here are 6 of the worst art works we saw all year

Artnet News published a year-end roundup of the worst artworks of 2023, as selected by its writers and editors. The list includes Meta's AI-art chatbot experiments on Instagram, which cloned celebrity likenesses into cringe-worthy avatars like Snoop Dogg's 'The Dungeon Master' and Kendall Jenner's 'Billie,' alongside Refik Anadol's 'Unsupervised' at MoMA, criticized as shallow tech spectacle. Other entries include a poorly received Picasso-themed exhibition and additional works deemed ill-conceived or badly executed.

What You Should Definitely Avoid in Venice

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The article humorously critiques the Venice Biennale, highlighting several disappointments. It describes a Japanese pavilion installation by Ei Arakawa-Nash featuring baby dolls for diaper-changing, which a critic dismisses as a male artist over-romanticizing parenthood. Other flops include long queues for the German and Austrian pavilions, underwhelming main exhibition "In Minor Keys," and annoying self-promotional performers outside venues. The piece also laments the presence of loud American collectors and donors who dominate the event.

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The article reviews Yuji Agematsu's exhibition at the Judd Foundation in New York, where 366 of his "zips"—small assemblages of found objects collected during daily walks and arranged in cigarette cellophane sleeves—were displayed on open aluminum shelves in grids representing each day of 2024. The show ran through August 30, 2025, and marked a departure from previous presentations of Agematsu's work, which had been enclosed in acrylic cases; here, the zips were left exposed, with a fan causing plant matter to sway, making the work feel more alive and immediate.

Sophia Rivera’s Mythology of Everyday New York

The article reviews "Sophie Rivera: Double Exposures" at El Museo del Barrio, the first survey of the late Nuyorican photographer Sophie Rivera, who died in 2021. The exhibition spans her career, including her feminist conceptual series "Rouge et Noir" and "Bowl Study" (c. 1976–78), which depict intimate bodily waste like used tampons and feces, and her socially engaged "Latino Portraits" series from the late 1970s, which countered negative media stereotypes of Puerto Ricans with affectionate, mythologizing portraits. The review highlights a moment where the critic misidentifies abstract toilet photographs as pinhole or double exposures before learning their true subject.

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W. David Marx's book "Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century" argues that 21st-century culture has stagnated, blaming the Internet and its economies for a lack of innovation. The book cites critics like Jason Farago and Alex Ross who lament the death of monoculture and the failure of the Internet's promised diversity, while Marx himself longs for a past era of linear artistic progress defined by -isms like Realism and Cubism. However, the review criticizes Marx's framework as rooted in a 19th-century positivist fallacy, noting that art history has never been a clean linear progression and that overlooked artists—such as Hilma af Klint and Hector Hyppolite—have always complicated the canon.

An Analog Tether

A new wave of gallery exhibitions is championing analog physicality and personal intimacy as a direct counter-response to the rise of AI-generated imagery. Artists like Ben Wolf Noam and Joseph Geagan are utilizing traditional mediums such as charcoal, lithography, and oil paint to capture spontaneous, sentimental moments of human connection, from family dinners to portraits of friends. These works emphasize the "hospitable mess" of real life, prioritizing the recognizable faces and tangible textures that AI often flattens.

Blank Spaces. Sung Tieu by Sarah Johanna Theurer

Sung Tieu's installations, characterized by austere, bureaucratic surfaces, explore the hidden architectures of power embedded in everyday systems. The article examines her series of works that deconstruct administrative forms used in asylum procedures, reducing them to blank spaces and quantified grids to expose how institutional power operates through seemingly neutral documents. Her exhibition "In Cold Print" at Nottingham Contemporary physically manifests these themes by using steel fences to control viewer movement, drawing direct parallels between minimalist sculpture and the dehumanizing design of border controls.

The Unnameable Artists of the Canton Trade System

Art historian Winnie Wong’s new book, *The Many Names of Anonymity: Portraitists of the Canton Trade*, investigates the lives and legacies of 18th and 19th-century Chinese artists who produced works for Western traders under the Canton system. These artists, often dismissed by history as mere copyists or left anonymous in museum "tombstone" labels, created complex works that blended European techniques with Chinese traditions. Wong challenges the reductive category of "Asian export art," proposing instead the term "Canton trade painting" to better reflect the unique atmosphere of cultural exchange in Guangzhou.

Arsenale Review: Where Voices Resist Erasure

At the 2026 Venice Biennale's Arsenale, critic Andrew Durbin reviews national pavilions, finding the US presentation vacuous and lacking meaning, while praising the British and German pavilions for their incisive and moving installations that resist erasure. The review highlights a stark contrast in curatorial ambition and political engagement among the participating nations.

‘YBA & BEYOND’ Exports British Cool

Frieze critic Andrew Durbin reviews the national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The British pavilion, titled 'YBA & BEYOND,' exports British cool by showcasing works from Young British Artists and their successors, while the German pavilion offers a deeply resonant experience. The US pavilion is criticized for lacking meaningful content, raising questions about curatorial direction and national representation.

Ayotunde Ojo Maps Interiority Under the Public Gaze

The article, a critic's guide review by Andrew Durbin, contrasts the US national pavilion presentation at an unspecified biennial with those of Britain and Germany. The US presentation is described as vacuous and lacking in meaning, while the British and German installations are praised for being incisive and moving. The review critically examines the thematic and conceptual approaches of each national pavilion, highlighting a disparity in artistic depth and engagement.

Off-Site Exhibitions Review: The Politics of Listening

Andrew Durbin reviews the national pavilions at an unnamed biennial, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review critiques the lack of meaningful engagement in the US pavilion while praising the depth and emotional resonance of the British and German contributions.

National Pavilions Review: Who’s Afraid of Meaning?

Andrew Durbin reviews national pavilions at a major biennial, contrasting a vacuous US presentation with incisive and moving installations from Britain and Germany. The review critiques the lack of meaningful content in the US pavilion while praising the depth and emotional resonance of the British and German contributions.

From gunshots to gilded plates: Who are the real hooligans of the art world?

Alex Burchmore reviews 'The Hooligans,' an exhibition that explores the Maoist concept of hooliganism in the context of contemporary Chinese art. The show features works by artists like Xiao Lu, who famously fired a gun at her installation during the 1989 'China/Avant-Garde' exhibition, as well as Zhu Yu and He Yunchang, known for incorporating human body parts and surgical procedures into their art. The exhibition contrasts these transgressive acts with more market-friendly works, such as Zhu Yu's gilded plate paintings and Hu Yinping's commercial-style figurines, highlighting the tension between artistic rebellion and commercial success.

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.