The Week in Art

As the war in the Middle East continues to rage, Ben Luke speaks to The Art Newspaper’s reporter on Iran and other countries in the region, Sarvy Geranpayeh, about the response of cultural communities in Iran and Lebanon, and the damage to heritage in both countries. The latest edition of the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report has been published and shows that the market has returned to growth. But the details show a more c...

As the war against Iran instigated last week by Israel and the United States continues to spread through the Middle East, we explore how it affects tourism in the Arabian Gulf, of which art and culture more generally have been a cornerstone. One of The Art Newspaper’s Middle East correspondents, Melissa Gronlund, joins Ben Luke to discuss the latest news. The 82nd biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York opens thi...

Following the tragic death of Koyo Kouoh last May, the details of her final project—In Minor Keys, the international exhibition of the 2026 Venice Biennale—were unveiled this week by the collaborative team that will carry through her vision for the show. Ben Luke speaks to The Art Newspaper’s editor-at-large Jane Morris, about the show’s themes and strands and the artist list. The Barbican Art Gallery in London has opened a new exh...

After opening a major building project in May last year and announcing the details of another in September, which is due to open in the early 2030s, the National Gallery in London has revealed, quite unexpectedly, that it has to make serious cuts, including to its staff, in the face of a deficit that could rise to £8.2m in the coming year. Martin Bailey, The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent in London, tells us more. In The Hag...

On 4 July 2026 the US will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the nation’s founding document. But huge divisions in US society and culture are symbolised in a number of disputes relating to its history and the representation of its people. The latest furore came this week, when it emerged that the Trump administration had removed the rainbow Pride flag from the Stonewall Monument, the landmark for LGBTQ+...

The first Art Basel Qatar art fair is now open in Qatar’s capital, Doha, and The Art Newspaper’s art market editor, Kabir Jhala, joins Ben Luke to discuss its impact, as well as reflecting on the wider artistic outlook in Qatar and the Middle East. The author of a new catalogue raisonné of the work of Albrecht Dürer argues that a painting of the artist’s father in the National Gallery in London, long thought to be a copy after Düre...

The South African culture minister, the right-wing populist Gayton McKenzie, is attempting to cancel the project for South Africa’s pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, proposed by the artist Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo. Goliath and Masondo have appealed to the country’s president and submitted a case to its high court to overturn McKenzie’s decision. Ben Luke speaks to Charles Leonard, who has been reporti...

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. this week opens Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, a new exhibition focusing on LGBTQ+ artists from across Africa and its diaspora. Ben Luke talks to its co-curator, Kevin Dumouchelle, about the exhibition and forthcoming book. We explore the cultural effects of the protests in Iran that began at the end of last year, and the brutal crackdown that followed,...

As the British Museum opens Hawaiʻi: a kingdom crossing oceans, Ben Luke takes a tour of the exhibition with the museum’s head of Oceania, Alice Christophe. We also hear about the museum’s fresh approach to the stewardship of its collection of Hawaiian objects and materials. In Venice, one of the most famous palazzi on the Grand Canal, the Ca’ Dario, is up for sale and we discuss the building, its history and its supposed curs...

It is the first episode of 2026. So we look ahead at the next 12 months with a guide to big museum openings, biennials and exhibitions. Ben Luke is joined by Jane Morris, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper and Cultureshock, and Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, to discuss the key art fairs, major museum building projects and the top biennials of the year, and we pick our exhibition highlights.All of t...

Frank Gehry, the architect behind the Guggenheim Bilbao, Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Los Angeles, and the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, among other museums and art spaces, died last Friday at his home in Santa Monica, California. He was 96. Ben Luke discusses his long engagement with art, artists and museums with Paul Goldberger, the architecture critic and Gehry’s biographer. Serpentine and the US-based FLAG Art Foundation la...

The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Americas, Ben Sutton, and art market editor, Kabir Jhala, are in Miami Beach for Art Basel’s latest edition and discuss the top sales and the wider mood at the fair. As staff at the Musée du Louvre in Paris vote to strike, Ben Luke talks to Vincent Noce, our correspondent in Paris, about the deepening crisis at the museum, following the robbery in October. And this episode’s Work of the Week is ...

After a delayed application process and an aborted initial commission, the US has at last appointed its artist for next year’s Venice Biennale: the Utah-born, Mexico-based artist Alma Allen. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, talks Ben Luke through this confusing saga. At the National Museum of Norway in Oslo a new exhibition, Deviant Ornaments, focuses on the expression and representation of queerness...

Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914-16) sold for the second highest price ever realised at auction at Sotheby’s in New York on Tuesday. It was the most notable of several big sales in the sold-out (or “white-glove”) auction of 24 works from the collection of the late billionaire Leonard Lauder, and has prompted some commentators to declare that the art market has turned a corner following a prolonged downturn. Ben Lu...

Studio Museum in Harlem, Grand Egyptian Museum, Stanley Spencer

As the Studio Museum in Harlem opens in its first ever purpose-built space, a new building by the architects Adjaye Associates, The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, speaks to Thelma Golden, the museum’s director, and Ben Sutton then gives reviews the building and the inaugural programming with Ben Luke. In Egypt, the long-awaited Grand Eg...

The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, US, has agreed to return two works from 1857 by the enslaved 19th-century potter David Drake to his present-day descendants. By the terms of the contract, one vessel will remain on loan to the museum for at least two years. The other—known as the “Poem Jar”—has been purchased back by the museum from the heirs for an undisclosed sum and now comes with “a certificate of ethical ownership”. Ben...

The authenticity of the final self-portrait by Paul Gauguin, made in 1903 and housed in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, was earlier this year called into question. Now, the museum has completed its promised analysis, and confirmed that the painting is not a fake and is by Gauguin. Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent, Martin Bailey, about the saga. In recent years, the late Indian sculptor Mrinalini Mukhe...

It is an event that has shocked the world and prompted a national reckoning in France: the robbery of eight jewels from the Apollo Gallery of the Louvre last Sunday. Ben Luke talks to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper France and journalist at Paris Match, and Dale Berning Sawa, a regular contributor to The Art Newspaper, about the heist, the reaction, the political fallout and what it tells us about the place of cu...