ArtHoles

Michael Anthony has zero formal art training, and honestly, that might be what makes ArtHoles so good. He picks an artist -- Caravaggio, Frida Kahlo, Toulouse-Lautrec -- and then spends months doing obsessive research before recording multi-part series that can stretch past four hours per episode. The result is this strange, wonderful collision of comedy and genuine scholarship that has no business working as well as it does. The format is unlike anything else in the art podcast world. Instead of quick overviews, Anthony commits to exhaustive biographical deep-dives. His eight-part Caravaggio series alone could fill a graduate seminar, except a graduate seminar probably wouldn't include the running jokes and profanity-laced tangents that keep you laughing through the bloodier parts of Baroque Rome. He gets into the social and political context surrounding each artist, the messy personal lives, the rivalries and scandals that textbooks often sanitize. With 33 episodes, a 4.9-star rating from over a thousand reviewers, and an explicit content tag that is very much earned, ArtHoles has built a fiercely loyal following. Episodes drop at an unhurried pace -- sometimes months between releases -- but listeners stick around because the quality is consistently high. If you want art history that feels more like your funniest friend got obsessed with Renaissance painters and won't shut up about it (in the best possible way), this is your show. Just clear your schedule, because four-hour episodes demand commitment.