Field Notes
Marina Abramović’s new avatar project with Taex does not simply extend performance into digital art. It tests whether a practice built on silence, deprivation, risk and bodily discipline can survive once presence becomes transferable.
Law & Politics
The Kennedy Center’s removal of Joel Shapiro’s Blue leaves more than an empty site. A work that once marked arrival at the REACH now sits inside a wider struggle over stewardship, public explanation and the meaning of a national cultural institution.
Art & Tech
Serpentine’s Future Art Ecosystems R&D Fellowship gives Alfredo Salazar-Caro, Alice Bucknell, Auriea Harvey and Reina Mun a place inside conversations around AI, research, policy and public life.
Field Notes
Across three sites, Dissident Chorus tests whether sound can hold political difference without turning it into harmony, as protest memory, public assembly and international circulation meet unequal conditions of access.
Field Notes
At Meilahti Art Hall, Canal Cheong Jagerroos’s Beneath the Surface does not arrive as a closed statement of origin or identity. Seen through her layered paintings, Floating Island, and the long Blue and Red dialogue with Nanna Susi, the work keeps movement active without resolving where it belongs.
Latest Art News
Jessica Morgan’s appointment as Director of Tate tests whether a Dia-trained model of site, duration and artist stewardship can govern a museum system carrying greater scale, financial strain and public expectation.
Field Notes
After Yayoi Kusama’s death, KUSAMA’s POP becomes one of the first rooms of her afterlife — testing whether dots, mirrors, pumpkins and pop surfaces can still carry the compulsion that made them necessary.
Across three sites, Dissident Chorus tests whether sound can hold political difference without turning it into harmony, as protest memory, public assembly and international circulation meet unequal conditions of access.
Maja Ćirić reviews Nadja Argyropoulou’s 9th Thessaloniki Biennale, reading Everything Must Change. RI.S9 through radical intelligence, mêtis, metamorphosis, and the politics of adaptive survival.
The flagship fair is not simply showing market strength. It is using delayed visibility, historical depth, and physical encounter to make selective confidence legible again.
Maja Ćirić reviews the second part of Minor Keys, the 61st Venice Biennale, tracing Koyo Kouoh’s absence through delegated curating, mourning, accumulation, and polyphonic form.
Access Learning Lab & Critics Corner
Kim Conaty’s appointment as director of Dartmouth’s Hood Museum is more than a move from the Whitney to a university museum. After a major expansion, the Hood’s next test is how its collection, building and academic mission become active inside student life, scholarship and public engagement.
At Aviva Studios, Button Up! turns Manchester’s Warehouse architecture into a theatre of empire, migration and censorship — while testing whether political monumentality can still accuse power without becoming spectacle itself.
Sotheby’s $4.4 billion first-half result is more than a market rebound. It shows how the auction house is expanding beyond auctions into private sales, finance, luxury, hospitality and destination-building around the collector.
How artists build meaning, confidence and serious interest before a project formally arrives.
The White House report on the Smithsonian raises a real question about historical stewardship. But a museum founded in one era has to educate another. What matters now is whether museums can adapt without letting the record become weaker than the agenda.
A new study links arts and cultural engagement with slower epigenetic aging, with effects comparable to physical activity. The deeper issue is what happens when culture enters the evidence systems that decide what counts as health, value and public need.
With STUDIOS Architecture Paris and Selldorf Architects selected for the Louvre’s Nouvelle Renaissance project, the museum is trying to turn a year of institutional strain into a new public approach: entrances, routes, visitor flow and a separate path for the Mona Lisa.
Maja Ćirić reviews Nadja Argyropoulou’s 9th Thessaloniki Biennale, reading Everything Must Change. RI.S9 through radical intelligence, mêtis, metamorphosis, and the politics of adaptive survival.
Creativity frameworks promise to make uncertainty legible. But inside cultural institutions, process can become a measure of professional viability: who can explain delay, absorb evaluation, transform constraint, and remain readable while calling the condition freedom.
Between Louisiana and Miami, Jean-Michel Basquiat is not moving from purity to spectacle. He is moving through the full structure of his afterlife: private study, public masterpiece, market object, civic event — and still, if the viewer stays long enough, a difficult work of art.
As MPs warn that national museums remain exposed to cyber-attacks and theft, the issue is not simply whether institutions are secure. It is whether they are being asked to carry risks that now belong to the whole public culture system.
At Tate Modern, Frida: The Making of an Icon traces how Kahlo became a global image — and shows how recognition can sometimes make an artist harder to encounter.