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The Los Angeles art scene is navigating a complex recovery as it prepares for Frieze Los Angeles 2026. The city is grappling with the lingering trauma of devastating wildfires that destroyed significant private collections, alongside economic instability caused by massive layoffs in the entertainment industry and recent political unrest. This combination of environmental and financial crises has led to a notable market downturn, resulting in the closure of several high-profile galleries including Blum, Tanya Bonakdar, and Sean Kelly.

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Jenna Burlingham Gallery, founded in 2010, moved in 2021 to a historic compound called Rope Yard in Hampshire, England. Instead of a traditional white cube, the gallery's interiors are designed to feel like a beloved home, with furnished rooms displaying modern British and contemporary art alongside antiques. The gallery recently celebrated its 15th anniversary, attracting collectors from London and worldwide to its village location.

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Artnet News profiles seven key works by Yayoi Kusama, tracing her career from the 1960s to the present. The article highlights her iconic pieces such as *Narcissus Garden* (1966), a guerrilla installation at the Venice Biennale where she sold mirrored spheres, and *Death of a Nerve* (1976), a soft sculpture reflecting her emotional struggles after returning to Japan. It also notes her early life, including her traumatic childhood, move to New York, and friendships with artists like Georgia O'Keeffe and Joseph Cornell.

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The article introduces and defines the concept of "red-chip art," a new category of art collecting that rejects traditional art-historical reverence in favor of aesthetics rooted in street art, graffiti, super-flat cartoons, multi-colored chrome, and crypto culture. It describes red-chip collectors as mysteriously affluent millennials, techies, hip-hop visionaries, and crypto aspirants who gravitate toward artworks that resemble toys, limited-edition dolls, NFTs, and memecoins, often consumed at venues like the Eden Fine Art gallery at the Wynn in Las Vegas or parties during Art Basel Miami Beach. Key artists associated with this movement include KAWS, George Condo, Virgil Abloh, Tom Sachs, Alex Israel, Damien Hirst, Harmony Korine, Yoshitomo Nara, and Banksy, with Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami seen as transitional "purple chip" figures.

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The VIP opening of Frieze Los Angeles at Santa Monica Airport saw a surge of high-value transactions and heavy foot traffic from both local and international collectors. Major galleries reported multi-million dollar sales within the first few hours, including a $2.8 million work by Njideka Akunyili Crosby at David Zwirner and a sold-out booth of Conny Maier paintings at Hauser & Wirth. Dealers described the atmosphere as a "frenzy," noting that sales figures in some cases already tripled their performance at previous major fairs like Art Basel Miami Beach.

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Art Basel has launched its first edition in Doha, Qatar, with a deliberately small and tightly controlled format. The fair features only 87 galleries, all required to mount solo presentations, with strict limits on booth size, power sources, and rehanging of works. This creates a slower, calmer atmosphere distinct from its larger, more chaotic sister fairs in Miami and Paris.

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ARTnews reporter Daniel Cassady recounts his experience navigating the nightlife and social events surrounding Art Basel Miami Beach 2024. The article details his week from Monday to Wednesday, including parties at Untitled Art's venue at The Moore, a dinner at Joe's Stone Crab hosted by dealer Rob Dimin, Gagosian's party at Mr. Chow, and late-night gatherings at Casa Tua and Mac's Club Deuce. He spotlights art-world figures such as dealer Lindsey Jarvis, collector Beth DeWoody, and artist Lucy de Kooning Villeneuve, while noting the chaotic, phone-thieving atmosphere of the Deuce.

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Christopher Kulendran Thomas, an artist who has been building his own neural networks for over a decade, is showing new paintings and a video installation at Gagosian's Upper East Side location, with concurrent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and upcoming at the New Museum. His series 'Peace Core' uses AI trained on Sri Lankan painters to generate compositions that are hand-painted onto canvas, depicting Mullivaikkal beach—the site of a 2009 massacre of Tamil civilians during the Sri Lankan civil war. The Gagosian show also features a 24-screen video installation that algorithmically remixes American TV footage from the morning of September 11, 2001, before the attacks became visible.

