The Week in Art

This week, we look at a much anticipated exhibition, Slavery at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands’ national art and history museum and the curators of the exhibition state in the catalogue that the country’s colonial past has been "insufficiently examined in the national history of the Netherlands, including at the Rijksmuseum”. Ben Luke talks to Valika Smeulders, head of history at the Rijksmuseum and one of the four curators of the exhibition, focusing on...

This week: two festivals of art. Aimee Dawson talks to Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls about their ongoing activism and their new billboards for Art Night, while Ben Luke discusses Glasgow International with its director, Richard Parry, and then reviews the work in the festival with The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Ben talks to Samantha Friedman, co-curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s...

This week: Mary Beard on Nero, one of the most infamous Roman emperors. Was he the sadistic murderer of legend, the emperor who fiddled as Rome burned, or has he been a victim of spin and myth? As well as getting Mary’s take on this infamous figure and Nero: the man behind the myth, the exhibition about him that’s just opened at the British Museum in London, Ben Luke also talks to the exhibition's curator Thorsten Opper. Also this week, as the first London Gallery Weekend begins—with 140...

This week: Viking-age treasures—what the medieval gold, silver, textiles and even dirt in a hoard found in 2014 in Scotland can tell us about the Viking age, its people, its art and its international networks. Ben Luke talks to the curator Martin Goldberg about the Galloway Hoard, which has just gone on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Also this week: six proposals for the highest-profile public art commission in London, the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, have gone...

Ben Luke talks to Ralph Rugoff, artistic director of the last Venice Biennale and director of the Hayward Gallery, London, about Matthew Barney and Igshaan Adams, two very different artists exploring autobiography, social issues and dance, among much else, at the Hayward; Louisa Buck talks to the curator Laura Smith as the Whitechapel Gallery unveils two shows about Surrealism and women artists: a solo show of Eileen Agar’s work and an archival show about women’s role in the movement. And...

It's a big week in the New York salerooms: Scott Reyburn, art market expert for The Art Newspaper and The New York Times, discusses the big sales and notable trends at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York auctions. Meanwhile, as museums in England get ready to open for the first time in five months, we talk to Heather Phillipson about her new exhibition in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, to mark the centenary of the birth of the German artist Joseph...

This week: ecocide in Brazil. In a special in-depth interview marking a retrospective at Fondazione MAST in Bologna, Italy, and an exhibition at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, the artist Richard Mosse discusses his photographs and forthcoming film installation picturing the scale of the destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. Mosse also talks about his earlier photographic and film series on the themes of war, displacement and migration. And in this episode's Work of the Week, the...

This week: Los Angeles has finally opened its museums after more than a year. When New York's galleries have been open since August, what took California so long? We talk to Jori Finkel about LA's slow emergence from lockdown. Also: DB Burkeman tells us about his new book Art Sleeves, a trawl through 40 years of artist-designed record covers. And in this episode's Work of the Week, as Scottish museums re-open after a long lockdown, Kirsty Hassard, the curator of V&A Dundee's exhibition Night...

This week on the now award-winning The Week in Art: Kusamarama. We take a deep dive into Yayoi Kusama’s polka dots, pumpkins and infinity rooms as shows open in New York, Washington, London and Berlin. We’re joined by three curators: Frances Morris, the director of Tate Modern in London, talks about Kusama’s Infinity Rooms; Mika Yoshitake, the curator of an exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden, explains the fundamental role of plants and nature in Kusama’s art; and Stephanie...

This week: after four long months, commercial art galleries are open again in England. We discuss some of the London shows with Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, and take a tour of Rachel Whiteread’s exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in Grosvenor Hill, London. And we talk to the artist Idris Khan, who has a new exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery, about his oil, watercolour and collage works made in the English countryside and using sheet music from...

