For this summer episode, I’m joined by The Art Daddy for their first-ever interview.

The Art Daddy is a New York City-based art and culture reporter, critic, educator and artist who has spent more than a decade covering the contemporary art world.

Their writing has appeared in The Art Newspaper, ELLE, ARTnews, Artnet News and many other publications, and they have taught and lectured at universities across the United States.

They studied performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and minored in Women’s Studies. That background remains central to The Art Daddy, which they see not simply as a media platform, but as an extension of their artistic practice.

Across Substack and Instagram, The Art Daddy combines reporting and criticism with gossip, satire and cultural analysis. Often described as the TMZ of the art world, the platform looks beyond official narratives to examine the personalities, hierarchies and power structures shaping contemporary art.

I am, of course, a middle-aged white man working within the art world, precisely the demographic that frequently appears in Art Daddy’s criticism. This gave us a particularly open, self-aware and entertaining starting point.

We talk about the art market, generational shifts in taste and power, the problem with middle-aged men, and the often invisible labour dynamics sustaining the art world. We also get into the individuals, behaviours and hypocrisies that frustrate The Art Daddy most, and much more.

It is candid, intelligent and very funny. Perfectly relaxed summer listening, but certainly not without bite.

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In this episode, our host Roland-Philippe Kretzschmar is joined by Miramar Al-Nayyar, the Iraqi artist whose UK solo debut opens today (July 3, 2026) at Saatchi Yates in London. Miramar is the inaugural winner of the Saatchi Yates Fellowship Prize, selected from more than 5,000 submissions worldwide. She is 29, based between Amman and Abu Dhabi, and paints with a maturity that shows in her command of atmosphere, silence, and inner force.

Her exhibition brings together paintings shaped by the vastness of the Middle Eastern desert: rock formations, flowers, solitude, and the slow intelligence of nature. Made between Lebanon and Jordan against a backdrop of conflict and unrest, these are not abstract landscapes. They are meditations on endurance, on what can still bloom under pressure.

At the centre of the exhibition is the desert rose: a formation at once geological and floral, mineral and symbolic. In Miramar's hands it becomes visionary, a flower of the mind that emerges from silence, heat, distance, and memory. Her surfaces hold that tension between barrenness and abundance, fragility and force, the physical world and the invisible one. The work draws from desert landscapes and natural movement, but also from meditation, seclusion, and the ornamental rhythms of classical Islamic geometry. The paintings unfold like inner architectures: psychedelic, atmospheric, embodied. Her process is intuitive and physical, gesture as a way of listening. She paints less to depict nature than to receive it.

What stayed with me was the spiritual depth of our conversation. We spoke about art as a form of surrender, about solitude as a creative condition, about the desert as both real landscape and inner state, about how images arrive from somewhere beyond language.

Something in the way Miramar speaks about nature, intuition, prayer, and the unseen resonated with me. It reminded me that painting, at its most powerful, is not only visual. It can be a vessel for transformation, a way of making contact with what is buried, what is sacred, and what is still becoming. We speak about the desert rose, movement, memory, meditation, conflict, hope, and what it means for a young Iraqi artist to bring this personal, spiritually charged visual language into her first UK solo show.

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I'm speaking today with Lea Bischofberger, a Zurich-based gallerist and art dealer whose life and work are bound up with one of the most remarkable legacies in postwar and contemporary art.

The Bischofberger name runs through some of the defining artistic relationships of the late twentieth century. Her father, Bruno (who passed away in late spring 2026), was a legendary gallerist who worked with Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jean Tinguely, as well as Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, David Salle, George Condo, Miquel Barceló, Enzo Cucchi, Peter Halley and Mike Bidlo.

But Lea's story isn't only one of inheritance. It is also one of proximity, intuition, independence and renewal. Having grown up close to the artists, collections and conversations that helped shape art history, she now carries that experience into her own gallery work in Zurich.

Through Lea Bischofberger Gallery and Lele Projects, she has shown artists including Kate Daudy, Geraldina Bassani Antivari, Ashkan Sahihi, Roberto Ruspoli, Aryana Sheibani and Ulf Saupe. The programme suggests a more intimate and exploratory chapter, one attentive to memory, materiality, portraiture, language and psychological presence.

In this conversation we talk about legacy, taste, the changing role of the art dealer, Zurich as an art-world city, and what it means to carry history forward without being defined by it.

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