Process Is the Point at IFPDA Print Fair

The International Fine Prints and Drawings Association (IFPDA) Print Fair returned to New York’s Park Avenue Armory, featuring 80 global galleries, publishers, and print studios. The event showcased a diverse range of works, from 19th-century Japanese ukiyo-e masterworks by Hokusai to contemporary pieces by artists such as Kiki Smith, Julie Mehretu, and David Hockney. Notable highlights included Kiki Smith’s massive 12-foot watercolor "Wooden Moon" and Paula Rego’s influential abortion etchings, which were recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Art Basel Qatar has launched its inaugural edition in Doha, marking a significant expansion of the Swiss fair brand into the Middle East. The event features 87 exhibitors in a unique, booth-less format spread across the M7 and Doha Design District, departing from traditional trade fair aesthetics in favor of a curated, biennial-style presentation. While the opening VIP day saw strong attendance from regional collectors and major international galleries like Hauser & Wirth, the atmosphere was tempered by light initial sales and significant regional geopolitical tensions.

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The Affordable Art Fair opened its latest New York edition on March 30 at the Metropolitan Pavilion, featuring 72 galleries from six continents. The fair, now in its 15th year in New York, offers artwork priced between $100 and $10,000, with at least half of each booth's inventory under $5,000. Highlights include Lucy Sparrow's felt grocery items for $100, Orson Kartt's mixed media prints for $250, and Yann Guitton's oversized $20 bill artwork. The fair also offers themed tours such as “Female Voices” and “Finds Under $500.”

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Artnet News's Wet Paint column reports that Lomex gallery founder Alexander Shulan and art advisor Ralph DeLuca are partnering to open a new gallery, Lomex Las Vegas, in an old atomic ranch home three miles from the Strip. The space, located in a historic neighborhood where parts of Martin Scorsese's 'Casino' were filmed, will feature seasonal exhibitions, performances, and events curated by Shulan, with a new roster of artists distinct from Lomex's existing lineup. Separately, the column introduces Marvin, an AI-generated Instagram influencer who mimics a techno-optimistic art speculator and leaves ChatGPT-style comments on art world accounts.

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Celine is partnering with the Centre Pompidou to offer free public access on four select days this summer, coinciding with Wolfgang Tillmans's major exhibition "Nothing Could Have Prepared Us – Everything Could Have Prepared Us." The initiative, "Accès Libre par Celine," launches June 13 and continues on July 3, August 28, and September 22. Tillmans's exhibition occupies the museum's entire second floor, typically home to the Bibliothèque publique d'information (Bpi), and runs through September 22. Rather than a chronological retrospective, the installation engages directly with the building's architecture, repurposing library furniture and redesigning partitions. The show follows Tillmans's traveling retrospective "To Look Without Fear" at MoMA in 2022 and a recent solo presentation at David Zwirner.

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The second edition of the Aspen Art Fair returns to the historic Hotel Jerome from July 29 to August 2, marking the launch of Aspen Art Week. The fair has more than doubled its exhibitor count from 21 to 44 galleries across 15 countries, including newcomers like Sean Kelly and Marianne Boesky, alongside international participants such as Praise Shadows, Anat Ebgi, the Sunday Painter, La Loma Projects, and 193 Gallery. Programming includes talks with artists Mickalene Thomas and Issy Wood, curated home tours, and a site-specific exhibition inspired by *A Room of One’s Own*. Cofounders Becca Hoffman and Bob Chase emphasize the fair's intimate, un-boothlike atmosphere, with in-room installations transforming guest suites into salon-style exhibitions.

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A new art fair called Arrival made its debut at the Tourists hotel in North Adams, Massachusetts, featuring 36 exhibitors and attracting curators, collectors, and artists from across the country. The fair, which closed June 15, offered an intimate format with world-class art, deep conversation, and a relaxed atmosphere that included swimming between sales, set against the backdrop of cultural attractions like Mass MOCA, the Clark Art Institute, and the Williams College Museum of Art.

