The Week in Art

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...

This week: after four long months, commercial art galleries are open again in England. We discuss some of the London shows with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, and take a tour of Rachel Whiteread’s exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Grosvenor Hill, London. And we talk to the artist Idris Khan, who has a new exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery, about his oil,...

On this week's podcast: the world’s greatest art heist. As a new Netflix documentary hits our screens, who stole the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Manet, among other items, and are we any closer to finding them? We talk to Jeff Siegel, producer of the new Netflix series This is a Robbery about the 1990 heist at the Gardner museum, in Boston, Massachusetts. A...

The Art Newspaper ’s annual survey of museum attendance is out: just how many visitors and how much money have museums lost in the pandemic? And how have digital initiatives helped? José da Silva, exhibitions editor at The Art Newspaper, and one of the editors of our annual visitor figures survey, talks about the 77% global fall in visitor numbers and the huge losses in self-generated income in mu...

This week: Germany announces that its museums will send the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria: will other nations follow? We talk to Catherine Hickley, who broke the story of Germany’s planned restitution of the bronzes in The Art Newspaper this week, and to Dan Hicks, whose book The Brutish Museums tells the story of British colonial destruction and looting that led to the bronzes’ collection by muse...

On this week's podcast: the most influential annual art market report has just been published—so what does it tell us about the effects of a year of Covid-19 on the market? We talk to Clare McAndrew, the author of the The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Also in this episode, we talk to the scholar of Dada and Surrealism, Dawn Ades, about her book on Marcel Duchamp—and we address the de...

This week, we focus on two books: Aimee Dawson talks to Alice Procter about the debate over contested heritage in the UK and her book The Whole Picture , a strident call for colonial histories to be told in museums. Jori Finkel speaks to Glenn Adamson about Craft: An American History , a radical reappraisal of craft's role in forging American identity. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben L...

This week: the Frick Collection in New York has moved temporarily from its Gilded Age Mansion on Central Park to Marcel Breuer’s 1960s building created for the Whitney Museum. So what happens when the Old Masters meet Brutalism? We talk to Xavier Salomon, deputy director and chief curator of the Frick about this remarkable change of setting for one of the world’s great collections. We talk to Vinc...

This week: NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens. What are they? Are they a fad or do they represent the future of the art market? We talk to two people in the world of crypto commodities about the explosion of NFTs on the art market. We hear from the artist Beeple, whose piece Everydays: The First 5000 Days is the first standalone NFT work of art to be sold at auction, and to Jason Bailey, the founder of t...

This week: the curator Naomi Beckwith and artist Okwui Okpokwasili discuss Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America , a major show at the New Museum in New York—the final project conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor. Also, we explore the effect of Covid-19 on artists with disabilities: we talk to the artist Cara Macwilliam and to Hannah Whitlock and Laura Miles from the UK charity O...