The Week in Art

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...

This week: Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he is recognised for his Outstanding Contribution to his medium in the Sony World Photography Awards. He discusses the Russian invasion and his Ukrainian heritage. In this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at Winslow Homer’s most famous work, The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906), which is at the heart of a new show at the M...

This week: Quiet as It’s Kept, the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, is now open to the public at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Art Newspaper’s associate editor Tom Seymour, Americas editor Ben Sutton and staff reporter Gabriella Angeletti gather to discuss it. As the latest incarnation of the show Afro-Atlantic Histories is unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Wash...

This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds? We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines. As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at t...

We talk to Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the new plans for the museum’s wing of modern and contemporary art, including the appointment of the architect Frida Escobedo in place of David Chipperfield. As The Art Newspaper is about to publish its annual museum attendance survey, showing that visitors are beginning slowly to return to museums after the height of the pa...

Donatello in Florence, the Biennale of Sydney and Eduardo Navarro’s seed installationThis week, as the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence present a survey of Donatello, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance masters, we talk to Arturo Galansino, the Strozzi’s Director General, and Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello museum, about the show. The Biennale of S...

This week: as more than two million refugees leave war-torn Ukraine, what can the arts do? Counterpoints Arts is a charity that works with refugee artists and creates programmes in a range of artforms on the subject of migration and displacement in the UK and beyond. Their mission is underpinned by a belief that arts can inspire social change and enhance the inclusion and cultural integration...

This week: following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we talk to Svitlana Biedarieva, a Ukrainian art historian, artist and curator, about the community of artists in her home country, their work since the Maidan, or Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and how they are responding to the events of recent days. Also on Ukraine, Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Mark Neville, who has been based in the Uk...

As an exhibition opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London focusing on artists’ studios over the last century, we take an in-depth look at the subject. The artist, critic and activist William Powhida discusses the Artist Studio Affordability Project in New York and how developers and gentrification have forced artists’ communities to breaking point. We take a tour of the Whitechapel exhibition wi...

This week: The Collaboration, a new play dramatising the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat has opened at the Young Vic theatre in London. It looks at the period between 1983 and 1985 in which they worked together on a group of paintings, many of which were shown to critical derision and commercial failure at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York in 1985. Ben Luke talks to t...

As a show looking at Louise Bourgeois’s late-career obsession with textiles opens at the Hayward Gallery in London—ahead of other exhibitions of her work in Basel and New York—we look at the French-American artist’s fabric-related creations with Jerry Gorovoy, who worked with Bourgeois for 30 years and is now President of the foundation that manages her legacy. A host of contemporary art shows hav...

This week, we talk to Cecilia Alemani, the artistic director of the Venice Biennale for art, which opens in April, about her show, The Milk of Dreams. She discusses the story by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that gives the Biennale its title, the “time capsules” of historic art that punctuate the exhibition, the thematic structure, and the fact that it is the first Venice Biennale featu...

This week, we visit the Royal Academy in London, where a new show looking at Francis Bacon’s use of animal imagery, Man and Beast, is about to open. The RA’s director, Axel Rüger sheds light on Bacon’s means of transposing the animal into the human figure. We talk to our editor-at-large, Georgina Adam, about The Man of Sorrows, the Botticelli painting sold at auction this week—and we find out if i...

This week, our contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck visits the exhibition Testament at Goldsmiths CCA in London, where 47 artists have been invited to make proposals that ponder the idea of tearing down and erecting monuments and what it might mean to rethink them. Louisa talks to Sarah McCrory, the director of Goldsmiths CCA, and to Adham Faramawy, one of the artists in the show. In Rome, a...

In this first episode of 2022, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck and the novelist and columnist at The Art Newspaper Chibundu Onuzo preview the year’s biennials, exhibitions and art fairs and our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has a stab at predicting the art market’s fortunes.  Events discussed:  Venice Biennale Documenta 15 Biennale of Sydney Berlin Biennale...

It’s the final episode of 2021 and so, as always, it’s our review of the year. Joining Ben Luke to look at 2021’s biggest stories are three members of The Art Newspaper team: Martin Bailey, a correspondent in London, Anna Brady, art market editor, and Jane Morris, editor-at-large. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: the French decorative art that inspired Walt Disney, Henri Matisse’s collaboration over 40 years with the Baltimore art collector Etta Cone, and Josef Albers’s prints. The Art Newspaper’s deputy digital editor, Aimee Dawson speaks to Wolf Burchard, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, which opens today, 10 Dec...

This week, as Art Basel in Miami Beach opens, we discuss a new book, The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride, with its author Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist at the Financial Times and editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper. Melanie ponders the past, present and future of art fairs. A huge new show, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now has just opened at Tate Britain in London...