The Art Angle

Legendary documentary filmmaker Ken Burns is famous for his deep dives into topics of American history, ranging from the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin, the Civil War, and the history of baseball, to name just a few.  Now Burns is delving into the fascinating life of 15th century genius Leonardo da Vinci, examining his life and his numerous roles as a draftsman, painter, and scientist. This venture marks the first time the director has tackled a subject that is not American. The film, which is divided into two, two-hour segments was co-written by his daughter Sarah Burns along with Dave McMahon, and was directed and produced by all three. Leonardo's many notable achievements are explored via close examination and analysis of his prolific personal notebooks alongside accounts of his life and on-camera interviews with leading scholars, contemporary artists, engineers, and some famous fans like biographer Walter Isaacson and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro.  Leonardo da Vinci also marks a departure from Burns's traditional filmmaking style, in which a pan or zoom added in post-production across a still image gives the illusion of movement.  That style of filmmaking has become so closely associated with his material that it has garnered his own filter in iMovie software as what else? "The Ken Burns effect," of course. However, here, the filmmakers use split screens with images, videos, and sound effects from a range of time periods to highlight da Vinci's many achievements through his artistic and scientific explorations, along with the original music commission from celebrated composer Caroline Shaw. It creates a compelling effect and new stylistic approach for the iconic documentarian. This week, Burns joins Senior Market Editor Eileen Kinsella to discuss the endlessly revelatory and fascinating life of Leonardo.

Re-Air from August 15,2024 There’s so much culture now that it can be hard just to keep up, let alone to think about it all as a whole… but that only makes the effort to find perspective more important. It’s not always clear when you’re in the thick of it, but almost certainly when people in the future look back, they will see more clearly than we do the common concerns beneath the fragmented surface of the culture of the 2020s. The literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has an idea about all this. She argues that what characterizes the art of the now might be, in fact a particular hunger for now-ness. Her book published this year by Verso is called “Immediacy or the Style of Too Late Capitalism.” Across a broad array of culture, both high and low, Kornbluh tracks, as she writes, “immediacy as a master category for making sense of 21st century cultural production.” She shows how the drive towards immediacy can help explain a vast array of developments and asks why. It’s a thin but challenging book. Immediacy was Ben Davis’s pick for our summer reading list, and we’re not the only ones who has found it useful. In the magazine Art Review, author Alex Niven wrote that Kornbluh has done better than almost anyone in recent memory to define the elusive claustrophobic spirit of the age. It’s heady terrain to explore, and this week on the podcast, Kornbluh joins Ben Davis to guide us through it.

We are back this week with our monthly edition of the Art Angle Roundup, where co-hosts Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by a guest to parse some of the biggest headlines of the month. This week, Naomi Rea, newly appointed editor in chief of Artnet News joins the show. Kate and Naomi just returned from reporting on the ground at Art Basel Paris, which came just one week after Frieze London and Frieze Masters, where a clearer picture of the art market was taking shape. Before we get to that, speaking of London, there was big news that activists were sentenced to prison time for the souping of a very famous Vincent Van Gogh painting. The trio discusses what the implications of this punishment are for the activists using soup-throwing and other tactics to get their message across, and if it's working at all. Next, we dive into the state of the art market, which has been the subject of many think pieces, often providing contradictory views. Finally, we dig into the man of many controversies: Elon Musk. He has been the subject of multiple accusations of alleged plagiarism in the past couple of weeks. First, Alex Proyas, who directed the 2004 adaptation of the short story I, Robot, called out Musk's Tesla on social media, writing simply: “Hey Elon, can I have my designs back please?” and shared a side-by-side image of his work on the film next to those of newly-released prototypes of Optimus, Cybercab, and Robovan at a long-awaited October 10 event intended to showcase Tesla’s future products to investors. Just days later, the producers of Blade Runner 2049 filed a lawsuit suing Tesla for using imagery from that film without permission. In fact, Alcon Entertainment denied a request from Tesla and Warner Bros Discovery to use images from its film, and then Musk went ahead and used A.I.-generated references anyway. Alcon Entertainment called it “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit.”

Contemporary art comes in many shapes and forms, but close your eyes and think of what an artist looks like and nine times out of 10, I bet you are still thinking of a painter in front of a canvas. If recent interest for museums and galleries is any indication, however, that image should be joined by another one: the fiber artist. Think of a weaver seated at the loom or a quilt-maker laboriously stitching together layers of fabric. The textile arts have experienced a quiet but steady groundswell of interest in the last decades, and recently I've noticed that it feels as if it is kicked into a new, even higher level, from the many kinds of textile based art throughout the most recent Venice Biennale to the major show "Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction," which is on a tour of some of North America's most important museums right now. As many textile scholars will tell you, tapestry was once as exalted as painting as an art form, and it may be so again. This surge of interest is bringing new audiences, new histories, and new vocabularies into the center of the action that are worth getting familiar with, and to unravel all the different threads, I turned to Elissa Author, a scholar who looked at the tangled history of fiber art in her book String Felt, Thread: The Hierarchy of Art and Craft in American Art.  More importantly, she's been closely observing and encouraging the contemporary boom in textile art as the chief curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. This week she joins me on the podcast to discuss what's behind the resurgence of interest in this medium. —Ben Davis Fiber Art Is (Still) Having a Moment Artists working in fiber and textile are increasingly visible at art fairs, museums and galleries, and there's no sign of a slowdown.  

Few creative works ever managed to get the weird pathologies and unique characters of the art world quite right. But journalist and author Hari Kunzru's newest novel Blue Ruin is definitely one of those works. Set in the early stages of the pandemic, Kunzru's novel looks at how wealth and privilege function and fester in the art world. It's  an astonishing and incisive exploration of the power dynamics and value creation in art by an author who has been keenly observing the art world's odd rituals for decades. Blue Ruin moves between lockdown in upstate New York where some art professionals are hiding out on a very nice property, and then moves back in time to the optimistic art scene of the 1990s in London. Between these places, we follow Jay, a British artist who makes a grand gesture of quitting art in his twenties, only to find himself ramped back into the art world and the people who haunted it, all of which he had tried to leave behind. Originally from Britain and based in New York. Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including White Tears and Red Pill. Blue Ruin is the third of this trilogy.  He's also a regular contributor to the New York Review of books in the New York Times and writes a column for Harpers. Kunzru also teaches in the creative writing program at New York University and is the host of the podcast Into the Zone.