Welcome to Art Angle, an Artnet News podcast that dives into the places where the art world meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story to earth. Join us each week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market and more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators and diners. other leading experts in the field.
If you follow the traditional art world, you’ll know that over the past decade, one of the biggest stories has been the rise of new types of figurative painting. A visit to the recent wave of art fairs in New York revealed that this boom is far from slowing downbut nothing stays the same forever, and trend watchers have been scanning the landscape to see what new developments might emerge.
Artnet News European Editor Kate Brown has a tryout where she brings together some recent examples to speculate on a possible new wrinkle in the history of contemporary art at this time. What’s cool in art right now? The answer might be that what’s cool is painting your cool friends. And the word Kate uses to describe what she sees is hypersentimentalism.
It is an art that exchanges knowingly stylized or lightly romanticized images of friends and colleagues with a heightened attention to intimate bonds, and a veiled but also conscious attention to the art scene itself as subject matter. In a recent conversation, national art critic Ben Davis joined Kate to find out where she sees this new trend at play, and more importantly, what other bigger developments in culture might be driving the drift in this particular direction.
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