Arts news

• Russian-Owned Phillips Auction House Says Sanctions Won’t Affect Business

  28-02-2022 21:16 via artnews.com
  
  Amid bloodshed in the Ukraine following the Russian military’s invasion in the country last week, sweeping economic sanctions targeting oligarchs with ties to the Russian government are being levied. With questions lingering about how businesses of all kinds will be impacted, the auction house Phillips, which is owned by Russian luxury retailer Mercury Group, has said it doesn’t expect sanctions to affect its operations.
  Owned by Leonid Friedland and Leonid Strunin, the Moscow-based
  
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• London’s Sid Motion Gallery to Close After a Decade: ‘Not in a Financial Position to Fully Honor My Artists’

  11-08-2026 21:56 via artnews.com
  
  London dealer Sid Motion will close her eponymous gallery in London’s South Bermondsey district when its fall exhibition closes. She opened the gallery a decade ago.“As I look ahead to the future, I can see that the gallery is not in the financial position to fully honor the extraordinary potential of each of my artists, and I will not compromise when it comes to supporting them in the way that they deserve,” said Motion in a statement on her website. “Closing the gallery
  
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• Spotify Will Label A.I. Artists and Avoid Promoting Them

  11-08-2026 21:46 via nytimes.com
  The new label, which will begin to be applied next month, is an effort by the streaming service to be more transparent about A.I.-generated music on its app.
  
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• One of the Greatest Private Hiroshige Collections Ever Assembled Is Heading to Christie’s

  11-08-2026 21:36 via artnews.com
  
  For decades, if you wanted to talk about Japanese prints, the conversation usually began and ended with Hokusai’s Great Wave. That may be starting to change.This September, Christie’s will begin selling more than 600 prints from the collection of Alan Medaugh, an American businessman who spent half a century chasing the finest impressions he could find by Utagawa Hiroshige, Hokusai’s great rival and one of the towering figures of Japanese printmaking. Specialists say the c
  
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• Spotify Will Label A.I. Artists and Avoid Recommending Them

  11-08-2026 21:00 via nytimes.com
  The new label, which will begin to be applied next month, is an effort by the streaming service to be more transparent about A.I.-generated music on its app.
  
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• New York’s School of Visual Arts Reports One-Third Drop in Enrollment Since 2019, Faces Largest Budget Deficit Ever

  11-08-2026 20:50 via artnews.com
  
  Amid a broad crisis in higher education in the US resulting from demographic trends and a combative Trump administration, enrollment at New York’s School of Visual Arts (SVA) is down some 34 percent since 2019, and the school faces a $22 million structural budget deficit, “the largest in its nearly 80-year history,” according to a previously unreported July 1 email to faculty and staff from interim president Christopher J. Cyphers. The school’s annual operating budget is
  
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• Could DNA on Ancient Cave Walls Help Solve Art History’s Oldest Provenance Mystery?

  11-08-2026 20:34 via artnews.com
  
  Provenance is everything in the art world. Auction houses spend years tracing the ownership history of a painting from one collector to the next. But for some of humanity’s oldest works of art, the provenance goes cold tens of thousands of years ago.Who painted the bison on the walls of Altamira? Who pressed a hand against damp limestone before blowing red pigment around their fingers? Archaeologists have spent generations trying to answer questions like those. A new study suggests genetic
  
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• Arlene Smith, Whose Song ‘Maybe’ Helped Define Doo-Wop, Dies at 84

  11-08-2026 20:09 via nytimes.com
  With the Chantels, a groundbreaking female vocal group, she tugged heartstrings with the indelible hit and paved the way for a wave of “girl groups.”
  
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• My Summer of Bob Dylan

  11-08-2026 20:00 via nytimes.com
  Hear tracks inspired by his Long Hot Summer Tour, including “My Back Pages” and “Mississippi.”
  
