Arts news

• San Francisco’s Brutalist Vaillancourt Fountain Will Be Dismantled

  05-11-2025 22:40 via artnews.com
  The San Francisco Arts Commission board of directors has voted to dismantle a controversial concrete fountain by Armand Vaillancourt at Embarcadero Plaza.On Monday, November 3, the board voted eight to five to remove the brutalist Vaillancourt Fountain to make way for the plaza’s redevelopment.The recreation and parks department reportedly plans to spend about $4.4 million to hire a disassembly consultant to take apart the fountain and store the pieces for three years. The department
  
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• US Antiques and Decorative Arts Hit Hard By Trump Tariffs

  05-11-2025 22:33 via artnews.com
  Import tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, that took effect October 14, are reportedly causing unintentional harm to the international trade of antiques and decorative arts.The executive order signed on September 29 aimed to support domestic manufacturers by placing 25 percent tariffs on wood imports and products such as upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets. Imported softwood timber and lumber will see an increase of 10 percent due to the tariffs, while upholstered wooden products
  
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• This Is An Emergency

  05-11-2025 22:03 via artsjournal.com
  
  <a href="https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/2025/11/this-is-an-emergency.html" title="This Is An Emergency” rel=”nofollow”> <img
  
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• V&A East Museum Will Open in London’s Olympic Park in April 2026

  05-11-2025 21:25 via artnews.com
  London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has announced an opening date for the newest branch of its museum. The five-story building, designed by the Irish architecture firm O’Donnell + Tuomey, will open to the public on Apr. 18, 2026. The V&A East, as the new outpost is called, will be home to exhibitions, live events, site-specific commissions, and performances.V&A East Storehouse opened in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park earlier this year. Designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it h
  
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• Heritage Experts Call for International Task Force to Oversee Palmyra Restoration

  05-11-2025 21:21 via artnews.com
  Heritage experts have called for an international task force to aid the restoration of the ancient Syrian city Palmyria, following the first comprehensive conference on the topic since the end of Bashar Al Assad’s regime in 2019.International heritage officials, antiquities authorities, and Syrian residents gathered in Switzerland last week at a conference organized by UNESCO and the Aliph Foundation, as first reported by The Art Newspaper. The group later recommended establishing an inter
  
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• Christine Sun Kim Heads to Gallery Hyundai, John Tain Hired by Carnegie Museum of Art, and More: Industry Moves for November 5, 2025

  05-11-2025 21:06 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Industry MovesYoshitomo Nara Heads to David Zwirner: The Japanese artist will continue his relationship with Pace, which has represented him for 14 years, as ARTnews previously reported. Blum, a gallery that previously showed Nara, recently announced plans to close.Christine Sun
  
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• Kristin Chenoweth On The Backlash To Her Tweet On Charlie Kirk’s Death

  05-11-2025 21:02 via hollywoodreporter.com
  
  “It was tough on me, but I’m not going to answer any questions about it because I dealt with it. It nearly broke me, and that’s all I’m going to say. You probably know my heart, so you probably know. … Anybody that knows me knows how I believe.” – The Hollywood Reporter
  
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• Consignors to This Season’s New York Auctions, Revealed: Who’s Selling Their Art at the November Sales?

  05-11-2025 20:58 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.As the fall auction season returns to New York, it does so under unusually uneven skies.This year’s major market events have played out like a series of plot twists: Art Basel in Switzerland, the bellwether of blue-chip appetite, left many dealers underwhelmed in June, with ins
  
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• “The Baker’s Wife,” A Musical That’s Been Proofing In The Oven For 50 Years

  05-11-2025 20:03 via theatermania.com
  
  Composer Stephen Schwartz and book writer Joseph Stein spent months on a pre-Broadway tour in 1976 trying to fix the show. It didn’t work, although one song, “Meadowlark,” became a hit. Since a revival in 2002, productions have been trying to address the piece’s problems, and now there’s a high-profile staging Off-Broadway. – TheaterMania
  
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• Raquelín Mendieta, Longtime Administrator of Ana Mendieta Estate, Dies at 79

  05-11-2025 19:40 via artnews.com
  Raquelín Mendieta, the longtime administrator of the estate of his sister, artist Ana Mendieta, died on October 24 in Miami. She was 79. Her family said in a statement that the cause was a long illness.Ana Mendieta died in the early hours of September 8, 1985, after falling from the 34th floor of her Greenwich Village apartment, which she shared with her husband Carl Andre. (Andre was charged and ultimately acquitted of her murder, and Mendieta’s death sharply divided the New York a
  
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• In The Attention Economy, Our Inner Lives Are Shrinking

  05-11-2025 19:35 via commonwealmagazine.org
  
  Roughly speaking, globalization flattens space and pares away cultural particularity; neoliberalism flattens value, reducing everything to its going rate on the market; the internet, and especially social media, flatten transactions and relationships into their barest, most instrumentalized form. – Commonweal
  
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• No Master Thieves Here: Louvre Bandits Were Petty Criminals, Police Say

  05-11-2025 19:15 via artnews.com
  
  “This is not quite everyday delinquency … but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime,” Laure Beccuau told France Info Radio. – ARTnews
  
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• Is Marseille Becoming A Dance Capital?

