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 artist Rachel Maclean talks about her new work for Jupiter Artland, the sculpture park near Edinburgh, in the context of Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Fever: Designing Club Culture, talks about Volker Hinz's photograph of the singer and fashion model Grace Jones, in the Area nightclub in New York in 1984. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Rosenthal, director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin, discusses the huge Kusama retrospective that’s just opened there.Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirror Rooms will open to Tate Members from 18 May and then to the wider public from 14 June. It will continue until June 2022. Two of the Infinity Mirror Rooms, will feature in One with Eternity: Yayoi Kusama in the Hirshhorn Collection, an exhibition soon to open at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington. The museum's currently closed but do visit its website to check for announcements.KUSAMA: Cosmic Nature is at The New York Botanical Garden until 31 October. Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective continues at the Groipus Bau in Berlin until 1 August. And Stephanie Rosenthal has created a reading list on Kusama for our Book Club, visit theartnewspaper.com to read more. Later this year, the retrospective will travel to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art later this year. New My Eternal Soul paintings by Kusama will be shown in London, Tokyo, and New York this summer—at Victoria Miro in London from 4 June as part of exhibition of new paintings and sculptures, then at David Zwirner, New York, from 17 June and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, from 19 June. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. And in this episode’s Work of the Week we talk to the artist James Welling, whose latest photographic projects stem from direct encounters with ancient Greek objects, about Kore 674, an ancient Greek sculpture from 500 BCE in the Acropolis Museum, Athens. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Royal Academy of Arts in London about whether such a scheme could work in the UK's museums and galleries, and to Tania Coen-Uzzielli of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in Israel, where they have a “green pass” scheme, from which museums are exempt. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, Susan Foister, deputy director of the National Gallery in London, discusses Jan Gossaert’s Adoration of the Kings—the subject of a show at the gallery which has now been developed into an experience for smartphone users. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 arts industry, about museums’ work in the digital field, how effective it has been and how it might be used in the future. And, in excerpts from our sister podcast, A brush with... we hear Michael Armitage and Julie Mehretu discussing Titian and Velázquez. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 sold at auction. We ask The Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey about the painting and discuss his latest Van Gogh blog, about the tragic lives of Vincent’s sisters. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, the artist Rana Begum talks about Always Now (1981), by the painter Tess Jaray. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 the Week, Jakob Fenger, a member of Danish artist collective Superflex, discusses a work by the Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles, Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (1970). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Bevan at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London—about Auerbach's EOW Sleeping IV (1967), in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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, involving works by artists including Cranach, Hals and Orazio Gentileschi and some of the world's most august institutions. And for this episode’s Work of the Week the artist Collier Schorr talks about the photographer August Sander's Young Soldier, Westerwald, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (and various other museum collections). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.