The Art Angle

• A Crypto Billionaire's Lawsuit, Koons’s Hulk Blasts Back,' the Art Basel Awards

  It's been a minute, but we're back with our Round-Up episode, where we parse and discuss some of the biggest stories going on around the art world, and it's really good to be back into this format again after a little commercial break.  A lot has been happening lately in the so-called art world—good, bad, and there's been plenty of in-between that—but it remains as colorful, contradictory, and chaotic as ever.  We'll be diving into crypto collector Justin Sun’s escalating legal battle with Blue Chip Titan David Geffen over a long-nosed Giacometti sculpture; a trio of massive Hulk sculptures by Jeff Koons that descended on Frieze New York a couple of weeks ago—these big green bellwethers for the state of the market are in play; and finally, we'll look at some of the major developments at Art Basel, including the launch of its very first art award. Senior Editor Kate Brown is joined by co-host, art critic Ben Davis, and Artnet News Pro Editor Andrew Russeth.

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• The New Rules of Subculture

  There is nothing that Artnet’s Art Critic Ben Davis likes better than finding a name for a phenomenon that’s all around him, but that he doesn’t have a name for yet. The writer and theorist Nadia Asparouhova has a new book out that offered exactly this. It’s called Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading. We tend to think of cultural influence as being tied to popularity and visibility. What Asparouhova wants us to pay attention to is a whole other class of cultural stuff whose influence is linked instead to being hard to find or difficult to understand. These are what she calls “anti-memes.” It’s the opinion puts you at odds with some people but really connects you to others, so you’re careful how you share it. It’s the artwork that looks like nonsense to the majority of the audience but is full of intricate meaning to fans. The theory of "anti-memes” is about how some of our most intense cultural investments are below the radar—not because they haven’t been found yet, but because that’s how they are built. All this touches on themes that a lot of artists have been thinking about. Asparouhova’s book, in fact, is published by a group of artists and thinkers called the Dark Forest Collective, named after writer Yancey Strickler’s idea of the internet as a “dark forest,” a space that has become so contentious and commercial that the smart people retreat to more private digital spaces for authenticity and cachet. Asparouhova’s book helps focus in on the question of how difficult ideas and art that’s not built to go viral survive and find real fans now.

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• How to Curate a Life: Lessons From 3 Art World Tastemakers

  Spring art week just wrapped in New York City. Known for its extravagant floral displays and signature oysters and champagne, TEFAF is the fair with a vibe. This year, 91 exhibitors from 13 countries presented everything from antiquities to modern and contemporary art and design at the stately Park Avenue Armory. There’s a real sense of passion here— dealers are eager to share the stories behind their works. Which brings us to today’s episode, recorded live at the Thrill of the Chase panel with three very different cultural omnivores who personify Tefaf’s ethos which span centuries and styles. Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn‘s gallery Salon 94, has long blurred the lines between art and design. Housed in a Beaux-Arts townhouse on the Upper East Side she has presented everything from Rick Owens furniture to the recent Kennedy Yanko solo exhibitions. Adam Charlap Hyman, co-founder of Charlap Hyman & Herrero, brings a sweeping vision to interiors, furniture, architecture, and opera sets. He also curates, most recently Glass Subjects at R & Company which is currently on view. Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, Curator of Contemporary Design at the Cooper Hewitt, began her career in literature before turning to storytelling through objects. Her work explores symbolism, inclusion, and cultural memory. Together, they explore what makes an object irresistible. Is it beauty, rarity—or the story it tells? In this conversation, Artnet Studio's William Van Meter dig into the thrill of discovery, the elusive “X factor,” and how great objects help shape layered narratives.

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• How Painters Today Are Reframing… the Frame

  Almost by definition, the frame of a picture is something that you are not supposed to notice. But if you go to the art galleries to look at paintings now, you might get a very different sense of what a frame can or even should do. Weird and wild frames that very much draw attention to themselves seem to be having a moment. Recently, Artnet writer and editor Katie White penned a piece titled Bordercore: Why Frames Became the New Frontier in Contemporary Art. In her essay, she looks both at the history of framing styles, and talks to a number of contemporary painters to figure out what is causing so many to treat something that was literally considered peripheral to what they do as very much part of the main attraction. This week she joins Art Critic Ben Davis on the podcast to discuss this new frontier in art.

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• Megastar Artist Kent Monkman Is Rewriting Colonial Narratives on Canvas

  Kent Monkman is one of the most vital and provocative voices in contemporary painting. Based between Toronto and New York, and a member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Treaty 5 Territory, Monkman is known for his epic, genre-bending canvases that challenge dominant historical narratives and reframe them through Indigenous and queer perspectives. Monkman has developed a distinctive visual language that subverts classical European art traditions—particularly those of 19th-century and 20th-century history painting—to expose the distortions and omissions of colonial narratives. His work blends these European conventions with Indigenous histories, recontextualizing colonization while exploring themes of resilience, sexuality, joy, and identity. At the center of many of these works is Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman’s time-traveling alter ego. Clad in high heels, Miss Chief operates as both a trickster figure and a witness to colonial encounters, embodying Indigenous worldviews and queering history in a way that destabilizes settler-colonial perspectives. Through Miss Chief, Monkman reimagines historical events, placing Indigenous presence and agency at the forefront. Monkman’s large-scale commissions include mistikôsiwak (Wooden Boat People), a pair of monumental paintings created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019, which directly confronted the institution’s colonial legacies. His work has been exhibited in major museums across North America and Europe, and is part of significant public and private collections. As his first major U.S. museum exhibition, "History is Painted by the Victors," opens at the Denver Art Museum, Monkman joined me to reflect on the road to this moment—a journey that spans decades of challenging entrenched narratives in Western art history. We spoke about how growing up in Winnipeg, amidst the complexities of Indigenous representation in Canadian institutions, shaped his relationship to museums; how painting serves as both a political tool and a personal method for processing historical trauma; and the collaborative energy that fuels his expansive studio practice.

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