The Los Angeles–based trend forecaster and writer Sean Monahan is known for his sharp takes on the zeitgeist. Over the past decade, his cultural insights have routinely gone viral—most famously when he coined the term “vibe shift,” a phrase that quickly spread from niche corners of the internet to mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Guardian. In the early 2010s, he co-founded the trend-forecasting collective ⁠K-HOLE⁠ with Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal, and Dena Yago. Though short-lived, their reports had an outsized influence on the cultural sphere, best known for popularizing the term “normcore”—a concept that began in the art world and ended up becoming a household world an era of anti-style.
Today, Monahan runs ⁠8Ball⁠, his cult-favorite newsletter on Substack that decodes contemporary aesthetics, social dynamics, tech, and the subtle undercurrents of change. If you want to understand why things look, feel, and behave the way they do right now—his writing is essential.
Senior Editor Kate Brown spoke with Sean about his own journey from art school to consulting for brands, and how that path informs his view of the present moment. They discussed institutional decay, the legacy of post-internet art, generational shifts, and the persistent sense that culture has entered a holding pattern. He also offered thoughts on why the 2020s—after several false starts—may finally be congealing into a definable decade.


Why Does Culture Feel Stuck?

When we first aired this episode about red chip art a few months back, it captured a cultural and art market phenomenon hiding in plain sight. My colleague Annie Armstrong mapped out a world of Cybertrucks, crypto wallets, and Alec Monopoly openings—a bro-filled art scene where KAWS, MSCHF, and Daniel Arsham are the mainstays, and where spectacle often outpaces substance.

Then Adrien Brody had an art show.

This summer, at Eden Gallery in New York, the Oscar-winning actor unveiled his solo exhibition "Made in America," including a body of work that dives headfirst into the visual language of red-chip art. The show includes mixed-media paintings with portraits of Marilyn Monroe, and there are also Basquiat-inspired crowns, rats, and images of Mickey Mouse. There’s even a participatory element that involves audience members sticking their used chewing gum on the gallery wall. Brody's maximalist, pop-culture salad seems tailor-made for virality, sure—but reactions in the art world have been quite mixed.

Some see Brody’s exhibition as a genuine creative endeavor; but others view it as a high-profile example of what happens when celebrity, commerce, and art collide in an already hype-driven market. Some don't mind the celebrity aspect but think it is just bad painting. Either way, what’s certain is that Brody isn’t just dabbling in this so-called red chip art world sphere—he’s fully committed and he is now the new face of it— in all of its chrome-coated, algorithm-charmed aesthetic.

In honor of the buzz surrounding "Made in America," we’re re-airing our episode on red chip art. In it, I spoke to Annie about the phenomenon, exploring how social media, speculation, and celebrity culture are reshaping a corner of the art world that often defies traditional critical frameworks. Whether you see it as democratizing or dystopian, red chip art is impossible to ignore.

Re-Air: The Rise of the Red Chip Art World

It’s the end of June. It’s hot. And it’s time to take a look back at the hot art stories of the last month.
Today the Art Angle team has picked out three items. On the agenda:
—The ⁠announcement⁠ of a brand new, ambitious museum-like art venue, Canyon, dedicated to immersive video art, on the Lower East Side. We'll also talk about the general state of immersive art attractions.
—What went down ⁠at Art Basel⁠, the big Swiss art fair that is the art industry’s most important event, and the ⁠ongoing chaos⁠ in art prices.
—And finally, the Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody’s painting show in New York City, which has ⁠everyone talking⁠—or at least, tittering.
Culture editor Min Chen joins art critic Ben Davis and Artnet senior editor—and Art Angle co-host—Kate Brown to talk about it all.


The Round-Up: Tech’d Out Museums, Art Basel Takeaways, and Adrien Brody's Awesomely Awful Art

What’s a painting worth? For art world professionals, that question of price has never been easy—but lately, it’s gotten harder than ever.

As we’ve discussed on this podcast before, the art market has cooled off. But this isn’t just a downturn—it’s a disruption. The system that once supported pricing logic is now in disarray, and dealers and advisors are feeling the strain.

