Arts news

• Elaine Short obituary

  01-01-2026 18:13
  My friend Elaine Short, who has died aged 89, was an artist, potter, teacher and Francophile. She was also a skilled and talented weaver. When I met her in the 1990s she showed me some of her beautiful tapestries, many of them inspired by the Sussex countryside. Her work was exhibited in galleries including Hastings Art Forum, where she was an active member, and her tapestry techniques were much admired.Born in Nice, France, to Alice (nee Bousseaux) and John Braithwaite, a British army officer,
  
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• Hull’s maritime history thrusts city into world’s top places to visit in 2026

  01-01-2026 17:00
  Historic trawler and floating lighthouse among East Yorkshire city’s attractions as it gears up for tourism boostA combination of a world record-breaking trawler, a floating lighthouse and a dizzying array of maritime objects that include a stuffed polar bear called Erik are all helping to make Hull one of the top 25 places in the world to visit in 2026.The East Yorkshire city is on the verge of completing an ambitious £70m transformation, which, supporters believe, will propel it in
  
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• Last letters from Denmark: Danes write to Devonian artist as postal service ends

  01-01-2026 14:51
  Closure of country’s 400-year-old service made headlines and prompted Gillian Taylor to appeal for final missivesSome describe the joy of receiving dispatches from far afield, others speak of the discipline of sitting down to carefully order their thoughts in a letter.One writer tells of finding a poignant cache of letters after a parent’s death, while another has shared a map of where the post boxes used to be in her town. Continue reading...
  
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• Last letters from Denmark: Danes write to Devon artist as postal service ends

  01-01-2026 14:51
  Closure of country’s 400-year-old service made headlines and prompted Gillian Taylor to appeal for final missivesSome describe the joy of receiving dispatches from far afield, others speak of the discipline of sitting down to carefully order their thoughts in a letter.One writer tells of finding a poignant cache of letters after a parent’s death, while another has shared a map of where the postboxes used to be in her town. Continue reading...
  
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• Tacita Dean on witnessing Ceal Floyer’s final work of art: ‘She gave death the middle finger’

  01-01-2026 14:12
  The Royal Academician celebrates an extraordinary moment as her friend, the artist Ceal Floyer, approached the end of her life last month• Read more: Ceal Floyer obituaryIt is very hard to describe a work by the British conceptual artist Ceal Floyer because description overburdens it. Her practice was so finely wrought that it existed only in the experience between a work’s idea and its absorption. Ceal handled this equation deftly and with perfect poise, but it was a perilous and nak
  
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• Cecilia Giménez’s botched Monkey Christ became a global meme. The real marvel was the humble, graceful woman behind it | Sam Jones

  01-01-2026 06:00
  The restorer, who died on Monday, brought unwanted attention to herself – and her small Spanish town. Then, slowly, a small miracle took placeVery few of us find fame quite as late, or quite as brutally, as Cecilia Giménez did in the summer of 2012. The Spanish amateur artist was already 81 when her efforts to restore a decent, if unremarkable, fresco of the scourged Christ brought her a renown that almost destroyed her.Almost overnight, Giménez, who died on Monday at the age
  
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• Happy New Year

  01-01-2026 02:54 via artsjournal.com
  Today’s AJ highlights the year we just left.We begin with my own attempt to make sense of it all: From 30,000 Feet: Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025 looks at the more than 6,000 stories we posted this year to find the patterns beneath the noise. The individual incidents—closures in San Francisco, lawsuits in D.C., op-eds on the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated events and reveal a broader structural shift (Diacritical Blog).The Wa
  
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• From 30,000 Feet: Five Year-end Observations about Arts and Culture in 2025

  01-01-2026 01:01 via artsjournal.com
  We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a structural shift.
  
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• Five Year-end Observations about the state of Arts and Culture in 2025

  01-01-2026 01:01 via artsjournal.com
  We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the “death of cinema”—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a structural shift.
  
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