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, t...
Dec 03, 2021•1 hr 9 min
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...
Nov 26, 2021•59 min
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, go...
Nov 19, 2021•1 hr 8 min
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 ...
Nov 12, 2021•1 hr 14 min
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 facilit...
Nov 05, 2021•1 hr 8 min
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 Januar...
Oct 28, 2021•1 hr 11 min
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...
Oct 21, 2021•58 min
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 ...
Oct 14, 2021•44 min
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....
Oct 07, 2021•1 hr 2 min
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 hig...
Sep 30, 2021•59 min
This week: the Art Basel fair has opened in Switzerland, but are the collectors back and are they buying? We talk to Jane Morris, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, about the art on show and whether the galleries’ jitters ahead of the fair have proved founded. Also, we hear from the classicist Mary Beard about her new book, Twelve Caesars, looking at representations of power across 2,000 years of art history, from Roman coins and busts, to 18th-century fakes, lost Titian masterpieces and T...
Sep 23, 2021•1 hr 7 min
This week: as a tribunal in London hears of human rights atrocities against the Uyghur community and other Muslim groups in China, how will museums, galleries and other cultural institutions working with government-supported institutions in China respond? We talk to The Art Newspaper’s editor-at-large Cristina Ruiz, who has heard many hours of disturbing evidence at the tribunal, and to Sir Geoffrey Nice, the tribunal’s chair. Also, this week, Martin Bailey tells us about his latest book, Van Go...
Sep 16, 2021•1 hr 13 min
As a huge survey of contemporary painting opens at the Hayward Gallery in London, we ask: is the time-honoured medium of painting the art form best suited to exploring the complexity of our age? We look at the thriving and diverse contemporary painting scene in the UK and explore the Hayward director Ralph Rugoff’s suggestion that this ancient medium “seems like the best technology there could possibly be for reflecting on what it's like to live in a culture where image is the primary currency i...
Sep 09, 2021•1 hr 7 min
We're back with a new season of The Week in Art , which takes us right up to the holidays. In this episode, we reflect on events in Afghanistan in recent weeks. We hear from an anthropologist and an Afghan artist about the country's people, art and heritage as the Taliban assume power again. Melissa Chiovenda, an assistant professor of anthropology at Zayed University in Abu Dhabi, discusses the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 in the context of the Hazara...
Sep 03, 2021•57 min
It's an all-woman line-up on this week's podcast. Nancy Kenney speaks to Andrea Nelson, the curator of The New Woman Behind the Camera , an exhibition opening at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and touring later to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Aimee Dawson talks to Camille Morineau, a former Centre Pompidou curator, about the Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions (Aware), an organisation she founded in order to rewrite art history from a more gender-equal p...
Jul 01, 2021•1 hr 5 min
This week: should the Science Museum in London stop taking money from the oil company Shell? We talk to a student activist, Anya Nanning Ramamurthy of the UK Student Climate Network, who held a protest at the Science Museum over the weekend of 19 and 20 June, and Chris Garrard, co-director of the ethical sponsorship campaigners Culture Unstained, about fossil-fuel sponsorship and the increasing pressure on the museum. Louisa Buck talks to the British artist Michael Landy about his exhibition Mic...
Jun 24, 2021•1 hr 1 min
This week, we look at a much anticipated exhibition, Slavery at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The Rijksmuseum is the Netherlands’ national art and history museum and the curators of the exhibition state in the catalogue that the country’s colonial past has been "insufficiently examined in the national history of the Netherlands, including at the Rijksmuseum”. Ben Luke talks to Valika Smeulders, head of history at the Rijksmuseum and one of the four curators of the exhibition, focusing on several...
Jun 18, 2021•1 hr
This week: two festivals of art. Aimee Dawson talks to Frida Kahlo and Kathe Kollwitz of the Guerrilla Girls about their ongoing activism and their new billboards for Art Night, while Ben Luke discusses Glasgow International with its director, Richard Parry, and then reviews the work in the festival with The Art Newspaper ’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck. And in this week’s Work of the Week, Ben talks to Samantha Friedman, co-curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York’s Cézanne...
Jun 11, 2021•1 hr 9 min
This week: Mary Beard on Nero, one of the most infamous Roman emperors. Was he the sadistic murderer of legend, the emperor who fiddled as Rome burned, or has he been a victim of spin and myth? As well as getting Mary’s take on this infamous figure and Nero: the man behind the myth , the exhibition about him that’s just opened at the British Museum in London, Ben Luke also talks to the exhibition's curator Thorsten Opper. Also this week, as the first London Gallery Weekend begins—with 140 galler...
Jun 04, 2021•1 hr 10 min
This week: Viking-age treasures—what the medieval gold, silver, textiles and even dirt in a hoard found in 2014 in Scotland can tell us about the Viking age, its people, its art and its international networks. Ben Luke talks to the curator Martin Goldberg about the Galloway Hoard, which has just gone on view at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Also this week: six proposals for the highest-profile public art commission in London, the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, have gone on vi...
May 28, 2021•59 min
Ben Luke talks to Ralph Rugoff, artistic director of the last Venice Biennale and director of the Hayward Gallery, London, about Matthew Barney and Igshaan Adams, two very different artists exploring autobiography, social issues and dance, among much else, at the Hayward; Louisa Buck talks to the curator Laura Smith as the Whitechapel Gallery unveils two shows about Surrealism and women artists: a solo show of Eileen Agar’s work and an archival show about women’s role in the movement. And for th...
May 21, 2021•56 min
It's a big week in the New York salerooms: Scott Reyburn, art market expert for The Art Newspaper and The New York Times , discusses the big sales and notable trends at Christie’s and Sotheby’s New York auctions. Meanwhile, as museums in England get ready to open for the first time in five months, we talk to Heather Phillipson about her new exhibition in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. And in this episode’s Work of the Week, to mark the centenary of the birth of the German artist Joseph Be...
May 14, 2021•1 hr 12 min
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 artis...
May 07, 2021•56 min
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...
Apr 30, 2021•50 min
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, ...
Apr 23, 2021•1 hr 2 min
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 ...
Apr 16, 2021•1 hr
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 ...
Apr 09, 2021•1 hr 14 min
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 in...
Apr 02, 2021•58 min
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...
Mar 26, 2021•56 min
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 W...
Mar 19, 2021•1 hr 5 min
