The Art Angle Podcast: ‘New Yorker’ Art Scribe Calvin Tomkins on What Makes Great Artists Tick

Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that
delves into the places where the art world meets the real world,
bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join host Andrew
Goldstein every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in
museums, the art market, and much more with input from our own
writers and editors as well as artists, curators, and other top
experts in the field.

Six decades ago, an editor at Newsweek magazine
summoned a young journalist named Calvin Tomkins out of the
foreign-news department to interview the legendary conceptual
artist Marcel Duchamp, who had apparently left art-making to play
chess and… simply breathe. Although it would be years before
Tomkins discovered that Duchamp had in fact been hard at work on
his magnum opus, Étant Donnés, for years before their
first meeting, this chance encounter altered the trajectory of his
career and life. Duchamp was the gateway to what would become a
prolific collection of artists—many of them eccentric or otherwise
challenging, all of them great (or at least noteworthy)—that
Tomkins went on to profile in the pages of the New Yorker
beginning in 1962.

Dozens of those profiles have now been compiled into a lavish
new multi-volume set, titled The Lives
of Artists, published by Phaidon. The collection
joins 18 other books that Tomkins has published on artists and the
art world, including an essential biography of the man who started
it all for him: Marcel Duchamp. In the process, Tomkins has
arguably become known as the world’s authority on not only many of
the most consequential postwar and contemporary artists in the
canon, but also the art of profiling itself. To celebrate the
release of The Lives of Artists, Tomkins joined Artnet
News editor-in-chief Andrew Goldstein in our studio to discuss his
one-of-a-kind journey, what David Hammons and Duchamp have in
common, and his take on Maurizio Cattelan’s
Comedian, the banana that took over the
world.

Listen below and subscribe to The Art
Angle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever you get your podcasts. (Or
catch up on past
episodes here on Artnet News.) And for even more of Tomkins’s
wit and wisdom, read the extended two-part interview, beginning
with the first half here.

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The Art Angle Podcast: Who
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The Art Angle Podcast: Hans Neuendorf on 30 Years
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The Art Angle Podcast:
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The Art Angle Podcast: Why
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Introducing the Art Angle
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The post The Art Angle Podcast: ‘New Yorker’ Art Scribe
Calvin Tomkins on What Makes Great Artists Tick appeared first
on artnet News.