The Week in Art

As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess. Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts orga...

This week: as the exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia opens at the Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavik, Ben Luke talks to Masha Alekhina, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, and the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, one of the co-curators of the show. As protests continue across Iran, Aimee Dawson, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor, speaks to Shirin Neshat, the artist whose...

Ben Luke talks to Hannah McGivern, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper who has just been to Qatar, about the vast number of public art projects that will accompany the FIFA Men’s World Cup that begins there on Sunday 20 November. She also discusses the museums that Qatar plans to open by 2030. How does this explosion of cultural initiatives sit with Qatar’s record on human rights and treatment o...

This week: as the UN’s climate emergency summit, Cop27, continues in Egypt, Ben Luke talks to Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent—and the author of our online column about art and climate change—about international art initiatives responding to the crisis. Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, tells us about the museum’s ne...

This week: uproar over the National Gallery in London’s building plans—is it a sensitive makeover or like “an airport lounge”? We talk to the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, about the gallery’s controversial plans for changes to its Sainsbury Wing, and to Rowan Moore, architecture critic at the Observer, about his views on the designs by the architect Annabel Selldorf, and how...

This week: the recent opening of Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum has reignited a controversy over the provenance of some of his works. We talk to the leading Hopper scholar Gail Levin about the story of Arthayer R. Sanborn, a Baptist Minister who befriended the Hopper family and eventually amassed a vast collection of memorabilia and art, some of which is in the Whitney Museum’s exh...

This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest. Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+,...

This week: Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, about the atmosphere at the Frieze London and Frieze Masters fairs amid the UK’s economic struggles and the strong US dollar. They also discuss the booming market for so-called “ultra-contemporary” art, and a shift in the artists being bought by collectors. We then talk to Cecilia Vicuña, the Chilean artist and poe...

This week: Georgina Adam joins Ben Luke to discuss the intriguing story of the bankrupt entrepreneur and art collector, the museum scholar and a host of Old Master paintings given new attributions. We talk to Suzanne Pagé, the curator of Monet-Mitchell, an exhibition bringing together the Impressionist Claude Monet and the post-war American abstract painter Joan Mitchell, at the Fondation Louis Vu...

As a host of new exhibitions of the work of Lucian Freud opens across London to mark his centenary, this episode is all about this leading figure in post-war British painting. Ben Luke takes a tour of the major show at the National Gallery, which promises new perspectives on his work, with its curator, Daniel Herrmann. Martin Gayford discusses Freud’s little-explored letters, gathered in Love Luci...

Amid growing support for hard-right parties in Europe, Ben Luke speaks to James Imam, The Art Newspaper’s Italian correspondent, about the far-right party Brothers of Italy, whose leader Georgia Meloni looks set to win power in the general election on 25 September. The party has given culture unusual prominence in its election campaign. The longest-running contemporary art exhibition in the US, th...

Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the proclamation of King Charles III, Ben Luke speaks to the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Desmond Shawe-Taylor. They discuss the Royal Collection, the late Queen’s taste in art, the new King’s commitment to art education, and how the modern era compares to the past in terms of Royal patronage of visual art. As lights in museums and on monum...

This week: is art censorship on the rise? The Art Newspaper’s chief contributing editor, Gareth Harris, joins Ben Luke to discuss his new book, Censored Art Today. We look at the different ways in which freedom of expression is being curbed across the globe and at the debates around contested history and cancel culture. This episode’s Work of the Week is Diane Arbus’s Puerto Rican woman with a bea...

Ben Luke talks to Alexander Kellner, the director of the National Museum of Brazil, about how he plans to mark Brazil’s bicentennial and to restore the museum in the wake of the devastating 2018 fire, which destroyed most of the building and millions of objects. The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about the National Portrait Gallery’s ambition to acquire the £50m Portra...

On 29 June, Frieze announced the details of the first edition of its art fair in Seoul, South Korea. So for this last episode of the current season, we’re exploring the art scene and market in the Korean capital. Ben Luke talks to the art historian and curator Jiyoon Lee about contemporary art in Seoul and beyond, and the origins of the current art scene in 1990s globalisation. The Art Newspaper’s...

This week: our associate editor, Kabir Jhala, and editor-at-large, Jane Morris, have been in Kassel, Germany, to see Documenta, the quinquennial international art exhibition. They review the show and respond to the escalation of a long-running row over antisemitism and broader racism, which has resulted in a work being removed from the exhibition. Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and lawyer, di...

This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it? Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material...

We talk to the writer and critic Amy Castor about what effect the tumbling crypto markets might have on the until-now booming world of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. As Norway’s vast new National Museum opens, we speak to its director Karin Hindsbo. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Folding Screen with Indian Wedding, Mitote, and Flying Pole, made in Mexico in the late 17th century. It is one o...

This week, Picasso and the Old Masters: as shows pairing the Spaniard with Ingres and El Greco open in London and Basel respectively, Ben Luke talks to Christopher Riopelle (curator of Picasso Ingres: Face to Face at the National Gallery) and Carmen Giménez (curator of Picasso-El Greco at the Kunstmuseum in Basel) about the profound influence of historic artists on Picasso’s rupturing of tradition...

This week: are stolen Cambodian statues hidden in the world’s great public collections? We discuss Cambodia’s looted heritage with Celia Hatton, Asia Pacific editor and presenter at the BBC World Service, whose documentary for BBC TV and radio Cambodia: Returning the Gods exposes the connections between looters, smugglers and, allegedly, some of the world’s most famous encyclopaedic museums. Plus,...

This week, as Frieze New York takes place at The Shed in Hudson Yards, and we come to the end of two weeks of huge auction sales, we talk to The Art Newspaper’s editor in the Americas, Ben Sutton, about the New York market. Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, tells us about Bët-bi, a new museum the foundation hopes to open in Senegal in 2025, with a...

This week: is heritage in Ukraine being attacked and looted, and what can be done to protect it? Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s museums and heritage editor, Tom Seymour, who has been to the Ukrainian-Polish border with the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to witness museum materials being sent into Ukraine to help institutions there. Then, Tom talks to Sophie Delepierre, the head of...

This week, Philip Guston Now is unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after its controversial postponement in 2020; Ben Luke talks to Kate Nesin and Megan Bernard, two of the four curators on the team assembled by the museum to revise the exhibition, which was postponed by four museums in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. We discuss how the show and its interpretation have changed in the...

This week, now that the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has defeated the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, we speak to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper France, about the Macron government’s cultural record so far and what we can expect from his second term. Tate Britain has opened an exhibition of work by the late 19th- and early 20th-ce...

A Venice Biennale special: we give you a flavour of the 59th edition of the Biennale which, as ever, brings a deluge of contemporary art to the historic Italian city. We talk to four artists in the national pavilions – Francis Alÿs in the Belgian pavilion, Sonia Boyce in the British pavilion, Shubigi Rao in the Singapore pavilion and Na Chainkua Reindorf in the Ghana pavilion – about their present...