Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the proclamation of King Charles III, Ben Luke speaks to the former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Desmond Shawe-Taylor. They discuss the Royal Collection, the late Queen’s taste in art, the new King’s commitment to art education, and how the modern era compares to the past in terms of Royal patronage of visual art. As lights in museums and on monuments are turned off across Europe, UK institutions are facing soaring energy bills that could prove ...
Sep 15, 2022•53 min
This week: is art censorship on the rise? The Art Newspaper’s chief contributing editor, Gareth Harris, joins Ben Luke to discuss his new book, Censored Art Today. We look at the different ways in which freedom of expression is being curbed across the globe and at the debates around contested history and cancel culture. This episode’s Work of the Week is Diane Arbus’s Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C., 1965, one of the 90 images that feature in Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, wh...
Sep 08, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Ben Luke talks to Alexander Kellner, the director of the National Museum of Brazil, about how he plans to mark Brazil’s bicentennial and to restore the museum in the wake of the devastating 2018 fire, which destroyed most of the building and millions of objects. The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about the National Portrait Gallery’s ambition to acquire the £50m Portrait of Omai (1776), arguably the greatest work by the 18th-century British artist Joshua Reynolds—the...
Sep 01, 2022•53 min
On 29 June, Frieze announced the details of the first edition of its art fair in Seoul, South Korea. So for this last episode of the current season, we’re exploring the art scene and market in the Korean capital. Ben Luke talks to the art historian and curator Jiyoon Lee about contemporary art in Seoul and beyond, and the origins of the current art scene in 1990s globalisation. The Art Newspaper’s associate editor, Kabir Jhala, speaks to two gallerists—Joorhee Kwon, deputy director at the Kukje ...
Jun 30, 2022•57 min
This week: our associate editor, Kabir Jhala, and editor-at-large, Jane Morris, have been in Kassel, Germany, to see Documenta, the quinquennial international art exhibition. They review the show and respond to the escalation of a long-running row over antisemitism and broader racism, which has resulted in a work being removed from the exhibition. Virginia Rutledge, an art historian and lawyer, discusses the dispute over Andy Warhol’s appropriation of a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith of the pop ic...
Jun 23, 2022•1 hr 5 min
This week: why is Tate rejecting an archive of material relating to Francis Bacon, 18 years after acquiring it? Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his recent scoop that Tate is returning a thousand documents and sketches said to have come from the studio of Francis Bacon to Barry Joule, a close friend of the artist, who donated them to Tate in 2004. We then discuss the material with Martin Harrison, the pre-eminent Bacon scholar and editor of the catalogue raisonné of Francis ...
Jun 16, 2022•1 hr 7 min
We talk to the writer and critic Amy Castor about what effect the tumbling crypto markets might have on the until-now booming world of non-fungible tokens or NFTs. As Norway’s vast new National Museum opens, we speak to its director Karin Hindsbo. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Folding Screen with Indian Wedding, Mitote, and Flying Pole, made in Mexico in the late 17th century. It is one of the major pieces in a new show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, called Archive of the Worl...
Jun 09, 2022•51 min
This week, Picasso and the Old Masters: as shows pairing the Spaniard with Ingres and El Greco open in London and Basel respectively, Ben Luke talks to Christopher Riopelle (curator of Picasso Ingres: Face to Face at the National Gallery) and Carmen Giménez (curator of Picasso-El Greco at the Kunstmuseum in Basel) about the profound influence of historic artists on Picasso’s rupturing of tradition. In this episode’s Work of the Week, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buc...
Jun 02, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This week: are stolen Cambodian statues hidden in the world’s great public collections? We discuss Cambodia’s looted heritage with Celia Hatton, Asia Pacific editor and presenter at the BBC World Service, whose documentary for BBC TV and radio Cambodia: Returning the Gods exposes the connections between looters, smugglers and, allegedly, some of the world’s most famous encyclopaedic museums. Plus, the dark truth behind the art and antiques assembled by the Marcos family in the Philippines as the...
May 26, 2022•1 hr 9 min
This week, as Frieze New York takes place at The Shed in Hudson Yards, and we come to the end of two weeks of huge auction sales, we talk to The Art Newspaper’s editor in the Americas, Ben Sutton, about the New York market. Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, tells us about Bët-bi, a new museum the foundation hopes to open in Senegal in 2025, with a building designed by Mariam Issoufou Kamara, the Niger-based architect. And in this episode’s Work o...
