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.

It's the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and Adam's recording from the bathroom again.

Adam and Colton open in Vancouver, where the Vancouver Art Gallery is taking heat over a Charlie Kirk memorial it had nothing to do with — a Turning Point Canada vigil staged in the public plaza next door. Adam explains why he covered a story that got him yelled at on Reddit, raising questions about what a museum owes the public when a demonstration lands on the sidewalk outside its doors.

Then to Dallas, where George W. Bush has painted 16 new works for the 9/11 anniversary, on view at his presidential center at SMU through September 30. The guys walk through the firefighter portraits and Bush's bullhorn self-portrait — and whether painting straight from a famous news photo raises any copyright questions.

The big one this week: Adam's reporting that defense contractors are buying naming rights at the Smithsonian. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing have put tens of millions into the National Air and Space Museum's renovation — enough to hang a missile maker's name on the planetarium — raising questions about who gets to write the historical record of the weapons on the walls.

For a break, a trip to New Zealand, where a thief unbolted a wooden sculpture from its base at the Hundertwasser Art Centre in Whangārei, tucked it under one arm and pedaled off on a bicycle. Karin de Beer's Tiori Toru is still missing, and the hosts have questions — starting with how you carry a four-and-a-half-foot sculpture on a bike.

Back home, the Brooklyn Cyclones throw a Bob Ross night — bobbleheads, a paint-along, drunk baseball fans — and Urgent Matter runs its first story written by someone other than Adam.

They close in the south of France, where thieves walked four Renoirs out of the museum in Cagnes-sur-Mer and dropped two on the way out. A real heist, to set against the one on the bicycle.

Cold Take is Urgent Matter's weekly art-news podcast, where Adam Schrader and Colton Crews talk through the biggest stories in the art world — the legalities, the opinions, and everything that doesn't fit in a news article.

Read the reporting behind these stories at urgentmatter.press.

Colton Crews plays in Burning Slow, American Sycamore, and Bum Lucky — go listen.

Urgent Matter founder and editor Adam Schrader and longtime friend Colton Crews — a Texas-based everyman and musician with the bands Burning Slow, American Sycamore and Bum Lucky — return after a few weeks off for a loose, lightly edited run through the week's art news, trading artspeak for direct, skeptical takes.

Once they get past a doorbell and an ADT salesman, the show opens on WNDR Museum closing both its Chicago and Boston locations. The guys use it to pull apart the whole for-profit "experience museum" model — Meow Wolf, the Museum of Ice Cream, Mercer Labs — from the ticket prices and the personal-injury lawsuits to the near-total lack of financial transparency, raising questions about whether any of it was built to last.

From there it's the Art Institute of Chicago cutting its in-house custodians for a third-party cleaning contractor. That turns into the episode's real argument: what a museum becomes once you start outsourcing it, whose labor gets valued, and a genuinely heated exchange over what a curator's job is actually worth.

The episode closes in London, where two Youth Demand activists have been convicted of criminal damage for taping an image of a Gazan mother and child over Picasso's Motherhood and pouring paint on the gallery floor. The case turns out to be less about the art, which was untouched, than about the bill for the floor — and who decides a protest is worth prosecuting.

Cold Take is the podcast arm of Urgent Matter, an independent arts-accountability publication. Read the reporting behind these stories at urgentmatter.press, and check out Colton's music with Burning Slow, American Sycamore and Bum Lucky.