The Art Angle Podcast: KAWS Is the World’s Most Popular Artist. Why?

Artnet News April 8, 2021 ShareShare This Article

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.

Art shows are a thing again! At least in New York, at least for now, and at least in the socially distanced way that we’ve come to see as normal. But it’s really great news for the art museum-going crowd. And it’s even better news that some of the shows on view are really, really good.

Without question, one of the buzziest shows of the season is the Brooklyn Museum’s sweeping survey of the street artist and late capitalism prodigy known as KAWS, one of the most popular artists in the world.

So, is his show really, really good? What’s the deal with KAWS anyway? We decided to ask Artnet News chief art critic Ben Davis, who saw the show and wrote a review of it with the arresting title “Why KAWS’s Global Success May Well Be a Symptom of a Depressed Culture, Adrift in Nostalgia and Retail Therapy.”

On this week’s episode we dive into the social-media, fast-fashion, luxury-object, street-artist fever dream that helped propel Brian Donnelly, aka KAWS, to superstardom.