The Week in Art

As her new series for the BBC, Africa Rising, takes Afua Hirsch to Morocco, Nigeria and South Africa, we talk to her about the artists and art scenes she encountered and what she took away from her experiences. The Liverpool Biennial’s latest edition opened last weekend and has a South African curator, Khanyisile Mbongwa, and an IsiZulu title, uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things. The Art Newsp...

This week: Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood on their collaborative art, Wayne McGregor on his new choreographic work—a collaboration with the late Carmen Herrera—and Whistler’s Mother returns to Philadelphia. Ahead of an exhibition of their work in London in September, we talk to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood—who has created the artwork with Yorke for every Radiohead album since 1994, a...

As It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby opens at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, we talk to Catherine Morris and Lisa Small, who have curated the show with the Australian comedian. Floods at the end of last month have caused widespread damage to heritage in the Italian region of Emilia Romagna; we speak to James Imam, our correspondent in Rome, to gauge the extent of the damage and...

This week: the first ever museum show of Keith Haring’s work in Los Angeles. We talk to Sarah Loyer, the curator of Keith Haring: Art Is for Everybody at the Broad in Los Angeles. Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain in London, has led the complete rehang of the museum’s collection, including a vastly expanded presence of women and artists of colour across 500 years of British art. He te...

This week: the Frieze art fair and spring auctions in New York. As the Frieze Art Fair returns to The Shed in Manhattan, coinciding with the season’s big auctions, The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, and our contributing editor Anny Shaw take the temperature of the market in New York. Just as we completed the episode, the US Supreme Court ruled that Andy Warhol infringed on the photogra...

This week: the Sudan crisis. How are artists responding to another war in the East African country? The photographer Ala Kheir joins us from Khartoum to tell us about the conflict in Sudan and how it is affecting him and other artists. We talk to Alyce Mahon, the co-curator of Sade: Freedom or Evil, a new exhibition at the Centre Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) in Barcelona about the 18t...

This week: the coronation in the UK. As Charles III is crowned at Westminster Abbey this weekend, Anna Somers Cocks, founder of The Art Newspaper and a former assistant keeper of metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, tells us about the objects involved in the coronation and the monarchical history they convey. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York this week opens Karl Lagerfe...

This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those w...

This week: we take a tour of Tate Modern’s exhibition that brings together the Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian. We hear about the two artists’ distinctive contributions to abstraction, their shared interest in esoteric belief systems and their deep engagement with the natural world, from one of the show’s curators, Bryony Fer. Our editor, Americas, Ben Sutton visi...

This week: Expo Chicago and the art scene in the Windy City. Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, and Carlie Porterfield, associate editor, art market, Americas, discuss the fair, and the wider market and gallery scene in Chicago. As the US president Joe Biden visits Northern Ireland to honour the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday or Belfast agreement, we talk to Hannah Crowdy, head...

This week: Ben Luke talks to Melanie Gerlis about the recent turbulence in the banking sector, as US banks go under, an ailing Credit Suisse is acquired by UBS and Deutsche Bank shares fall at one point by 14%. What are the implications for the art world? Melanie also explains the figures in the latest Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. The Baltimore Museum of Art in the US this week open...

The Art Newspaper’s annual report on museum visitor figures around the world has been published. We talk to Lee Cheshire, who co-edited the report, and to Charles Saumarez Smith, a former director or chief executive of three London museums and galleries—the National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and Royal Academy of Arts—about how important the figures are to museums and whether they are a va...

This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality. So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+...

This week: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged. The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rin...

Is the Old Masters market struggling? As Tefaf opens its fair in Maastricht, we look at this major moment in the market calendar and what it tells us about the strength or otherwise of the market for historic art. The Art Newspaper’s Acting Art Market editor, Anny Shaw, joins us from the fair. The Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris has just received a major gift of more tha...

This week: as the Art Dubai fair opens, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor Aimee Dawson tells us about this latest edition, its ongoing commitment to displaying the art of the global south and its continued focus on digital art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the largest media exhibition it has ever staged, Signals: How Video Transformed the World on 5 March. It looks at how art...

This week: Nigeria heads to the polls this weekend; what are the implications for its museums and art scene? Dolly Kola-Balogun, director of the Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, reflects on the candidates and discusses the importance of art, and culture more widely, to the country’s future. We also talk to Patrick Bringley, the author of a new book All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museu...

This week: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage? We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Gridd...

In this special episode, we are in Amsterdam for one of the shows of the year: Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. As an unprecedented 28 of the 37 surviving Vermeer paintings are gathered in the Dutch capital, Ben Luke talks to several people involved in the project: Gregor Weber, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells us about his new biography that reveals the depth of influence of the Jesuits and Cat...

As we approach the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Art Newspaper has published an investigation that raises serious concerns that works of art taken by Russian troops from a museum in Kherson, Ukraine, in November 2022 may not be repatriated once the fighting ends. Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his story. Plus, the Sharjah Biennial opens next week,...

This week: as robotic figures of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama appear in windows of Louis Vuitton stores in New York, London and Tokyo, Ben Luke talks to Federica Carlotto, a specialist in art and luxury, about the latest collaboration between Kusama and the LVMH brand. What does it tell us about what the former creative director of Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, called the “monumental marriage be...

Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Tokyo are the subject of a legal claim in the US relating to Nazi loot. The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent and resident Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey tells us why Sunflowers (1888-89) is at the centre of the dispute, 35 years after it was sold for a record price at auction, and why the heirs of the German Jewish banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who owne...

In the first episode of the year, we look ahead at the next 12 months. Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor at The Art Newspaper, peers into her crystal ball and tries to predict the fortunes of the art market this year. Then, Jane Morris, one of our editors-at-large, José da Silva, our exhibitions editor, and host Ben Luke select the museum projects, biennales and exhibitions that they are mos...

It’s our final podcast of 2022 and so, as ever, we’re looking back at the worlds of art and heritage over the past 12 months. Ben Luke is joined by three members of The Art Newspaper team: Louisa Buck, contemporary art correspondent, Kabir Jhala, acting deputy art market editor, and Ben Sutton, editor in the Americas. Among much else, they discuss the effects of the war in Ukraine, Just Stop Oil’s...

This week: the Parthenon Marbles; it has emerged that George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and now chair of the trustees of the British Museum, has been holding talks with the Greek government about the ancient sculptures. So might this lead to a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over their ownership? Ben Luke speaks to Yannis Andritsopoulos, the reporter for the Greek newspaper Ta Nea...