Intersections: The Art Basel Podcast

‘Growing up in London, as a teenager, I became obsessed with how Black culture expressed itself in public life,’ says Sir David Adjaye OBE. The renowned Ghanaian-British architect meets Marc Spiegler to discuss the power of architecture, Black artists’ work, race in the artworld, and his collaboration with curator Okwui Enwezor, as well as his current project, designing the Edo Museum of West African Art in Benin, which will house the Benin Bronzes, returned to Nigeria from the British Museum.

Rapper, musician, and record producer Swizz Beats (Kasseem Daoud Dean) discusses the meeting points between activism and collecting with Marc Spiegler. ‘How can we be a part of the culture when we don't own the culture?’ he asks, describing how he went to Harvard Business School and got involved with the business of art and culture as a way of promoting the creatives he believes in.

Lisa Spellman first arrived in New York to study art at SVA, moving into a loft that seemed predestined to be a gallery. Kim Gordon was reading about the art happening in New York while she was in LA, but when she got to the East Coast, ended up playing music. A few years later, Spellman founded 303 Gallery and Gordon was playing with iconic band Sonic Youth. The two talk to Marc Spiegler about New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, the art scene and the music scene, the places they all went, and how it all intersected. It’s an image of an old New York that still reverberates in the city today.

Businesswoman and art collector Pamela Joyner tells Marc Spiegler that she is surprised at the analogies she sees between art collecting and her career in finance. ‘Both environments are very relationship-oriented, they're reliant on individuals having confidence in each other's integrity,’ she explains. Described as an ‘activist collector’ by ArtReview magazine for promoting and collecting the work of contemporary African-American artists, Joyner reflects on the collector as patron and the work she believes in. Our correspondent Stephanie Bailey interviews artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang on her new commission, Anthem (2021). The piece was conceived in collaboration with the legendary singer, composer, and transgender activist Beverly Glenn-Copeland and is currently filling the Guggenheim museum’s rotunda.

Today’s experiments in art and technology are wide-ranging, and few know better about the latest developments than Daniel Birnbaum, director and curator of Acute Art, and New York City-based artist Jacolby Satterwhite. In this episode, Birnbaum and Satterwhite talk to Marc Spiegler about the use of virtual reality as an artistic medium, the future of mixed reality and the ‘metaverse’, the digitalization and democratization of the artworld, and the idea of cosmic NFTs. Plus, our correspondent Anny Shaw explores a new art gallery located in a UK football stadium and talks to its founder, Eddy Frankel, who also happens to be an art critic and Time Out London’s Art & Culture Editor.

Online sales seem like they’re to stay and millennials continue to be the biggest spenders when it comes to collecting art, says Dr. Clare McAndrew, renowned cultural economist and founder of Arts Economics. Findings such as this were recently released in ‘Resilience in the Dealer Sector: A Mid-Year Review 2021’, an art market report authored by McAndrew and published by Art Basel and UBS. In this conversation with our correspondent Anny Shaw, McAndrew sheds light on the report’s key takeaways, which also include the market’s generational and gender dynamics and the role of dealers in an increasingly digitized industry. To address the report’s findings from another perspective, Art Basel Executive Editor Jeni Fulton also talks to Chief Economist of Global Wealth Management at UBS and author Paul Donovan about the parallels between the global economy and the art market.

Recorded live on the show floor during Art Basel in Basel, this special episode brings together seven distinguished art world voices. Artists AA Bronson and Mario García Torres, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, gallerists Jeffrey Deitch and Jasmin Tsou, and museum directors Elena Filipovic and Ann Demeester reflect on the artworld’s coming together again, how the pandemic changed them and how they see the future.

'We see the world as this huge kaleidoscopic field of information … and I think the way we see culture and the arts should also embrace that,' Doug Aitken says. In this conversation with Marc Spiegler, the interdisciplinary artist discusses his wide-ranging practice, from its roots in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 80s to his project Station to Station, which transformed a train along a 4,000-mile journey into a nomadic studio, to his recent collaboration with musician Jamie xx and creating sculptures that live underwater. Art Basel Executive Editor Jeni Fulton also speaks with musician Fatima al Qadiri about her latest album, Medieval Femme, her lifelong fascination with the sensual recitation of classical Arabic poetry, and her recent forays into scoring films.

In her book My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018), Ottessa Moshfegh portrays a pre-9/11 artworld obsessed with style over substance­. The award-winning novelist’s own introduction to the artworld was also in the early 2000s, and her experience at the time was colored by 'a sense of impending doom,' she recalls. In this episode, Marc Spiegler speaks to Moshfegh about her literary foray into the artworld (and the fact that she’s currently hiding from it), transforming her books into feature films, and other current projects.

'In my most core self, I’m a writer and a performer,' says Miranda July. But since coming of age in Portland’s riot-grrrl scene, July has made a name for herself as a true multihyphenate: as an artist, singer, screenwriter, author, Hollywood film director and actress, and more. In this episode, she speaks with Marc Spiegler about writing her first play – based on correspondence with a convicted murderer – to releasing her film Kajillionaire in the midst of the pandemic and the flood of DMs that followed. 'My entire experience of the release was those messages,' she recalls. Separately, curator Larry Ossei-Mensah talks to Jon Gray, a cofounder of the activist cooking collective Ghetto Gastro, about food as a device for social change and branching out into the world of art.