Art
Reviewing a Wild Year in Art With the ‘Culture Gabfest’ – The New York Times
The co-hosts of Slate’s long-running and influential podcast discuss the “urgency” of art in a crisis and whether Meryl Streep should play Anthony Fauci.
This year was bittersweet for the culture consumer under lockdown. Some ways of experiencing art (reading, watching television, listening to podcasts) felt more necessary than ever, while the absence or degradation of others (going to the movies, or to the theater, or to a live music performance) left an agonizing void. The pandemic and subsequent crises of racial justice and democracy bled into all of it, posing new questions about meaning and merit that will linger long after the virus fades.
Few charted these changes with more deftness and good humor than Stephen Metcalf, Julia Turner and Dana Stevens, critics and co-hosts of the long-running Slate podcast “Culture Gabfest.” As it has since its premiere in 2008, the show delivered a weekly (or, for a three-month stretch this summer, every two weeks) mix of brainy cultural analysis and sparkling repartee — proof that even a once-in-a-century calamity could be reckoned with if not overcome.
If you’ve ever listened to a conversation podcast about popular culture, you’re probably familiar with the “Gabfest.” One of the earliest shows of its kind, its format — in which the hosts dissect three zeitgeist-y topics collectively and then each make a personal recommendation — helped define a genre.
Recently, I spoke by video chat with Metcalf, Turner and Stevens about adapting with the times over the podcast’s more than 650 episodes, critics as inessential workers and what art does in a crisis. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.
How did your consumption habits change this year? Do you ordinarily have routines for getting through all the material that you have to digest in a given week?
STEPHEN METCALF We kind of exist on the far end of a pipeline that has a very ritualized flow of content coming from the major entertainment conglomerates — a big movie of the week, for example. Once that flow got disrupted, we were liberated in our format. We started doing movies that we called “comfort watches” — something from history that we thought was somehow either apposite to the pandemic or an antidote to it.
JULIA TURNER It was fun to talk about old movies and not have the sense that the culture industry was serving us 10 different things we should talk about every week. Like I had never seen “Twister,” Dana’s oft-mentioned favorite cable TV movie watch. And we sort of watched everything from “In a Lonely Place” to …
METCALF “Paddington 2.”
TURNER I think one thing that characterizes us as a culture show is that we like to try to bring some sense of historical sweep or academic framing to the way we think about culture. So it was fun to go back and look at these other older objects and ask, what did this mean? And, what does it mean that we want to watch this right now? Dana kept making us watch just sicko, torment type content.
DANA STEVENS All my comfort movies involved some kind of mass death or something.
How much culture do you engage with just for yourselves versus what’s for the podcast?
STEVENS Doing a lot of this stuff does feel like homework to us, even if it might be interesting or fun homework. Since we’ve been stuck at home, I find myself less likely to want to stuff something new into my head, because I’m never short on things to watch. In a way I dread when someone comes to me saying, “You’ve got to discover this great Swedish Vimeo series!” Someone did just recommend that to me. And it sounded amazing. But a part of me thought, that’s what I’m going to do with my spare time? More cramming of meaning and words and thoughts into my brain rather than just trying to let what’s already in there expand?
TURNER I mean, it’s such a privilege to have a job where literally anything I do culturally counts as work. [In addition to co-hosting the “Gabfest,” Turner is a deputy managing editor for The Los Angeles Times.] But I do reserve corners of my brain for culture consumption that’s harder to turn into work. We don’t do many books on the show, because it’s a lot to ask of listeners, but I’ve been leaning into either highbrow thriller mysteries or literature with strong plot elements, because I just want to be pulled into another world.
METCALF I’m kind of the opposite of Julia.
TURNER That’s our whole shtick.
METCALF I’m a human, she’s a robot.
TURNER I love the people, he’s a snob.
METCALF No, but I’m a terrific weirdo. And I’m always in danger of spinning completely off the axis of contemporary life. So doing this podcast has anchored me in what everyone is watching and talking about in ways that I’m incredibly grateful for. Because what I do now in my spare time is what I would do with all my time if I weren’t doing the podcast, which is read essay after essay on the nature and state of neoliberalism. Right now I’m reading Habermas’s 1980 lectures on the nature of modernity.
Did it ever feel strange, or uncouth, to be spending your time grappling with art, or asking other people to do the same, amid so many overlapping societal crises? Did you ever feel inessential?
