‘Growing up in London, as a teenager, I became obsessed with how Black culture expressed itself in public life,’ says Sir David Adjaye OBE. The renowned Ghanaian-British architect meets Marc Spiegler to discuss the power of architecture, Black artists’ work, race in the artworld, and his collaboration with curator Okwui Enwezor, as well as his current project, designing the Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin, which will house the Benin Bronzes, returned to Nigeria from the British Museum.
Rapper, musician, and record producer Swizz Beats (Kasseem Daoud Dean) discusses the meeting points between activism and collecting with Marc Spiegler. ‘How can we be a part of the culture when we don't own the culture?’ he asks, describing how he went to Harvard Business School and got involved with the business of art and culture as a way of promoting the creatives he believes in.
Lisa Spellman first arrived in New York to study art at SVA, moving into a loft that seemed predestined to be a gallery. Kim Gordon was reading about the art happening in New York while she was in LA, but when she got to the East Coast, ended up playing music. A few years later, Spellman founded 303 Gallery and Gordon was playing with iconic band Sonic Youth. The two talk to Marc Spiegler about New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, the art scene and the music scene, the places they all went, and how it all intersected. It’s an image of an old New York that still reverberates in the city today.
Businesswoman and art collector Pamela Joyner tells Marc Spiegler that she is surprised at the analogies she sees between art collecting and her career in finance. ‘Both environments are very relationship-oriented, they're reliant on individuals having confidence in each other's integrity,’ she explains. Described as an ‘activist collector’ by ArtReview magazine for promoting and collecting the work of contemporary African-American artists, Joyner reflects on the collector as patron and the work she believes in. Our correspondent Stephanie Bailey interviews artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang on her new commission, Anthem (2021). The piece was conceived in collaboration with the legendary singer, composer, and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland and is currently filling the Guggenheim museum’s rotunda.
Today’s experiments in art and technology are wide-ranging, and few know better about the latest developments than Daniel Birnbaum, director and curator of Acute Art, and New York City-based artist Jacolby Satterwhite. In this episode, Birnbaum and Satterwhite talk to Marc Spiegler about the use of virtual reality as an artistic medium, the future of mixed reality and the ‘metaverse’, the digitalization and democratization of the artworld, and the idea of cosmic NFTs. Plus, our correspondent Anny Shaw explores a new art gallery located in a UK football stadium and talks to its founder, Eddy Frankel, who also happens to be an art critic and Time Out London’s Art & Culture Editor.
Online sales seem like they’re to stay and millennials continue to be the biggest spenders when it comes to collecting art, says Dr. Clare McAndrew, renowned cultural economist and founder of Arts Economics. Findings such as this were recently released in ‘Resilience in the Dealer Sector: A Mid-Year Review 2021’, an art market report authored by McAndrew and published by Art Basel and UBS. In this conversation with our correspondent Anny Shaw, McAndrew sheds light on the report’s key takeaways, which also include the market’s generational and gender dynamics and the role of dealers in an increasingly digitized industry. To address the report’s findings from another perspective, Art Basel Executive Editor Jeni Fulton also talks to Chief Economist of Global Wealth Management at UBS and author Paul Donovan about the parallels between the global economy and the art market.
Recorded live on the show floor during Art Basel in Basel, this special episode brings together seven distinguished art world voices. Artists AA Bronson and Mario García Torres, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Jasmin Tsou, and museum directors Elena Filipovic and Ann Demeester reflect on the artworld’s coming together again, how the pandemic changed them and how they see the future.
'We see the world as this huge kaleidoscopic field of information … and I think the way we see culture and the arts should also embrace that,' Doug Aitken says. In this conversation with Marc Spiegler, the interdisciplinary artist discusses his wide-ranging practice, from its roots in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s to his project Station to Station, which transformed a train along a 4,000-mile journey into a nomadic studio, to his recent collaboration with musician Jamie xx and creating sculptures that live underwater. Art Basel Executive Editor Jeni Fulton also speaks with musician Fatima al Qadiri about her latest album, Medieval Femme, her lifelong fascination with the sensual recitation of classical Arabic poetry, and her recent forays into scoring films.
