Arts news

• Opera In Decline? Maybe Not In Australia, Suggest Recent Data

  06-11-2025 19:15 via artshub.com.au
  
  ‘Both our Sydney summer and winter 2025 seasons recorded their highest ever number of first-time purchasers, while repeat purchasers also grew. This increase in first-time attendees shows growing interest among younger, culturally curious, and tourism-driven audiences.’ – ArtsHub
  
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• Sotheby’s to Offer the Most Valuable Single-Owner Whiskey Collection Ever Sold

  09-01-2026 12:21 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s is binning any notion of “dry January” by betting big on whisky at the end of this month. At its new Breuer Building HQ on January 24, the house will host its first-ever live, single-owner sale devoted entirely to American whisky.Called The Great American Whisky Collection, it will be the most valuable collection of its kind to hit the market, with a high estimate of $1.7 million. A total of 360 bottles will hit the auction block, spread across 320 lots.  The auc
  
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• A Show About French Theory Boils Big Ideas Down to Wall Decor

  09-01-2026 11:00 via artnews.com
  There is a danger in trying to say everything and it is not that you might say nothing. It is that you might say worse than nothing: You might say something that you didn’t intend.“Echo Delay Reverb: American Art, Francophile Thought,” an ambitious show at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, aims to trace the effect of 20th-century French writers on American art since the 1970s. Works from 60 artists are set alongside quotations by, photographs of, and book covers from Jean-Paul Sart
  
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• Sperone Westwater Dissolution Fight Raises Questions Over Governance and Artist Payments

  08-01-2026 23:29 via artnews.com
  Sperone Westwater’s closure has exposed a deeper legal and financial dispute than first suggested by the gallery’s sudden shutdown at the end of 2025. Newly filed court documents allege governance failures, disputed payments to artists, and years of internal deadlock at the 50-year-old New York firm.As Artnet News reported earlier this week, the gallery closed amid a legal battle between its two principals, Gian Enzo Sperone and Angela Westwater, who each control 50 percent of t
  
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• MSCHF’s Latest Project Could See a Two-Year-Old Cow Slaughtered

  08-01-2026 22:56 via artnews.com
  In about two months, the fate of a cow named Angus will be decided. At present, the outlook is grim: Angus is slated to be turned into roughly 1,200 hamburger patties and four leather handbags. But MSCHF—the art collective behind viral artworks ranging from Big Red Boots to a branded ATM publicly displaying users’ account balances—appears to be hoping that might still change in the next 64 days.Angus, who lives on a farm in upstate New York, is the subject of MSCHF’s ongo
  
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• MSCHF’s Latest Project Could See a Two-Year Cow Slaughtered

  08-01-2026 22:56 via artnews.com
  In about two months, the fate of a cow named Angus will be decided. At present, the outlook is grim: Angus is slated to be turned into roughly 1,200 hamburger patties and four leather handbags. But MSCHF—the art collective behind viral artworks ranging from Big Red Boots to a branded ATM publicly displaying users’ account balances—appears to be hoping that might still change in the next 64 days.Angus, who lives on a farm in upstate New York, is the subject of MSCHF’s ongo
  
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• Scientists Extract DNA from Drawing That Could Connect to Leonardo da Vinci

  08-01-2026 22:34 via artnews.com
  Scientists extracted DNA from a possible Leonardo da Vinci drawing that may provide genetic links to one of the most storied humans to walk the Earth. In a not-yet-peer-reviewed paper posted Tuesday in a preprint database, researchers from the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project (LDVP) suggested that there may be connections between a chalk sketch titled Holy Child and materials thought to contain traces of members of the artist’s extended family.As reported in Science, “The preprint concl
  
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• Researchers Find 60,000-Year-Old Poisoned Arrowheads in Africa

  08-01-2026 22:34 via artnews.com
  Researchers from South Africa and Sweden have found traces of poison on 60,000-year-old arrowheads in South Africa. Their discovery, reported by Stockholm University in the journal Science Advances, is the earliest direct evidence of the use of poisoned hunting weapons in the world so far. The oldest poisoned arrowheads known prior to the present study date to approximately 6,700 years ago.The quartz arrowheads were collected from sediment at Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Afri
  
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• Smithsonian Reportedly Told Staffer to Remove ‘Unjust’ From Exhibition on Japanese American Internment

  08-01-2026 22:32 via artnews.com
  2025 was quite a year for the Smithsonian Institution, which found itself in the crosshairs of the second Trump administration early and often. Last year began with Trump calling for a purge of “anti-American ideology” from the institution’s 19 museums. 2026 appears to have brought more of the same.On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump Administration has redoubled its efforts to bring the Smithsonian to heel and has put forward a deadline of next Tuesday
  
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• France’s Top Art Award, the Prix Marcel Duchamp, Names 2026 Nominees

  08-01-2026 22:19 via artnews.com
  The Prix Marcel Duchamp, France’s most esteemed art prize, has named the artists nominated for its 2026 award. While there are normally four nominees, this year there are technically five.Those nominees include Joël Andrianomearisoa, a Malagasy artist whose vibrant textiles have been exhibited widely, and Josèfa Ntjam, a participant in last year’s Bienal de São Paulo whose installations and sculptures address fluid identities, often by making reference to the Afric
  
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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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• Casino Review Legal: A Comprehensive Guide

  08-01-2026 07:44 via zouchmagazine.com
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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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