TURNER I think we feel deeply inessential most of the time, so I don’t know if that was a change. A podcast is fundamentally optional listening for people who find it valuable. To me, one of the most striking things about this year, was just that it was sort of the first pan-human event. The first global event where everyone was being buffeted by the same problem at the same time and we had instantaneous communication. To the degree that art is fundamentally about reckoning with being, and the question of what does it mean to be human, it felt urgent to me. It was as relevant as it ever has been.
METCALF I completely agree. And I would just add that, from the beginning the concept animating our show was politics as culture, culture as politics; that in modern American life especially, there’s no distinction between one or the other. So yes, we’re utterly inessential, and yet culture itself and how you apprehend the culture isn’t somehow trivial. It’s how Americans order their sense of common reality. It comes as much from Kim Kardashian as it does from Joe Biden.
What’s your appetite for art about the pandemic or about 2020? Is there a gold standard for that kind of thing? Because there’s going to be a lot of it.
STEVENS I’m so not looking forward to those “Game Change”-style somber re-enactments of recent political events. I do not want to see some sort of behind-the-scenes ticktock of why Fauci was ousted from the inner circle of pandemic discussants. It’s bad enough knowing that it’s happening right now. I don’t care who puts on prostheses to look like Steven Mnuchin or something. That whole genre is just so old and tired.
TURNER I think I probably have a bigger appetite for it than Dana. Because if you think about the set of art that was made about the financial crisis, and a bunch of films we ended up talking about, from “Margin Call” to “The Big Short,” people will make dopey re-enactments, and they’ll make big-deal fancy Hollywood things, and there will also be smart little indie slices of it. I’m sure some of it will be fascinating and profound.
We’re all in the middle of going through something wild and incomprehensible, and art has such an important role to play, I think, in helping us process that. We don’t know yet what young artist will find purchase on it in some way. What legends and lions will come up with some fascinating new thing to say. But I don’t think it all has to be Meryl Streep as Anthony Fauci, or Julianne Moore is Sarah Palin.
The year you guys started, 2008, is basically prehistory for podcasts. What are the biggest changes you’ve seen in the industry or community over that time?
TURNER Well, people know what we do now. I think for a while people were like, “You have a what? OK.” So it’s gone from being an unknown to, “I know what that is,” to a little bit of an eye roll, like, “Oh, of course you have a podcast. Who doesn’t?”
But the medium is so exciting now and flexible and full of people doing really interesting things, with documentary, with fiction, with short form, with history. I think at the beginning, podcasting felt like another radio station, and now it feels like a whole genre and universe unto itself.
Has your experience of the show, or your relationship to it, changed at all?
METCALF I would say for me, it took a long time to find what the right voice was. I started out with this kind of “radio voice” that was preposterous, like a character on a sitcom. And then you try to just kind of speak as yourself, but that’s too informal. So it’s just finding this register that’s somewhere in between. Of course the master of this is Ira Glass, right? He just sounds like he rolled out of bed but also as if he has this entirely synthetically created, informal persona that he’s in complete control of. I think I finally got it right about a year and a half ago.
STEVENS Steve, I like your on-air persona so much more than Ira Glass’s manufactured offhandedness. I’d rather hear you any day.
METCALF That stays in the piece, Reggie.
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A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Turner Prize shortlist includes art showcasing Scottish Sikh community
A Scottish artist who uses cars, worship bells and Irn-Bru in her work is among the nominees for this year’s Turner Prize.
Glasgow-born Jasleen Kaur’s work reflects her life growing up in the city’s Sikh community.
She is up for the prestigious art award, now in its 40th year, alongside Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson and Delaine Le Bas.
Turner Prize jury chairman Alex Farquharson described it as a “fantastic shortlist of artists”
Works by the nominated artists will go on show at London’s Tate Britain gallery from 25 September.
They will receive £10,000 each, while the winner, to be announced on 3 December, will get £25,000.
In a statement, Farquharson said: “All four make work that is full of life.
“They show how contemporary art can fascinate, surprise and move us, and how it can speak powerfully of complex identities and memories, often through the subtlest of details.
“In the Turner Prize’s 40th year, this shortlist proves that British artistic talent is as rich and vibrant as ever.”
The shortlisted artists are:
Pio Abad
Manila-born Abad’s solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford included drawings, etchings and sculptures that combined to “ask questions of museums”, according to the jury.
