The Art Angle

There are many ways to read the vast trove of documents tied to the convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in prison in 2019. The Epstein files offer a window into the rarefied, power-brokering circles he inhabited. But the latest tranche—released by the U.S. Department of Justice in late January and comprising some three million pages, 2,000 videos, and 180,000 images—also provides a behind-the-scenes view of high-level financial maneuvering, including Epstein’s connections to the art and cultural worlds.

Revelations in the latest files have already had consequences: former French culture minister Jack Lang resigned as president of the Arab World Institute after disclosures connecting him to Epstein, and French financial-crimes prosecutors have opened a preliminary investigation into him and his daughter for alleged “aggravated tax-fraud laundering.” Art collector and film producer Steve Tisch is also facing scrutiny over email correspondence with Epstein in 2013 concerning multiple women. In early February, David A. Ross, chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Art Practice at New York’s School of Visual Arts, resigned after documents showed ties to Epstein.

The files also shed additional light on the art holdings of the billionaire Leon Black and his dealings with Epstein. Black, who served as chairman of the board of trustees of the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2018 to 2021, stepped down from that role after backlash over his financial ties to Epstein, though he remained on the board as a trustee. Black has faced civil lawsuits and allegations that he sexually assaulted women introduced to him through Epstein. Black has denied the claims, and no criminal charges have been filed.

So we knew about Black and Epstein, to an extent. But my colleague, senior reporter Katya Kazakina, recently focused on how the latest documents illuminate Epstein’s sophisticated use of financial structures to enhance the value of Black’s vast art holdings—and just how much of his wealth was effectively stored in art.

This enormous release is wide-ranging, touching people and industries far beyond the criminal sexual activity in which Epstein was involved. Because of its sheer breadth, it bears emphasizing that inclusion in the files does not imply criminal wrongdoing. More will come to light as journalists and the public sift through the documents.

There is an enduring association with creative experiment and psychedelic experiences. Recently, psychedelics have become more mainstream, explored not just for their far-out spiritual associations but as medicine, as therapy, and even just to make you more productive. How should we think about psychedelics and how they relate to art and art-making now?

Ryan McGinness has had a long and well-known career as an artist. His densely layered, colorful abstract paintings have been shown at museums and galleries around the world. He’s also long explored world-building through his art, expanding his designs to maze-like environments and staging sprawling events and parties.

Recently, however, McGinness has showed a new side of his creative journey. He has just published an art book, Trip Advisor: Notes From over 25 Years of Psychedelic Voyages, from Blurring Books. The colorful tome collages together images of McGinness's paintings and photos of his studio and life with the raw diaries he kept beginning in 1999, as he chronicled his own mind’s voyages on psilocybin mushrooms, alongside essays reflecting on what they have meant and continue to mean to him.

So, what insight do these trips offer about art and life? What might you gain creatively and what are the pitfalls? Ryan McGinness is our guide into the world of psychedelics and art today.

If you had to pick two conversations that defined the last 10 years in art, one would certainly be about digital culture and online life. The other would be about race, racism, and representation. The critic and artist Aria Dean has been at the center of both these conversations.

As a theorist, her essays on these topics are much cited. You can find them gathered in the recent collection Bad Infinity, from Sternberg Press. She also worked for some years at Rhizome.org, one of the most important venues advocating for digital art.

As as an artist, Dean has been in many important shows, from the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial to the Whitney Biennial here in New York. Recently, for the Performa biennial of performance art, Dean staged The Color Scheme, a two-person theatrical work, which is also set to tour to Berlin later this year.

The Color Scheme focuses on an imagined meeting in the 1920s in Berlin, between two Black intellectuals, one called The Poet and the other called The Philosopher. It may be as close as Dean has come to totally fusing her work as a thinker with her work as an art maker. It literally stages a conversation about Black culture, politics, and art. Yet The Color Scheme also plunges us a century back in time, very much away from the world of digital culture she has written so much about.

It felt to me like a continuation of the important debates Dean has been a part of, but also an attempt to find new perspective. And that seemed a good cue to talk with her about how she’s viewing art now, why she’s looking to art history, and how her views have evolved over a tumultuous decade.

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.