Art World Infamy is a special series from the team behind The Art Angle, investigating the scandals and schemes that have rocked the art world. In the first chapter, told over four episodes, senior market reporter Eileen Kinsella unravels the rise and fall of dealer Inigo Philbrick.
What happens when you mix staggering sums of money with opaque financial deals in the high-stakes world of art?
Welcome to Art World Infamy, a new podcast mini-series about the scandals and larger-than-life figures that have gained industry notoriety. We begin with a four-part investigation into how Inigo Philbrick climbed to the top of the art world—and how it all unraveled.
Once hailed as a wunderkind dealer, Philbrick leveraged personal connections and the soaring contemporary art market to build what looked like an unstoppable career. But his fortunes hinged on deception, and once uncovered, the losses were staggering.
In this opening episode, we’ll trace the convoluted deals that propelled Philbrick to the top, and would eventually lead to a spectacular collapse that left collectors and investors out of tens of millions of dollars.
 


Art World Infamy: Inigo Philbrick – Asset Class (Ep. 1)

Museums across the globe are facing unprecedented challenges. In the West, public funding is shrinking, politics is creeping into the galleries, and institutions are asking hard questions about how to stay relevant to their donors and their publics. In an era of increasing scrutiny and diminishing returns, even the most established museums are questioning what long-term sustainability means.
Meanwhile in China, the private museum boom that once symbolized cultural ambition and real-estate wealth is cracking, and some of these lavish new museums are having to close or scale back.
In short, museums are in crisis.
Senior editor Kate Brown recently worked with Margaret Carrigan, our news editor and host of the Art Market Minute, to edit a ⁠four-part series⁠ examining this issue from different angles.
Margaret joins her on the podcast to talk about the takeaways and the financial, political, and ethical pressures reshaping museums. We also discuss whether this breaking point could be the start of a new era of reinvention.


The Silent Emergency Facing Museums

Manga is surely one of the most beloved and influential types of culture in the world. And while there’s long been a thriving international fandom around Japanese graphic novels, in the last 5 years in particular, there’s been a huge surge of popular interest, with manga impossible to miss in book shops and comic stores—and now in ⁠museums too⁠.
The big exhibition “Art of Manga” at the De Young Museum in San Francisco is proving to be a real event. As the title suggests, the show looks at manga not just as a cultural phenomenon but as visual art, digging into the history of the medium and celebrating its dynamic graphic and storytelling style.
Specifically, “Art of Manga” focuses on 10 Japanese creators, selected to show the breadth of what manga has meant, and can be. They are: Akatsuka Fujio, Araki Hirohiko, Chiba Tetsuya, Oda Eiichiro, Tagame Gengoroh, Takahashi Rumiko, Taniguchi Jiro, Yamashita Kazumi, Yamazaki Mari, Tanaami Keiichi, and Yoshinaga Fumi.
What is the connection of manga to Japanese art history? What does a museum have to add to the story of manga? And what can the popularity of manga, in turn, teach museums? The show’s curator, Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, agreed to talk to us about all of this.


Manga Mania Gets Its Big Museum Moment

One of the things Ben Davis likes about contemporary art is that he is always learning new things, because art spaces are always bringing new ways of making and thinking into the mix. Recently, unexpectedly, this has included magic. Specifically, ⁠Jeanette Andrews⁠.
Andrews began her career as a professional magician, but now works mainly in museums, creating a body of work that’s something new, exploring magic as an expressive medium. Her works usually bring together the science of perception, the intrigue of coded messages, and the history of illusion as a craft.
Andrews has performed parlor tricks dreamed up by an algorithm to investigate human versus machine creativity; ⁠re-performed⁠ the earliest documented magic trick from 1584; and made art inspired by the use of sleight of hand in actual CIA espionage in the 1950s. And her explorations of this unusual creative space are actually getting their first dedicated museum exhibition soon, at the Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois—that’s a little bit of news we’re breaking on the Art Angle, as a matter of fact.
Earlier this month, Ben went to see one of Jeanette Andrews’s most recent commissions in Boston, "⁠The Attestation,⁠" at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology. He describes it as a hybrid of stage magic and social experiment.
The questions of why, if, and how magic fits in in the museum seem fascinating to me, so he was happy that Andrews agreed to talk about how she pulled off her biggest trick of all: making magic art.




The Magician Who Became an Artist

It’s been a really dizzyingly busy October, and as is customary, we are ending the month by talking about three of the biggest topics. We have a palette of stories that gives a sense of how head-spinning it was.
First, we are going to talk about one of the biggest stories in the world, the $102 million ⁠jewel heist⁠ at France’s Louvre museum, which has transfixed the public.
Second, it’s been a busy few weeks in the European art world on top the Louvre heist, with both ⁠Art Basel Paris⁠ and ⁠Frieze London⁠. Our reporters were there so we are going to check in on what the news from the art biz is.
And third, we’ll talk about the new Sora 2 app, an all-A.I. TikTok clone that isn’t public yet but is at the top of the app charts. I got a chance to try it out and ⁠looked at it⁠. An artist I know called it “the death of video art.” Is it that bad or that good? What does it mean for art? We’ll talk about that too.
Ben Davis is joined as is custom by Artnet’s senior editor and Art Angle co-host Kate Brown, in Berlin, alongside European news reporter Jo Lawson-Tancred.