In a recent report for Artnet News Pro, our editor-in-chief Naomi Rea explored how the traditional rules of art pricing have stopped making sense. With confidence waning and speculation drying up, dealers are quietly recalibrating. What we’re seeing may be more than a correction—as Naomi reports, it could be the unraveling of an entire logic.

Naomi joins senior editor Kate Brown to unpack what’s going on in the “danger zone” of the market and how different players—from mega-galleries, emerging dealers, to advisors and collectors—are adapting. We also discuss whether we might be heading toward a more sustainable and meaningful art market.


Why No One Trusts Art Prices Anymore

If you’ve been around art in the last several decades or so, you likely have heard the term “institutional critique.” This is a genre of art that turns the lens back  onto the world around the art object as its subject, finding playful or polemical ways to provoke thought on art’s unspoken rules and expectations and links to the wider world.
Andrea Fraser is one of the artists who has most helped define “institutional critique” as a genre and as a practice. She has done this in artworks that sometimes look like performances, or lectures, or works of research—but also in her essays and theoretical writings.
One of her recent essays, “⁠The Field of Contemporary Art: A Diagram,⁠” published over at e-Flux Notes, is an attempt literally to map out how contemporary art is not one thing but a landscape of different competing camps and value systems, so that you might figure out where you stand within it. She calls this theory “a resource to make sense of a field that makes no sense,” and she agreed to talk to art critic Ben Davis about it.
 


There Is Not One Art World. There Are (at Least) Five

It may be the dog days of summer, but the art world doesn’t take a break, and there’s plenty to talk about for our monthly roundup episode, where we parse and analyze the biggest headlines shaping the art world and industry. In this episode, we take a look at what is going on in the art scenes across London, New York, and Berlin, including some of the biennials going on this summer. Then, we get into the headlines: including a dive into a long-gestating biopic by actor Johnny Depp, called ⁠Modì: Three Days on the Wing of Madness⁠. The new film is Depp's first directorial effort in nearly three decades, and it dramatizes 72 chaotic hours in the artist Amedeo Modigliani’s ⁠life⁠ as he chases around early 20th-century Paris with artists Chaim Soutine and Maurice Utrillo. We also talk about Depp's ⁠new art drop⁠. Is it all a rebranding exercise?
After that, we break down the intrigue swirling around the U.S. pavilion for next year’s Venice Biennale and what it might reveal about American cultural diplomacy in 2025. Within that fold, we take stock of ⁠a proposal from controversy-loving artist Andres Serrano⁠ and another idea from far-right American blogger Curtis Yarvin. Last but not least, we analyze the ⁠Labubu mania⁠, a craze for these mischievous little dolls that has finally made its way into the art world and into the market.
National art critic Ben Davis and our editor-in-chief, Naomi Rea joined senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to talk about it all.

The Round-Up: Johnny Depp Does Modigliani, Labubu Mania, and a Weird Idea for the Venice Biennale

While we are on summer break, this is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year.
Can you think of a work of art that truly thrilled you? Maybe you can—and if you can, maybe it even literally made you shiver, or sent a chill up your spine.
This is the phenomena that is called “Aesthetic Chills.” It’s tied to strong emotional reactions to music or dramatic moments in fiction, or even to works of visual art. The effect is a bit mysterious, though it’s also associated with some of our most memorable art encounters. What does it mean for an artwork to be literally “spine-tingling?” Why does it happen when it happens, and why is it so rare? Ben Davis wrote a two-art essay last year on this fascinating phenomena.
Ben’s essay argued that this was more than just a technical subject. He thought that it might even point towards some vital parts of what make art important in our lives that don’t get enough attention. Based on the reaction of readers, many seem to agree—we also published an essay of readers responding with their own examples of artworks that had the effect on them.

