An exhibition opens this weekend at Conditions, the low-cost studio programme for artists in Croydon, on the outskirts of south London, featuring two of the great works of art of recent decades: Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) and Arthur Jafa’s Love is the Message, the Message is Death (2016). Ben Luke talks to Mark and AJ about showing together and the affinities and contrasts in these two contemporary masterpieces. The 12th SITE SANTA FE International exhibition also opens on Fr...
Jun 26, 2025•1 hr 9 min
The Art Newspaper’s digital editor Alexander Morrison is in Basel for the annual Art Basel fair. He talks to our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, about the atmosphere at the fair after a long downturn in the art market and underwhelming auctions last month in New York. While some major museums around the world would rather avoid the topic of returning objects acquired in the colonial period to their countries of origin, The Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam is attempting to get on the front foot, with an...
Jun 19, 2025•55 min
The Dulwich Picture Gallery, the UK’s first purpose-built public art gallery, is hosting an exhibition of one of Britain’s brightest young painting talents, Rachel Jones. Ben Luke visits the gallery to talk to her about the paintings—giant and tiny—in the show. The latest Liverpool Biennial has just opened in that great British city; Louisa Buck, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, joins Ben to review the show. And this episode’s Work of the Week, is the UK Aids Memorial Quilt, w...
Jun 12, 2025•1 hr 1 min
The fifth edition of London Gallery Weekend takes place this weekend, and opens as the global art market is at a low ebb. So what can it do to change the mood? Ben Luke speaks to Ananya Mukhopadhyay, the managing director of Ames Yavuz, which is opening a new London gallery to coincide with the weekend events, and Jeremy Epstein, co-director of the Edel Assanti gallery, who is the co-founder and co-director of London Gallery Weekend. In 2018, a devastating electrical fire tore through the Nation...
Jun 05, 2025•59 min
We visit major museum projects unveiled this week in London and New York: Ben Luke takes a tour of V&A East Storehouse in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which offers unprecedented access to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection. He meets the deputy director of the V&A, Tim Reeve, and speaks to key members of the team that are making this radical museological vision for London a reality: the museum’s lead technician, Matt Clarke, its senior curator Georgia Haseldine, and Kat...
May 29, 2025•1 hr 22 min
A host of exhibitions and events this month and next celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely, one of the godfathers of kinetic and auto-destructive art. Ben Luke speaks to Roland Wetzel, the director of the Tinguely Museum in Basel about the artist’s life and work, and the events marking the centenary. In Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Fenix, a museum about migration, has just opened, featuring a dramatic stainless steel tornado form on its roof. We discuss ...
May 22, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Koyo Kouoh remembered, Queen Elizabeth II memorial, Jasper Johns by Robert Storr Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroon-born curator who was director of Zeitz Mocaa in Cape Town and had been invited to curate next year’s Venice Biennale died on 10 May. There has been an outpouring of moving tributes to Kouoh from artists, curators and gallerists across the world, and Ben Luke speaks to Nolan Oswald Dennis, the Johannesburg-based artist who has a current show at Zeitz, and Liza Essers, the owner and director o...
May 15, 2025•59 min
This week: after a two-year closure, the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing reopens this week, revealing a major overhaul by the architect Annabelle Selldorf. The gallery has also rehung its entire collection and Ben Luke takes a tour of both the revamped building and the new displays with the National Gallery director, Gabriele Finaldi. Tate Modern celebrates its 25th anniversary this weekend, and Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck and another of our reg...
May 08, 2025•1 hr 20 min
During his lifetime, the late artist Frank Auerbach never had an exhibition in Berlin, the city of his birth, which he left for the UK in 1939 to escape the Nazis. This weekend, the first show of his work in the German capital opens at the Galerie Michael Werner. Our digital editor, Alexander Morrison, went to Berlin to talk to the artist’s son, the filmmaker Jake Auerbach, about the exhibition. A new book by Dan Hicks, a curator at the Pitts River Museum in Oxford, UK, titled Every Monument Mus...
May 01, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Following the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, The Art Newspaper’s managing editor, Louis Jebb, who has written an extensive obituary of the late pontiff, joins Ben Luke to talk about the late pope’s engagement with art and with the Vatican art collections. Wednesday 23 April was the 250th anniversary of the birth of JMW Turner, one of the greatest British artists. A host of exhibitions and events are marking this moment, and we speak to Amy Concannon, the senior curator of historic Briti...
