Art books, materials, theory, and culture.
New Books in Art follows authors and interviewers through books on art, aesthetics, materials, and cultural history. The conversations move from medieval pigments and European print networks to Nigerian diasporic performance, digital hacks, rocks, uncertainty, and speculative theory.
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New Books in Art is a book-centered interview feed for art history, visual culture, aesthetics, and adjacent scholarship. Its conversations show a wide field rather than a narrow gallery beat. One episode follows historical recipes for natural inks, paints, and dyes, with attention to plants, gardens, harvesting, pigments, and whether old instructions still work in practice. Another turns to the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp and the distribution of prints through European trade networks. The show is comfortable with practical research. It is just as comfortable with theory. Episodes named in its episodes move through decolonizing the Novum, speculative visions of the conquest of the Americas, Latin American literature, science fiction, and alternate ways of imagining history. The feed also makes space for Nigerian diasporic women's art, where disbelonging, unruliness, pleasure, play, and performance become central terms. Digital culture enters through Cory Arcangel, hacks, video games, social media, code, flows, remix, parody, and aesthetic practice. Art is not treated as decoration here. It appears as labor, research method, material process, business network, technology, and conceptual pressure point. The conversations are guided by interviewers speaking with authors about books. The tone is scholarly without becoming sealed off from practical questions. Interviewers ask for definitions, origins, examples, and methods. Authors often explain how their projects began and why certain objects, texts, performances, or materials matter. Some excerpts include ads and network housekeeping, so the listening experience may shift briefly away from the book discussion. The strongest through-line is curiosity about how culture gets made and moved. Paint comes from plants. Prints travel through merchants and presses. Performances create rupture. Games and social media become material for art. The result is a dense, intellectually steady feed for listeners who want art discussed through evidence, argument, and close attention to form.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants scholarly art conversations with enough context to follow unfamiliar books, methods, and concepts. It especially fits someone drawn to material practices, visual history, performance, print, digital aesthetics, and theory.
What sets it apart: New Books in Art stands apart by using author interviews to connect art scholarship with concrete research practices: pigments, presses, performance, code, trade, and historical imagination. The breadth is wide while staying anchored to specific books.
This podcast is a channel on the New Books Network. The New Books Network is an academic audio library dedicated to public education. In each episode you will hear scholars discuss their recently published research with another expert in their field. Discover our 150+ channels and browse our 28,000+ episodes on our website: newbooksnetwork.com Subscribe to our free weekly Substack newsletter to get informative, engaging content straight to your inbox: https://newbooksnetwork.substack.com/ Follow us on Instagram and Bluesky to learn about more our latest interviews: @newbooksnetwork Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/art
From Antwerp print merchants to garden-grown dyes, your art curiosity gets its hands dirty.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded look at plant-based color, historical recipes, and what happens when old methods are tested again.
Nabil Ali's discussion of Gold from Newton's Apple Tree frames color as something made, tested, and learned through materials rather than simply admired.
Science fiction reopens the conquest of the Americas as a field of possible histories.
Zach Zimmer frames science fiction's novum as a way to reopen the conquest of the Americas, treating the genre's new component as more than a device for invention.
A thoughtful case for treating uncertainty as a creative discipline when strategy can no longer rely on business as usual.
Uncertainty becomes the episode's material, not a flaw to sand away. Margaret Heffernan links artistic practice with the demands placed on leaders in volatile conditions, then sharpens the point through scenario planning.
A clear look at how Antwerp, trade networks, and distribution shaped Plantin's print business.
Karen Bowen and Dirk Imhoff use the Plantin-Moretus Press of Antwerp to show how a sixteenth-century print business relied on movement in several forms: books and prints in circulation, merchants and ships carrying goods, and personal connections turning trade into opportunity.
A focused review of a conversation on disbelonging as a source of artistic risk, unruliness, and self-definition.
This single-episode review follows a conversation that loosens a familiar idea about diaspora: alienation does not have to read only as loss. Bimbola Kimbola, an Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at Northwestern University and author of Transatlantic Disbelonging,…
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Dr.
An interview with Lucy Donkin about her book on the significance of holy ground in medieval religious practice.
An interview with Shilla Lee about her book on traditional potters and rural creativity in Japan's regional revitalization.
An interview with Stephen Murphy about his book on Buddhist art and archaeology of the Khorat Plateau from the 7th to 11th centuries.
Miranda Melcher interviews Nabil Ali about Gold from Newton's Apple Tree, Princeton University Press, 2026, a book on recipes for natural inks, paints, and dyes.
Zach Zimmer discusses decolonizing the concept of the novum in science fiction theory.
Margaret Heffernan argues on New Books in Art that writers, musicians, and artists thrive because they work inside uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it.
Jana Byers speaks with Karen L.
Abigail Sellis speaks with Bimbola Akinbola, Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, about Transatlantic Disbelonging: Unruliness, Pleasure, and Play in Nigerian Diasporic Women’s Art, published by Duke University Press in 2025.
Eivind Røssaak presents his MIT Press book The Cory Arcangel Hack (2025), which reads Arcangel's work through Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of flow and the 'machinic phylum.' He sorts Arcangel's career into three types of hack, flow-break (Super Mario Clouds), flow-remix (the Schoenberg cat videos, 'Working on My Novel') and flow-parody (the 2021 Century 21 bot works).
Beth Derderian’s “Art Capital” examines how Abu Dhabi adapted the Louvre model through the Saadiyat Island museum plan.
In New Books in Art, Christina Gessler interviews art historian Jennifer Dassel about the American Girls' Club in Belle Époque Paris.
An interview with Vojta Hybl about his book 'Rocks: A Guide to the Stones Around Us and the Stories They Tell', which helps readers identify and understand rocks they find.