Arts news

• Author Brandon Taylor Shares His Top Five Recent Obsessions

  25-11-2025 19:25 via artnews.com
  Brandon Taylor is the New York–based author of the recently released novel Minor Black Figures. Below, he discusses creative genius and community, along with related interests.
  
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• Bonhams Saw Significant Revenue Drop in 2024, In Line With the Big Three

  08-01-2026 20:44 via artnews.com
  UK-based auction house Bonhams saw its pre-tax loss jump almost 90 percent to £213 million ($286.3 million) in 2024, as revenue fell 9 percent to £176 million ($236.6 million), according to its most recent filings with UK’s Companies House, as reported by the Financial Times.(Financial filings released through Companies House, the UK’s rough equivalent of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, typically trail by one year.)The house saw impairment charges of £1
  
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• Man Serving Life Sentence for Attacking Six-Year-Old at Tate Modern Faces New Assault Charges

  08-01-2026 20:25 via artnews.com
  Jonty Bravery, a 24-year-old man who was given a life sentence for throwing a six-year-old French boy from the 10th floor balcony at the Tate Modern in London, now faces an additional sentence for new charges.Bravery was charged for—and recently found guilty of—assaulting two nurses in September 2024 at Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital in the UK. He has been held at Broadmoor since being sentenced for the Tate attack in 2020. That year, he was handed another 1
  
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• Yoshiko Mori, Former Chair of Mori Art Museum, Has Died at 85

  08-01-2026 20:02 via artnews.com
  Yoshiko Mori, chairperson emerita of Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum, died on December 23 from pneumonia. She was 85 years old. The museum confirmed her death in a statement on Tuesday.  She and her husband, real estate developer Minoru Mori, who died in 2012, opened the museum, considered one of Japan’s top contemporary art institutions,in 2003. “For more than two decades since then,” the museum said in a statement, “she devoted herself with great passion to cont
  
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• The U.S. Returned 7 Ancient Artifacts to Egypt, From Mummified Fish to a Falcon Head

  08-01-2026 19:18 via artnews.com
  Thanks to the collaboration of several government organizations in the United States and Egypt, seven artifacts were recently repatriated to Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The objects had been smuggled from the country in separate cases and are from different time periods, according to Shaaban Abdel Gawad, director-general of the Repatriation of Antiquities Department and supervisor of the Antiquities Units in Ports. The news was first reported in Egyptian news outlet Ahram O
  
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• Steve Jobs’s Early Apple Artifacts Go Under the Hammer at RR Auction

  08-01-2026 19:17 via artnews.com
  A collection of early Apple computers and Steve Jobs memorabilia has gone up for auction as the technology company approaches its 50th anniversary, underscoring a growing appetite for artifacts linked to modern corporate mythology.The sale, run by Boston-based RR Auction, comprises 191 lots spanning vintage Apple hardware, original corporate documents, and personal belongings from Jobs’s childhood bedroom in Los Altos, California. Bidding opened this week and will run through January
  
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• Sexual Assault Lawsuit Against Norval Morrisseau Estate Is Tossed Out

  08-01-2026 17:18 via artnews.com
  A lawsuit that alleged sexual assault by the late artist Norval Morrisseau was tossed out by British Columbia’s Supreme Court this week, according to the Canadian Press.Filed against the artist’s estate, the lawsuit by Mark Anthony Jacobson claimed that Morrisseau had touched his buttocks without his consent. Jacobson claimed that he had visited Morrisseau in 2006, roughly a year prior to the Anishinaabe artist’s death, after an assistant told Jacobson that Morrisseau could hea
  
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• Fungi: Anarchist Designers review – a perverse plunge into mushroom mayhem, from stinkhorns to zombie-makers

  08-01-2026 15:03
  Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam
  They have poisoned emperors, taken over insect brains and survived atomic bombs. This Dantean journey through fungal hell is riveting – though frogs may disagreeSylvia Plath’s poem Mushrooms is a sinister paean to the natural world. Her observations on fungi are freighted with foreboding, noting how “very / Whitely, discreetly, / Very quietly” they “Take hold on the loam, / Acquire the air”. The poem ends: “We shall by morning
  
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• 6 Works to Know by Grandma Moses

  08-01-2026 15:00 via artnews.com
  “Her primitive paintings captured the spirit and preserved the scene of a vanishing countryside.” So reads the epitaph of American artist Grandma Moses (aka Anna Mary Robertson Moses), whose lifetime remarkably stretched from the Civil War to the Kennedy administration. A self-taught artist who didn’t start painting until her late 70s, Moses created scenes of a bygone American era that were treasured by the public yet kept at a distance by the art establishment. In the 1,500-pl
  
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• Calendar: Every Major Art Fair Taking Place in 2026

  08-01-2026 14:15 via artnews.com
  In 2026, there is no shortage of art fairs taking place around the world. When it comes to the art market this year, all eyes will be on the Gulf region as Art Basel launches a fair in Qatar this February and Frieze takes over Abu Dhabi Art, which runs in November. One other major change to the calendar is that Frieze Seoul and the Armory Show will no longer conflict with each other. Since last summer, there have been a slew of gallery closures, running the gamut from blue-chip dealerships to em
  
