is Jessica Morgan, the director of the Dia Art Foundation—that much beloved organization so associated with the great land artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Pilgrimage, place and change of pace are important aspects of any visit to Dia—which has 11 sites in places as diverse as Utah, Bridgehampton, Beacon, New Mexico and New York City. Morgan talks to host Charlotte Burns about fundraising—since joining in 2015 she has launched a $78m capital campaign to renovate and expand Dia’s existing spaces, raising around $60m already. She also discusses the problems with judging museums’ success by attendance figures, and reveals her future plans for Dia. Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-jessica-morgan/ “In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.

  Where is the great art being made in America today? In this episode, our guests Chrissie Iles (Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz curator at the Whitney Museum of American art), Carolyn Ramo (executive director, Artadia) and Hamza Walker (executive director, LAXART) join our host Charlotte Burns to discuss the subject. They talk about art being made throughout the United States in places outside the major market hubs, as well as ways to broaden the lens through which we view contemporary art in this country. “We're currently in an extremely dynamic moment for emerging artists and for culture,” Iles says in conversation with our other guests, who talk about how collectors and curators might discover—and steward—the art of their region. Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-art-across-america-with-chrissie-iles-carolyn-ramo-and-hamza-walker  “In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.

“By now, I’m kind of an opinion machine,” says Roberta Smith, co-chief art critic for The New York Times in this special podcast recording with our host Charlotte Burns. “I would say all art that’s middling-to-great is a strike for freedom; is an expression of liberty,” Smith says. “It’s somebody asserting themselves in a new way. And that kind of newness, you can hear it in jazz, you can see it in painting. Most of us have the potential for newness.” Smith, who says she once “really thought about becoming a dealer”, talks about art today and her writing. She discusses the ways in which criticism and the media have changed—though her role (“I want to help people see art and have a new appreciation of what they’re seeing”) has remained essentially the same. Since she began writing in 1972, the readers have been, she says, “the engine in my work”. “Whatever gripes you have with the art world—and we all have them—it’s the most open it’s ever been,” she says. “I can't imagine writing in any other time than this,

The American artist Joel Shapiro has been pioneering new forms in sculpture for more than five decades. He joins our host Charlotte Burns today to talk more about his art and his influences; his hopes and motivations; and about what, for him, defines great art. “I'm not talking magical thinking—but some level of rapture or depression or some level of emotionality that is not matter of fact, and I think that that's what artists want,” he says. “So when you see something like that, I don't think it's so explicable.” Shapiro, whose art has been exhibited widely around the world—from the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York to a recent show at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in Switzerland—discusses a range of topics, from investing his art with emotion to the importance of color. He talks about the artists who have inspired him and the works he himself has collected. Art, he says, “is a manifestation of the culture, so it's important. It shows you what's going on.” For this, and much more, tune in today. Trans

“Because Sylvio is courageous, I was able to buy more hamburgers to keep up my strength, and more paint to continue painting,” said artist Robert Ryman about collector Sylvio Perlstein, who was a patron of his at a time when few others were interested. Born in Belgium, Perlstein grew up in Rio de Janeiro, where his family moved when fleeing the Nazis in 1939. Perlstein bought his first work of art from a florist in Brazil; over the course of the next five decades, he would add more than 1,000 works to his collection by artists including Man Ray; Duchamp; Carl Andre; Diane Arbus; Hans Bellmer; Magritte Solowitz; Donald Judd; Hannah Kirk; Max Ernst; Bruce Nauman; Edward Shea; and Andy Warhol—to name just a few. “For me, it was not even a collection. It was things that I saw, and I liked,” Perlstein says. “To tell you the truth, I never count them. I'm not well organized.” A selection of works from the Perlstein collection is now on show at Hauser & Wirth, New York (“A Luta Continua”, until 27 June). Reflect

"When people ask me how to describe the work or describe myself, I always just start by saying artist," says Glenn Kaino. "Everything stems from the art practice." The visionary American conceptual artist's work has led him to become an off-Broadway producer, a performer, a magician, a social activist and the technological innovator who helped legalize the music download platform Napster.  A "horrible" trip to an art fair in 2008 caused Kaino to close his studio for a year, unhappy with "how much influence an overall, overriding economic system" was having on art making. He decided instead to "go hang out with a bunch of magicians and see what happens—because they know something about believing".  Magic is "why we do what we do, as artists", says Kaino, who went on to co-produce the off-Broadway magic show "In and Of Itself"—which is smashing box office records. Both magic and art are about belief for Kaino, who says: "Belief has always been at the core of the practice; it's really belief about the power of a

