The Week in Art

The exhibition The Time Is Always Now, featuring 22 artists from the African diaspora whose work takes the Black figure as its starting point, is now open at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and will tour to Philadelphia later in the year. We explore the show with its curator Ekow Eshun. 2024 marks the centenary of the the first Surrealist manifesto by André Breton, and the first of a seri...

A vast survey covering seven decades of art by Yoko Ono has just opened at Tate Modern, and we take a tour of the show with Juliet Bingham, its curator. The collection from Elton John’s home in Atlanta in the US is up for auction at Christie’s and ahead of its big Opening Night auction next week, The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor Alexander Morrison spoke to Tash Perrin, Christie’s...

As she stages a non-stop reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism for five days at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, Tania Bruguera reflects on growing concerns about the censorship of artists in Germany in relation to the Israel-Hamas war. She also discusses the comments made by Ai Weiwei this week that censorship in the West was now “exactly the same” as in Mao’s China. The Court...

This week: Adriano Pedrosa, the artistic director of the 60th Venice Biennale, on his exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere. As he announces the themes, concepts and the list of artists in the show, we speak to the Brazilian curator about his plans. Hugely popular immersive art experiences are popping up across the world from London to Las Vegas, Tokyo and Abu Dhabi, and we discuss this phenomenon and...

This week: masters week in New York—can the market for historic works be revived? Scott Reyburn, a market reporter for The Art Newspaper, has for some time been exploring the decline in the trade for Old Master paintings. He looks ahead to the auctions in Masters Week in New York, which begin this weekend. In India on Monday, the prime minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a vast temple to the Hindu...

This week: the astonishing civil trial in Manhattan between a Russian oligarch and Sotheby’s. The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, witnessed the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev’s testimony in the trial in New York in which he accuses Sotheby’s of aiding the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier in an alleged fraud. It relates to the sale of major works of art, including the c...

In the first episode of 2024 we look ahead to the next 12 months. The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor Tim Schneider peers into his crystal ball to tell us what we might expect from the coming 12 months in the art market. Then, Jane Morris, editor-at-large, Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor, and host Ben Luke select the biennials and exhibitions they are most looking forward to in 2...

It’s the final episode of 2023 and so, as always, it’s our review of the year. Host Ben Luke is joined by Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, based in London, and Ben Sutton, editor, Americas, based in New York, to discuss the big art and heritage news stories of the year, from rows over the Israel-Hamas war to thefts at the British Museum and the battle for art-fair s...

This week: the final big art market event of the year, Art Basel in Miami Beach. The Art Newspaper’s associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, talks to our acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, in Miami about the fair, as tensions rise ahead of the pivotal 2024 US election. In Athens, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, or EMST, is next week opening a months-long programme which will e...

The tragic human cost of the bombardment of the Gaza Strip in the Israel-Hamas war is well documented. What is now becoming clear is how many historic buildings and sites have also been destroyed. We talk to Sarvy Geranpayeh, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper in the Middle East, about the fate of heritage in Gaza. As a huge exhibition of the work of Emily Kam Kngwarray, perhaps the most celebr...

This week: The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, Ben Sutton discusses redundancies and ticket price-hikes at several museums across the US, and what it tells us about the economic climate for American museums in the wake of the pandemic. After a troubled 15th edition in 2022, Documenta—the influential exhibition that takes place twice a decade in Kassel, Germany—is at the centre of another controv...

This week: the New York auctions. Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, joins us to discuss two weeks of major sales in New York and whether they have calmed a jittery art market. Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s, an exhibition exploring radical art made in six countries under communist rule in Central Eastern Europe, has just opened at t...

This week: live art and activism. Performance art has long been used as a vehicle for protest and political activism and now, in its tenth edition, the Performa Biennial in New York has a new programme dedicated to artists exploring the subject. Protest and Performance: A Way of Life, which started as part of the 19-day festival this week, features eight events involving artists from across the wo...

As global political leaders, key figures in the tech industry and academics meet at Bletchley Park in the UK for a two-day summit on artificial intelligence— discussing in particular the risks of these new technologies and how they could be mitigated—we look at a project that reflects AI’s extraordinary potential. The Vesuvius Challenge aims to use AI to unlock the texts in the papyrus scrolls tha...

This week: the first Kyiv Biennial since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year is taking place in various locations across the wartorn country as well as a host of neighbouring European states. We talk to the co-curator, Georg Schöllhammer, about this year’s event. As refugees and displaced people continue to dominate the news, a global sound art project, Migration Sounds, aims to explore and rei...

This week: it’s the second year of Paris +, the event that has taken over from Fiac as the leading French art fair. How is Art Basel’s French flagship faring amid geopolitical turmoil and economic uncertainty, and is Paris still on the rise as a cultural hub? We speak to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, and Kabir Jhala, our deputy art market editor, who are in Paris, to find...

The Frieze art fair has turned 20 this week, and is only growing in its ambitions, having acquired the Armory Show fair in New York and Expo Chicago. So what should we make of Frieze’s continuing expansion and what’s the mood at Frieze London and Frieze Masters this year? We talk to Tim Schneider, The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, who is over from New York for the fairs. In Reykjavik i...

The looted Ethiopian icon, AI copyright debate in US, the end of China’s museum boomThis week: The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about the Kwer’ata Re’esu, a European painting of Christ that became a revered icon in Ethiopia before being looted by an agent for the British Museum in the 19th century. Martin’s colour photographs of the work—which has been stored in a va...

This week: three big London shows, in depth. As Marina Abramović draws huge crowds to the Royal Academy of Arts in London, we interview her about the exhibition—the first ever dedicated to a woman artist in the Royal Academy’s main galleries. At the National Gallery, meanwhile, is a remarkable survey of the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch master Frans Hals, which will tour next year to Amsterd...

This week: the latest controversies prompted by the Unesco World Heritage Committee. As we mentioned last week, the 45th session of the committee is taking place in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, and continues until 25 September. The founder of The Art Newspaper, Anna Somers Cocks, joins host Ben Luke to look at the latest sites granted World Heritage status and at the Committee’s decision not...

A Unesco conference and archeological summit in Saudi Arabia are the latest examples of the country’s increasing focus on culture as part of the so-called Vision 2030 programme. We look at Saudi Arabia’s unprecedented and lavishly funded focus on contemporary and ancient culture and how that relates to ongoing concerns about artistic freedom and human rights abuses in the kingdom. Alia Al-Senussi,...

It’s our 250th podcast, and in this special episode we focus on the future. We ask leading figures across the art world to tell us about their hopes and concerns for the visual arts. Among them are Max Hollein, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Bénédicte Savoy, the co-author of the Saar-Savoy report into the restitution of cultural heritage, Shanay Jhaveri, the head of vi...

In the first episode of this new season of The Week in Art, we talk to Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent, about the thefts scandal at the British Museum and its implications for the museum in the future. The artist Grada Kilomba is one of four curators of this year’s Sāo Paulo biennial, called Choreographies of the Impossible, and she joins our host Ben Luke to discuss the sh...

This week: in the final episode of this season, James Goodwin, a specialist on the art market and its history, tells us about what high inflation and interest rates mean for the art market and what lies ahead. As Spain heads to the polls in July, we talk to Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Madrid. What could the election mean for the controversial...

The Art Newspaper’s editor, Alison Cole, and London correspondent, Martin Bailey, join our host Ben Luke to review the National Portrait Gallery after its £41m revamp. We talk to Nancy Ireson at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia about the exhibition William Edmondson: A Monumental Vision. Edmondson was the first African American artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New Yor...