The Week in Art

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...

This week, we look at the case of the art dealer Inigo Philbrick, who pleaded guilty to fraud in a New York court last week: is the art world, as his attorney claimed, “corrupt from top to bottom”? Georgina Adam, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper gives her response. For this epsiode’s Work of the Week, we talk to Carmen Hermo, the curator of the exhibition Andy Warhol: Revelation at the Brookly...

This week, record-breaking auction sales in New York—are we in a new boom? Anna Brady discusses the big lots in New York over the last two weeks, and what they tell us about the market and the world of collectors. In London, Aimee Dawson visits the Victoria and Albert Museum to hear about Carl Fabergé’s shop in London, the subject of a new exhibition, with the show’s co-curators Kieran McCarthy an...

In Hong Kong, the long-awaited M+ Museum opens this week, amid accusations of censorship by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ilaria Maria Sala joins us to tell us about her visit to the museum. The Courtauld Gallery, one of London’s great collections, is re-opening after a three-year renovation, and we take a tour of the gallery with its director Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen. And in this week’s Work...

This week, as talks continue at Cop26, the UN’s climate charge conference in Glasgow, we talk to Lucia Pietroiusti of the Serpentine Galleries about climate justice and how the art world can go beyond sustainability to "thriveability". As the spectacular Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opens to the public, we talk to Sjarel Ex, the museum's director, and Sandra Kisters, its head of collections and re...

This week, Aimee Dawson, deputy digital editor at The Art Newspaper, is in Giza in Egypt for Forever is Now, where works by Egyptian and international artists are shown along a trail around the Giza plateau, among the pyramids (until 7 November). She talks to its curator, Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, as well as two of the artists involved, Gisela Colón and Lita Albuquerque. The New Museum in New York’s l...

This week, Paris’s resurgence: is the French capital stealing London’s thunder? As established and up-and-coming galleries open branches in Paris and the Fiac art fair opens there, we ask Melanie Gerlis if this is indeed a shift of power from the UK to the French capital. For this episode’s Work of the Week, Donatien Grau, curator of contemporary programmes at the Musée d’Orsay discusses Lady of U...

This week, as the Frieze art fairs open and the international art world descends on London, we talk about Mark Rothko’s late paintings, now on view at Pace’s new space in the British capital, with his son Christopher. He also reflects on Rothko’s Seagram Mural paintings, which are now back at Tate Britain, close to JMW Turner’s works, as Rothko had hoped when he gave them to the Tate. Louisa Buck...

This week: Jasper Johns. Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf of the Whitney Museum of American Art talk to Ben Luke about their simultaneous shows of the 91-year-old artist, and taking a radical approach to a retrospective of a radical artist. Also this week: Venice’s tourist problem. Are Venetian authorities subjecting tourists in Venice to unprecedented surveilla...

This week: is the burgeoning phenomenon of private museums, founded by billionaires and corporations, undermining our public cultural institutions? We talk to Georgina Adam about her new book, The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum. Also, Nancy Kenney explores a huge new museum that has just opened in Los Angeles, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and hears from its curators Doris Berger...

This week: the Art Basel fair has opened in Switzerland, but are the collectors back and are they buying? We talk to Jane Morris, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, about the art on show and whether the galleries’ jitters ahead of the fair have proved founded. Also, we hear from the classicist Mary Beard about her new book, Twelve Caesars, looking at representations of power across 2,000 yea...

This week: as a tribunal in London hears of human rights atrocities against the Uyghur community and other Muslim groups in China, how will museums, galleries and other cultural institutions working with government-supported institutions in China respond? We talk to The Art Newspaper’s editor-at-large Cristina Ruiz, who has heard many hours of disturbing evidence at the tribunal, and to Sir Geoffr...

As a huge survey of contemporary painting opens at the Hayward Gallery in London, we ask: is the time-honoured medium of painting the art form best suited to exploring the complexity of our age? We look at the thriving and diverse contemporary painting scene in the UK and explore the Hayward director Ralph Rugoff’s suggestion that this ancient medium “seems like the best technology there coul...