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• Amid Widespread Humanities Cuts, Elite Universities Suspend or Reduce Art History Graduate Admissions

  08-01-2026 11:00 via artnews.com
  Amid widespread budget deficits, several top universities have suspended admissions to their art history graduate programs or cut the size of the cohorts they will admit, along with modifications to other humanities concentrations. Boston University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and Princeton University are among those institutions seeing changes.The cutbacks come in the context of a widely discussed crisis in higher education. Philadelphia-based public radio station WHYY repor
  
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• Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

  08-01-2026 06:00
  The president has vowed to kill off ‘woke’ in his second term in office, and the venerable cultural institution a few blocks from the White House is in his sightsOn 30 May last year, Kim Sajet was working in her office in the grandly porticoed National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The gallery is one of the most important branches of the Smithsonian Institution, the complex of national museums that, for almost 200 years, has told the story of the nation. The director’s sui
  
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• Venezuela’s Cultural Scene Looks On in Moment of Historic Upheaval Following Maduro Ouster

  07-01-2026 21:34 via artnews.com
  In a historic military operation that flouted international law, the United States invaded the South American nation of Venezuela early Saturday morning, seizing the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who will face federal charges in New York. US President Donald Trump has openly said that his administration will “run” the country until a favored administration takes control, and said that the US will revive the crumbling petrochemical infrastr
  
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• Artist Diana Thater Partners with Conservation Lab to Save Work Destroyed by Altadena Fire

  07-01-2026 19:57 via artnews.com
  When the fire reached Diana Thater’s home in Altadena last January, there was no time for triage. As she and her husband, the artist T. Kelly Mason, evacuated ahead of the flames, Mason grabbed what he could carry: a server and several hard drives. Thater took the cats. Everything else—decades of raw footage, master tapes, installation manuals, ephemera, paintings—was left behind in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground.“It’s hard to live to be 6
  
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• After a 2025 of Over-Performances, Li Hei Di’s Market Seems Poised to Take Another Jump This Year

  07-01-2026 19:55 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.There are artists whose auction markets feel like accidents—brief flare‑ups of appetite fueled by novelty, narrative, or a single well‑placed sale. And then there are artists whose markets feel, even early on, like the visible surface of something deeper and slower moving. Li Hei
  
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• Uffizi Workers Protest With Flags and Flares Against ‘Precarious Lives’

  07-01-2026 19:21 via artnews.com
  Workers waving flags and holding flares staged a protest at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence behind a banner reading “Basta Vite Precarie” (No Move Precarious Lives).As reported by the Art Newspaper, the protest in the Piazzale degli Uffizi was convened after some temporary workers at the museum—assigned to roles in security, reception, ticketing, the bookshop, and the coatroom—lost their jobs following a change in service providers at the institution last fall. That rais
  
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• Diriyah Biennale Announces Artists for 2026 Contemporary Art Edition

  07-01-2026 18:57 via artnews.com
  The Diriyah Biennale Foundation has announced the artists participating in the third edition of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, opening on January 30, in the JAX District, an industrial zone that has been converted into an arts complex in Diriyah, near the capital city of Riyadh.Taking the title “In Interludes and Transitions,” this edition of the Biennale will be curated by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed and feature more than 65 artists, alongside over 20 new commissions.Ra
  
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• US Artists Are Increasingly Self-Funding Institutional Projects, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale Names Artists: Morning Links for January 7, 2025

  07-01-2026 18:07 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesPAY TO PLAY. As The Art Newspaper points out, Dominican American artist Lucia Hierro’s ambitious recent commission, a 7.5-foot chair installation, illustrates a growing crisis in the US art world: artists are increasingly expected to raise the funds for institutional projects. Fabrication costs for her work far exceeded the commissioni
  
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• ‘For a moment, only that story matters’: my plan to reignite the all-consuming love of books

  07-01-2026 18:06
  Reading for pleasure rates are shockingly low in young people. So we should all get behind a new drive to turn them into avid readers. Why not start with books about art?A girl on the cusp of adolescence gazes down at a book. Her left hand rests against her flushed pink cheeks, while her right clutches the pages, ready to turn to find out what happens next. She has porcelain-like skin and golden hair seemingly full of air, executed in textures that contrast with the scratchy, loose marks that ma
  
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• Painter Amy Sillman Leaves Gladstone Gallery for David Zwirner

  07-01-2026 17:32 via artnews.com
  David Zwirner Gallery now represents New York–based artist Amy Sillman. Sillman, whose colorful paintings and drawings expertly straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. She previously worked with Gladstone Gallery. Her first show there, “Mostly Drawing” in 2018, offered viewers “a thrilling, rollercoaster-like experience,” as Phyllis Tuchman wrote in her review for ARTnews.Before that, Sillman showed with Capitain Petzel and carlier | gebauer in Berlin,
  