  05-11-2025 19:01 via dancemagazine.com
  
  “The Ballet National de Marseille has also taken a bold new direction under the leadership of the experimental collective (LA)Horde, producing edgy performances drawing on internet-native styles like jumpstyle and TikTok choreography. Dancers and choreographers are relocating to the city, too.” – Dance Magazine
  
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• ‘A model of the transnational artist’: Cuban artist Wifredo Lam gets first US retrospective

  05-11-2025 19:01
  The major modernist artist is finally getting a blockbuster exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, celebrating a career filled with innovationAlthough he was a major modernist artist whose collaborators ranged from European greats like Pablo Picasso and André Breton to new world giants like Aimé Césaire, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam has not seen a major US retrospective worthy of his stature. That changes with the MoMA’s blockbuster show Wifredo Lam: When I D
  
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• V&A East to Open with Gen Z in Mind, Calls for US Museums to Return Nazi-Looted Artworks Grow Louder, Sotheby’s Selling Manny Davidson Collection: Morning Links for November 5, 2025.

  05-11-2025 18:52 via artnews.com
  The HeadlinesA MUSEUM FOR GEN Z. Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the new V&A East, wants London’s long-awaited cultural hub to spark creative passion in Gen Z visitors when it opens in the spring, he told the Guardian. “As a child, he often felt excluded from museums, sensing they didn’t tell the stories of Black British people like him. His sister Margaret changed his perspective, telling him, “These spaces belong to all of us, and you can change them.” Now, he
  
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• V&A East Opens with Gen Z in Mind, Calls for US Museums to Return Nazi-Looted Artworks Grow Louder, Sotheby’s Selling Manny Davidson Collection: Morning Links for November 5, 2025.

  05-11-2025 18:52 via artnews.com
  The HeadlinesA MUSEUM FOR GEN Z. Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the new V&A East, wants London’s long-awaited cultural hub to spark creative passion in Gen Z visitors, he told the Guardian. “As a child, he often felt excluded from museums, sensing they didn’t tell the stories of Black British people like him. His sister Margaret changed his perspective, telling him, “These spaces belong to all of us, and you can change them.” Now, he’s fulfilling that pro
  
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• Book Publishing’s Horror Genre Is Breaking Records

  05-11-2025 18:44 via thebookseller.com
  
  2024’s total figure of 836,199 was its biggest volume performance since 2009 and, so far in 2025, we have seen 628,431 books pass through the tills, an increase of 6.7% against the first 42 weeks of last year. – The Bookseller
  
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• Detroit Institute of Arts Workers Move to Unionize

  05-11-2025 18:33 via artnews.com
  Employees at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) announced plans to form a union on Tuesday, November 4, joining a wave of organizing that has swept cultural institutions across the United States in recent years.According to a statement shared with ARTnews, DIA staff are seeking to unionize with AFSCME Cultural Workers United (AFSCME Michigan), a division of the national AFSCME union that represents workers at cultural institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of
  
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• NYC’s Joyce Theatre Gets $15M Boost For Dance

  05-11-2025 18:31 via nytimes.com
  
  Two of New York’s most prominent dance philanthropists are donating $15 million to the Joyce Theater, a leading dance stage in Manhattan, helping to assure the theater’s long-term financial stability at a time when dance organizations are struggling with declining financial support and audiences. – The New York Times
  
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• Librarians On The Front Lines Of Civilization

  05-11-2025 18:15 via lithub.com
  
  The librarian is a seeker and keeper of truth, and that makes her a dangerous figure in the eyes of those who fear the fullest, most comprehensive, and most uncomfortable truths emerging. – LitHub
  
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• A Non-Profit Is Crawling Paywalled Content And Supplying It To AI Companies

  05-11-2025 18:15 via theatlantic.com
  
  Common Crawl has opened a back door for AI companies to train their models with paywalled articles from major news websites. And the foundation appears to be lying to publishers about this—as well as masking the actual contents of its archives. – The Atlantic
  
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• DJing As Therapy For Ukrainian War Veterans

  05-11-2025 18:05 via theguardian.com
  
  “At the Superhumans Centre, near Lviv, … the most critically war-wounded are treated with prosthetics and reconstructive surgery, and psychological support is given to children and adults affected by the war. And within the range of treatment is music therapy” — including “the EnterDJ programme, which teaches veterans the basics of mixing.” – The Guardian
  
