The Art Angle

Here we are, already at the end of the first month of the new year. That means it’s time to do the first Art Angle Round-Up of 2026, where, as is custom, we’ll review some of the art news stories that people are talking about, and what they might tell us something about the forces shaping the year to come.

Today art critic Ben Davis, senior editor Kate Brown and editor in chief Naomi Rea talk about three stories:

—The big controversy over the South Africa pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which Artnet News has had multiple pieces about.

—The Prado Museum in Madrid, which has a good problem: it has too many visitors. It also has a plan to deal with overcrowding.

—The mini-genre of "speed painting," specifically the painter Vanessa Horabuena. She sold a painting of Jesus for almost $3 million dollars that she made in 10 minutes at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser—a sign of the world out of control, though perhaps a slightly more fun one to talk about than some of the other things in the news. Or maybe not.

The first quarter of the 21st century is now behind us. Yet a pervasive sense of cultural stagnation persists: many observers and participants feel that creativity across the arts, media, and popular culture has slowed, leaving society with a muted sense of innovation and excitement.

David Marx’s new book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, provides an incisive guide through the cultural touchstones that have defined the last twenty-five years. Marx examines how commercialization gradually came to dominate contemporary culture, propelled by rapid technological advancements and a shifting cultural mindset that favors profit-driven formulas over experimentation. He argues that these dynamics—spanning art, literature, music, film, and fashion—have stymied radical innovation, making the opening decades of the new century some of the least transformative since the invention of the printing press. As Marx observes, there is now “a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.”

In Blank Space, Marx also proposes five strategies to help restore a society that values and nurtures cultural inventiveness. He joins the Art Angle to discuss the pressures and developments that slowed the emergence of radical new formats in art and broader culture over the last 25 years, and he outlines potential paths forward. Topics explored include the rise of kitsch, nostalgia, cultural omnivorism, and poptimism, all of which, he suggests, have contributed to the current climate of creative inertia.

Marx is a Tokyo-based American critic and writer whose work has appeared in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He is also the author of several previous books, including Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change and Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style. Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century was published in November 2025 by Penguin Random House.

In art right now, it's hard to avoid talking about Beeple. That, of course, is the alias of Charleston-based Mike Winkelmann, known to millions of followers for digital images that he makes and posts daily. These works give off the sense of a brain overdosing on memes—we're talking pictures of giant emojis and pop culture junk being worshiped in dystopian techno hellscapes, or melted versions of celebrities and politicians turned into grotesque monsters and killer robots.

Beeple first burst into the center of the art world conversation in early 2021 when his work Everydays, The First 5,000 Days hit the block at Christie's Auction House. Sold as an NFT, it was essentially a high-resolution digital image that compiled everything he had made in his first decade-plus of daily posting. It sold for a shocking $69 million, still one of the biggest prices ever for a work by a living artist, and it made Beeple a symbol of both the new respect and opportunity for digital artists and of critics' worst fears about a blockchain-fueled art bubble and the meltdown of taste.

While that digital art bubble did crash, Beeple survived and experimented with new media. One of his interactive video sculptures has only just closed at LACMA in Los Angeles, while a set of robot dogs with human heads that he created was the talk of the recent Art Basel Miami Beach art fair in December. His work inspires a lot of commentary, positive and negative, including from national critic, Ben Davis. But there is no doubt that his influence seems to be growing as both museums and galleries try to figure out how to court a new generation of digital natives.

At the top of 2025, the outlook for the art industry was pretty bleak, and art insiders' worst fears were, in some cases, more than realized. By now, if you're paying any attention to the movements in the art market you have been hearing the drumbeat of bad news: Galleries shuttering, a lot of the buying energy drying up, some fairs shriking operations, and the secondary market stuttering.

But the picture is, as usual, quite nuanced depending on how you look at it. There were some upsides to the slowdown in the hype and the speculation gamification of art seems to be over, which some art insiders say is not the worst thing. Things seemed to turn a corner in the closing months of 2025, which included a successful fall New York auction week and a stronger-than-expected edition of Art Basel Miami Beach.

Following two years of a down market and declining sales, the world’s two leading auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s reported at the close of the year, upticks in total projected revenue for 2025. So is the wind back in the sails? After years of downturn, has the art market changed in permanent ways? What major shifts can we expect in 2026?

Senior editor Kate Brown is joined by Marc Spiegler to consider these questions.

For those who don’t already know, Spiegler led Art Basel from 2007 to 2022, and the brand saw a major expansion under his tenure. Currently, he works on a portfolio of cultural strategy projects with major foundations, private corporation, including digital and experiential endeavors. Spiegler has long been a visiting professor in cultural management at Università Bocconi in Milan and launched the Art Market Minds Academy.

As we close out another bumpy year in the art market, we are revisiting a recent episode that looks at one of the factors in play: the erosion of logic when it comes to the price of works of art. Our editor-in-chief was on the podcast sharing what she learned about how the rules of art pricing were made and broken—and what may come next.  

What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that question of price has never been easy—but lately, it’s gotten harder than ever.

As we’ve discussed on this podcast before, the art market has cooled off. But this isn’t just a downturn—it’s a disruption. The system that once supported pricing logic is now in disarray, and dealers and advisors are feeling the strain.

In a recent report for Artnet News Pro, our editor-in-chief Naomi Rea explored how the traditional rules of art pricing have stopped making sense. With confidence waning and speculation drying up, dealers are quietly recalibrating. What we’re seeing may be more than a correction—as Naomi reports, it could be the unraveling of an entire logic.

Naomi joins senior editor Kate Brown to unpack what’s going on in the “danger zone” of the market and how different players—from mega-galleries, emerging dealers, to advisors and collectors—are adapting. They also discuss whether we might be heading toward a more sustainable and meaningful art market.