A Duchamp Retrospective at MoMA Presents an Artist Who Challenged the Very Definition of Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has launched a major retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, marking the first comprehensive North American survey of the artist’s work in over 50 years. Co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition traces Duchamp’s evolution from his early Cubo-Futurist paintings to his revolutionary "Readymades" and optical experiments. The show features seminal works such as Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train and explores his various personas, including his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy.

Mary, Queen of Scots Final Letter on View; French Artist Adds Armor to Dalida Sculpture: Morning Links for March 10, 2026

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Perth Museum has unveiled the final letter written by Mary, Queen of Scots, marking the document's first public display in Scotland in three decades. Penned hours before her execution in 1587, the letter to Henry III of France frames her death as a religious martyrdom and is subject to extreme conservation protocols that limit its exhibition frequency. Meanwhile, in Paris, artist Luz has installed a spiked, mirror-encrusted bodice on the famous Dalida bust in Montmartre to protest the tradition of tourists rubbing the sculpture's breasts for luck.

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Art Basel Paris launched a new ultra-exclusive invitation-only preview called Avant Première, held one day before the official VIP preview. The four-hour event on Tuesday afternoon saw strong sales, with Thaddaeus Ropac selling works including a 1953 Alberto Burri for €4.2 million and two George Baselitz pieces, while Hauser & Wirth sold Gerhard Richter's 1987 *Abstraktes Bild* for $23 million, the highest reported sale. The fair limited each gallery to six invites with plus-ones, resulting in an estimated 3,000 attendees compared to 6,000 for the regular First Choice preview, creating a more manageable and urgent atmosphere.

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V. Joy Simmons, a Los Angeles-based physician and longtime art collector, opened her Baldwin Hills home to ARTnews for a tour of her extensive collection. The house features over 150 objects, including stained-glass windows by Varnette Honeywood and Joyce Dudnick, a site-specific column installation by Lauren Halsey, and works by Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Kerry James Marshall, Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, and Carrie Mae Weems, among many others. Simmons began collecting in the 1970s with a $50 lithograph by Catlett and has since built a collection that spans generations of Black artists, often juxtaposing older and younger artists in her displays.

Are We Too Reverent of Marcel Duchamp?

The Museum of Modern Art has launched a major retrospective of Marcel Duchamp, co-organized with the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The exhibition tracks the artist's evolution from his early Cubist experiments and the scandal of 'Nude Descending a Staircase' to his radical invention of the readymade, exemplified by the infamous urinal, 'Fountain'. The show presents a comprehensive look at 'The Duch' through a reverential, church-like atmosphere, concluding with his later years as a dapper, enigmatic figure of the avant-garde.

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Christie's 21st-century evening sale in New York on Wednesday night achieved $123.6 million, just below its $126 million high estimate and 16% above last year's sale. The sale featured 19 lots from the collection of the late Stefan Edlis and his widow Gael Neeson, which brought in $49.2 million against a $30 million estimate. The top lot was Christopher Wool's "Untitled (RIOT)" (1990), selling for $19.8 million. New auction records were set for Firelei Báez ($1.1 million) and Olga de Amaral ($3.1 million). Only one of 45 lots failed to sell—a Cecily Brown painting estimated at $4–6 million. The sale was characterized by careful use of third-party guarantees and lowered reserves, with art advisor Aileen Agopian noting bidding was "deep and robust" despite a flat atmosphere.

Joan Semmel Is Doing Her Best Work at 93

Nonagenarian painter Joan Semmel is experiencing a significant career renaissance, marked by a major survey exhibition at the Jewish Museum and a concurrent solo show at Alexander Gray Associates. At 93, Semmel continues to work from her Soho studio, where she has lived for over fifty years, producing unflinching figurative paintings that explore the female body, aging, and the gaze. The article traces her trajectory from her early education at Cooper Union and a formative period in Madrid to her pivotal role in feminist art history.