The 40-year-old, who works in London, reflects on colonial history and growing up in the Philippines, where his parents struggled against authoritarianism.
The title of his exhibit is a nod to Mark Twain’s 1901 essay To the Person Sitting In Darkness, which hit out at imperialism.
Jasleen Kaur
Kaur is on the list for Alter Altar at Tramway, Glasgow, which included family photos, an Axminster carpet, a classic Ford Escort covered in a giant doily, Irn-Bru and kinetic handbells.
The 37-year-old, who lives in London, had previously showcased her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum by looking at popular Indian cinema.
Delaine Le Bas
Worthing-born Le Bas is nominated for an exhibition titled Incipit Vita Nova. Here Begins The New Life/A New Life Is Beginning. Staged at the Secession art institute in Vienna, Austria, it saw painted fabrics hung, with theatrical costumes and sculptures also part of the exhibit.
The 58-year-old artist was inspired by the death of her grandmother and the history of the Roma people.
The jury said they “were impressed by the energy and immediacy present in this exhibition, and its powerful expression of making art in a time of chaos”.
Claudette Johnson
Manchester-born Johnson has been given the nod for her solo exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery in London, and Drawn Out at Ortuzar Projects, New York.
She uses portraits of black women and men in a combination of pastels, gouache and watercolour, and was praised by the judges for her “sensitive and dramatic use of line, colour, space and scale to express empathy and intimacy with her subjects”.
Johnson, 65, was appointed an MBE in 2022 after being named on the New Year Honours list for her services to the arts.
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Claudette Johnson has been nominated for this year’s Turner prize for her work, which includes a portrait of the African-American slavery abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond commissioned as part of the Guardian’s award-winning Cotton Capital series.
Pio Abad, Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas will compete for the £25,000 prize, while the nominated artists will each collect £10,000 as the prize returns to Tate Britain for the first time in six years.
Colonialism, migration, nationalism and identity politics are the key themes running through the 40th edition of the Turner prize, which the jury described as showing contemporary British art “is appealing and dynamic as ever”.
Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain and chair of the Turner prize jury, said this year’s nominees were exploring ideas of identity and would be exhibited from 25 September, before the jury’s final choice.
He said: “This year’s shortlisted artists can be broadly characterised as exploring questions of identity, autobiography, community and the self in relation to memory, or history or myth.”
The Turner prize, regarded as one of the art world’s most prestigious awards, is presented to an artist born or working in Britain for an outstanding exhibition or presentation of their work over the previous year.
Abad was nominated for his solo exhibition To Those Sitting in Darkness at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, with the jury commenting on the “precision and elegance” of his work, which takes its title from a Mark Twain poem of a similar name that critiques American imperialism the Philippines, his homeland.
The show also contains references to the Benin Bronzes, after Abad discovered that the punitive expedition of 1897 – during which British troops sacked Benin City and looted thousands of objects, of which about 900 are in the British Museum’ – set off from his home, Woolwich, in south London.
Johnson was nominated for her solo Presence exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, which the Guardian said “brilliantly questions depictions of non-white figures by such revered painters as Gauguin and Picasso”. She was also recognised for her New York show, Drawn Out, at Ortuzar Projects, which included her Redmond portrait.
She is the latest black female artist who emerged in the Black Art Movement of the 1980s to be recognised by the Turner prize, following in the footsteps of Lubaina Himid (2017 winner) and Veronica Ryan (2022), while Ingrid Pollard and Barbara Walker have both been nominated.
The jury said Johnson had been nominated because of the “renewal of her practice”, after she stopped making work in the 1990s, and the fact she was still “taking risks and trying new forms of practice”.
Kaur’s work in the exhibition Alter Altar, which was shown at Tramway in Glasgow, features sculptures and soundscapes, including a red Ford Escort covered in a huge doily, which references her father’s first car and ideas of migration and belonging in Britain.
Kaur grew up in Glasgow’s Sikh community in Pollokshields, and the jury said the exhibition was a breakout show that was “generous, celebratory, moving and alive to timely issues, speaking imaginatively to how we might live together in a world increasingly marked by nationalism, division and social control”.
Le Bas’s work, shown at the Vienna Secession exhibition, was described as a “response to social and political turmoil” and includes immersive performance art with theatrical costumes and sculptures.
Farquharson said there was a chance the show may travel to Bradford during its City of Culture year, following the precedent set by Coventry, which hosted the awards in 2021, although that was still “to be confirmed”.
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