May 19, 2022•59 min
This week: is heritage in Ukraine being attacked and looted, and what can be done to protect it? Ben Luke talks to The Art Newspaper’s museums and heritage editor, Tom Seymour, who has been to the Ukrainian-Polish border with the International Council of Museums (ICOM), to witness museum materials being sent into Ukraine to help institutions there. Then, Tom talks to Sophie Delepierre, the head of heritage protection at ICOM, about the organisation’s efforts in Ukraine and elsewhere. As a major ...
May 12, 2022•1 hr 4 min
This week, Philip Guston Now is unveiled at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston after its controversial postponement in 2020; Ben Luke talks to Kate Nesin and Megan Bernard, two of the four curators on the team assembled by the museum to revise the exhibition, which was postponed by four museums in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. We discuss how the show and its interpretation have changed in the last two years. As Queer Britain, the UK’s first national LGBTQ+ museum opens its doors, Gareth Harr...
May 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min
This week, now that the pro-European centrist Emmanuel Macron has defeated the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the French presidential election, we speak to Anaël Pigeat, editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper France, about the Macron government’s cultural record so far and what we can expect from his second term. Tate Britain has opened an exhibition of work by the late 19th- and early 20th-century British painter Walter Sickert; we take a tour of the show with one of its curators, Thomas Ke...
Apr 28, 2022•53 min
A Venice Biennale special: we give you a flavour of the 59th edition of the Biennale which, as ever, brings a deluge of contemporary art to the historic Italian city. We talk to four artists in the national pavilions – Francis Alÿs in the Belgian pavilion, Sonia Boyce in the British pavilion, Shubigi Rao in the Singapore pavilion and Na Chainkua Reindorf in the Ghana pavilion – about their presentations and how, if at all, they relate to the idea of nationhood. Louisa Buck and Jane Morris join h...
Apr 21, 2022•1 hr 26 min
This week: Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Edward Burtynsky as he is recognised for his Outstanding Contribution to his medium in the Sony World Photography Awards. He discusses the Russian invasion and his Ukrainian heritage. In this episode’s Work of the Week, we look at Winslow Homer’s most famous work, The Gulf Stream (1899, reworked by 1906), which is at the heart of a new show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sylvia Yount and Stephanie Herdrich, the curators of the exhi...
Apr 14, 2022•50 min
This week: Quiet as It’s Kept, the 80th edition of the Whitney Biennial, is now open to the public at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The Art Newspaper’s associate editor Tom Seymour, Americas editor Ben Sutton and staff reporter Gabriella Angeletti gather to discuss it. As the latest incarnation of the show Afro-Atlantic Histories is unveiled at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, we speak to its curator, Kanitra Fletcher, about the gallery’s approach to this complex s...
Apr 07, 2022•57 min
This week: the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2022 is out—is the market’s recovery as good as it sounds? We talk to Melanie Gerlis, art market columnist for The Art Newspaper and the Financial Times, about the sixth edition of the market report, what the headline figures tell us and what we can read between the lines. As the exhibition Hideouts: The Architecture of Survival, opens at the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw—focusing on the spaces in Poland and Ukraine used by Ho...
Mar 31, 2022•50 min
We talk to Max Hollein, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the new plans for the museum’s wing of modern and contemporary art, including the appointment of the architect Frida Escobedo in place of David Chipperfield. As The Art Newspaper is about to publish its annual museum attendance survey, showing that visitors are beginning slowly to return to museums after the height of the pandemic, we ask Hollein how the vision for the museum has changed following the events of the past tw...
Mar 25, 2022•1 hr 9 min
Donatello in Florence, the Biennale of Sydney and Eduardo Navarro’s seed installationThis week, as the Palazzo Strozzi and Museo Nazionale del Bargello in Florence present a survey of Donatello, one of the greatest of all Italian Renaissance masters, we talk to Arturo Galansino, the Strozzi’s Director General, and Paola D’Agostino, Director of the Bargello museum, about the show. The Biennale of Sydney in Australia has just opened, with the theme of rīvus, meaning stream in Latin. José Roca, the...
Mar 18, 2022•1 hr 9 min
This week: as more than two million refugees leave war-torn Ukraine, what can the arts do? Counterpoints Arts is a charity that works with refugee artists and creates programmes in a range of artforms on the subject of migration and displacement in the UK and beyond. Their mission is underpinned by a belief that arts can inspire social change and enhance the inclusion and cultural integration of refugees and migrants. We talk to a producer at Counterpoints Arts, Tom Green. The Art Newspaper’s de...
