Arts news

• Utah Balletgoers Are Getting Scammed With Counterfeit “Nutcracker” Tickets

  18-12-2025 17:03 via sltrib.com
  Ballet West in Salt Lake City reported Monday a “dramatic spike” in people “arriving at performances with fake or invalid tickets purchased from third-party sellers.” – The Salt Lake Tribune
  
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• Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000 Has Closed Its New York Branch: ‘Business Was Quite Slow’

  23-12-2025 19:02 via artnews.com
  In a multi-year market slowdown, numerous galleries large and small have either gone out of business or retrenched. Galerie 1900-2000, founded in Paris, opened a New York branch on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in February 2023 as a joint venture with Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, but the Manhattan outpost is going dark. Its last exhibition closed in September.“We decided to close the gallery mainly because the business was quite slow even though we made some fan
  
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• Jessica Silverman Adds Rebecca Manson, Rubin Acquisitions, and More: Industry Moves for December 23, 2025

  23-12-2025 18:57 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.Happy Tuesday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.Industry Moves
  Jessica Silverman Adds Rebecca Manson to Roster: The New York–based sculptor, known for her large intensely tactile ceramics, will debut at the gallery with a solo exhibition in Janua
  
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• Rome Introduces Entry Fee to See Famous Trevi Fountain

  23-12-2025 18:19 via artnews.com
  Rome has unveiled its latest tactic to curb over-tourism: a €2 ($2.35) entrance fee for close-up access to the Trevi Fountain.The measure will take effect on February 1 and be enforced daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri announced on Friday. The iconic fountain will remain visible from a distance free of charge, but visitors seeking a closer view will be required to purchase a ticket. The Italian capital previously implemented restrictions around the 18th-century Baroq
  
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• Louvre Installs Bars on Notorious Window at Center of Art Heist

  23-12-2025 17:32 via artnews.com
  While the Louvre was closed on Tuesday, the museum continued beefing up its security, this time by installing bars on the window through which thieves entered the institution in October and stole bejeweled objects, most of which still have not yet been recovered.The window faces into a space in the Galerie d’Apollon. The thieves reached the window from the outside using a ladder, then applied power tools to slice through the glass and come into the gallery.After being denounced by politici
  
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• Stop Making Sense: 2025 Was the Year No One Could Figure Out the Art Market 

  23-12-2025 16:30 via artnews.com
  Time has become a strange and elastic thing in the post-Covid era. Since President Donald Trump reentered office on January 20, his administration has “flooded the zone” with executive orders, outlandish statements, and social media posts both aggressive and digressive. The cumulative result is a year in which each week has seemed to last, for some for an eternity.So, looking back on 2025, it is exceptionally challenging to boil down what happened in the art market. There were so man
  
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• MoMA Adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to Its Collection, Becoming Latest Major Museum to Acquire Onchain Art

  23-12-2025 16:11 via artnews.com
  The Museum of Modern Art in New York has added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. The acquisition, which comes via donations from multiple collectors, is the latest acquisition by a major museum of on-chain art and one of the medium’s most significant institutional endorsements to date.CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 unique, algorithmically generated 24×24 pixel characters on the Ethereum blockchain. They were launched by Larva Labs in 2
  
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• Digital Art’s Narcissism Problem, Sotheby’s to Host Second Saudi Auction, Smithsonian Returns 3 Statues to Cambodia: Morning Links for December 23, 2026

  23-12-2025 15:14 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesDIGITAL NARCISSISM. The Art Newspaper opines that this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach exposed a problem in contemporary digital art: its entrenched culture of narcissism. Nowhere was this apparently clearer than in Zero 10, the fair’s new digital art initiative, which operated outside the usual safeguards of the art
  
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• In Memoriam 2025: Notable Artists, Dealers, Curators, and Collectors Who Died This Year

  23-12-2025 15:00 via artnews.com
  Each December, we remember the art-world figures we have lost in the past year. This year, our list includes the famous and the not-so-famous, insiders and outsiders, those who had long careers and those whose lives were cut tragically short. Below, a look back at some of the most notable artists, dealers, curators, art writers, and collectors who died in 2025.Read more of our “2025: Year in Review” coverage here.
  