Huge sums of money—more than $2.6bn—have been spent on Impressionist, Modern and contemporary art over the past two weeks in New York. On today’s podcast, Nicholas Maclean (of London and New York dealership Eykyn Maclean) and Allan Schwartzman (co-founder of AAP), discuss with our host Charlotte Burns (editor of In Other Words), what happened: what the surprises were; what trends we can detect; and what's going to happen next.  Here are some choice soundbites: "It is a sign that the market is starved for broadening what it sees as valuable. This is a big triumph; this is a turning point in perception” — Allan Schwartzman  "I honestly thought that this could be the death knell for the Impressionist market. And then we saw it: that change between 2005 and 2008 was extraordinary” — Nicholas Maclean "This question of identities seems to me to be a very American one. I think Americans, and perhaps the American market, are more open to approaching their own identities” — Charlotte Burns "True collectors who will ju

“There’s no goal to being an artist—you keep doing it and then, in theory, one dies,” says Carroll Dunham, who Allan Schwartzman describes as one of the greatest painters of the past 40 years. Art is a “kind of lustful driving forwards” for Dunham, who has moved from abstraction to figuration over the course of his varied career. Works from his “Wrestlers” series are currently on show at Gladstone Gallery in New York (until 16 June). “I wanted to try to find a male equivalent to the women that I had been drawing and painting, which I had thought of as being rather primeval in some way,” Dunham says. “They are naked white guys beating the crap out of each other. I’m not claiming any special relevance or meaning for these things. They just allow me to keep making paintings.” Dunham talks to Schwartzman and host Charlotte Burns about how his life and work—and the broader art community—have changed since moving from the bustle of New York, where he spent his early career, to the solitude of rural Connecticut. Kno

One of the most talked about exhibitions this year, “Outliers and American Vanguard Art”, closes next week at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (13 May), after which it will travel to the High Museum in Atlanta and then to LACMA.  Our guest today is Lynne Cooke, the senior curator of special projects at the NGA who spent five years researching the exhibition. Talking to our host Charlotte Burns, Cooke says much of the art on show was made by people on the peripheries, often in marginalized positions because of their gender, race, class or age. “A great deal was made by African-American artists. Their work is simply not entered into the circuits and orbits of the contemporary art world for lack of opportunity, for lack of education, for lack of money. As I said: class, race.”  The exhibition comprises around 270 works by more than 80 artists and focuses on periods of social, political, economic and cultural upheaval in the United States, during which times the boundaries between the avant-garde and

This week we bring you a special episode from Hong Kong, where we staged our first ever live In Other Words event on 29 March, a panel discussion on "The Future of The Museum”. Our guests included Michael Govan, director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Doryun Chong, deputy director and chief curator, M+ in Hong Kong; and Allan Schwartzman. The panel was introduced by Kevin Ching, CEO of Sotheby’s Asia and moderated by Charlotte Burns.  Joining us remotely was Budi Tek, the founder of the Yuz Museum and Foundation, Shanghai, who broke the news of an unprecedented collaboration between Yuz and LACMA. This opened a discussion about the increasing willingness of museum directors and private patrons to collaborate and share. Our panelists also spoke about where innovation is taking place geographically; about cultural norms and how they manifest differently region to region; and about new technologies, such as augmented reality, and how they might impact museums and exhibition making. These are, of cour

Almost two million people so far have visited the blockbuster exhibition “David Bowie Is”, on show now at the Brooklyn Museum (until 15 July). The exhibition was masterminded by Geoffrey Marsh, the director of London's Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) theater and performing arts department. He has organized several other major “immersive” exhibitions, harnessing state-of-the-art audio and visuals to tell narratives in new ways, such as “You Say You Want A Revolution? Records and Rebels 1966-1970” (2016-17) and “Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains” (2017). He joins our host Charlotte Burns in London to talk about combing through Bowie’s collection to tell the story of how this music legend evolved. Marsh also talks about how new technologies—specifically augmented reality—are about to change the ways in which exhibitions are curated and experienced, as well as the role of the museum itself. He also discusses his dream exhibition: “a show so powerful that probably 10% of people would walk out because they hate

The gallerists Daniella Luxembourg and Amalia Dayan specialize in cutting-edge Contemporary art and overlooked 20th-century art. They have in common with AAP co-founder Allan Schwartzman a passion for postwar Italian art and, during this podcast, the trio discuss the market for art from this period. They also discuss this current moment as one of real transition in the broader market, during which time tastes and demand are shifting. During the conversation, moderated by host Charlotte Burns, Luxembourg & Dayan speak about the difference between their London and New York businesses (Europe sells and America buys) and what impact Brexit might have. They talk about ugliness and struggle in art; the fall of Empires; their own personal obsessions—art and food.  Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-daniella-luxembourg-amalia-dayan/ “In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.