On this week's podcast: the world’s greatest art heist. As a new Netflix documentary hits our screens, who stole the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s paintings by Rembrandt, Vermeer and Manet, among other items, and are we any closer to finding them? We talk to Jeff Siegel, producer of the new Netflix series This is a Robbery about the 1990 heist at the Gardner museum, in Boston, Massachusetts. As Denmark brings in the "coronapas", a form of vaccine passport, we talk to Axel Rüger of the...

The Art Newspaper’s annual survey of museum attendance is out: just how many visitors and how much money have museums lost in the pandemic? And how have digital initiatives helped? José da Silva, exhibitions editor at The Art Newspaper, and one of the editors of our annual visitor figures survey, talks about the 77% global fall in visitor numbers and the huge losses in self-generated income in museums. And we talk to Chris Unitt, the founder of One Further, a digital consultancy for the...

This week: Germany announces that its museums will send the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria: will other nations follow? We talk to Catherine Hickley, who broke the story of Germany’s planned restitution of the bronzes in The Art Newspaper this week, and to Dan Hicks, whose book The Brutish Museums tells the story of British colonial destruction and looting that led to the bronzes’ collection by museums across the world. Also: a Van Gogh painting which had never been exhibited has just been...

On this week's podcast: the most influential annual art market report has just been published—so what does it tell us about the effects of a year of Covid-19 on the market? We talk to Clare McAndrew, the author of the The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. Also in this episode, we talk to the scholar of Dada and Surrealism, Dawn Ades, about her book on Marcel Duchamp—and we address the debate about who made Fountain (1917), the famous upturned urinal. And in this episode’s Work of...

This week, we focus on two books: Aimee Dawson talks to Alice Procter about the debate over contested heritage in the UK and her book The Whole Picture, a strident call for colonial histories to be told in museums. Jori Finkel speaks to Glenn Adamson about Craft: An American History, a radical reappraisal of craft's role in forging American identity. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben Luke talks to the critic Michael Peppiatt—curator of an exhibition uniting Frank Auerbach and Tony...

This week: the Frick Collection in New York has moved temporarily from its Gilded Age Mansion on Central Park to Marcel Breuer’s 1960s building created for the Whitney Museum. So what happens when the Old Masters meet Brutalism? We talk to Xavier Salomon, deputy director and chief curator of the Frick about this remarkable change of setting for one of the world’s great collections. We talk to Vincent Noce about his new book L'Affaire Ruffini, following an Old Master forgery scandal,...

This week: NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens. What are they? Are they a fad or do they represent the future of the art market? We talk to two people in the world of crypto commodities about the explosion of NFTs on the art market. We hear from the artist Beeple, whose piece Everydays: The First 5000 Days is the first standalone NFT work of art to be sold at auction, and to Jason Bailey, the founder of the analytical database artnome. And for this episode’s Work of the Week, the artist Doug Aitken...

This week: the curator Naomi Beckwith and artist Okwui Okpokwasili discuss Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, a major show at the New Museum in New York—the final project conceived by the late curator Okwui Enwezor. Also, we explore the effect of Covid-19 on artists with disabilities: we talk to the artist Cara Macwilliam and to Hannah Whitlock and Laura Miles from the UK charity Outside In. And Goya’s Graphic Imagination has opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New...

This week: excavations have revealed new archaeological finds at Stonehenge but the UK government has approved a road tunnel through this iconic World Heritage Site—will it ruin it? We talk to Mike Pitts, an archaeologist, about the debate over the tunnel and its effect on the ancient stones and their surrounding landscape. Plus: museums in France are urging their government to let them reopen; we talk to Jean-François Chougnet of Mucem, a museum in Marseille. And for this episode’s Work of...

On this week's podcast: the artist-activists at the heart of Russia’s biggest protests in a decade and how the Indian government is using heritage and museums to re-write the history of the country. We talk to Lölja Nordic, an artist, DJ and activist in Saint Petersburg, who appeared in a video released this week by Pussy Riot, Russia’s most famous cultural activists, in support of "political prisoners" arrested in the protests across Russia. And we talk to the academic Sarover Zaidi about...