Recorded September 23, in the middle of New York Art Week, Urgent Matter founder and editor Adam Schrader and longtime friend Colton Crews — a Texas-based musician with the bands Burning Slow, American Sycamore and Bum Lucky — run through a loose, lightly edited week of art news, trading artspeak for direct, skeptical takes.

The episode opens in a hotel room, where Adam caught Mamie Green’s “fools,” a dance adaptation of Sam Shepard’s “Fool for Love” staged in a suite at the Ace Hotel. From there the guys take on Hyperallergic’s new paywall and sign-in requirement, six years after it told readers membership wouldn’t mean a paywall, and argue on the record about how an independent outlet like Urgent Matter is supposed to pay for itself.

Then it’s out to Maryland, where the NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum has opened an exhibit on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Adam digs into the exhibit’s claim that a 1998 press leak cost the agency bin Laden’s satellite phone, a story The Washington Post called an “urban myth” back in 2005, raising questions about what a spy agency’s museum chooses to repeat.

The show also covers the House vote holding billionaire collector and former MoMA chairman Leon Black in contempt of Congress over subpoenas in its Epstein investigation, and why MoMA still keeps him on its board. Black has denied any role in Epstein’s crimes.

Next up is Iza Mendoza, a Mexican printmaker whose first New York solo show opened at cia gallery in Ridgewood, Queens, without her after the U.S. denied her visa. That turns into a real disagreement over whether America is losing its talent under Trump.

The episode closes with Adam’s FOIA reporting on NASA’s shuttered Goddard library and his interview with Kirsten Dickerson of Artist & Nomad, whose craft tours try to cut middlemen out of what tourists spend on artisans’ work, raising questions about what ethical cultural travel looks like.

Cold Take is the podcast arm of Urgent Matter, an independent arts-accountability publication. Read the reporting behind these stories at urgentmatter.press, where Insider subscribers can now read the full episode transcript, and check out Colton’s music with Burning Slow (@burningslowmusic on Instagram), American Sycamore and Bum Lucky.