The Round-Up: Louvre Heist!, Europe's Art Market Reboot, and the Queasy Art of Sora

Nigerian modern art is having a moment. In London, the Tate has opened a critically acclaimed exhibition, called “⁠Nigerian Modernism,⁠” featuring more than 50 artists who experimented with vibrant new styles in the mid 20th century in the giant and influential West African nation. More generally, the artists of this era have become more recognized outside of their home country in recent decades, from early figures who laid the groundwork like Aina Onabolu to a towering figure of the 1950s like Ben Enwonwu to younger innovators of the 1950s and 1960s such as Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, with many more important names to know and bodies of work to discover.
This was an earth-shaking time in Nigerian history, when a near-century of British colonial domination was shed and the many problems of a fragile new independent nation had to be faced. These artists were part of figuring out how to express that new sense of identity in images. But their art was not always so celebrated, sometimes dismissed as derivative of European art.
The scholar and curator Chika Okeke-Agulu has been important to the recent re-estimation of Nigeria’s art history. He teaches at Princeton, and is the author of, among many other things, of ⁠Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria⁠, a book that personally excited me very much when I first found it. With the Tate show drawing a fresh wave of interest, art critic Ben Davis thought Okeke-Agulu would be an excellent guide to what this art was, what it meant, and why it still demands attention today.


The Dramatic Story of Nigerian Modernism

Before the idea of feminism took shape, there was what writers once called “the woman question.” The phrase comes from the querelle des femmes—a centuries-long debate in Europe about women’s rights, intellect, and place in society. One of the first to take it up was Christine de Pizan, the Italian-French court writer who, in 1405, published The Book of the City of Ladies. At a time when most women were excluded from education and public life, de Pizan challenged misogyny head-on, laying some of the earliest groundwork for what we now understand as feminist thought.
That question—what is a woman’s place in culture and history?—has echoed ever since. In 1971, the art historian Linda Nochlin famously reframed it by asking: “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” We have a clear answer: there had been great women artists all along, but their stories were often overlooked, dismissed, or erased.
A new exhibition at the recently opened ⁠Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw⁠ hones in on that conversation. "The Woman Question: 1550–2025," curated by Alison M. Gingeras, gathers nearly five hundred years of women’s creative production—from Renaissance pioneers like Sofonisba Anguissola and ⁠Lavinia Fontana⁠, to Baroque heroines such as Elisabetta Sirani and ⁠Artemisia Gentileschi⁠, and contemporary artists including Betty Tompkins and Lisa Brice. With more than 200 artworks, the exhibition focuses on how women saw and depicted themselves and the world, and how the represented power, resistance, desire, and violence. Through portraits, allegories, and bold depictions of female experience, these artists reveal how women have long claimed creative agency despite the structures built to contain them.
On this episode of The Art Angle, Gingeras joins senior editor Kate Brown from Warsaw, Poland, to talk about early women art stars, recent rediscoveries, and why, after all this time, we still need all-women exhibitions.




Do We Still Need All-Woman Art Shows?

Last year, Jack Hanley—one of ⁠New York’s most beloved⁠ and idiosyncratic gallerists— ⁠announced⁠ he would close his gallery after 37 years in business. The news landed with both surprise and sadness: Hanley has always been a disruptor, a dealer with a sharp eye for fresh talent, who followed instinct over market logic. A gem of the New York art scene and beyond.
Over the decades, Hanley gave early shows to artists like Günther Förg, Christopher Wool, Sophie Calle, and Christian Marclay—and all of that was long before they became art-world names they are now. He helped define the San Francisco scene of the 1990s, championed artists who blurred lines between high and low and made challenging work; and more recently, even gave the digital artist ⁠Beeple his first-ever gallery show⁠. As a former Grateful Dead roadie, avid orchid grower, art fair founder, and having run galleries in several cities, he’s seen a lot. And played music with more than a few art dealers.
Hanley joins senior editor Kate Brown to discuss transformation and continuity in the art world and art industry. We talk about what’s changed, what hasn’t, and what keeps art interesting, even as the market has grown more absurd.




A Long, Strange Trip Through the New York Gallery Scene

You've been hearing a lot about the Louvre lately. Last month, thieves broke into the Paris Museum in broad daylight when the museum had just opened and made off with eight pieces of royal jewelry. The spectacular heist captured the world news cycle and the imagination of the internet. But why are people so obsessed with the Louvre in general? What is it about this museum in particular? We decided to re-air a recent episode where we look at the enigmatic institution and dive into the many secrets and stories that it holds.

The Louvre is among the largest, most-visited, and best-known museums in the world, and for nearly too many reasons to count. It’s home to some of the most celebrated works of art, from the Venus de Milo to the Mona Lisa. Its blended contemporary and historic architecture is astounding. And it also has a truly formidable past, stretching back through time, well before the building became a museum in 1793.

An institution and collection that has been a quiet witness to so much history and change is bound to have stories to tell. Elaine Sciolino, contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, has captured many of these stories in her newest book, Adventures in the Louvre: How to Fall in Love with the World’s Greatest Museum, which came out in April with Norton & Company. Sciolino is acclaimed for her chronicles of French history, and she’s the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris, The Seine, and La Seduction. And at the Louvre, she spoke to everyone, from the guards to the lead curators, and received unprecedented access to rooms I didn’t even know existed.

Senior Editor Kate Brown caught up with Elaine, who is based in Paris, to discuss the enigmatic and ever-enchanting Louvre, and what she learned from her exploration of its many halls, backrooms, and basements.


Re-Air: Uncovering the Louvre’s Hidden Stories

a weekly podcast that brings the biggest stories in the art world down to earth. Go inside the newsroom of the art industry's most-read media outlet, artnet News, for an in-depth view of what matters most in museums, the market, and much more.

A Long, Strange Trip Through the New York Gallery Scene

The Art Angle

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