The Week in Art

After opening a major building project in May last year and announcing the details of another in September, which is due to open in the early 2030s, the National Gallery in London has revealed, quite unexpectedly, that it has to make serious cuts, including to its staff, in the face of a deficit that could rise to £8.2m in the coming year. Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent i...

On 4 July 2026 the US will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s founding document. But huge divisions in US society and culture are symbolised in a number of disputes relating to its history and the representation of its people. The latest furore came this week, when it emerged that the Trump administration had removed the rainbow Pride flag from the Stonewal...

The first Art Basel Qatar art fair is now open in Qatar’s capital, Doha, and The Art Newspaper’s art market editor, Kabir Jhala, joins Ben Luke to discuss its impact, as well as reflecting on the wider artistic outlook in Qatar and the Middle East. The author of a new catalogue raisonné of the work of Albrecht Dürer argues that a painting of the artist’s father in the National Gallery in London, l...

The South African culture minister, the right-wing populist Gayton McKenzie, is attempting to cancel the project for South Africa’s pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, proposed by the artist Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo. Goliath and Masondo have appealed to the country’s president and submitted a case to its high court to overturn McKenzie’s decision. Ben Luke speaks to Ch...

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. this week opens Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, a new exhibition focusing on LGBTQ+ artists from across Africa and its diaspora. Ben Luke talks to its co-curator, Kevin Dumouchelle, about the exhibition and forthcoming book. We explore the cultural effects of the protests in Iran that began at the end of last year, and...

As the British Museum opens  Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans , Ben Luke takes a tour of the exhibition with the museum’s head of Oceania, Alice Christophe. We also hear about the museum’s fresh approach to the stewardship of its collection of Hawaiian objects and materials. In Venice, one of the most famous palazzi on the Grand Canal, the Ca’ Dario, is up for sale and we discuss the buildi...

It is the first episode of 2026. So we look ahead at the next 12 months with a guide to big museum openings, biennials and exhibitions. Ben Luke is joined by Jane Morris, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper and Cultureshock, and Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, to discuss the key art fairs, major museum building projects and the top biennials of the year, and we pick...

As always, the final episode of The Week in Art of the year is a review of the past 12 months. To look at the top stories, the big issues and the best art in 2025, host Ben Luke is joined by The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buck, our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, and Ben Sutton, our editor-in-chief, Americas. We reflect on subjects from the Los Angeles wildfires in Janu...

Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Guggenheim Bilbao, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Los Angeles, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, among other museums and art spaces, died last Friday at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 96. Ben Luke discusses his long engagement with art, artists and museums with Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic and Gehry’s biographer. Serpentine and...

The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Americas, Ben Sutton, and art market editor, Kabir Jhala, are in Miami Beach for Art Basel’s latest edition and discuss the top sales and the wider mood at the fair. As staff at the Musée du Louvre in Paris vote to strike, Ben Luke talks to Vincent Noce, our correspondent in Paris, about the deepening crisis at the museum, following the robbery in October. And...

After a delayed application process and an aborted initial commission, the US has at last appointed its artist for next year’s Venice Biennale: the Utah-born, Mexico-based artist Alma Allen. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, talks Ben Luke through this confusing saga. At the National Museum of Norway in Oslo a new exhibition, Deviant Ornaments, focuses on the express...

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) sold for the second highest price ever realised at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday. It was the most notable of several big sales in the sold-out (or “white-glove”) auction of 24 works from the collection of the late billionaire Leonard Lauder, and has prompted some commentators to declare that the art market has turned a corner fol...

Studio Museum in Harlem, Grand Egyptian Museum, Stanley Spencer As the Studio Museum in Harlem opens in its first ever purpose-built space, a new building by the architects Adjaye Associates, The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, speaks to Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, and Ben Sutton then gives reviews the building and the inaugural programming with Ben Luke. In...

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, US, has agreed to return two works from 1857 by the enslaved 19th-century potter David Drake to his present-day descendants. By the terms of the contract, one vessel will remain on loan to the museum for at least two years. The other—known as the “Poem Jar”—has been purchased back by the museum from the heirs for an undisclosed sum and now comes with “a cer...

The authenticity of the final self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, made in 1903 and housed in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, was earlier this year called into question. Now, the museum has completed its promised analysis, and confirmed that the painting is  not  a fake and is by Gauguin. Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent, Martin Bailey, about the saga. In recent years, the...

It is an event that has shocked the world and prompted a national reckoning in France: the robbery of eight jewels from the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre last Sunday. Ben Luke talks to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper France and journalist at Paris Match, and Dale Berning Sawa, a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper, about the heist, the reaction, the political fallout and wha...

Amid much debate about the health of the art market, Frieze is back in London, with its two fairs, Frieze London and Frieze Masters. Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s art market editor, Kabir Jhala, about the mood in the big tents in Regent’s Park. Beyond Frieze, of course, is a vast parallel art world, with thousands of unrepresented artists and curators keen to realise their big ideas. Hypha...

Tate Modern continues to explore the histories of Modern art beyond the European and North American canons that were once its focus. This week it opened the exhibition Nigerian Modernism, and The Art Newspaper’s digital editor, Alexander Morrison, speaks to the show’s co-curator, Osei Bonsu, and to one of the 50 artists in the exhibition, Jimoh Buraimoh. Before the 12-day war between Israel and Ir...

A new exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, called Made in Ancient Egypt, reveals untold stories of the people behind a host of remarkable objects, and the technology and techniques they used. The Art Newspaper’s digital editor, Alexander Morrison visits the museum to take a tour with the curator, Helen Strudwick. One of the great revelations of the past two decades in scholarship...

The Art Newspaper’s chief contributing editor, Gareth Harris, has just published a new book, Towards the Ethical Art Museum, which explores a range of issues affecting museums in the 21st century, from questions of provenance and restitution to funding and governance and responsibilities to staff and the communities the museums serve. He joins Ben Luke to discuss the book. One of the exhibitions o...

Kerry James Marshall: The Histories at the Royal Academy of Arts in London is the largest ever European retrospective of the work of the US artist and has been greeted with universal critical acclaim. Ben Luke takes a tour of the exhibition with Mark Godfrey, its curator, and visits a related exhibition of Marshall’s graphic novel project, Rythm Mastr, at The Tabernacle in Notting Hill, London, wi...

Earlier this year, we took a tour of the V&A East Storehouse, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s vast new complex in East London. This week, it opens the David Bowie Centre, a dedicated space to the music icon. It is the permanent repository of thousands of items from Bowie’s archive, which are on display and also available for personal study. Ben Luke explores the displays at the centre with th...

Since we were last on air in June, the US government has announced what it calls a comprehensive internal review of activities at eight of the 21 museums under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution. Meanwhile, one of those museums, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., saw the artist Amy Sherald cancel a long-scheduled exhibition of her work, citing censorship and institutional...

An exhibition opens this weekend at Conditions, the low-cost studio programme for artists in Croydon, on the outskirts of south London, featuring two of the great works of art of recent decades: Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016). Ben Luke talks to Mark and AJ about showing together and the affinities and contrasts in t...

The Art Newspaper’s digital editor Alexander Morrison is in Basel for the annual Art Basel fair. He talks to our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, about the atmosphere at the fair after a long downturn in the art market and underwhelming auctions last month in New York. While some major museums around the world would rather avoid the topic of returning objects acquired in the colonial period to thei...