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• Sotheby’s to Host Its Second Auction in Saudi Arabia in January and This Time Without Luxury Goods for Sale

  23-12-2025 12:02 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s has announced it will hold its second auction in Saudi Arabia on January 31. The house hosted the kingdom’s first international auction this past February, selling a mix of art, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia in the hyper-gentrified town of Diriyah, the original home of the Saudi royal family that is located a stone’s throw from the capital, Riyadh. Next year’s sale—titled “Origins II”—will be in the same location but only feature a
  
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• Sotheby’s to Host Its Second Auction in Saudi Arabia in January and This Time Only Art will Be Sold, No Luxury

  23-12-2025 12:02 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s has announced it will hold its second auction in Saudi Arabia on January 31, 2026. The house hosted the kingdom’s first international auction in February, selling a mix of art, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia in the hyper-gentrified town of Diriyah, the original home of the Saudi royal family. It is located a stone’s throw from the capital, Riyadh. Next year’s sale—titled “Origins II”—will be in the same place and only feature art, t
  
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• The Best Digital Art of 2025, According to Curators, Artists, and Critics

  23-12-2025 12:00 via artnews.com
  Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a bi-weekly column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.It’s the end of the year. You know what that means: a list. For this end-of-year edition of LinkRot, I asked artists, curators, gallerists, critics, and technologists to pick the best works of digital art they saw in 2025.The works chosen, like digital art itself, span a wide range of approaches and topics
  
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• Visionary Artist Tom Lloyd Deserves to Be Canonized. His Studio Museum Show Is Proof.

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  “We cannot be free until our art is free,” reads a flyer from the 1960s issued by the Arts Workers Coalition, an activist group whose protests helped reshape the New York art world. Remember that remark when you visit the Studio Museum in Harlem’s divine survey for Tom Lloyd, a member of the Coalition who spoke on similar terms with his art.Set inside a church-like space with a high ceiling, the Studio Museum’s one-room show is mainly devoted to Lloyd’s light sculpt
  
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• The Unhinged Degas Murder Mystery I Didn’t Know I Needed

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  The Artist has manic energy; everyone in this new TV series is yelling all the time. Even Edgar Degas. Even Thomas Edison. Even the robber baron and his wife and their live-in ballerina.This is art history at its most unhinged. But asking friends, “Have you seen The Artist on The Network?” has produced mostly furrowed-brow responses: this great TV show seems little-known at the moment, and the question is made enigmatic by its generic-sounding proper nouns. The final episodes air Dec
  
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• Our Most-Read Stories of 2025

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Let’s face it: with writing, as with everything else, popularity doesn’t always align with one’s proudest work—particularly when algorithms get involved. Usually, it’s the most salacious, scandalous, or sexy that takess off online. But 2025 was a welcome exception. This year, our most-read stories suggest a strong interest in art history, in serious criticism—and to my surprise, in animal welfare—among our readers. I like to think that implies that art c
  
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• New York City Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani Signs Open Letter Supporting Met Museum Union

  22-12-2025 23:17 via artnews.com
  New York City Mayoral-Elect Zohran Mamdani has signed an open letter in support of roughly 1,000 workers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board in November to approve a bargaining unit. The vote is scheduled to take place on January 13 and 15, 2026, and if it passes, the Met would become the largest unionized museum in the country.The letter was released on December 18 by the United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents the Met w
  
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• Artists Denounced Jeffrey Epstein’s Behavior Nearly 20 Years Ago—and Other Art-Related Reveals from the Newly Released Files

  22-12-2025 21:14 via artnews.com
  Federal authorities, journalists, and Jeffrey Epstein’s accusers have spent years scrutinizing the financier’s properties and possessions, piecing together an aesthetic world that often seemed to mirror the abuses he committed. Reporting by ARTnews, the New York Times, Artnet, and other publications has detailed Epstein’s fixation on sexually charged imagery, the theatrical displays inside his properties, and the objects that blurred the line between décor and surve
  
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• Uruguay’s Only Art Fair Wagers That It Can Create a New Regional Market Force

  22-12-2025 20:18 via artnews.com
  “There’s a before and after Este Arte,” Uruguay’s first and only art fair, according to its founder, Laura Bardier. The professionalization of Uruguay’s art market could read as Bardier’s biography—the curator who, through sheer insistence, converted a quixotic dream into a promising market machine—but that would misinterpret the ambition of Este Arte.The fair has a handful of exhibitors, few of whom are well-known in the United States or Euro
  
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• Just in Time for Christmas, Identical New Banksy Murals Look to the Stars But Point to Problems on the Ground

  22-12-2025 19:42 via artnews.com
  For the third time this year, Banksy has created a new work of street art. The new piece has been confirmed in the anonymous British artist’s customary fashion, with an Instagram post. The artwork shows two children lying on their backs and looking toward the heavens, with one pointing a finger skyward. It was spotted Monday outside the Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London, near the landmark Brutalist Centre Point skyscraper. As Christmas approaches, the work could be read
  
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• An Inherited Mess: How a High-Growth Fantasy Is Destroying the Art World from Within

  22-12-2025 19:01 via artnews.com
  I entered the art world in 2004. I can still hear the first dealer I worked for in San Francisco railing against the “Wal-Martization” of the art world, fueled by the rapid rise of the global art fair circuit: Frieze London, NADA Miami, and Zona Maco all launched in 2003, Art Basel Miami Beach a year earlier. At 26 and blind to the industry’s inner workings, I assumed his politics rejected a model that stripped away the intellectual pursuit he valued above all else. In hindsigh
  
