The podcast "Death of an Artist" is sorted under "True Crime" on Spotify.

As with classic podcasts of this format, you hear witnesses, police officers, friends of the victim, friends of the alleged perpetrator and all sorts of other people who think they have something to say about it.

But what Helen Molesworth - the hostess - cleverly wraps up in six episodes is that here, true crime is merely the form, not the substance.

The case presented here is the death of artist Ana Mendieta.

On September 8, 1985, Mendieta fell 34 floors from her Greenwich Village apartment in New York, where she lived with her husband, artist Carl Andre.

Andre is considered one of the most important artists of minimalism and was already so successful in 1985 that he was able to make a good living from his art.

He laid metal plates on the ground, forcing the viewer to trample on the sculpture.

That was radical and new at the time.

Mendieta was what today would be called “young and aspiring”.

Beard hair and animal blood on the body

Her art dealt with her body;

with what the female body means in patriarchy and with its relationship to nature.

She often photographed herself naked, doused herself with animal blood or glued beard hair on herself.

Mendieta and Andre had a tumultuous relationship marked by jealousy, alcohol and arguments.

How exactly it happened that Mendieta fell out of the window is still unclear.

It is clear that in the course of the investigation Andre gave different and contradicting versions of the course of the evening.

In one version, he lay in bed and didn't notice that she fell trying to close the windows of the shared bedroom.

However, he told the police, who received his call shortly after Mendieta's death, about a bad fight over

which of them was more visible in public, whereupon she stormed into the bedroom, he followed and she "went" out the window.

A third version says that he sat on the sofa all evening, watching TV, not noticing the window opening or her fall.

He remains with the last one to this day.

These and many other inconsistencies meant that, even though Andre was acquitted in 1988, Ana Mendieta's death remains a topic that the art world doesn't like to talk about.

One of Molesworth's sources, B. Ruby Rich, the assistant prosecutor in the 1980s, says she "never encountered a wall of silence like this, except in mafia cases."

The event split the art world into two camps: those who supported Andre and those who believed he was responsible for Mendieta's death.

However, Molesworth only superficially pursues the question of what exactly happened that evening.

The art world as a place of being at the mercy

Rather, it paints a complete picture of the art world from the 1980s to the present day, which is still characterized, among other things, by the fact that people with a lot of power meet people with very little power.

Molesworth, herself a former curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, makes it possible to understand how these structures run through galleries, museums and art criticism.

And she also poses the question that ultimately always seems to be the point: Can art be separated from the artist?

Can one see on the one hand the Carl Andre who added something radically new to art history and on the other hand the one who has an unclear connection with the death of his wife?

This question cannot be answered conclusively for Molesworth either.

Maybe because it's the wrong question.

Rather, one must examine the access conditions to museums.

Who determines what is collected, preserved and presented?

Who are the ones who select the canon of art history, and what are the dependencies of these people, whose personal decisions determine what the public sees?

And so perhaps even the podcast's add-on episode, "The Numbers," is the most important of all.

Because it proves that there is a huge gap between the progressive image that the art world likes to paint of itself and reality.

The two journalists Charlotte Burns and Julia Halperin, who have their say there, began in 2018 to examine the first data collection on purchases by black Americans and women at 25 American institutions.

Black American purchases accounted for just 2.4 percent in 2018.

Works by women make up eleven percent.

Shockingly, the trend is falling.

Just unraveling those numbers and connections would be worth a podcast of its own, which Molesworth is hopefully already working on.

Without a murder case, you could also classify this as a “true crime”.