Recorded September 30, days after New York’s fall art fairs wrapped, 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 short, loose week of art news as Urgent Matter nears its first anniversary.

The episode opens with R.C. Horsch, a late Philadelphia erotic photographer whose former home police have linked to seven missing women. Colton and Adam dig through Horsch’s self-published books and debate whether talking about his art only gives it a bigger audience.

From there, Colton brings up another podcast’s roast of Sergio Furnari’s Charlie Kirk statue in Times Square, which leads to a sculpture the guys actually like: a 300-pound bronze faun by Alfred Lepère. It was stolen from a French zoo in 1993 and returned to the Musée de Picardie after an auction house’s provenance check turned it up. A detour through Colton’s handmade drums raises questions about how anyone proves they own anything.

In a rapid-fire round, Adam walks through the Nasher Museum’s “Turn the volume up!,” a protest-art show inspired by New York’s 2025 mayoral turnout. He also covers a quiet Armory Show where Canadian dealers faced a new 50% U.S. tariff, and Alice Herbert’s redacted arrest report and house-arrest self-portraits at Spring/Break.

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 read the full episode transcript, and check out Colton’s music with Burning Slow (@burningslowmusic on Instagram), American Sycamore and Bum Lucky.

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.

Adam Schrader and Colton Crews are back after a week off, and a week late to post.

The episode opens with the Experiential Orchestra, the Grammy-winning classical group planning a "Music in a Time of War" concert that asks the audience to write down how war has touched their lives — and traces the group back to its early days of Barolo-soaked Rite of Spring dance parties with mosh pits and mock sacrifices.

From there it's downtown to The Tank for Lilith, Adina Aaron's new 90-minute play that reworks the biblical Adam's mythological first wife.

In the back half, Adam (Schrader) breaks down Syria's Damascus Citadel controversy, where food stalls inside a World Heritage site sparked backlash and a government disavowal.

Then the Interlochen Center for the Arts investigation — a 97-page external report documenting decades of sexual abuse, including a former donor named Jeffrey Epstein — and what real institutional transparency should look like.

Adam also covers Karoline Leavitt's exit as White House press secretary through the arts angle, from the Kennedy Center to a shuttered EPA museum, and the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum's closure after curator Andrew Farago's arrest.

The episode closes on a light note, with the New Bedford whaling museum that turned a one-star "worst aquarium" review into merch.

Cold Take is the weekly podcast from Urgent Matter, the hard-news publication for the art world. New episodes every week. Read the reporting behind these stories at urgentmatter.press.

Read the stories:

• Experiential Orchestra / "Music in a Time of War"
• Lilith at The Tank
• Damascus Citadel food stalls
• Interlochen abuse investigation
• Karoline Leavitt steps down
• Cartoon Art Museum closure

Follow Colton's bands: Burning Slow · American Sycamore · Bum Lucky — new Bum Lucky album out Aug 18.

A leaner episode from a slow news week — Urgent Matter spent most of it building the August print edition — but the stories run deep.

Adam and Colton open on the Second Circuit's ruling that set designer Michael Hayden waited too long to sue Jeff Koons over the snake sculpture at the center of his "Made in Heaven" series — the one built for Italian porn star turned politician Ilona Staller, better known as Cicciolina. The court never reached whether Koons actually infringed, which raises the question of how artists protect work they sell outright.

From there it's into federal spending records, where the State Department turns out to be quietly funding the arts abroad: a $32,000 drone show for a Freedom 250 event over Bangkok, a $92,000 ice sculpture of the White House in Sapporo, and millions more in embassy commissions and world's-fair pavilions. That leads to a conspiracy theory that happens to be true — the CIA's Cold War funding of Jackson Pollock and Abstract Expressionism to beat the Soviets.

The heavier story is Oxfam's new report pricing Gaza's reconstruction at $71.4 billion and warning it will fail unless Palestinians lead it. Adam walks through his interview with researcher Asmaa Abu Mezied — including children in an art-therapy session who drew only in gray — and he and Colton disagree over how to read the report's warning against a "Riviera in Gaza."

Then to Collective Z in Lower Manhattan, where Haleh Atabeigi's paintings hang the bodiless clothing of Iranian women imprisoned in Tehran's Evin Prison, and a video of a woman arrested for singing in public — a return to the show's running argument about art and politics.

They close on the market, where LA dealer Chris Sharp is opening his Post-Fair in Paris and taking aim at the Art Basel–Frieze duopoly.