Mar 11, 2022•1 hr
This week: following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we talk to Svitlana Biedarieva, a Ukrainian art historian, artist and curator, about the community of artists in her home country, their work since the Maidan, or Revolution of Dignity in 2014, and how they are responding to the events of recent days. Also on Ukraine, Tom Seymour talks to the photographer Mark Neville, who has been based in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv for the past 18 months and left the city last week, about a photojournalistic s...
Mar 04, 2022•1 hr 8 min
As an exhibition opens at the Whitechapel Gallery in London focusing on artists’ studios over the last century, we take an in-depth look at the subject. The artist, critic and activist William Powhida discusses the Artist Studio Affordability Project in New York and how developers and gentrification have forced artists’ communities to breaking point. We take a tour of the Whitechapel exhibition with the gallery’s director Iwona Blazwick, and explore works by Kerry James Marshall, Paul McCarthy, ...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 3 min
This week: The Collaboration, a new play dramatising the relationship between Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat has opened at the Young Vic theatre in London. It looks at the period between 1983 and 1985 in which they worked together on a group of paintings, many of which were shown to critical derision and commercial failure at the Tony Shafrazi gallery in New York in 1985. Ben Luke talks to the playwright Anthony McCarten and the director Kwame Kwei-Armah about bringing these complex charac...
Feb 18, 2022•58 min
As a show looking at Louise Bourgeois’s late-career obsession with textiles opens at the Hayward Gallery in London—ahead of other exhibitions of her work in Basel and New York—we look at the French-American artist’s fabric-related creations with Jerry Gorovoy, who worked with Bourgeois for 30 years and is now President of the foundation that manages her legacy. A host of contemporary art shows have just opened in Saudi Arabia. But does this, as some commentators have said, mark a new era in the ...
Feb 11, 2022•53 min
This week, we talk to Cecilia Alemani, the artistic director of the Venice Biennale for art, which opens in April, about her show, The Milk of Dreams. She discusses the story by the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington that gives the Biennale its title, the “time capsules” of historic art that punctuate the exhibition, the thematic structure, and the fact that it is the first Venice Biennale featuring a majority of women artists. For this episode’s Work of the Week, Martin Bailey visits the Cour...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 1 min
This week, we visit the Royal Academy in London, where a new show looking at Francis Bacon’s use of animal imagery, Man and Beast, is about to open. The RA’s director, Axel Rüger sheds light on Bacon’s means of transposing the animal into the human figure. We talk to our editor-at-large, Georgina Adam, about The Man of Sorrows, the Botticelli painting sold at auction this week—and we find out if it went beyond its guaranteed sale price of $40m. We also talk about the big art market news of the w...
Jan 28, 2022•53 min
This week, our contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck visits the exhibition Testament at Goldsmiths CCA in London, where 47 artists have been invited to make proposals that ponder the idea of tearing down and erecting monuments and what it might mean to rethink them. Louisa talks to Sarah McCrory, the director of Goldsmiths CCA, and to Adham Faramawy, one of the artists in the show. In Rome, a villa with ceiling paintings by Caravaggio and Guercino with a price tag of €471m failed to attract...
Jan 21, 2022•49 min
In this first episode of 2022, The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent Louisa Buck and the novelist and columnist at The Art Newspaper Chibundu Onuzo preview the year’s biennials, exhibitions and art fairs and our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has a stab at predicting the art market’s fortunes. Events discussed: Venice Biennale Documenta 15 Biennale of Sydney Berlin Biennale Whitney Biennial 2022 Carnegie International Donatello: the Renaissance Steve McQueen Charles Ray: Sculpture Fi...
Jan 14, 2022•1 hr 10 min
It’s the final episode of 2021 and so, as always, it’s our review of the year. Joining Ben Luke to look at 2021’s biggest stories are three members of The Art Newspaper team: Martin Bailey, a correspondent in London, Anna Brady, art market editor, and Jane Morris, editor-at-large. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Dec 17, 2021•1 hr 12 min
This week: the French decorative art that inspired Walt Disney, Henri Matisse’s collaboration over 40 years with the Baltimore art collector Etta Cone, and Josef Albers’s prints. The Art Newspaper’s deputy digital editor, Aimee Dawson speaks to Wolf Burchard, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, about Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts, which opens today, 10 December and travels next year to the Wallace Collection, London. As the Baltimore Museum of Art opens ...
Dec 10, 2021•1 hr 11 min