Apr 24, 2025•1 hr 2 min
ollowing on from opening her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which continues until August, the US-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim this week opened a show in London in collaboration with Thomas Mader. The exhibition, 1880 THAT, uses a notorious historic conference in Milan in 1880, which effectively outlawed sign language in Deaf education, as a springboard to explore languages and stigma in Deaf and hearing cultures today. Ben Luke discusses the show with Kim and Ma...
Apr 17, 2025•52 min
In two-and-a-half months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a series of executive orders and other initiatives have attempted systematically to eliminate and defund some of the federal agencies responsible for the distribution of federal money to museums, libraries and other organisations. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, joins Ben Luke to discuss what is being seen as an authoritarian and ideologically driven attempt to control cultural activities ...
Apr 10, 2025•59 min
he Art Newspaper’s annual report on museum visitor figures is out and shows that the slow build-back after the Covid-19 closures is over, and museums are back at what we might consider their “natural level”. Host Ben Luke talks to the co-editor of our report, Lee Cheshire, about what that means, and who were last year’s big winners and losers. A new exhibition at the museum in the former London home of the 19th-century designer, socialist activist and writer, William Morris, looks at his ubiquit...
Apr 03, 2025•1 hr 1 min
After a five-year closure, the Frick Collection in New York will reopen to the public on 17 April and this week opened its doors to the press. The Gilded Age mansion, created on Fifth Avenue for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, has been restored and enhanced by Selldorf Architects, with the executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle. It is the biggest upgrade to the building since it first became a museum in 1935. Ben Luke talks to the architect Annabelle Selldorf. Then, Cabelle Ahn, a contribut...
Mar 28, 2025•1 hr 1 min
The largest ever exhibition of the work of Jack Whitten opens this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Ben Luke speaks to Michelle Kuo, the curator of the show, about the political and experimental commitment that drove Whitten’s remarkable body of work. In Paris, one of the final exhibitions to open at the Centre Pompidou before it closes for five years was unveiled this week. Paris Noir brings together more than 150 artists from across the African diaspora who were based in, ...
Mar 21, 2025•1 hr 9 min
After a challenging year in which international galleries, auction houses and museums have been forced to scale back their operations and make redundancies on an alarming scale, a slower, more considered approach to business seems to be emerging. So are we into an era of longer, more in-depth exhibitions and bespoke events concerned more with authentic connection than flashy spectacle? Ben Luke talks to Anny Shaw, a contributing editor at The Art Newspaper. In the Netherlands, just as in the US,...
Mar 14, 2025•54 min
It seems absurd that more than a year ahead of the next Venice Biennale, one of the major pavilions in the Giardini might be empty for next year’s event. But that is the dilemma facing Creative Australia, which is responsible for that country’s Biennale presentation. Last month, it announced the team comprising the Lebanese-born Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi and the curator Michael Dagostino as its selection for the 2026 event—and then, within days, rescinded the invitation. An almighty row...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Tate Modern this week opened a vast exhibition exploring the life and work of the maverick Australian-born performance artist, fashion designer and self-styled “club monster”, Leigh Bowery, as well as the variety of cultural figures in his orbit in London. It coincides with other related London shows: one analysing the fashion work of Bowery and his collaborators and peers at the Fashion and Textile Museum, and another at the National Portrait Gallery about the style and culture magazine The Fac...
Feb 28, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Shows opening in Washington and Dublin this month explore quiltmaking by African American women. Ben Luke talks to Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and the organiser of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), about the history of quiltmaking in this small part of Alabama, and the growing recognition of its artistic importance. The Musée Picasso in Paris this week unveiled its exhibition “Degenerat...
Feb 21, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Next month, the German artist Anselm Kiefer will be 80, and the first of a number of shows internationally to mark this landmark moment opened this week at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. It focuses on his early works, and Ben Luke visits Oxford to discuss this pivotal moment in his career with Lena Fritsch, the curator of the exhibition. The latest edition of the biennial in the United Arab Emirate of Sharjah opened earlier this month. The Art Newspaper’s correspondent Dale Berning Sawa visit...
Feb 14, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Last weekend, the US President Donald Trump signed executive orders placing 25 percent tariffs on Mexico and Canada, which were due to take effect on Tuesday. But at the last minute, the tariffs were postponed, at least for a month. Inevitably, though, the talk of a trade war set nerves jangling at Zona Maco, the art fair in Mexico City, which opened on Wednesday. Ben Luke speaks to Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, who is in the Mexican capital, about the prevailing mood, and ab...
