Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), the work featuring a banana stuck to a wall with grey duct tape, sold at Sotheby’s in New York, on Wednesday for $5m or $6.2m with fees. But how did other works fare at this week’s auctions in New York? Ben Luke talks to Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, about the sales. Frank Auerbach, the painter who escaped the Holocaust and dedicated more than 70 years to creating portraits and cityscapes in London in raw, thick paint and expressive...

UK museums are at a moment of transformation with a new generation of directors taking the helm at several of the major national institutions in London. So for this landmark 300th episode, we felt it was a good moment to look at the challenges and opportunities for museums now and in the future. We invited Gus Casely-Hayford of V&A East, Nicholas Cullinan of the British Museum and Karin Hindsbo of Tate Modern to join our host Ben Luke for a wide-ranging discussion. LAST CHANCE...

This week: two exhibitions in London are showing remarkable works made during the Renaissance. At the King’s Gallery, the museum that is part of Buckingham Palace, Drawing the Italian Renaissance offers a thematic journey through 160 works on paper made across Italy between 1450 and 1600. Ben Luke talks to Martin Clayton, Head of Prints and Drawings at the Royal Collection Trust, about the show. At the Royal Academy, meanwhile, the timescale is much tighter: a single year, 1504 to be precise,...

Shortly after the US election on 5 November, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington opens The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture, a radical new perspective on the history of the discipline from 1792 to now. Ahead of its opening, Ben Luke speaks to Karen Lemmey, a curator of sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and co-curator of the exhibition. In Warsaw, the Museum of Modern Art—a project 20 years in the making—has partially opened. We speak to its...

This week: with less than two weeks before the US goes to the polls, and with early voting underway, Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, about what we might expect depending on whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump wins the presidential election on 5 November. The exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and will open at the National Gallery in London next March. Our associate digital...

After descending on London last week, the art world arrived in Paris this week, with the main attraction being the Art Basel Paris art fair—now staged in the renovated Belle Epoque masterpiece, the Grand Palais. An editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, Jane Morris, was at the VIP opening and tells us more. As always, alongside the fair are a number of eye-catching museum shows and projects. Among them is Chapelle, a new in-situ work for the Musée Picasso by the Argentinian artist Guillermo...

The Frieze London art fair has a new look for 2024 as it looks to keep its freshness amid increased competition with the new kid on the art fair block, next week’s Art Basel Paris. So how effective is the re-design? Ben Luke talks to Kabir Jhala, the art market editor at The Art Newspaper, about this year’s fair and about the auctions which have also taken place in London this week. The duo The White Pube who, since 2015, have shaken-up the world of art criticism in the UK, have just...

This week: a huge survey of the work of the late linchpin of the Los Angeles contemporary scene Mike Kelley has arrived at Tate Modern in London. We speak to its co-curator Catherine Wood about this enormously influential artist and his visceral and absurd response to popular culture and folk traditions of the US. A major show of Indian art made between 1975 and 1998, a pivotal period of political, social and economic change in the country, opened this week at the Barbican Art Gallery in...

This week, three major international shows: Claude Monet’s Thames views in London, the Henri Matisse retrospective in Basel and Helen Frankenthaler in Florence. An exhibition that Claude Monet hoped to see in his lifetime but which never happened has at last become a reality. A gathering of Monet’s views of the Thames—looking from his hotel room at the Savoy and from across the river on a private terrace of St Thomas’s hospital—has just opened at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Monet had...

This week: the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK, has invited the US artist Glenn Ligon to explore its history and collections, and his interventions are revealed this week. Ben Luke goes to Cambridge to talk to Ligon about the project. Few artists’ lives prompt as much discussion as that of Paul Gauguin, and a new biography of the French artist by Sue Prideaux has just been published. We talk to Sue about the book. And this episode’s Work of the Week is the piece that has just been...

This week: the Van Gogh blockbuster in London, a new book on the birth of Impressionism, and Juan Pablo Echeverri’s performative self-portraits. As the exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers opens at the National Gallery in London as part of its bicentenary celebrations, The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent and resident expert in the Dutch painter, Martin Bailey, takes a tour of the exhibition with our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison. The National Gallery of Art in...

The Week in Art is back. In this first episode of the season: on Tuesday it was reported in the Financial Times that Sotheby’s core earnings are down 88% in the first half of this year. This is the latest evidence to suggest that the art market may be in a far more serious economic rut than its major players have previously indicated, after disappointing sales and job cuts at the major auction houses, as well as closures and layoffs in the world of commercial galleries. In the September issue...