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• V&A Changes Paid Break Policy as East Storehouse Strike Looms

  11-08-2026 19:30 via artnews.com
  
  Just weeks after workers at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s East Storehouse voted to strike over working conditions, the institution announced that it was changing its break policy, according to Museums Assocation, a nonprofit representing museum, gallery, and heritage professionals and organizations in the UK.The trade union Prospect, which represents collections access officers at the Storehouse, argued that its members were not given enough time to use the bathroom or drink water durin
  
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• Cultural Center of the Philippines Appoints New Chief Curator, Ahead of Reopening Next Year

  11-08-2026 18:09 via artnews.com
  
  In advance of its scheduled reopening early next year after renovation work commenced in 2021, the Cultural Center of the Philippines appointed Carlos Quijon Jr. as the next chief curator of its museum for contemporary art.As reported by ArtReview, “Quijon is an art historian, curator and critic based between Manila and New York. For the past two years, he has been the inaugural C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives) research fellow for Southeast and East Asia at MoMA, New York.&
  
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• ARTS Southeast Revives Residency Program on Georgia’s Remote Ossabaw Island

  11-08-2026 18:04 via artnews.com
  
  ARTS Southeast, an artist residency nonprofit based in Savannah, Georgia, will launch a new residency program on Ossabaw Island, the state’s third-largest barrier island.The Ossabaw Island Residency will host two week-long sessions, one in fall 2026 and one in spring 2027, with six artists for each session. The fellows will receive a stipend for their participation, as well as have their travel and accommodations to Savannah and to Ossabaw covered. Because of the length of the residency, t
  
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• SF Camerawork To Close After Five Decades, Citing ‘Changing Philanthropic Landscape’

  11-08-2026 18:00 via artnews.com
  
  The Bay Area photography exhibition venue SF Camerawork is calling it quits after 52 years, the institution announced on its website yesterday.“This decision follows years of rising operating costs, declining public funding, and a changing philanthropic landscape,” said the institution. “SF Camerawork is not alone in facing these pressures; arts organizations across the country are confronting similar challenges. Despite the determined efforts of our staff, Board, artists, dono
  
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• Photography Exhibit on Wildfires Nearly Engulfed by Real Wildfire in Sicily

  11-08-2026 16:00 via artnews.com
  
  Life not only imitated art at an exhibition in Sicily this summer — it almost destroyed it. Stefano Cerio’s outdoor photography installation about the devastation wrecked by wildfires was nearly engulfed in a real wildfire on Saturday, reported Artribune.“A sad, surreal, involuntary performance,” wrote the artist in an Instagram post.Firemen were able to extinguish the flames as they came only a few feet away from Cerio’s seven large panels installed along a road in
  
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• Lincoln Center’s Orchestra Makes Creative Programming Look Easy

  11-08-2026 16:00 via nytimes.com
  Jonathon Heyward, who leads the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center, conducted two concerts that put new music in conversation with classics.
  
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• Ari Emanuel’s Company to Acquire 7 Broadway Theaters and 10 in the West End

  11-08-2026 15:00 via nytimes.com
  The purchase of ATG Entertainment, which operates dozens of venues worldwide, will require regulatory approval.
  
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• Prado Museum Debuts AI, London Gallery to Close, a DNA Breakthrough in Cave Art, and More: Morning Links for August 11, 2026

  11-08-2026 14:37 via artnews.com
  
  Good Morning!Sid Motion Gallery, the South London dealership founded in 2016, will shutter this fall.Scientists have recovered ancient human DNA from cave walls, offering new clues about the people behind prehistoric art.Could the Bayeux Tapestry loan offer a model for using the Parthenon Marbles to boost British soft power while paving the way for their eventual return?The Headlines ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST. Sid Motion Gallery, the South London dealership founded in 2016 to support emerging a
  
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• This Playwright Says He’s Done With Maine. Let’s Hope Not.

  11-08-2026 11:02 via nytimes.com
  John Cariani remains drawn to the state, despite having moved away years ago. A new production of his “Darker the Night, Brighter the Stars” illustrates why.
  
