Art Sense

A conversation with Verisart Founder and CEO Robert Norton. Robert is a pioneer in the world of fine art e-commerce having founded Saatchi Art and Sedition before starting Verisart in 2015. Inspired by the emerging blockchain, Verisart was founded to provide better certificates of authenticity for traditional artwork. The company now offers a wide range of solutions that include robust digital COAs and the ability to easily mint NFTs from a Shopify plug-in. The conversation includes a bevy of insights from the bleeding edge of art and technology.

https://verisart.com/

https://www.instagram.com/verisart/

A conversation with Tina Kukielski, the Susan Sollins Executive Director and Chief Curator for Art21. Art21 is a leader in art-focused content that includes television series, films, publications, digital programs and a wide variety of educational resources. Most famously, Art21 is responsible for the production of the Peabody Award-winning PBS-broadcast television series “Art in the Twenty-First Century”. The conversation includes the history of the organization, the goals of their programming, the challenges they face and the upcoming 11th season of “Art in the Twenty-First Century” which debuts April 7 at 10pm ET on all PBS outlets.

https://art21.org/

https://www.instagram.com/art21/

A conversation with Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Executive Director Elizabeth Smith about a new exhibit of Frankethaler’s work currently on display at Gagosian’s 24th Street gallery in New York. “Drawing within Nature: Paintings from the 1990s” features more than a dozen works by Frankenthaler made during a period when she took inspiration from the environment near her Connecticut studio on Long Island Sound. The conversation touches on Frankenthaler's life, career and this latest exhibit.

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2023/helen-frankenthaler-drawing-within-nature-paintings-from-the-1990s/

https://www.frankenthalerfoundation.org/

A conversation with artist Julian Opie. Opie is an artist known for distilling the world around us into its simplest forms, reducing people, animals and architecture into shapes and lines that capture their essence instead of their details. In the conversation, we discuss his inspirations, his process and his new show at Lisson Gallery in London that includes his continued experimentation with virtual reality.

https://www.lissongallery.com/exhibitions/julian-opie-op-vr-hem-london

https://www.julianopie.com/

A conversation with Masterworks Founder and CEO Scott Lynn. In 2017, Lynn founded Masterworks after seeing an opportunity to securitize fine art as an asset class and thus providing the common Wall Street investor access to blue chip art. Today, Masterworks is the world’s largest buyer of art acquiring seven-to-eight-figure paintings from the likes of Joan Mitchell, Picasso and Basquiat almost daily to meet the demand of its nearly one million users.

https://www.masterworks.com

https://www.instagram.com/masterworks.io/

A conversation with artist Mat Collishaw. Collishaw is an artist who creates installations that leverage the ephemeral nature of illusions to explore issues related to perception, moral ambiguity and the brevity of life. Among his latest work is a collaboration with NFT veterans Danil Krivoruchko and the team at OG.Art. The project extends a floral theme Collishaw has explored for years by allowing collectors to breed and hybridize new variations based on community interactions and assets in the collectors’ wallets.

https://matcollishaw.com/

https://og.art/

A conversation with Boris Pevzner, Co-Founder and CEO of LiveArt, a technology company that provides a turn-key, anonymous, peer-to-peer marketplace for fine art. In order to enable informed marketplace decisions, the company has also created a powerful data platform that aggregates art market information that is typically difficult to get to.

https://liveart.io/

https://www.instagram.com/liveart.io/

A conversation with Chris Cummings, Founder and CEO of Iconic Moments, a technology company that works alongside cultural institutions like museums to create digital collectibles that heighten engagement and fuel what the company calls “crowd patronage”. The conversation sheds light on the variety of factors that weigh on the operation of museums and the importance of storytelling when engaging museum patrons.

https://www.iconicmoments.co/

https://twitter.com/Iconic_NFT?s=20&t=QNLhjtN8dgfFDVoGqe4yyQ

A conversation with author Christine Ross about her new book “Art for Coexistence: Unlearning the Way We See Migration”. Ross is a professor of contemporary art history at McGill University and uses that lens to examine contemporary art’s response to migration crises around the globe. Can art provide an emotional gateway to humanizing the life-threatening journey of migrants?

A conversation with artist Alex Prager about her decades of staged photography that explore our shared humanity through the use of vibrant colors, dramatic lighting and carefully-crafted characters. The conversation includes details of Prager’s formative years abroad, the moment she realized she needed to become a photographer, and her latest show up now at Lehmann Maupin in New York.

