Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast
In each episode of this show from David Zwirner, the gallery pairs artists and creative people to discuss art and their process for making things. Featuring major figures from the worlds of art, architecture, music, and beyond–Jeff Koons to Vija Celmins, Jeremy O. Harris to Hilton Als–in open-ended conversation.
Episodes
March 29, 2022 • 45 min
The artists and former partners on what it means to be an artist now—and what it meant when they emerged in the New York art world of the 1990s. Tiravanija, who will have his first exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong later this year, is renowned for participatory installations that have a living, social dimension to them. Peyton is one of her generation’s best-known painters, recognized for her intimate paintings of people.
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March 24, 2022 • 30 min
The editorial director of New York Review Books and editor of NYRB Classics explains the origins and cult status of the incredibly popular series. Since its founding by Frank in 1999, NYRB Classics’s mission has been to reintroduce out-of-print gems to a new audience, everything from Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps to a Janet Malcolm work of journalism. Combined with a simple and magnetic design, this model inspired David Zwirner Books’s ...
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March 15, 2022 • 45 min
A conversation that parses the nuances of the question: Does art have to be political to be important right now? With the art critic Jed Perl, who just published Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts, and the novelist Johsua Cohen, author of the acclaimed The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family, which fictionalizes the Israeli family in ways comic an...
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March 9, 2022 • 53 min
A conversation about the art of looking. The Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic and author Jerry Saltz, of New York magazine and the bestselling How to Be an Artist, and the influential young gallerist Ellie Rines, of New York’s 56 Henry, on doing their jobs in unorthodox ways—and how to look at the endlessly proliferating and increasingly uncategorizable art in the world today.
And a warning to our listeners: This episode briefly m...
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March 2, 2022 • 35 min
The celebrated artist on the role of art criticism today, and how she probes and ultimately goes beyond the limitations of her painting in her other practice as a writer. This episode with Sillman, who in 2020 published Faux Pas, a new collection of her writings, is guest-hosted by Jarrett Earnest, and is the last of his three-part miniseries on serious artists who are also serious writers.
Amy Sillman: Faux Pas is available here...
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February 23, 2022 • 43 min
What does evolutionary science have to do with the art world? A fascinating conversation with Richard Prum, a leading thinker in evolutionary ornithology who has developed a theory that impacts how we think about artistic genius, radicality, and the art world at large.
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February 16, 2022 • 25 min
A conversation with two exciting artists taking their multimedia practices onto the movie screen. Ulman, whose work combines video, performance, and the Internet in fluid ways, recently released her critically-acclaimed first feature film, El Planeta. A hit at the Sundance Film Festival, it features Ulman and her mother as a pair of mother-and-daughter grifters in Gijon, Spain, their hometown. And Lee, who works across all manner o...
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February 2, 2022 • 47 min
The activist and author Angela Davis and the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als in conversation about one of their favorite subjects and dearest friends: Toni Morrison. Early on in her career, Morrison worked as a kind of activist editor at Random House, where she helped change the landscape of publishing—including her effort to bring Davis’s landmark political autobiography to the public in 1974. (It was just rep...
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July 13, 2021 • 46 min
A conversation about the slippery slope from Donald Trump’s lies to the extinction of American democracy—and art’s ability to break through fascist monoliths. The eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder is the author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and “The American Abyss,” a widely circulated New York Times essay published following the January 6 storming of the Capitol. The essay caught the eye of Luc Tuymans, himself a kind ...
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July 7, 2021 • 46 min
Two of the most playful, expressive artists we have on their creative process, trying new things, and the art of being a great collaborator. The former lead singer of the Talking Heads, Byrne is an artistic polymath, making stage plays, performances, films, and now even drawings, which he recently showed with Pace. His Broadway hit, American Utopia, also became a streaming hit when Spike Lee turned it into a film for HBO; it was al...
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June 22, 2021 • 24 min
A conversation about the art of scents with the perfumer Frederic Malle. The latest in a storied French fragrance family, Malle—whose grandfather launched Christian Dior’s fragrance line, and whose uncle is the great filmmaker Louis Malle—had ambitions of being an art dealer before he took up the family trade, and his unique brand of of scent-making combines science, psychology, marketing wizardry, and (most importantly) art histor...
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June 15, 2021 • 54 min
The 86-year-old legend gets personal about a lifetime translating her singular voice to the world. While the major retrospective of her work currently at the Brooklyn Museum has cemented her reputation, Lorraine O’Grady did not discover herself as an artist until her 40s. Here, she traces her unlikely journey to becoming a conceptual and performance artist with a pioneering Black feminist sensibility—including stints along the way ...
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June 8, 2021 • 32 min
How does an artwork change as the person looking at it does? Kate Zambreno, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction and the author of the acclaimed 2020 novel Drifts, details the pleasures and discovery of returning to an artist or artwork over and over again—in her case, the likes of Sarah Charlesworth, Chantal Akerman, and Albrecht Durer. She speaks and writes about their lives and work with humor and personal insight born of long...
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June 2, 2021 • 47 min
A conversation about the art of telling stories with the South African artist Simphiwe Ndzube, who works between Cape Town and Los Angeles and whose first solo US museum exhibition opens this month at the Denver Art Museum, and the renowned writer Zakes Mda, whose novels are widely read throughout South Africa and beyond. The two dissect their magical realist stories of post-apartheid South Africa and their experiences of America o...
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May 26, 2021 • 43 min
A conversation about life as art with the author of The Flamethrowers. Few merge writing about art and writing about life the way Rachel Kushner does. A former editor at Artforum and Bomb, she’s deeply interested in memorializing the culture around the art—the conversations, the characters, the tall tales. In her 2013 novel The Flamethrowers, a National Book Award finalist, the New York art world of the 70s was brought to scintilla...
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May 19, 2021 • 57 min
Guest hosted by Jarrett Earnest, this conversation with the artist, curator, and critic Nayland Blake reflects on Blake’s own coming-of-age as an artist and writer—and their shared obsession and long history with the great artist Ray Johnson. Prompted by an Johnson exhibition curated by Earnest at David Zwirner in New York that reexamines and reframes the artist’s life and work through a queer lens, this episode is the first of thr...
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May 6, 2021 • 81 min
When Mike Winkelmann, now widely known as the digital artist Beeple, sold an artwork at Christie’s for $69 million in March 2021, it shocked the art world—and created an escalating interest in and market for NFTs, digital art using blockchain technology that allows the work of digital artists like Beeple to be collected for the very first time. But the high-stakes prices also brought two parallel art worlds—the traditional one of g...
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January 6, 2021 • 33 min
A conversation about the influence of the Bauhaus today, and its evolution from a seminal early-twentieth-century school of thought into popular shorthand for an aesthetic style that—like minimalism—is used for everything from furniture to smartphones. With guest Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the author of iBauhaus: The iPhone as the Embodiment of Bauhaus Ideals and Design. ...
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December 30, 2020 • 50 min
To close a tumultuous year, we’re revisiting one of its high points: a conversation that celebrates the life and work of the artist Noah Davis. With the curator Helen Molesworth, the filmmaker (and Noah’s brother) Kahlil Joseph, and the artist (and Noah’s wife) Karon Davis.
Dialogues will return with new episodes in 2021, please stay tuned.
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December 15, 2020 • 31 min
A conversation about art criticism that is deeply engaged with the lives of the artists. Olivia Laing’s work regularly appears in The Guardian, Financial Times, and Frieze. Her latest book, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, examines the more complicated parts of life through the biographies and art of Agnes Martin, David Hockney, Andy Warhol, and Joseph Cornell, among other artists. This acclaimed collection of essays presents ar...
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