Re-Air: What Makes Spine-Tingling Art? Aesthetic Chills: Explained

In art history, the pastoral has long offered a vision of nature as sanctuary—Arcadian meadows, idyllic countrysides, and timeless landscapes painted as if untouched by human conflict or change. It is a mode steeped in longing, often idealizing rural life as a place of harmony, simplicity, and beauty. From the verdant backdrops of Renaissance allegories to the sunlit fields of 19th-century landscape painting, the pastoral tradition has provided generations of artists and their audiences a gentle escape from the turbulence of urban and political life. You can still see these scenes in their full, romantic bloom at institutions like ⁠the Met in New York⁠ or ⁠the Louvre in Paris⁠, where they stand as visions of a perfect, almost mythical world.
Today, however, a different strain of pastoral is taking root—one that resists the urge to smooth over complexity. My sharp-eyed colleague Katie White has spotted a cohort of contemporary artists who are engaging with pastoral imagery in ways that raise the stakes, bringing the countryside into conversation with the crises and contradictions of the present. She’s dubbed this approach the para-pastoral, ⁠a genre that does not retreat into a calm and untroubled countryside⁠ but instead ventures into ambiguous, layered, and sometimes unsettling terrains.
According to Katie, this new approach reframes the landscape not as a static refuge but as a charged space, marked by ecological urgency, political tension, and social change. Rather than romanticizing, the para-pastoral interrogates: Who has access to land? What histories does it conceal? How do rural spaces fit into the global story of climate and capitalism?
Katie joins senior editor Kate Brown on the podcast to trace the history of pastoral art and explore the tense, resonant present of the para-pastoral. Together, we’ll look at what’s fueling the genre’s resurgence, the social and environmental urgencies shaping it, and how artists are reimagining the natural landscape—not as a refuge from reality, but as a mirror of it.




Why This New Art Trend Feels So Familiar

If you want to know which artist is having the biggest year in museums, there is one name that springs to mind for me: Cara Romero.
Since her first big breakout a decade ago at Santa Fe Indian Market, Romero has been steadily growing in influence. If you don’t know it yet, her photo-based art is full of color, drama, and detail. It’s sometimes funny, sometimes fantastical. And it moves between a variety of themes that are extremely important in museums right now: Indigenous identities, environmental concern, science fiction, and staged or set-up photography, to name a few.
For that reason, Romero finds her work part of ⁠many surveys⁠ and ⁠touring exhibitions⁠ at the moment. She had this year a mid-career retrospective at the Hood Museum at Dartmouth, “⁠Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai⁠,” meaning “Living Light.” She also has a two-person spotlight with her husband, the artist ⁠Diego Romero⁠, called “⁠Tales of Future Past,⁠” currently at the Crocker art Museum in Sacramento.
For someone who has risen to the very top of the museum circuit, Romero has had a unique career path and story.


Is This the Museum World's Favorite Artist?

This is a re-air of a popular episode from earlier in the year.
Have you ever asked yourself: What do artists have to learn from the octopus? Maybe not—but the question is at the heart of the work of ⁠Miriam Simun⁠, who currently has an exhibition about her ⁠Institute for Transhumanist Cephalopod Evolution⁠ at the art space Recess in Brooklyn. And it turns out the answer is mind-expanding. Almost literally.
Simun’s unusual art practice can be seen as part of a serious trend in recent years of artists exploring non-human thought of all kinds in the hopes of shifting our troubled relationship to the natural world. The centerpiece of Simun's show at Recess is a series of workshops titled “How to Become an Octopus (and sometime squid).” For these, the artist guides participants through a two-hour program of “psycho-physical” exercises she has developed over many years through collaborations with marine biologists, engineers, dancers, and synchronized swimmers.
She’s taught the method all over the world, and the description says the classes are “open to anyone curious about cephalopods, new ways of sensing, and expanding the definition of self”—an audience which included national art critic Ben Davis. He got in there to explore my cephalopod side, and for this week's Art Angle, we talk about Simun’s art and what he took away from my experience in her workshop.

Re-Air: The Art World's Octopus Teacher

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.

Re-Air: What Makes Spine-Tingling Art? Aesthetic Chills: Explained

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