We're back with a new season of The Week in Art , which takes us right up to the holidays. In this episode, we reflect on events in Afghanistan in recent weeks. We hear from an anthropologist and an Afghan artist about the country's people, art and heritage as the Taliban assume power again. Melissa Chiovenda, an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, discusses the s...

It's an all-woman line-up on this week's podcast. Nancy Kenney speaks to Andrea Nelson, the curator of The New Woman Behind the Camera , an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and touring later to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Aimee Dawson talks to Camille Morineau, a former Centre Pompidou curator, about the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibit...

This week: should the Science Museum in London stop taking money from the oil company Shell? We talk to a student activist, Anya Nanning Ramamurthy of the UK Student Climate Network, who held a protest at the Science Museum over the weekend of 19 and 20 June, and Chris Garrard, co-director of the ethical sponsorship campaigners Culture Unstained, about fossil-fuel sponsorship and the increasing pr...

This week, we look at a much anticipated exhibition, Slavery at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands’ national art and history museum and the curators of the exhibition state in the catalogue that the country’s colonial past has been "insufficiently examined in the national history of the Netherlands, including at the Rijksmuseum”. Ben Luke talks to Valika Smeulder...

This week: two festivals of art. Aimee Dawson talks to Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls about their ongoing activism and their new billboards for Art Night, while Ben Luke discusses Glasgow International with its director, Richard Parry, and then reviews the work in the festival with The Art Newspaper ’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck. And in this week’s Work of th...

This week: Mary Beard on Nero, one of the most infamous Roman emperors. Was he the sadistic murderer of legend, the emperor who fiddled as Rome burned, or has he been a victim of spin and myth? As well as getting Mary’s take on this infamous figure and Nero: the man behind the myth , the exhibition about him that’s just opened at the British Museum in London, Ben Luke also talks to the exhibi...

This week: Viking-age treasures—what the medieval gold, silver, textiles and even dirt in a hoard found in 2014 in Scotland can tell us about the Viking age, its people, its art and its international networks. Ben Luke talks to the curator Martin Goldberg about the Galloway Hoard, which has just gone on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Also this week: six proposals for the hig...

Ben Luke talks to Ralph Rugoff, artistic director of the last Venice Biennale and director of the Hayward Gallery, London, about Matthew Barney and Igshaan Adams, two very different artists exploring autobiography, social issues and dance, among much else, at the Hayward; Louisa Buck talks to the curator Laura Smith as the Whitechapel Gallery unveils two shows about Surrealism and women artists: a...

It's a big week in the New York salerooms: Scott Reyburn, art market expert for The Art Newspaper and The New York Times , discusses the big sales and notable trends at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York auctions. Meanwhile, as museums in England get ready to open for the first time in five months, we talk to Heather Phillipson about her new exhibition in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. And i...

This week: ecocide in Brazil. In a special in-depth interview marking a retrospective at Fondazione MAST in Bologna, Italy, and an exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, the artist Richard Mosse discusses his photographs and forthcoming film installation picturing the scale of the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. Mosse also talks about his earlier photographic and film series...

This week: Los Angeles has finally opened its museums after more than a year. When New York's galleries have been open since August, what took California so long? We talk to Jori Finkel about LA's slow emergence from lockdown. Also: DB Burkeman tells us about his new book Art Sleeves, a trawl through 40 years of artist-designed record covers. And in this episode's Work of the Week, as Scottish mus...

This week on the now award-winning The Week in Art : Kusamarama. We take a deep dive into Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots, pumpkins and infinity rooms as shows open in New York, Washington, London and Berlin. We’re joined by three curators: Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern in London, talks about Kusama’s Infinity Rooms ; Mika Yoshitake, the curator of an exhibition at the New York Botanical G...