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• A Hit Book’s Cover, Featuring a Vermeer Painting, Can’t Stop ‘Ragebaiting’ People

  07-01-2026 17:25 via artnews.com
  Mona’s Eyes, a recently published novel by Thomas Schlesser, has drawn widespread praise, leading Barnes & Noble to name it the book of the year for 2025. But it is also gaining less positive notice for a reason that has nothing to do with the text itself: its cover.“I feel like I’m being ragebaited by this book cover,” reads the name of a viral Reddit thread devoted to Mona Eye’s, which is about a girl who journeys through Paris’s museums with her grandfa
  
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• Franco Regime Sought to Censor Robert Motherwell Painting in Spain, New Documents Confirm

  07-01-2026 17:09 via artnews.com
  Longstanding questions about an episode surrounding a Robert Motherwell painting in Spain have finally been answered: the Franco regime really did try to censor the Abstract Expressionist’s work, proposing an altered title for one work with a name that explicitly referred to the Spanish Republic.The drama centered around Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 35 (1954–58), one of more than one 150 paintings in a series of abstractions that obliquely refer to the Spanish Civil War via blac
  
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• NFT Paris and RWA Paris Shelved With One-Month Notice Due to ‘Crypto and NFT Market Collapse,’ Founder Says

  07-01-2026 13:11 via artnews.com
  NFT Paris, Europe’s biggest annual conference for the Web3, NFT, and digital ownership community, has been cancelled just a month before it was set to open at the Grande Halle de la Villette. The organizers said that current market conditions made the event financially impossible.“The [crypto and NFT] market collapse hit us hard,” NFT Paris’ founder, Alexandre Tsydenkov, wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday. “Despite drastic cost cuts and months of trying to make it work, w
  
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• NFT Paris and RWA Paris Canceled With One-Month Notice Due to ‘Crypto and NFT Market Collapse,’ Founder Says

  07-01-2026 13:11 via artnews.com
  NFT Paris—Europe’s biggest annual conference for the Web3, NFT, and digital ownership community—has been canceled just a month before it was set to open at the Grande Halle de la Villette in the French capital. The organizers said that current market conditions made the event financially impossible.“The [crypto and NFT] market collapse hit us hard,” NFT Paris’s founder, Alexandre Tsydenkov, wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday. “Despite drastic cost cuts and mon
  
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• Hard Truths: Can an Artist Dally With Dubious Funding and Come Out Clean on the Other Side?

  07-01-2026 13:00 via artnews.com
  With a world in crisis and an art market spinning out of control, ace art-world consultants Chen & Lampert deliver hard truths in response to questions sent by Art in America readers from far and wide.My artist talent agent has been working hard pursuing a brand collaboration that will take me to the next level, and he landed an offer from a top-tier fashion brand to do an athleisure line based on my painting. I’m totally psyched, but there are easy-to-Google articl
  
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• Australia Post apologises for losing Aboriginal artist’s painting worth $4,000

  07-01-2026 07:09
  Bobbi Lockyer says she sent the item express post with tracking as the national postal service says the search continuesFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastJust before Christmas, Aboriginal artist Bobbi Lockyer packed up a precious painting she had spent more than a hundred hours on and sent it to her client.What arrived at the other end was an empty package. Continue reading...
  
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• Art could save your life! Five creative ways to make 2026 happier, healthier and more hopeful

  07-01-2026 06:00
  Engaging in creativity can reduce depression, improve immunity and delay ageing – all while you’re having funFor some reason, we have collectively agreed that new year is the time to reinvent ourselves. The problem, for many people, is that we’ve tried all the usual health kicks – running, yoga, meditation, the latest diets – even if we haven’t really enjoyed them, in a bid to improve our minds and bodies. But have any of us given as much thought to creativity
  
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• Was Sid Caesar’s Cancellation a Media Parable for Today?

  07-01-2026 05:51 via artsjournal.com
  It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don’t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar’s “Show of Shows” went off the air in 1954 and I
  
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• Bob Monk, Longtime Gagosian Director and Quiet Market Force, Dies at 75

  06-01-2026 22:41 via artnews.com
  Bob Monk, a Gagosian director who was with the gallery for more than 20 years, working closely with artists such as Ed Ruscha and Richard Artschwager, died on December 15 at 75. His ex-wife, Wendy Monk, said the cause was complications from a heart condition.Monk was a quiet force of the New York art market, with a CV that included working for dealer Leo Castelli and Sotheby’s, to say little of the gallery that Monk himself cofounded. Across several decades, he established himself as a qui
  
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• Jaqueline Humphries Survey Plays Hide-and-Seek

  06-01-2026 21:54 via artnews.com
  I was previously unfamiliar with the architecture of the Aspen Art Museum, having visited only before the current building, designed by Shigeru Ban, opened in 2014. My ignorance turned out to be helpful, enabling me to be properly confused by Jacqueline Humphries’s painting installation TSLA (2025). I first saw it, the night before the artist’s survey show opened, through the plate glass wall at the museum’s entrance: five large canvases (8 by 7 1/2 feet), her usual near-square
  
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