The Week in Art

This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality. So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+ museum and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that social media corporations have become...

This week: the extraordinary story behind what Canadian police have called “the biggest art fraud in history”. More than 1,000 fake works purporting to be by the First Nations artist Norval Morrisseau are seized and eight people have been charged. The Art Newspaper’s Editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, tells the extraordinary story, involving a rock star, a television documentary and alleged forgery rings, and what it tells us about the market for First Nations art in Canada. A report into...

Is the Old Masters market struggling? As Tefaf opens its fair in Maastricht, we look at this major moment in the market calendar and what it tells us about the strength or otherwise of the market for historic art. The Art Newspaper’s Acting Art Market editor, Anny Shaw, joins us from the fair. The Institut du Monde Arabe, or Arab World Institute, in Paris has just received a major gift of more than 1,600 modern and contemporary works from the French-Lebanese dealer and collector Claude...

This week: as the Art Dubai fair opens, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor Aimee Dawson tells us about this latest edition, its ongoing commitment to displaying the art of the global south and its continued focus on digital art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York opens the largest media exhibition it has ever staged, Signals: How Video Transformed the World on 5 March. It looks at how artists around the globe have used video as a networked technology capable of reaching huge...

This week: Nigeria heads to the polls this weekend; what are the implications for its museums and art scene? Dolly Kola-Balogun, director of the Retro Africa gallery in Abuja, reflects on the candidates and discusses the importance of art, and culture more widely, to the country’s future. We also talk to Patrick Bringley, the author of a new book All the Beauty in the World: the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, in which he reflects on his experiences as a guard at the museum and coming to...

This week: Turkey and Syria. As the countries reel from the devastation of the 6 February earthquake, how can communities and agencies protect damaged heritage? We talk to Aparna Tandon from Iccrom, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property about culture’s significance in the humanitarian response to the crisis. As Alice Neel: Hot off the Griddle arrives at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, we take a tour of the show’s key moments with...

In this special episode, we are in Amsterdam for one of the shows of the year: Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum. As an unprecedented 28 of the 37 surviving Vermeer paintings are gathered in the Dutch capital, Ben Luke talks to several people involved in the project: Gregor Weber, one of the exhibition’s curators, tells us about his new biography that reveals the depth of influence of the Jesuits and Catholicism on the artist. In the exhibition itself, we talk to Pieter Roelofs, Weber’s co-curator;...

As we approach the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Art Newspaper has published an investigation that raises serious concerns that works of art taken by Russian troops from a museum in Kherson, Ukraine, in November 2022 may not be repatriated once the fighting ends. Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his story. Plus, the Sharjah Biennial opens next week, and is the final biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019, but set the blueprint for...

This week: as robotic figures of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama appear in windows of Louis Vuitton stores in New York, London and Tokyo, Ben Luke talks to Federica Carlotto, a specialist in art and luxury, about the latest collaboration between Kusama and the LVMH brand. What does it tell us about what the former creative director of Louis Vuitton, Marc Jacobs, called the “monumental marriage between art and commerce”? Also this week, the artist Michael Rakowitz hopes to give a public...

Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Tokyo are the subject of a legal claim in the US relating to Nazi loot. The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent and resident Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey tells us why Sunflowers (1888-89) is at the centre of the dispute, 35 years after it was sold for a record price at auction, and why the heirs of the German Jewish banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who owned it until the 1930s, now value it at a staggering $250m. Our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has...

In the first episode of the year, we look ahead at the next 12 months. Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor at The Art Newspaper, peers into her crystal ball and tries to predict the fortunes of the art market this year. Then, Jane Morris, one of our editors-at-large, José da Silva, our exhibitions editor, and host Ben Luke select the museum projects, biennales and exhibitions that they are most looking forward to in 2023. Events discussed: The Grand Egyptian Museum: no confirmed...

It’s our final podcast of 2022 and so, as ever, we’re looking back at the worlds of art and heritage over the past 12 months. Ben Luke is joined by three members of The Art Newspaper team: Louisa Buck, contemporary art correspondent, Kabir Jhala, acting deputy art market editor, and Ben Sutton, editor in the Americas. Among much else, they discuss the effects of the war in Ukraine, Just Stop Oil’s activism, unionisation in US museums, the restitution of African and Native American (and...

This week: the Parthenon Marbles; it has emerged that George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and now chair of the trustees of the British Museum, has been holding talks with the Greek government about the ancient sculptures. So might this lead to a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over their ownership? Ben Luke speaks to Yannis Andritsopoulos, the reporter for the Greek newspaper Ta Nea who broke the story. In Afghanistan, it is more than a year since the Taliban reclaimed power—so...

As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess. Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni...

This week: as the exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia opens at the Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavik, Ben Luke talks to Masha Alekhina, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, and the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, one of the co-curators of the show. As protests continue across Iran, Aimee Dawson, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor, speaks to Shirin Neshat, the artist whose work expressing solidarity with women in Iran was recently installed outside the Neue...

Ben Luke talks to Hannah McGivern, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper who has just been to Qatar, about the vast number of public art projects that will accompany the FIFA Men’s World Cup that begins there on Sunday 20 November. She also discusses the museums that Qatar plans to open by 2030. How does this explosion of cultural initiatives sit with Qatar’s record on human rights and treatment of low-paid migrant workers in the building of its cultural venues and World Cup stadia? It has...

This week: as the UN’s climate emergency summit, Cop27, continues in Egypt, Ben Luke talks to Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent—and the author of our online column about art and climate change—about international art initiatives responding to the crisis. Kaywin Feldman, the director of the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, tells us about the museum’s new $10m endowment fund for purchases of works by women artists. The historic gift, from the...

This week: uproar over the National Gallery in London’s building plans—is it a sensitive makeover or like “an airport lounge”? We talk to the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, about the gallery’s controversial plans for changes to its Sainsbury Wing, and to Rowan Moore, architecture critic at the Observer, about his views on the designs by the architect Annabel Selldorf, and how they respond to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s original Post-Modern building. Tokini...

This week: the recent opening of Edward Hopper’s New York at the Whitney Museum has reignited a controversy over the provenance of some of his works. We talk to the leading Hopper scholar Gail Levin about the story of Arthayer R. Sanborn, a Baptist Minister who befriended the Hopper family and eventually amassed a vast collection of memorabilia and art, some of which is in the Whitney Museum’s exhibition. In London, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard tell us about The Horror Show!, their...

This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest. Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a...