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• Trump’s Skill With Imperial Images

  05-11-2025 17:31 via washingtonpost.com
  
  Trump’s aggressive moves to accumulate political power — deploying National Guard troops, invoking massive tariffs —have prompted protests and lawsuits as well as plaudits. But he is also asserting his power through what might be called an imperial aesthetic: surrounding his presidency with visual cues designed to project personal command and grandeur. – Washington Post
  
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• Independent Curator Kate Wong Organizing NADA Miami’s ‘Curated Spotlight’ Section

  05-11-2025 17:28 via artnews.com
  The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has appointed Vancouver-based curator Kate Wong to oversee the Miami fair’s Curated Spotlight section. This is the sixth time that NADA has appointed an independent curator to highlight a selection of up-and-coming galleries and nonprofit art spaces who are participating in the fair. Previous editions of Curated Spotlight were selected by Ebony L. Haynes, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Jasmine Wahi, and Jenée-Daria Strand (Miami), and Kendra Jayne Pat
  
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• Independent Curator Karen Wong Organizing NADA Miami’s ‘Curated Spotlight’ Section

  05-11-2025 17:28 via artnews.com
  The New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) has appointed Vancouver-based curator Kate Wong to oversee the Miami fair’s Curated Spotlight section. This is the sixth time that NADA has appointed an independent curator to highlight a selection of up-and-coming galleries and nonprofit art spaces who are participating in the fair. Previous editions of Curated Spotlight were selected by Ebony L. Haynes, Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels, Jasmine Wahi, and Jenée-Daria Strand (Miami), and Kendra Jayne Pat
  
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• Warning: BBC Is A Titanic On Collision Course

  05-11-2025 17:15 via theguardian.com
  
  “The way that consumption habits have shifted over the last five years is almost more drastic than it was in the previous 50 years. You have a pre-TikTok and post-TikTok split in the way that consumption was felt and experienced by people.” – The Guardian
  
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• Art Institute Of Chicago Is Building $50 Million Conservation Center

  05-11-2025 17:04 via wbez.org
  
  “The 25,000-square-foot facility, to be known as the Grainger Center for Conservation and Science, will contain conservation laboratories, offices and a study center as well as a gallery offering conservation-related exhibitions and opportunities to watch conservators at work.” Construction will begin early next year. – WBEZ (Chicago)
  
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• The Art World Reacts to Zohran Mamdani’s Win as Mayor of New York City: ‘A Remarkable Moment’

  05-11-2025 16:43 via artnews.com
  Following Zohran Mamdani’s historic win as Mayor of New York City, the art world has weighed in, with many artists, curators, and critics based in the city—and even some situated in locales beyond New York—responding to his victory with hope and joy. A few others, meanwhile, questioned whether his leadership would positively impact the city’s art scene.Siddartha Mitter, a New York–based critic who is on the team seeing through Koyo Kouoh’s vision for the 2026
  
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• Historic Philadelphia Theater To Become Cicely Tyson Performing Arts Center

  05-11-2025 16:32 via msn.com
  
  The former Logan Theatre, a 1923 movie palace on Broad Street in North Philadelphia which has been empty since 1992, will undergo a $10 million dollar renovation. The venue will include a 2,650-seat theater for plays and musicals, a 200-seat restaurant with live jazz, and a 4,000-square-foot gift shop. – The Philadelphia Inquirer (MSN)
  
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• Grade Inflation At Elite Colleges: Students Are Obsessed With “Points Taken Off”

  05-11-2025 16:06 via msn.com
  
  Harvard administrators have released a statement saying that grade inflation has crossed a catastrophic threshold. Many Harvard undergrads treated the statement as a catastrophe in itself. (Yes, tears were shed.) Yet, writes Ian Bogost, there are pressures on both students and instructors which just about guarantee grade inflation. – The Atlantic (MSN)
  
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• It’s Official: The Big, Weird, Brutalist Fountain In San Francisco Will Be Removed

  05-11-2025 15:33 via yahoo.com
  
  “A divided San Francisco Arts Commission on Monday approved a plan to at least temporarily remove the Vaillancourt Fountain from Embarcadero Plaza, a final sign-off that means the massive artwork could be dismantled as soon as early next year.” – San Francisco Chronicle (Yahoo!)
  
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• For First Time, Diary Collection Wins Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction

  05-11-2025 15:01 via yahoo.com
  
  “How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner charts the Australian writer’s life from her early career in bohemian Melbourne to raising her daughter in the 1970s and her disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.” The jury’s vote was unanimous, with one judge calling it “a remarkable, addictive book.” – BBC (Yahoo!)
  
