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.

In this re-air of an episode from last year. Ben Davis speaks with Julia Cameron, the author of The Artist's Way. It is a somewhat unusual subject for us, but it's also been an episode that's been very meaningful to a lot of listeners. And in case you're wondering, Ben started doing morning pages to prepare for the interview, and six months later, and he has stuck with it. Millions of people know The Artist’s Way. First published in 1992, the book began as notes for a class that its author, Julia Cameron, taught on creative self-discovery or, as she sometimes prefers to call it, “creative recovery.” It found a huge audience, and today you can find Artist’s Way groups all over the world. Cameron’s original The Artist’s Way offered a 12-week path towards overcoming artistic blocks. The book was subtitled “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity,” and it spoke of plugging into a current of what she called “spiritual electricity.” But her techniques were practical and easy to grasp. Rituals from The Artist’s Way such as starting your day by writing out three pages of unedited text, known as “doing your Morning Pages,” have become part of the creative process of many, many artists, musicians, and writers. More than three decades after its publication, The Artist’s Way continues to find new followers, and even got a new bump of popularity during the 2020s. And Julia Cameron herself has returned this year with The Daily Artist’s Way, offering a new way in for fans. Cameron agreed to speak to Davis to revisit the origins of her famous method and how she’s tweaking it now in this new book.

It is a time of disorienting, sometimes surreal shifts in the worlds of politics and technology. There aren’t too many artists who you might trust as a guide, but Trevor Paglen is one of them. Paglen has long functioned as an artist-researcher, with a fascination for pushing to the outer limits of what is seen or known. His work has often not just responded to but anticipated major conversations around government surveillance, conspiracy theory, and the politics of Silicon Valley. And he has an important new book just out from Verso, How to See Like a Machine: Images After A.I. It collects his writings on how the world of culture is mutating, exploring the secret networks of power that we can’t see but that govern how we see. Paglen also has a new art piece, “Voyager,” currently on view in a show called “Strange Rules” in Venice. In essence, it is an artwork whose medium is hypnosis. Paglen has invented a device that guides you into a trance state to permit you to have otherwise impossible artistic experiences. Art Critic Ben Davis jacked into “Voyager” and, for a spell, was unleashed from gravity and levitated in the air—in his own mind at least. Paglen joins Davis to talk about how he’s theorizing the forces reshaping culture now, and also how this new type of art he has created works, and how it fits in with that theory.

There are only a very few artists from the 20th century who are truly household names, figures like Salvador Dalí, Frida Kahlo, and Andy Warhol. The name M.C. Escher is certainly on that short list. Escher’s impact on the wider culture may be as big, or even bigger that of those other figures, even as he remains somewhat hard to classify as an artist. Born Maurits Cornelis Escher, the Dutch artist was a highly skilled maker of woodcuts, lithographs, and engravings, bringing a sense of exquisite precision and intricate geometry to his compositions. But as an artist, Escher is almost synonymous with the idea of visual paradox. You will know him for works like Drawing Hands (from 1953), depicting two hands holding pencils, each seeming to emerge from a piece of paper, where they are each being drawn by the other, in a magical loop. Or for Ascending and Descending (from 1960), showing a palace with a looping set of stairs on its roof, which seem, due to Escher’s cleverly realized optical illusion, to be leading tiny pilgrims both upwards and downwards—at the same time. So, is Escher one of the greats, or is he more of a novelty act? My colleague, Jo Lawson-Tancred recently went to see a show currently at Somerset House in London that’s called “M.C. Escher: The Exhibition,” which includes 150 of Escher’s original works from all the major phases of his career. Art Critic, Ben Davis leapt at the chance to talk to Jo about the show, the artist, and the cultural phenomenon that is M.C. Escher.

Doug Aitken’s new installation Lightscape has just landed at the Shed in New York. It is many things at once: a seven-screen film, an immersive environment, and a stage for live performances. But at its heart is music. The work unfolds across multiple screens, following different characters as they move through desert scenes, freeways, and other landscapes in flux. What binds those worlds and narratives together is sound.  Aitken built Lightscape around an original song cycle he wrote. The soundtrack also incorporates compositions by Minimalist pioneers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Meredith Monk, performed by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Last week, the work opened with a live performance by Los Angeles Master Chorale—but they won’t be the only musicians activating the installation. Upcoming performances will feature William Basinski, Suzanne Ciani, and the Sun Ra Arkestra. In that sense, Lightscape picks up on a thread that has long run through Aitken’s practice.  One of his earliest works, Diamond Sea, was set against an ambient soundtrack featuring Aphex Twin and Nine Inch Nails, among other musicians. His 2012 project SONG 1, a moving-image work projected onto the facade of the Hirshhorn Museum, was built around the song “I Only Have Eyes for You.” And in 2013, for Station to Station, he staged a series of art happenings by transporting artists and musicians by train across America. In an art world that often prefers tidy categories and boundaries, Aitken has built a career out of collapsing them. His works have moved between film, sculpture, performance, and sound, asking viewers to not just look, but to listen, move, and gather. So the ambitious Lightscape felt like the perfect opportunity to speak with Aitken. In his conversation with culture editor, Min Chen, he opened up about working across disciplines, the communal power of live performance, and the role music has played in his life and practice. This episode contains musical excerpts for Lightscape

Some of the most important visual artist working today are sound artists. It seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind of another is everywhere in and around the art. Ben Davis wanted to dig into this “sonic turn” in art, if that’s what it is—and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui’s work often takes the form of environments, with sculptures that double as experimental musical instruments, to be activated by the audience or performers. This form of art is both unique and clearly resonates with a bigger trend of using sound to activate the museum as an event space and a space of gathering. At the current Venice Biennale, Atoui is part of the Qatar Pavilion for a project called “Untitled 2026 (A Gathering Of Remarkable People),” working with a super-group of famous figures from the worlds of art, music, and food to make an environment that evolves for the course of the Biennale. And later this year, Atoui will be the next artist to do the giant Turbine Hall commission for the Tate Modern in London, occupying one of the most highly watched pieces of exhibition space in the international art world. Where does this genre of hybrid art come from? Where is it going? What are its challenges?