Listen Now

Happy Halloween! In today's episode we discuss Romanticism, a period that produced some of our favorite creepy images in the history of art. Romantic artists like Caspar David Friedrich, Francisco Goya, William Blake, and Théodore Géricault explored themes of death, despair, the sublime, and madness––perfect for your Halloween enjoyment!

The biggest show of the year in New York (and maybe America, or the world) closed this weekend: the retrospective of Jeff Koons at the Whitney Museum of American Art. While Koons is a controversial figure who has achieved more commercial than critical success, the consensus about this show seems to be that the works, in the end, are indeed masterpieces. In this episode, we put aside the hype and look very closely at three sculptures spanning the artist's career, in order to see if there is more than meets the eye.

In August, The Art Newspaper reported that Donald Olson, an astrophysicist at Texas State University, had pinpointed the exact moment that Monet painted his work Impression: Sunrise to 13 November 1872. The report described this moment as the "birth of Impressionism." In today's episode, we discuss the painting and unravel some of the problems of this claim.

Ai Weiwei is a Chinese artist and political activist who has been named the most influential artist alive. A retrospective of his work has been touring the U.S., and his name is constantly in the news (whether for his art, his run-ins with Chinese authorities, or his internet memes). While his activism has earned him international acclaim, it tends to overshadow his art; in this episode, we focus on looking closely at three of his major works, in order to understand the importance of his choices as an artist (and not only as an activist).

At the beginning of the 19th century, the Parthenon (a temple atop the Acropolis in Athens that was constructed in the 5th century BCE) had fallen into a state of ruin. From 1800 until 1812, Lord Elgin, who had been England's Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, removed approximately half of the Parthenon's remaining marble sculptures, eventually selling them to the British Museum where they are currently housed. In today's episode, we discuss the history of the marbles, and the various arguments for keeping them in England and for returning them to Greece.

In today's episode, we discuss New York's summer blockbuster exhibition, Kara Walker's A Subtlety. Walker is a prominent but controversial artist who makes art that comments on social problems related to race and gender; this work was the result of an invitation to make a work inside the defunct and soon-to-be-demolished Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and drew tens of thousands of people in two months.

In today's episode, we discuss the current situation with the Detroit Institute of Arts. Since the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy in July 2013, there have been numerous discussions of selling off the DIA's collections in order to pay down the city's debt.

As we prepare our first episodes, please enjoy this teaser!