The Week in Art

This week, as Art Basel in Miami Beach opens, we discuss a new book, The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride, with its author Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist at the Financial Times and editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper. Melanie ponders the past, present and future of art fairs. A huge new show, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now has just opened at Tate Britain in London, and we talk to its curators, Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, and David A Bailey, the artistic director of the International Curators Forum and the organiser of numerous seminal exhibitions on diaspora and Black representation in art. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, we’re back in Miami—our deputy digital editor Aimee Dawson talks to the artist Marco Brambilla about Heaven’s Gate, his new virtual reality work at the Pérez Art Museum.The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride by Melanie Gerlis is published by Lund Humphries and priced £19.99 in the UK, $34.99 in the US and $46.99 in Canada.Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art, 1950s-Now is at Tate Britain until 3 April 2022. David A Bailey’s book with Allison Thompson, Liberation Begins in the Imagination—an anthology of writings on Caribbean-British art and culture—is also published by Tate and priced £30.Marco Brambilla: Heaven’s Gate is at the Pérez Art Museum Miami until 1 February next year. An in-depth review of Heaven’s Gate by The Art Newspaper’s XR Panel can be found at theartnewspaper.com or on our apps for iOS and Android. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, we look at the case of the art dealer Inigo Philbrick, who pleaded guilty to fraud in a New York court last week: is the art world, as his attorney claimed, “corrupt from top to bottom”? Georgina Adam, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper gives her response. For this epsiode’s Work of the Week, we talk to Carmen Hermo, the curator of the exhibition Andy Warhol: Revelation at the Brooklyn Museum, about a painting in the show, New York Post (Judge Blasts Lynch) (1983), and what it tells us about Warhol’s Catholicism. And as GES-2 House of Culture, the V-A-C Foundation’s huge cultural centre in a former power station transformed by architect Renzo Piano, opens in Moscow next week, and the Garage Museum in the Russian capital announces its expansion into a landmark Modernist building in Gorky Park, we talk to Anna Bronovitsksya, architectural historian and professor at the Moscow Architecture School about these museums and the wider political situation in which they are being constructed. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, record-breaking auction sales in New York—are we in a new boom? Anna Brady discusses the big lots in New York over the last two weeks, and what they tell us about the market and the world of collectors. In London, Aimee Dawson visits the Victoria and Albert Museum to hear about Carl Fabergé’s shop in London, the subject of a new exhibition, with the show’s co-curators Kieran McCarthy and Hanne Faurby. And for this episode’s Work of the Week, Martin Bailey, our London correspondent, goes to the Agnews gallery to talk to Clifford Schorer of Agnews and Giulia Bartrum, former prints and drawings curator at the British Museum, about Albrecht Dürer’s rediscovered drawing Virgin and Child with a Flower on a Grassy Bench, which is about to go on view at Agnews gallery in London as part of an exhibition, Dürer and His Time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In Hong Kong, the long-awaited M+ Museum opens this week, amid accusations of censorship by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. Ilaria Maria Sala joins us to tell us about her visit to the museum. The Courtauld Gallery, one of London’s great collections, is re-opening after a three-year renovation, and we take a tour of the gallery with its director Ernst Vegelin van Claerbergen. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Christine Y Kim tells us about Samella Lewis’s Bag Man, a key work in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s exhibition Black American Portraits. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, as talks continue at Cop26, the UN’s climate charge conference in Glasgow, we talk to Lucia Pietroiusti of the Serpentine Galleries about climate justice and how the art world can go beyond sustainability to "thriveability". As the spectacular Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen opens to the public, we talk to Sjarel Ex, the museum's director, and Sandra Kisters, its head of collections and research, about the building they’re calling the world's first publicly accessible art storage facility. And, for this episode's Work of the Week, we discuss Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing as it goes back on display at the Wallace Collection in London after conservation treatment. Yuriko Jackall, the Curator of French Paintings at the Wallace Collection, and Martin Wyld, the conservator, tell us about the French Rococo artist’s most famous painting.Related climate crisis discussions on The Week in