Cold Take is Urgent Matter's weekly art-news podcast, hosted by founder Adam Schrader and musician Colton Crews.

Read the reporting behind every story at urgentmatter.press.

Adam Schrader and Colton Crews open at the MTA's June board meeting in lower Manhattan, where Orthodox Jewish leaders and a transit union officer asked the authority to pull Museum of Sex ads off the fronts of city buses.

Chair and chief executive Janno Lieber told them the agency has First Amendment obligations that prevent it from becoming the censor of all the ads. Adam pulls the ads up on screen — most are the museum's name in block type — and revisits his own 2024 reporting on artist Julia Sinelnikova, who sued the museum over a photograph used in an earlier campaign.

The two work through who actually decides what a public transit system is allowed to carry, and what it costs an agency that took in an estimated $183 million in advertising revenue last year.

Then a theology paper. Matthew Hale, writing in Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society, pairs Bernard Lonergan's idea of conceptualism with Max Horkheimer's instrumental reason and argues the two habits reinforce each other until institutions go rigid. Adam puts it in plain English and applies it to Indiana, where more than 400 degree programs were cut or suspended after lawmakers set graduate-earnings thresholds. Colton pushes back — higher education is shrinking, and cutting low-return programs may just be self-defense. The conversation ends up on prison arts programs, recidivism, and why Adam started Urgent Matter in the first place.

Next, the pair discuss 50 life-size buffalo puppets are coming to downtown Brooklyn and lower Manhattan on September 19 and 20 for Return of the Buffalo: Tatanka Owe Akupi, created by Amir Nizar Zuabi in partnership with elders from the Lenape and Lakota tribes and presented by St. Ann's Warehouse and The Walk Productions, the team behind Little Amal. Colton finds a way to get dragons back into the show.

The market segment goes to London Invitational, Dallas dealer James Cope's hotel-room fair, opening during Frieze week inside the former U.S. embassy on Grosvenor Square, now The Chancery Rosewood. Adam explains the boutique model — dealers sleep in the rooms they sell out of — and the two argue about admission fees, booth fees, and who exactly a $5,000 painting is accessible to. Colton reports from an art festival where one of the booths belonged to a parking-lot line-striping company.

The episode closes on Sergio Furnari, the Italian-born sculptor who says he sold his apartment to fund a Charlie Kirk monument he plans to unveil in Times Square on September 10, the first anniversary of Kirk's assassination. He has raised a fraction of his $150,000 goal.

Cold Take is Urgent Matter's weekly art-news podcast — a loose, lightly edited run through the week's headlines that trades artspeak for direct, skeptical takes.

Read Urgent Matter: https://www.urgentmatter.press

Adam and Colton open Episode 9 by playing the NPR segment that credits Urgent Matter's public records reporting on the University of North Texas censorship scandal — a first national radio pickup for the site.

From there, the UNT fallout keeps growing. New records show art faculty delayed publicizing a campus visit by MacArthur fellow Wendy Red Star out of fear she'd cancel over the censorship, after a lecture by media theorist Lev Manovich was already called off. Adam and Colton debate whether pulling out of a speaking gig is protest or self-censorship.

Then it's on to Texas Tech, where a faculty lawsuit alleges the university stripped race and queer themes from courses — including four songs about gay relationships cut from a French pop-music class — raising questions about academic freedom across Texas universities.

The hosts mark the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham with a look at his arts record, from voting against restoring $98 million in NEA funding in 1998 to backing the 2025 rescissions that killed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Then the show heads to Pyongyang, where North Korea opened an anti-U.S. art exhibition timed to the anniversary of the Korean War's outbreak. Adam and Colton scroll state media photos, question whether the paintings are A.I.-generated, and detour through the regime's attempt to claim sledding as intangible cultural heritage.

Back in New York, the George Eastman Museum still hasn't scheduled the listening sessions it promised photographers over its $400 hourly photography fee, and Adam explains where his criticism actually lands.

Finally, the East Hampton Town Board votes 4-1 to authorize legal action against The Ranch gallery in Montauk over its 60-foot shipping container sculpture — and Colton proposes a bat-box defense strategy.

Cold Take is Urgent Matter's weekly art-news podcast, hosted by Adam Schrader and Colton Crews.

Read the reporting behind every story in this episode at ⁠urgentmatter.press⁠.

Follow Urgent Matter:

Instagram: @urgent.matter

X: @TheUrgentMatter

Colton Crews:

⁠⁠American Sycamore⁠⁠

⁠⁠Burning Slow⁠