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• The Unexpected Secret of One of Instagram’s Most Nostalgic Accounts

  11-08-2026 11:01 via nytimes.com
  The Instagram account VHS Dates advertises itself as resurfacing lost dating service videotapes from the 1980s. The account’s creators came clean to our reporter, Sopan Deb.
  
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• ‘Saturday Night Live’ U.K. Stars Get a Hero’s Welcome at the Edinburgh Fringe

  11-08-2026 11:00 via nytimes.com
  As comics like Ania Magliano return to the festival for the first time since the show became a surprise hit, audiences are pouring in to catch them.
  
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• Musical Manuscripts Are Intimate and Transporting. See Why.

  11-08-2026 11:00 via nytimes.com
  Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director, takes us on a tour through the handwritten score of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony.
  
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• How the Bayeux Tapestry Got to the British Museum

  11-08-2026 11:00 via nytimes.com
  French art experts insisted the fragile 900-year-old masterpiece could never travel. Political will, cutting-edge engineering and unorthodox diplomacy proved them wrong.
  
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• Late Night Wonders if Trump Got a Wig

  11-08-2026 07:19 via nytimes.com
  Anthony Anderson, a guest host on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” said he’d “seen better weaves on ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta.’”
  
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• Barack Obama to Host New Podcast, ‘A Great Book’

  11-08-2026 00:43 via nytimes.com
  The former president will discuss works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson, among others, in a podcast that will premiere in September.
  
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• Divers Discover Hundreds of Ancient Ceramic Vessels Amid Shipwreck Off the Coast of Sicily

  10-08-2026 22:27 via artnews.com
  
  Divers with a specialized unit of the Carabinieri, Italy’s military police, have uncovered a 2,000-year-old shipwreck on the ocean floor off the northwest coast of Sicily. In a Facebook post on August 7, Alessandro Giuli, Italy’s culture minister, said that this is “one of the most important underwater archaeological discoveries in recent years.”According to the BBC, local fishermen alerted the Carabinieri to the shipwreck, which was full of hundreds of ancient Roman vess
  
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• Ireland’s Museum Staffers Struggle with Precarious Contracts and Toxic Environments

  10-08-2026 22:11 via artnews.com
  
  Museum staffers in Ireland are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain a career in the field over unstable contracts, low pay and toxic working environments, according to Dr. Emma McAlister, who wrote a blog post on the issue for the International Council of Museums on Monday.As McAlister recounted, she has only been able to work in the Irish museum industry over the last two and a half years through a temporary rolling contract that, at times, would be renewed just one day before its expir
  
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• Storm King Art Center Appoints Anne Reeve as Senior Curator

  10-08-2026 21:45 via artnews.com
  
  Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley has filled its senior curatorial vacancy after over a year and half. First reported by Artnet, Anne Reeve will lead the sculpture park’s curatorial program as senior curator from November 1. Reeve is no stranger to sculpture. She heads to Storm King from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., where she has worked since 2018 as associate curator and now curator, overseeing the modern and contemporary sculpt
  
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• National Gallery Accused of ‘Soft Censorship’ to Avoid Provoking Trump

  10-08-2026 21:36 via nytimes.com
  A former executive with the Washington museum says it moved a symposium about race in art to avoid political blowback.
  
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• Looted Ivorian “Talking Drum” Arrives at Its Home Village After More Than a Century

  10-08-2026 21:35 via artnews.com
  
  A sacred “talking drum” known as the Djidji Ayôkwé, looted from Côte d’Ivoire by French colonial troops over a century ago, returned this month to the place where it was made. According to the Namibia Press Agency (NAMPA), the drum arrived on August 7 at its home village of Adjame, where the local community was able to see it for the first time.The ten-foot-long, 940-pound drum has a single-piece soundbox slit in half longitudinally. Extending out from the sl
  
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• Ben Jones, ‘Dukes of Hazzard’ Actor and Congressman, Dies at 84

  10-08-2026 21:10 via nytimes.com
  He played the mechanic Cooter Davenport on the hit television series before serving two terms as a Democratic congressman from Georgia.
  
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