The Art Angle

What a difference 12 months makes! After years of declining sales in the auction realm, there are finally signs of life. The Artnet Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2026 reveals that global auction totals were up 13.3 percent in 2025 versus 2024. The full report, rich with new findings, is now available as a crisp PDF. The price? Free. (We hope that its contents will inspire you to subscribe to Artnet Pro, and to partake of the Artnet Price Database.)

In the report’s cover story, “Dark Mode,” Artnet’s Art Detective columnist, Katya Kazakina, delves into the intriguing and shadowy world of private auctions, where big-league paintings (and cars, jewelry, and more) trade behind closed doors, for enormous sums. In some cases, only certain collectors are invited. Many in this clandestine business seem to enjoy it, and Kazakina charts the major players and their strategies.

Meanwhile, in wide-ranging interviews, an auctioneer (maverick Joe Maddalena), an auctioneer-turned advisor (powerhouse Patti Wong), and an auctioneer-turned dealer (rainmaker David Schrader) share their insights on the changing state of play in public salesrooms. And Margaret Carrigan, who helms The Back Room newsletter for Artnet Pro, marshals data to explain the state of play in the art industry. There is more: Here’s the download link once more.

On this week’s Art Angle podcast, Kazakina sat down with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro’s editor, to discuss private auctions, the Intelligence Report, and what to expect at the big May sales in New York.

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser.

Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word.

Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the “technical image,” “the apparatus,” and “techno-imagination.” These have had a huge impact on media studies, and yet remain under-known.

Long in the works but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen: Vilem Flusser’s Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwendener is a teacher, an art historian, and a long-time art critic for the New York Times. The Society of the Screen tackles what Flusser’s wide-ranging and experimental body of thought means for art today and how his theories might help us find a way through our media-saturated moment.

Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He is the prince of painters, a master of the High Renaissance. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given him the full blockbuster treatment in a highly anticipated exhibition called "Raphael: Sublime Poetry."

The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. Curated by Carmen C. Bambach, it took 17 years to assemble.

No one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did. But what is the story within the story of this artist who left indelible mark on western art? Kate Brown is joined by art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis, who has just published a review of the exhibition, to dive into that question.

Register for the Intelligence Report live discussion: ⁠The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month.

In this episode, will be discussing:

— The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here)

— The rise of a new art historical art star: the Flemish baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689).

— And a new investigation that claims to definitively, absolutely, positively once and for settle the question of who Banksy really is. Do we think they did it? Does it matter?

Register for: The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology.

It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas.

Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work “Peace Core” showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a project space, Earth, on the Lower East Side in New York and in Echo Park in L.A.

Kulendran Thomas's works are complicated. They often feature paintings, inspired by A.I.-generated images. His video installations at MoMA and the New Museum involve deepfake interviews with celebrities like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or even other artists, together with documentary footage about Sri Lanka, where his family is from.

Beneath all these complex parts, Kulendran Thomas is weaving together an ambitious and maybe even unsettling argument, about political systems, philosophy, technology, human creativity, post-human creativity, and where we might be heading in the future—as artists and as a civilization.