Counting as Leverage: France’s Creative Economy and the Politics of Aggregation

France’s €102.7 billion cultural sector is more than an economic milestone. The consolidation of creative industries into a single macroeconomic bloc reshapes bargaining power, internal hierarchy, and the terms of cultural governance.

Why Escape to Moominvalley Matters Now: Tove Jansson and the Architecture of Gentleness

At Helsinki’s Architecture & Design Museum, Escape to Moominvalley reframes Tove Jansson not as a nostalgic figure, but as a world-builder whose imagined environments trained generations in how to live with others.

Expiry as Leverage: What Happens After the British Museum’s Three-Year Loans

When renewable loans replace permanent restitution, expiry becomes the decisive moment—redistributing risk, recalibrating authority, and testing whether circulation can substitute for ownership.

Olympic Opening Graphic Altering Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man Draws Scrutiny Over Broadcast Authority

An edited version of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing appeared in the opening sequence of Italy’s Winter Olympics coverage, prompting parliamentary questions and renewed scrutiny of cultural authorship within Olympic broadcast governance.

Art Basel Qatar 2026: Closure as Audit

What the inaugural edition installed once the week ended—how “Becoming” operated as governing grammar, how Msheireb functioned as an interface rather than a backdrop, and why the fair’s first closure mattered less as conclusion than as the proof condition for recurrence.

After Permanence: Restitution and the Legal Conditions of Museum Authority

A new French restitution law does not threaten to empty museums. It reveals how deeply institutional authority depends on legal immobility—and what changes when permanence becomes conditional.

When an Art School Is Still Thinking

As California College of the Arts prepares to close as an independent institution, its final years reveal a widening gap between cultural vitality and institutional survivability.

Contemporary Art in the House: When Domestic Space Becomes Cultural Infrastructure

How historic houses regulate access, allocate attention, and redistribute authority—reframing the rise of home-based exhibitions not as an alternative to institutional power, but as its reconfiguration.

Judgment Without Looking: How Confidence Replaces Perception in Art Institutions

How confidence operates as an institutional resource in contemporary art—stabilizing judgment under pressure while quietly displacing sustained perception.

Framing Meaning: Interpretation as Institutional Condition

How interpretive systems in museums function as institutional infrastructure, shaping authority, legibility, and the conditions under which judgment and perception are allowed to occur.

Lisa Phillips to Step Down as New Museum Director Following 2026 Reopening

After overseeing the New Museum’s transformation and expansion, Lisa Phillips will retire in April 2026, following the institution’s public reopening.

After Automation: Toward a Shared Language for Digital Art Governance

A framework proposing shared language for understanding responsibility, authorship, and governance in digital art systems shaped by automation.