‘‘Power’s doppelgänger is emptiness. That’s true for JP Morgan, that’s true for New York City. Is anything really going on? Obviously, recent news shows that actually quite a lot is going on.’’
In the ArtReview Podcast, artists, thinkers and cultural figures are invited to choose three works as lenses through which to examine their practice and explore critical issues impacting the contemporary art world.
In our second episode, artist Sarah Morris speaks to ArtReview associate editor Jenny Wu about the spectacle, getting into the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and the revealing power of the joke. An exhibition of her work, Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers, runs from 11 March through 9 May 2026 at White Cube Mason’s Yard, London.
Listen now on Spotify and YouTube. New episodes drop every fortnight. All of the works referenced in this podcast can be viewed below.
About Sarah Morris
Sarah Morris is a British-American artist who lives in New York City and has been making art for more than three decades. Over that time she has created a body of work of vivid, diagrammatic abstract paintings alongside 17 films that explore the rhythms, systems and architectures of contemporary life. Her paintings and films are often loosely related and anchored in specific places such as New York, Los Angeles, Abu Dhabi and Rio. Across both forms, her work asks how power, capital and culture circulate through global cities, and how those systems can be visualised, decoded and disrupted.
Credits
Interviewer: Jenny Wu
Host and producer: Chiara Wilkinson @chiarawilkinson
Audio editor: Charlie Duffield
Music design: Iona Smith @ic_yonic
Works mentioned, in order of reference
• Image World: Art and Media Culture was a landmark exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1989, curated by Lisa Phillips and Marvin Heiferman. It examined how contemporary artists were responding to an increasingly media-saturated society shaped by television, advertising, film and mass-produced imagery, and brought together works by figures such as Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman.
• Midtown was Sarah’s first filmwork, shot in New York during a single day in 1998. The film is composed of a sequence of shots showing everyday life unfolding on the streets of Midtown Manhattan, combining crowded sidewalks with imposing, powerful corporate buildings. You can see it at Sarah’s exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard from 11 March through 9 May 2026.
• Žižek’s Jokes: Did You Hear the One about Hegel and Negation? is a 2014 book by the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek that explores the social and political function of jokes. Drawing on examples from popular culture, it argues that jokes are far from trivial entertainment; instead they reveal the hidden structures of ideology, belief and social power.