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• Prix Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Prize, Goes To 20th-Century Family Saga “The Empty House”

  05-11-2025 14:40 via yahoo.com
  
  “Laurent Mauvignier Tuesday won France’s top literary award, the Goncourt, for his family saga spanning the 20th century and recounting the story of his grandmother accused of collaborating during World War II. Just one round of voting sufficed for the jury to select La Maison Vide.” – AFP (Yahoo!)
  
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• Medieval Tower In Rome Collapses, Kills Worker

  05-11-2025 14:15 via apnews.com
  
  During renovations on the 13th-century Torre dei Conti, the structure started to collapse, trapping two workers. During the 11-hour rescue operations, passersby watched as more of the tower crumbled. Both of the trapped men were rescued alive, though one died of his injuries shortly afterward. – AP
  
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• The Marbles review – thoughtful outline of case for giving the Parthenon marbles back to Greece

  05-11-2025 14:00
  David Wilkinson’s personal exploration of the issues open-mindedly examines both sides of a contentious political debateIn a very personal and thoughtful documentary, film-maker David Wilkinson revives the great question of the restitution of the Parthenon marbles, that longstanding Hellenic enthusiasm and flagship cultural cause for the educated British left from Lord Byron in the 1810s to Christopher Hitchens in the 1980s (although Hitchens’ vehement advocacy is not mentioned here)
  
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• Meet the 6 Gallerists Transforming Nigeria’s Art Scene, as Art X Lagos Opens

  05-11-2025 13:18 via artnews.com
  As Art X Lagos celebrates its tenth anniversary this week, the event has evolved into more than simply an art fair—it’s become a cultural movement. Since its inception, the fair, which runs November 6 to November 9, has bridged local and global audiences, spotlighting contemporary African voices while nurturing a new generation of collectors.However, the success of Art X Lagos wouldn’t be possible without the broader ecosystem of artists and dealers in Nigeria, who have helped
  
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• British Aristocrat Charles March, the 11th Duke of Richmond, is Showing His Minimalist, Abstract Photos in London

  05-11-2025 12:43 via artnews.com
  Speedster, photographer, arts patron…. British aristocrat Charles March, aka the Duke of Richmond, wears many hats. On Tuesday, he opened his new show of minimalist, abstract photos at London’s Hamiltons Gallery. Titled “Sandscript,” the exhibition runs through January 16 and “recalls the fluid brushwork of Chinese ink painting,” he said.Vintage automobile enthusiast March, who is the founder of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Goodwood Revival, set up the
  
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• British Aristocrat Charles March, the 11th Duke of Kent, is Showing His Minimalist, Abstract Photos in London

  05-11-2025 12:43 via artnews.com
  Speedster, photographer, arts patron…. British aristocrat Charles March, aka the 11th Duke of Kent, wears many hats. On Tuesday, he opened his new show of minimalist, abstract photos at London’s Hamiltons Gallery. Titled “Sandscript,” the exhibition runs through January 16 and “recalls the fluid brushwork of Chinese ink painting,” he said.Vintage automobile enthusiast March, who is the founder of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Goodwood Revival, set up the
  
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• British Aristocrat Charles March is Showing His Minimalist, Abstract Photos in London

  05-11-2025 12:43 via artnews.com
  Speedster, photographer, arts patron, and British aristocrat Charles March, aka the Duke of Richmond, wears many hats. On Tuesday, November 4, March opened his new show of minimalist, abstract photos at London’s Hamiltons Gallery. The exhibition, titled “Sandscript,” runs through January 16 and, he said, “recalls the fluid brushwork of Chinese ink painting.”A vintage automobile enthusiast, March is the founder of the Goodwood Festival of Speed and Goodwood Revival a
  
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• Sotheby’s Gears Up to Sell Real Estate Mogul Manny Davidson’s Huge Collection in Paris

  05-11-2025 11:39 via artnews.com
  Press trips and their rigid itineraries are the antithesis of spontaneity, which is why I generally dislike them, among other reasons. Impromptu, off-the-cuff art tours, though, are often a delight. I was fortunate enough be given one when I bumped into Chloe Stead, Sotheby’s global head of private sale, Old Masters, on Monday at the house’s Paris HQ. I had hopped over the Channel from London to talk wildcats and fractionaliizing Dutch masterpieces with billionaire philanthropist Tho
  
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• Drink tea, tidy up and take action! Can advice from artists really improve your life?

  05-11-2025 11:37
  As three self-help books chock full of arty wisdom are released, an art critic tests whether they can improve a seemingly lost cause: himYou’d think at this point I would have learned all the lessons I could from art. I have been a full-time, professional art critic for most of my adult life. I spend my days in galleries, surrounded by art, reading about it, absorbing it. I like art a lot, but I am also cynical about its supposed benefits beyond the merely aesthetic.But just as a new study
  
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