Cold Take: Epstein Files, Space Art and Censorship Fights

What this episode covers

In the third episode of Cold Take, Urgent Matter founder and editor Adam Schrader is joined again by longtime friend Colton Crews for a loose, skeptical conversation about art, public records, censorship and propaganda.The episode opens with a New York reading room filled with printed copies of the Epstein files — a project Adam and Colton discuss as part archive, part political provocation and part art installation. From there, they turn to Tim Makepeace’s NASA-inspired museum show in Washington, D.C., and the question of what happens when artists are given access to federal science programs.The conversation then moves to a Long Island student who reached a $125,000 settlement after her pro-Palestinian parking-space artwork was painted over by school officials. Adam and Colton use the case to talk about how small acts of censorship can become much larger stories once institutions try to make them disappear.They also revisit Urgent Matter’s reporting on the canceled Marka27 exhibition at the University of North Texas, where public records showed administrators worried about political “barking from Austin” before the show was called off.The episode closes with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Art and War” exhibition, which features American anti-war works by artists including Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein and James Rosenquist as Iranian cultural institutions use art in wartime messaging.Cold Take is a weekly podcast from Urgent Matter built around direct, lightly edited conversations about the art world’s biggest stories, stripped of artspeak and institutional PR language.For more document-driven reporting behind these headlines, visit urgentmatter.press.

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