Art:The Gallery Climate CoalitionVenice's climate emergencyFossil-fuel sponsors and activism at the Science Museum in LondonArtist Richard Mosse on environmental crime in the Amazon rainforest Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Aimee Dawson, deputy digital editor at The Art Newspaper, is in Giza in Egypt for Forever is Now, where works by Egyptian and international artists are shown along a trail around the Giza plateau, among the pyramids (until 7 November). She talks to its curator, Nadine Abdel Ghaffar, as well as two of the artists involved, Gisela Colón and Lita Albuquerque. The New Museum in New York’s latest triennial exhibition, this time called Soft Water Hard Stone, has just opened (until 23 January 2022), featuring 40 artists from across the world. Ben Luke talks to Margot Norton and Jamillah James, the two curators behind the show, about planning a major triennial during a pandemic. In this episode’s Work of the Week, Dorothee Hansen, a curator at the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany, discusses Édouard Manet’s remarkable depiction of the poet, critic and artist Zacharie Astruc, who was a central figure in Manet's milieu yet has been rather forgotten. The painting is the centrepiece of Manet and Astruc: Friendship and Inspiration, a show at the Kunsthalle (until 27 February 2022). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, Paris’s resurgence: is the French capital stealing London’s thunder? As established and up-and-coming galleries open branches in Paris and the Fiac art fair opens there, we ask Melanie Gerlis if this is indeed a shift of power from the UK to the French capital. For this episode’s Work of the Week, Donatien Grau, curator of contemporary programmes at the Musée d’Orsay discusses Lady of Uruk, a painting from one of the two shows of the work of the South African artist Marlene Dumas that have just opened at the museum. And as the Château de Versailles, and the Louvre and the Centre Pompidou in Paris all pay tribute to Christian Boltanski, who died in July, Annalisa Rimmaudo, curator at the Pompidou, discusses the three displays and remembers this leading figure in French art over the past 50 years. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week, as the Frieze art fairs open and the international art world descends on London, we talk about Mark Rothko’s late paintings, now on view at Pace’s new space in the British capital, with his son Christopher. He also reflects on Rothko’s Seagram Mural paintings, which are now back at Tate Britain, close to JMW Turner’s works, as Rothko had hoped when he gave them to the Tate. Louisa Buck talks to Heath Lowndes, managing director of the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), a charity founded by galleries across the world in response to the climate emergency—the GCC has a booth at the Frieze London fair. And, for this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben Luke visits Poussin and the Dance, a show at the National Gallery in London that travels to the Getty Center in Los Angeles next year. There, Francesca Whitlum-Cooper, the show’s curator, tells us about Poussin’s obsession with the Borghese Dancers, an ancient Roman bas-relief now in the Louvre, and how the French artist responded to it in his painting. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: Jasper Johns. Carlos Basualdo of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Scott Rothkopf of the Whitney Museum of American Art talk to Ben Luke about their simultaneous shows of the 91-year-old artist, and taking a radical approach to a retrospective of a radical artist. Also this week: Venice’s tourist problem. Are Venetian authorities subjecting tourists in Venice to unprecedented surveillance? We talk to Anna Somers Cocks, founder of The Art Newspaper and former chair of Venice in Peril. And in our Work of the Week, Aimee Dawson asks Marja Sakari, director of the Ateneum in Helsinki, about the Finnish artist Outi Heiskanen's Dream Play: Fleeting Virginity (1984), a key work in her retrospective at the Ateneum. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week: is the burgeoning phenomenon of private museums, founded by billionaires and corporations, undermining our public cultural institutions? We talk to Georgina Adam about her new book, The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum. Also, Nancy Kenney explores a huge new museum that has just opened in Los Angeles, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and hears from its curators Doris Berger and Ana Santiago, who have sought to question and expand the traditional Hollywood narrative by highlighting some painful film industry stories—including systemic racism—and incorporating an international array of creators, including the Studio Ghibli lynchpin, Hayao Miyazaki. And in this week’s Work of the Week, as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam opens Remember Me, an extraordinary exhibition of Renaissance portraits, Matthias Ubl, the show’s curator discusses one of the many highlights: Piero di Cosimo’s portraits of the architect Giuliano da Sangallo and his father Francesco Giamberti, made around 1482–85. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.