What ‘Costume Art’ Gets Wrong About the Body

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute spring exhibition, featuring nearly 400 objects, pairs garments and ensembles with Western figurative artworks from the museum's permanent collection in dyadic, associative displays. The show eschews traditional art-historical timelines and context in favor of visual and thematic parallels—comparing, for example, Rudi Gernreich's Pubikini with an Egyptian statuette, or Ying Gao's sound-responsive dress with a David Hockney drawing. The exhibition is sponsored by Jeff and Lauren Sánchez Bezos.

Todd Gray Reframes Black Diasporic History

Todd Gray's exhibition "Portals" at Perrotin in Los Angeles features multi-paneled photo assemblages that juxtapose images of slavery with European art, architecture, and formal gardens, exploring the evolution of Black history and identity. The show coincides with the opening of his commissioned installation "Octavia's Gaze" (2025) at the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gray's works incorporate his own photographs alongside sources like Hubble Space Telescope imagery, creating layered visual puzzles that invite viewers to find connections and ask questions about African diasporic identity.

V&A Rising Voices review – can decades of stunning global art really be squished into three rooms?

The V&A Museum in London has mounted an exhibition titled "Rising Voices" that attempts to summarize three decades of the Asia Pacific Triennial, a vast survey of contemporary art from Asia, Australia, and the Pacific organized by Queensland Art Gallery. The show crams works from multiple continents, island nations, and Indigenous cultures into just three rooms, featuring bark cloth paintings from Papua New Guinea, Indigenous Australian abstracts, shark sculptures from the Torres Strait, and Tahitian textiles. Many works address colonialism, political oppression, and tyranny, with artists like Elisabet Kauage, Pala Pothupitiye, and Svay Ken using art as resistance. The exhibition includes pieces by Maryam Ayeen, Abbas Shahsavar, Lila Warrimou, Pennyrose Sosa, Aline Amaru, Brenda V Fajardo, and Heri Dono.

Review: The Good, The Bad and The Venice Biennale

The article reviews the 2024 Venice Biennale, focusing on controversies over Russia's and Israel's participation. Protests erupted during opening week, leading the EU to cut funding and the International Jury to resign. As a result, awards like the Golden Lion and Silver Lion will be decided by public vote, with many pavilions and artists withdrawing in protest. The main exhibition, curated under the theme 'Minor Keys,' features standout works by Alfredo Jaar and Carrie Schneider, alongside national pavilions like Austria's provocative entry by Florentina Holzinger.

Zurbarán: a ‘magnificently choreographed’ showing of the Spanish ‘genius’

The article reviews the first-ever British exhibition dedicated to Spanish Baroque painter Francisco de Zurbarán, held at the National Gallery in London. The show brings together 40 works from collections spanning Seville to San Diego, featuring his hyper-real religious paintings and radiant still lifes, described as a 'magnificently choreographed' trawl through his oeuvre. Critics praise the exhibition for its dramatic lighting and revelatory presentation, though some note uneven quality in his later works.

Gabrielle Goliath Sounds a Call to Action in Venice

Gabrielle Goliath’s exhibition "Elegy" is presented as South Africa’s unofficial pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale, after the country’s Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie overrode an independent committee’s selection of Goliath, citing her proposed inclusion of a memorial for Palestinians killed in Gaza. The installation features three video works in which singers sound a single note in tribute to victims of violence: a South African femicide victim, two women killed in Germany’s colonial genocide in Namibia, and Palestinian poet Heba Abunada. The show occupies the Chiesa di Sant'Antonin in Venice, curated with Ingrid Masondo, after a legal challenge against McKenzie was dismissed.

The Politics of In-action: Review of In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art

Caroline Lillian Schopp's new book *In-action: Viennese Actionism and the Passivities of Performance Art* (2025) offers a revisionist history of Viennese Actionism, a movement retroactively named in 1970 by Peter Weibel and Valie Export. Schopp introduces the term "in-action" to describe a politics of artistic action that emphasizes intimacy, hesitation, and vulnerability rather than the violent or liberatory extremes typically associated with the movement. She expands the canon to include women artists such as Anna Brus, Hanel Koeck, and Ingrid Wiener, and reexamines the work of Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose death was mythologized as a suicide by self-castration but was actually a fall from a window. Through close readings of photographs, Schopp argues that Schwarzkogler's performances were characterized by passivity and "in-sincerity," challenging the dominant narrative of actionism as aggressive or heroic.

Why is contemporary art afraid of the present?

Warum fürchtet sich die Gegenwartskunst vor der Gegenwart?

The article critiques the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which emphasizes themes of compassion, vulnerability, and community. It argues that the exhibition feels like a capitulation to reality, failing to confront the rise of contemporary fascism and the political urgency of the present moment.