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• See Wonders of the ‘Nanocosmos’ Through an Electron Microscope

  22-12-2025 18:55 via artnews.com
  Nanocosmos: Journeys in Electron Space is an otherworldly collection of images from a mysterious realm of the extremely small scale. With help from powerful scanning electron microscope (SEM) technologies that he started working with at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), artist Michael Benson went on a years-long adventure to see creatures and organisms he wouldn’t otherwise be able to see—and to posit portraits of them as examples of a new kind of photography in an exp
  
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• TEFAF Managing Director Is Out After Just a Year, Continuing High Turnover

  22-12-2025 17:17 via artnews.com
  The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF) and its managing director have parted ways after just over a year, marking a continuing high rate of turnover in the post. Dominique Savelkoul was the fifth managing director in four years.When the Belgian arts administrator took up her post in September 2024, she had never run an art fair before, and was new to a job that touched the commercial arts sector. TEFAF runs a renowned fair that takes place in Maastricht, the Netherlands, every March and showca
  
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• White House Claims Smithsonian Hasn’t Fully Submitted to Content Review, Threatens Funding Cuts

  22-12-2025 17:11 via artnews.com
  The Trump administration turned up the pressure in its ongoing battle with the Smithsonian Institution, a museum network that the President has repeatedly taken to task for the way it represents the diversity of American history and culture in its exhibitions and displays.According to the Washington Post, the administration has now threatened to withhold funding from the Smithsonian as its museums face a content review. Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III had previously promised to submit
  
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• Mexico City’s Material Fair Announces Last-Minute Venue Change Due to ‘Stranger Things’ Activation Conflict

  22-12-2025 16:08 via artnews.com
  Feria Material, a satellite fair to Mexico City’s larger Zona Maco, will change its venue for its upcoming edition in February, moving from Expo Reforma, an event venue in the capital city’s Colonia Juárez, to Maravilla Studios, a historic industrial factory that was recently renovated into an events space in the Colonia Atlampa.Material, which is scheduled to run February 5–8, informed its 78 exhibitors of the new venue last Friday, just over six weeks before the fair i
  
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• Robert Mnuchin Dies at 92, UK Museum Calls for Santa to Be ‘Decolonized,’ Uzbekistan’s Cultural Draw: Morning Links for December 22, 2025

  22-12-2025 15:20 via artnews.com
  The HeadlinesOASIS OF ART. Located near the cracked, dried remnants of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan, the I.V. Savitsky State Art Museum (aka the Nukus Museum) in Nukus is a hidden treasure. As the Art Newspaper reports, it houses nearly 100,000 works from the mid-20th century, spanning canvases, etchings, and sketches of rural life, alongside regional folk art and textiles. In 2025, the museum has gained unprecedented attention. A few years ago it made the headlines for a scandalous leadershi
  
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• The best art and photography of 2025

  22-12-2025 13:00
  Jenny Saville’s bruising paintings, Andy Goldsworthy’s immersive stones, Lee Miller’s surrealist shots and Diane Arbus’s unforgiving nudes – our critics highlight a spectacular year
  • The best design and architecture of 2025
  • More on the best culture of 2025 Continue reading...
  
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• After A Five-Year Video Art Hiatus, Trisha Baga Is Back—with Their Best Film Yet 

  22-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  It happens to every artist working with technology: you develop a way of working, but it involves a tool that is eventually rendered obsolete. Arguably, the situation is only amplified now, as tech companies black box their products, making them more difficult to customize; as they plan and accelerate obsolescence; and as they move toward subscription software models with automatic updates. Trisha Baga, an artist who came up in the art world with 3D videos that explore the surreal encroachm
  
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• The Future Of Film Never Arrived, And Never Will

  21-12-2025 22:00 via theatlantic.com
  “I covered the 3-D boom from the start, and even early on one could see that the golden goose was cooked. It was clear that the marginal returns on 3-D screenings were rapidly diminishing.” – The Atlantic
  
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• In Los Angeles, People Daringly Put Their Faces On Buildings Asking ICE If They’re Next

  21-12-2025 21:30 via theguardian.com
  “Along with projecting portraits of Angelenos, Am I Next? highlights brief stories of people, including US citizens, accosted and snatched out of homes, cars, workplaces and the streets by federal agents, under the word ‘Taken.’” – The Guardian (UK)
  
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• Why I Stopped Reading Print, And Embraced Audiobooks

  21-12-2025 21:00 via nytimes.com
  “Here’s what I love about listening: I can do it all the time, not just while sitting still. I read … while making my bed, brushing my teeth, unloading the dishwasher, commuting to work, waiting in line, driving and occasionally while falling asleep.” – The New York Times
  
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