On Thursday 4 July, the UK will hold a general election, with the Labour party currently far ahead in the opinion polls. Dale Berning Sawa, a contributor to The Art Newspaper who is also commissioning editor at the online news site The Conversation, joins Ben Luke to reflect on the effects on culture of 14 years of Conservative or Conservative-led governments, and what they and the other parties are promising regarding culture in their manifestos. In Florence, Italy, the former director of...

This week: Just Stop Oil’s Stonehenge protest. On Wednesday, two activists sprayed orange powder paint made from cornflour on to three of the boulders at Stonehenge, prompting outrage and some support. Before this latest action, in an article for the July/August print edition of The Art Newspaper, John Paul Stonard had argued that Just Stop Oil’s museum-based protests add up to “one of the most successful campaigns of civil disobedience in history”. He reflects on whether the latest protests...

This week: it’s arguably the best loved of the major art fairs among collectors and dealers, but what have we learned about the art market at this year’s Art Basel, in its original Swiss home? The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, tells us about the big sales in Switzerland amid the wider market picture. The journalist Lynn Barber has a new book out, called A Little Art Education, in which she reflects on her encounters with artists from Salvador Dalí to Tracey Emin. We...

This week: we explore the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition dedicated to what Georgia O’Keeffe called her New Yorks—paintings of skyscrapers and views from one of them across the East River, which marked a turning point in her career. Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the curators of the show, tells us more. One of the most distinctive of all London’s contemporary art spaces, Studio Voltaire, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and has begun a fundraising drive to consolidate its...

The publication in April of Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Annual Report has provided the art world with much food for thought. We look at the implications for artists and institutions with Louis Jebb, the managing editor of The Art Newspaper and our technology specialist. As the Centre Pompidou in Paris is taken over on all its floors by what it calls the “ninth art”—graphic novels and comics—we talk to Joel Meadows, the editor-in-chief of Tripwire magazine and a comics...

As the Louvre’s director admits that the Paris museum wants to move its most famous painting away from the crowded gallery in which it is currently displayed, we ask the Leonardo specialist Martin Kemp: does the museum have a Mona Lisa problem? We also talk about the painting’s continuing allure and the ongoing efforts to explain its mysteries. In London, remarkably, Judy Chicago has just opened her first major multidisciplinary survey in a British public gallery, at the Serpentine North. We...

We take a tour of Tate Britain’s new exhibition, Now You See Us, featuring more than 100 women artists who worked between the 16th and 20th centuries, with Tabitha Barber, its curator. The Dia Art Foundation has reached its half century and its director, Jessica Morgan, tells us how it has changed in that time, and especially how it has radically expanded the range of artists it shows and collects. We also discuss the new commission at Dia Beacon by Steve McQueen. And this episode’s Work of...

We talk to The Art Newspaper’s reporter Sarvy Geranpayeh about her conversations with six Palestinian artists about their daily lives amid Israel’s ongoing military offensive in Gaza. Frank Stella, one of the key artists in the history of American abstraction, has died, aged 87. We speak to Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of the NSU Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, who worked with Stella on two landmark shows. And as Spring finally arrives in London, this episode’s...

After years of decreasing public funding, the lingering effects of the Covid pandemic and enduring questions around the ethics of corporate sponsorship, UK museums are facing unprecedented financial pressures. Some commentators are suggesting that the time has come to abandon the policy of free admission to museums that is viewed by many as key to the cultural fabric of the UK. Among those arguing for charging is the critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis, who joins Ben Luke to discuss the issue....

The last painting made by Gustav Klimt, left on his easel when he died in 1918 of illnesses relating to the Spanish flu epidemic of that year, has sold at auction in Vienna for €35m including fees. But much remains unclear about the picture, including its sitter, its commissioner and what happened to it in the Second World War. Ben Luke talks to Catherine Hickley, The Art Newspaper’s museums editor, about whether this murky provenance contributed to its relatively low price for a Klimt in the...

We are back in Venice for the latest edition of the biggest biennial in the world of art. The 60th Venice Biennale comprises an international exhibition featuring more than 300 artists, dozens of national pavilions in the Giardini—the gardens at the eastern end of the city—and the Arsenale—the historic shipyards of the Venetian Republic—and host of official collateral exhibitions and other shows and interventions across Venice. The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buck,...

This week: after 80 years in business, Marlborough Gallery, one of the most historic commercial galleries in London, New York and beyond, has announced that it is closing. Host Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, about what happened and what, if anything, it tells us about the market. The New Mexico-based sculptor Rose B. Simpson revealed newly commissioned public art works in Madison Square Park and Inwood Hill Park in New York on Wednesday, called Seed....