The Art Angle

Artists and creatives have been fascinated with tarot for over 600 years. Recently, that fascination has resurfaced in a big way, showing up everywhere from museum walls to fashion runways.

That's not surprising. As a sweeping universal narrative language small enough to fit in your pocket, tarot's archetypal imagery is built for rediscovery and reinterpretation. Once a medieval royal court game, tarot drifted into the realms of the occult, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 21st, it's entered the pop culture zeitgeist—accessible, affordable, and able to offer insight into the present, past, and future, but most importantly, yourself.

Artists have long mined the cards for spiritual and creative inspiration, contributing to their enduring relevance. Pamela Colman Smith designed the deck that's still the industry standard, back in 1909, though her name was buried for decades under the man who commissioned it. Leonora Carrington painted a hauntingly surreal Major Arcana in 1955. Salvador Dalí spent decades on his own gilded, cinematic deck, finishing it in the 1970s. Now, dozens of artists and designers are dabbling with imagery that fuses art history, numerology, astrology, and psychology with color, gesture, and form.

That's the real magic of tarot: The plurality of meaning and the staying power of images.

A major show at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York explores the history of and our enduring fascination with the cards. Annikka Olsen, Artnet's Galleries Editor, recently covered the exhibition and she joins Margaret Carrigan, Artnet's News Editor, on this episdoe to talk tarot, in all its many guises.

Julio Torres and Martine Gutierrez share a knack for building worlds and characters that operate on their own wonderful, absurdist logic. Throw them together, add some sea water, and you get Marina, their new performance commissioned by the Whitney Biennial.

Marina begins with a construction worker tossing a smartphone into the ocean and ends with a sea wench possibly discovering the internet. It’s like the Little Mermaid, but filtered through the flights of imagination that Torres and Gutierrez have become known for.

Torres first came to prominence as a writer for Saturday Night Live, but has since carved out one of the most distinctive creative paths around. He created the TV shows Los Espookys and Fantasmas, and made his feature debut with Problemista, starring Tilda Swinton. His comedy specials, My Favorite Shapes and Color Theories, are less stand-up than windows into the idiosyncratic way he sees the world.

Gutierrez, meanwhile, has spent her career transforming identity into an expansive artistic practice. In her series like ANTI-ICON and Supremacy, she uses performance, photography, and self-portraiture to inhabit a range of personas—from Aphrodite to Lady Godiva. It is work that challenges conventional ideas of femininity while celebrating reinvention and fluidity.

Marina won’t be the first time that Torres and Gutierrez are collaborating. Gutierrez has appeared in both Los Espookys and Fantasmas, where she played the mysterious Vanesja. The pair also share a rapport that is immediate, playful, and unpredictable, as you’ll hear in our conversation.

Here they are, talking about Marina, first meetings, fictional personas, and for reasons that will soon become clear, the first half of Speed.

We’re in the hot dog days of August, awaiting the new art season to kick off in September. In the meantime, I thought we might take the temperature of art in New York, looking at two big museum shows that opened earlier ruin the year, and that seek to highlight new voices from the city.

So, we will be talking about “Greater New York,” the important show at MoMA PS1 in Queens that once every five years. This time out it has over 53 artists and collectives from the Big Apple, stretched across several floors of the museum, and is certainly worth checking out before it closes its several months run. It’s gotten generally very positive reviews. We’ll see what we think.

And the other show we’re going to be talking about is the “Seventh AIM Biennial” at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. It’s called “Forms of Connection” and features art by the last two classes of the museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program. That’s a year-long career accelerator and professional development seminar that takes on 14 artists based in New York each year, so its a good chance to see what styles and themes emerging artists are looking to now to be taken seriously.

There’s been quite a lot of angst about art in New York, and this is our chance to see how healthy it looks. And to see if there exciting new figures to watch emerging from the mix.

Ben Davis speaks with Danielle Jackson, the critic, writer, researcher, teacher, and returning Art Angle guest, who is working on an article about the AIM Biennial for Artnet News.

At the end of last year, Annie Armstrong stepped down as Artnet's gossip columnist after filing 198 Wet Paint columns over the span of more than four years. Gabi Vidal-Irizarry has picked up the mantle.

Annie departed the art world for the food world to write for Caper Media, an enterprising new startup that aims, in its words, "to tell the inside story of the restaurant business in New York." While Annie is on a new beat, she's found that the art and restaurant worlds are closely intertwined in New York, and her must-read weekly column regularly charts the goings-on of promising artists, dealers, and collectors in our city's dining establishments.

Especially remarkable art food crossovers have just arrived. Sotheby's, the New Museum, and Amant out in Brooklyn all have high-profile and highly ambitious new restaurants in Marcel, Oberon, and Zoli Restaurant respectively. Annie's been to all three, and so it was a thrill to have her back on the Art Angle to discuss those spots, as well as where art people like to eat, and the places that she recommends gallery goers visit in different neighborhoods.

The art market is a famously opaque place, a world of handshake agreements and big-dollar private deals. How does it actually operate, and how has it changed over the centuries? In a richly researched new book titled Trading Beauty: Art Market Histories from the Altar to the Gallery, Valentina Castellani provides surprising answers, drawing on a long and storied career in the industry.

She's worked at Sotheby's and Gagosian, where she helped organize landmark exhibitions devoted to Pablo Picasso and Piero Manzoni. Now, she's an adjunct professor at New York University's Steinhardt School, where she teaches a class about the art market. Castellani's book, which is published by Gagosian, reveals how popes, aristocrats, plucky entrepreneurs, and brave true believers developed new ways of commissioning, funding, and selling art, from medieval frescoes to avant-garde conceptual pieces. It's a wild ride, and it spans some 1,500 years.

She joined Andrew Russeth on The Art Angle to delve into her findings. During our conversation, she uncorked stories about maverick dealers and patrons, the undersung role of women in this narrative, and the ways that artists have cannily enticed the market across time. Perhaps most importantly, she makes the case that the art market's relevance extends far beyond money.