Feb 07, 2025•57 min
Peter Hujar, Gregg Bordowitz and Rotimi Fani-Kayode are three artists whose work reflects in different ways on the Aids crisis that has devastated communities across the world since the 1980s. Hujar, who died from Aids-related pneumonia in 1987, is the subject of a new show at Raven Row in London, the largest to date at a UK gallery. Host Ben Luke takes a tour of the show with its curators, the writer John Douglas Millar, and the artist, master printer and model for some of Hujar’s photographs, ...
Jan 31, 2025•1 hr 15 min
The Art Newspaper’s correspondent for the Middle East, Sarvy Geranpayeh, has been reporting on the effect of Israel’s military bombardment of Gaza on artists and art workers there since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas conflict in 2023. In the wake of the three-stage ceasefire that began last Sunday, she has returned to those she has spoken to over the past 16 months to hear their views on the agreement and what happens next. The Musée du Louvre in Paris this week opened a show of the great 13t...
Jan 24, 2025•1 hr
This week: the Los Angeles wildfires. The Art Newspaper’s West Coast contributing editor in LA, Jori Finkel, tells our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison, about the devastation in Southern California, and its effect on artists and institutions. The World Monuments Fund (WMF), the independent organisation devoted to safeguarding global heritage has released its biennial World Monuments Watch, a list of 25 sites that are potentially threatened. The aim of the list is, according to the WM...
Jan 17, 2025•59 min
A 2025 preview: Georgina Adam, our editor-at-large, tells host Ben Luke what might lie ahead for the market. And Ben is joined by Jane Morris, editor-at-large, and Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor, to select the big museum openings, biennials and exhibitions. All shows discussed are in The Art Newspaper's The Year Ahead 2025, priced £14.99 or the equivalent in your currency. Buy it here . Exhibitions: Site Santa Fe International, Santa Fe, US, 28 Jun-13 Jan 2026; Liverpool Biennial, 7 Ju...
Jan 10, 2025•1 hr 20 min
It is the final episode of 2024 and so, as always, we review the year, looking at the top stories, the big issues and the best art. Host Ben Luke is joined by The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buck, our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, and Ben Sutton, our editor in the Americas. Under discussion, among much else: the growing faultlines between institutions and artists in relation to Gaza; the big museum stories, from Saudi Arabian funding to attacks on artworks and restit...
Dec 20, 2024•1 hr 22 min
This week, three artist interviews: Carsten Höller on his book of games, Takashi Murakami on his new work, and Valeria Luiselli and Leo Heiblum on their Dia sound installation. Höller is the author of a book featuring 336 games that can be played alone, in pairs or in groups, without any props. He tells Ben Luke about art and play and his perennial quest for unpredictability. Takashi Murakami has been in London this week for the opening of his exhibition, Japanese Art History à la Takashi Muraka...
Dec 13, 2024•54 min
The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, Ben Sutton, and our art market editor, Kabir Jhala, are in Florida and report on the sales and the mood on the first VIP day at Art Basel Miami Beach. On 8 December, the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris will reopen, more than five years after the fire that partly destroyed it. Ben Luke talks to one of the architects responsible for its rise from the ashes, Pascal Prunet. And this episode’s Work of the Week is The Madonna and Child with Saints (1526-27) by Pa...
Dec 06, 2024•56 min
Two exhibitions have just opened that look at art and tech: in London, Tate Modern’s Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet celebrates the pioneers of kinetic, programmed and digital art, and offers a kind of origin story of contemporary immersive installation. Ben Luke speaks to Val Ravaglia, the co-curator of the show, amid the blinking lights and bleeping sound. In California, meanwhile, Digital Witness at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) looks at how new software...
Nov 29, 2024•1 hr 5 min
Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019), the work featuring a banana stuck to a wall with grey duct tape, sold at Sotheby’s in New York, on Wednesday for $5m or $6.2m with fees. But how did other works fare at this week’s auctions in New York? Ben Luke talks to Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor, Americas, about the sales. Frank Auerbach, the painter who escaped the Holocaust and dedicated more than 70 years to creating portraits and cityscapes in London in raw, thick paint and expressive charco...
Nov 22, 2024•1 hr 7 min