A conversation with Iranian-American artist Y.Z. Kami. Kami has gained notoriety over the last four decades with his large-scale portraits of faces in contemplation, as well as a variety of other bodies of work which explore themes related to spirituality and the architecture of sacred spaces through both figuration and abstraction. In the conversation, we discuss the commonalities in his diverse body of work and what can be seen at his latest exhibition in New York.

A conversation with author Matthew Wilson about his new book “The Hidden Language of Symbols”. In the conversation, we touch on just a handful of the dozens of symbols and hidden meanings collected from the art and architecture of societies from around the world and profiled in the book.

https://www.matthewwilson.uk/work

https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Language-Symbols-Matthew-Wilson/dp/0500025290

A look back at the conversations from 2022, featuring excerpts of conversations with Jerry Saltz, Sarah Morris, Simon de Pury, Matthew Collings and Shepard Fairey.

A conversation with Daniel H. Weiss, CEO and President of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, regarding his new book “Why the Museum Matters”. In the book, Weiss describes the origins of the modern day museum, the challenges museums face and what the future holds. The conversation includes insights on some of the thorniest issues facing museums today, including diversity, restitution, and deaccessioning.

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300259353/why-the-museum-matters/

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Museum-Matters/dp/0300259352

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/leadership

A Conversation with Lisa Darms, Executive Director of the Hauser & Wirth Institute. The institute is a non-profit, private foundation dedicated to transforming the field of artists’ archives by nurturing equity and innovation, while also increasing access to archives. HWI provides grants for progressive archival projects and education, fosters networks locally and internationally and organizes public programming that expands conversations around artistic legacies.

https://hauserwirthinstitute.org/

https://www.instagram.com/hauserwirthinstitute/

A conversation with Web3 art collector, investor and DAO co-founder Derek Edward Schloss. Derek was an early advocate for the economy that has grown around the collecting of digital art. He is the co-founder of Collab+Currency, a crypto-focused venture fund that made early investments in companies like SuperRare, Art Blocks, Async Art, Metaversal, Rarible and PROOF. He is also a founding member of the ultra-exclusive crypto-art-collecting Flamingo DAO, which boasts the world’s most valuable collection of NFTs. In the conversation, Derek discusses the assessment of value, his love of generative art and the inner workings of an art-collecting DAO.

https://www.collabcurrency.com/

https://flamingodao.xyz/

https://twitter.com/derekedws

An exploration of the life and work of the incredibly influential Spanish artist Antoni Tàpies. 2023 will mark what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday. Tàpies’ son Toni Tàpies and daughter-in-law Natasha Hébert join me to discuss the materiality, philosophy and symbolism that were hallmarks of Tàpies’ work, as well as details about the events planned to honor his centenary in the coming year.

https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/antoni-tapies/

https://www.pacegallery.com/exhibitions/antoni-tapies-transmaterial/

https://fundaciotapies.org/en/

A conversation about the intricacies of the Chinese art market with iconic Chinese gallerist Pearl Lam. Lam has been a fixture in the contemporary art scenes of Shanghai and Hong Kong during an unprecedented time of growth and evolution among Chinese artists and collectors. Her galleries represent artists from both China and abroad and The China Art Foundation (which she co-founded with scholar Gao Minglu) aims to utilize art to spark cross-cultural dialogues between the East and the West.

A discussion about the future of digital art displays with Poppy Simpson, Head of Product and Content for Netgear’s Meural product line. In the conversation, we discuss a number of issues around the use of digital art frames, including the evolving user experience, the advantages of providing a library of curated content and Netgear’s pioneering work with the SuperRare DAO to develop a licensing and royalty model for displaying NFTs on digital displays.

A discussion with artist Glenn Brown. Finding inspiration in works from art history as well as science fiction, Brown creates beautifully crafted paintings built from layers of fine brush strokes and thin glazes. The process can take years, but yields paintings that captivate the viewer with sublime colors and intertwining strokes that invite the viewer’s closer inspection. The conversation dives into Brown’s artistic mindset and methodology, as well as a discussion about his current exhibit “We’ll Keep On Dancing Till We Pay the Rent” at Gagosian’s 24th Street location in New York - his first show in the city since 2014.

https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2022/glenn-brown-well-keep-on-dancing-till-we-pay-the-rent/

https://glenn-brown.co.uk/