In her book My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh portrays a pre-9/11 artworld obsessed with style over substance. The award-winning novelist’s own introduction to the artworld was also in the early 2000s, and her experience at the time was colored by 'a sense of impending doom,' she recalls. In this episode, Marc Spiegler speaks to Moshfegh about her literary foray into the artworld (and the fact that she’s currently hiding from it), transforming her books into feature films, and other current projects.
'In my most core self, I’m a writer and a performer,' says Miranda July. But since coming of age in Portland’s riot-grrrl scene, July has made a name for herself as a true multihyphenate: as an artist, singer, screenwriter, author, Hollywood film director and actress, and more. In this episode, she speaks with Marc Spiegler about writing her first play – based on correspondence with a convicted murderer – to releasing her film Kajillionaire in the midst of the pandemic and the flood of DMs that followed. 'My entire experience of the release was those messages,' she recalls. Separately, curator Larry Ossei-Mensah talks to Jon Gray, a cofounder of the activist cooking collective Ghetto Gastro, about food as a device for social change and branching out into the world of art.
Rapper, songwriter, and record producer Kim Nam-joon – better known as RM and a founding member of BTS – joins Art Basel’s Marc Spiegler to talk about everything from meeting Eminem to the formation and rise of BTS to the first artwork he ever bought. Collecting, he says, 'really gives me the standard to live as a better man, as a better adult, and [as] an artist.'
Can tech change social structures? What role can NFTs play in activism?In episode 2, host Anny Shaw takes a close look with three pioneers in the NFT and Web 3 worlds: the artist Olive Allen, the NFT studio founder Melissa Gilmour and the head of Pace Verso Christiana Ine-Kimba Boyle.
Moses Sumney opened for acts like Sufjan Stevens, James Blake, and Solange before even releasing his own album, but he’s more than a musician. In this conversation, it becomes clear that the California native is a talented storyteller who has mastered a variety of media 'to push art forward,' as he says, 'and to make inquiries into the state of the soul.'
The podcast Talk Art is all about breaking down barriers in the arts. Its guests have ranged from Jeff Koons to Radiohead to Lena Dunham, and its cofounders and cohosts Russell Tovey and Robert Diament firmly believe that “art is for everyone.” Here, they speak about dismantling elitist structures, the importance of living with images, and how it is never too late to learn.
Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron have designed some of today’s best-known museums, including London’s Tate Modern and Hong Kong’s M+. In this episode, Herzog weighs in on the development of architecture over the last 30 years, what it was like to collaborate with Ai Weiwei and Miuccia Prada, and if the era of the starchitect has come to a close.
Video- and performance-art pioneer Joan Jonas and jazz pianist Jason Moran first collaborated almost 20 years ago to create the now-iconic performance The Shape, The Scent, The Feel of Things. Here, they reminisce on their six weeks of intense preparation, what they’ve learned from each other since, and the importance of performance not just for an art audience but for civilization at large.
JW Anderson is one of fashion’s most visionary minds. In this episode, he talks about coming to design via theater – ‘I’ve always been fascinated by character building,’ he notes – his love of ceramics, and the importance of artistic production today.
Author, podcaster, and curator Katy Hessel joins Marc Spiegler to discuss all things women and art, especially in relation to her newly published book, The Story of Art without Men. Who was Sofonisba Anguissola? Did Duchamp really make the Urinal or was it his contemporary Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven? ‘What I’m trying to do’ Hessel says, ‘is turn upside-down what we’ve known as art history.’
Fresh from the mud-spattered, Santiago Sierra designed catwalk of the Balenciaga Spring 2023 collection, Artistic Director Demna talks to Marc Spiegler about cutting his teeth at Martin Margiela and Louis Vuitton to the lasting effects of having been a refugee of the Former Soviet Union. He also warns of a brand becoming more powerful than a product—’popularity is always very dangerous’ - and reflects on his relationship to artists and his need for silence. Ultimately, he says, ‘I no longer think about making the fashion industry understand what I do,’ he says, ‘I just do it.’
In this special episode, journalist Anny Shaw investigates findings from A Survey of Global Collecting in 2022. She speaks with Chief Economist of UBS Global Wealth Management Paul Donovan and collector Amitha Raman about the impacts of the current economic crises and Brexit on the art market and collecting habits. Plus, how have buzzwords like ‘sustainability’ and ‘diversity’ been practically applied in the market sector? And what’s in store for 2023?