Jerry Saltz, perhaps the most well-known art writer working today, has been the senior art critic of New York magazine since 2006. During this interview with our host Charlotte Burns, which was recorded in the downtown offices of New York magazine, Saltz talks about a range of topics: from how he approaches viewing and reviewing art, to what he calls the “ass-holeness” of his social media persona.  Before becoming a critic, Saltz was an artist and a long-distance truck driver, and he discusses the benefits of being a late-bloomer. He defines what great art means to him and describes a recent exhibition of work by an artist who could be the “strongest to emerge this century in America." We are, he says, “living in a crisis and it’s time to look at the art of the present. I want to see what artists say now.” Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-jerry-saltz/ “In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.

From fetching beer for Joseph Beuys to the implications of Brexit and new borders, the Austrian art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac talks frankly about a range of topics in a conversation with our host Charlotte Burns, including the dangers of becoming too corporate; plans for his own collection; and his expectations for the art market in 2018.  Recorded in London, where Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac recently opened a fifth space (there are four others across Salzburg and Paris), Ropac shares his views on topics including the emerging art centres in the Middle East and China; the vibrancy of the Paris art scene; the pervasiveness of art fairs; and the importance of maintaining the trust of his artists.  Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-thaddaeus-ropac/ “In Other Words” is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby’s, produced by Audiation.fm.

During his 31 years as the exhibitions secretary at London’s Royal Academy, Sir Norman Rosenthal staged groundbreaking exhibitions of art including the legendary show, “A New Spirit in Painting” (1981), which brought artists such as Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter and Georg Baselitz to broader recognition. "Art is entertainment, but entertainment in the best sense of the word," he says in our latest podcast, speaking to host Charlotte Burns. “Museums, in the end, are like cupboards. And with the contents of the cupboards you have to try and make beautiful things—exhibitions that can tell with genuine artifacts aspects of the great story of art and human civilization.” Since leaving the RA in 2008, Rosenthal has organized exhibitions and written essays for a number of organizations such as Gagosian, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (“If you're freelance, you are a kind of whore—but you can choose your clients," he says). No stranger to controversy, Rosenthal talks us through his views o

Whether hauling ice from the Arctic, partnering with SpaceX or training as a deep-sea diver, the artist Tavares Strachan works on an ambitious scale—often at the cutting edge of technology. He largely operates beyond the gallery model, instead relying on patrons, partnerships and collaborations to create innovative works of art.  The Bahamian-born artist, who was recently appointed to the MIT and RISD boards, is interested in overlooked or forgotten histories and “operating in a state of play”. His work ranges from multimedia installations to large-scale earthworks and is often an exercise in creative problem solving. Speaking to our host Charlotte Burns, he says: “If there's a way that art can actually affect the way we think about the world, it is forcing us to think about the gray, about where we overlap and how we're actually the same. If we spend more time focusing on that as an exercise, we may be able to move some immovable ideas.”  Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/transcript-tavares-strach

”In the particular political moment in which we live, the question of authority and voice has become increasingly important,” says Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA. ”Who has the right to speak for whom? How do we imagine someone else's voice?” In this wide-ranging conversation, Lowry describes the museum as a crucible during a ”very flammable moment” and talks about the role of culture today. He discusses technology at the museum and the value of thinking slowly. Talking with host Charlotte Burns, Lowry covers various topics including MoMA’s expansion, the possibilities of closer institutional collaboration, the importance of anxiety—and lots more besides.  Transcript: http://www.artagencypartners.com/episode-22-transcript-glenn-lowry/ "In Other Words" is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby's, produced by Audiation.fm.

“We're in a moment where we are all paying attention to what's going on in the headlines. Many artists are thinking about what kind of world their work is entering into, and how to respond to or deal with the times we live in,” says Christopher Y. Lew, co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial, who talks about his travels across America researching emerging art for the biennial. For a transcript of the show, click here: http://www.artagencypartners.com/episode-21-transcript-christopher-y-lew-talks-emerging-art/ "In Other Words" is a presentation of AAP and Sotheby's, produced by Audiation.fm.