Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Has Contemporary Art Lost Its Edge? | With Dean Kissick

Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Show Notes

Helen Molesworth speaks to Dean Kissick, author of The Painted Protest, a polemic piece on the state of contemporary art in this month’s Harper’s Magazine that has had a lot in the art world talking. Dean Kissick is a writer, contributing editor of Spike Art Magazine, and a director of Earth.

More from Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Sep 30, 2026

Curator Mark Godfrey and painter Emma McIntyre discuss the importance of Sigmar Polke—skeptic, trickster, and visionary—on the occasion of Sigmar Polke: The Knowledge of Colours, a solo exhibition at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands, part of Sigmar Polke: Athanor NOW, a project by the Anna Polke Foundation. Polke is widely recognized as one of the most innovative painters and multidisciplinary artists of the postwar era, and the exhibition is on view through February 28 of next year.

Sep 2, 2026

The international avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama has passed away at 97, but her work and extraordinary legacy will remain for posterity. As our own small remembrance, we revisit a 2025 episode exploring her unmatched influence, in which art historian Jennifer DeVere Brody, art critic Johanna Fateman, and curator Catherine Taft unpack the many versions of Yayoi Kusama—and her singular importance in 20th and 21st century art.

Jul 14, 2026

Curator Adrienne Edwards joins guest host Ebony L. Haynes to share their tips, tricks, and must-see shows from the 2026 Venice Biennale, the sixty-first iteration of the world’s largest and longest-running art biennale.

May 20, 2026

Dialogues is pleased to present an episode podcast from our colleagues at The New York Review.

May 12, 2026

In this bonus live episode, Lucas Zwirner returns to the mic for an interview with Nicholas Fox Weber, the director of the Josef & Anni Albers Foundation, to celebrate Weber’s new biography, titled Anni Albers: A Life. Over the course of the exchange, Weber opens up about the writing process behind this major new biography and shares some rare anecdotes from a lifetime spent working closely with the Alberses.

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