Art Paris 2026: 10 Booths for Great Discoveries

Art Paris 2026 : 10 stands pour faire de belles découvertes

The 28th edition of Art Paris has opened at the Grand Palais, marked by a vibrant and optimistic atmosphere. The fair features a diverse array of works ranging from Fabrice Hyber’s monumental inflatable bears at the entrance to a curated selection of contemporary ceramics, textiles, and innovative paintings. A central highlight is the "Reparation" thematic itinerary curated by Alexia Fabre, which connects various artists through the concept of healing and transformation.

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Post-Fair will return to Santa Monica from February 26–28 for its second edition, bringing 30 galleries and 31 total exhibitors to the Art Deco former post office that helped define its identity. Founded by Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp, the fair debuted last year as a low-cost alternative to Los Angeles's expensive fair scene, offering single-artist presentations at a flat fee. This year's edition expands internationally with new participants from Europe and Asia, including Edouard Montassut (Paris), Lovay Fine Arts (Geneva), MISAKO&ROSEN (Tokyo), and P21 (Seoul), alongside additions like Anton Kern (New York), Eli Kerr (Montreal), and White Columns.

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Three art-world professionals—adviser Sarah Galender Meyer, gallerist Yng-Ru Chen, and artist Crystalle Lacouture—have launched Arrival Art Fair, a biannual, invitation-only event in North Adams, Massachusetts, at the Tourists hotel. The fair features 36 exhibitors selected by curators with regional ties, including galleries such as Jane Lombard, Sears Peyton Gallery, Jessica Silverman, Abattoir Gallery, and Wolfgang Gallery. Programming includes outdoor sculpture, museum talks, and an acquisition prize from the Williams College Museum of Art, with booth fees supplemented by philanthropic support to keep the fair free for visitors.

Participating Artists and Curators Push Back on Venice Biennale’s Relocation of Israeli Pavilion, Call for Exclusion of Russia, Israel, and US

Seventy-three artists and curators participating in the main exhibition of the 2024 Venice Biennale have issued an open letter objecting to the organizers' decision to relocate the Israeli national pavilion to the Arsenale. They argue this move creates an intimidating atmosphere contrary to the late curator Koyo Kouoh's vision of "radical solidarity" and will necessitate a heightened security presence. The signatories, which include key curators tasked with realizing Kouoh's exhibition, also call for the exclusion of Israel, Russia, and the United States from the event, citing their governments' alleged commission of war crimes.

Art Basel’s Soft Opening Belies Strong, Swift Sales Across Tiers

Art Basel's 2025 edition opened with a soft atmosphere that belied strong and swift sales across all price tiers. Major galleries reported significant transactions: David Zwirner sold 68 works including a $9.5 million Ruth Asawa sculpture and a $6.8 million Gerhard Richter painting; Gladstone placed a $3.5 million Keith Haring piece; and Thaddaeus Ropac sold a €1.8 million Georg Baselitz and a $1.8 million James Rosenquist painting to a European institution. White Cube, Hauser & Wirth, and Tina Kim Gallery also reported robust sales, with works by artists such as Dana Schutz, Marlene Dumas, Yayoi Kusama, and Ha Chong-Hyun moving quickly. However, mid-tier galleries like Marianne Boesky Gallery noted more cautious, eye-driven buying rather than the frenzied chasing of past years.

Frieze and NADA New York’s Early Sales Signal Buyer Confidence

Frieze New York opened its VIP preview on May 7, with early sales indicating cautious but steady buyer confidence amid economic uncertainty and the recent acquisition of the fair by Endeavor's former CEO Ari Emanuel. American buyers dominated, while Asian and European collectors were largely absent. Mega-galleries like Gagosian and Pace reported significant sales, including Jeff Koons's Hulk Elvis sculptures and works by Adam Pendleton and Lynda Benglis, though the atmosphere was more subdued and negotiation-friendly than in previous years.

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The second edition of the Atlanta Art Fair took place at Pullman Yards, a historic 27-acre former rail works in the Kirkwood district. The fair, directed by Kelly Freeman, featured around 80 dealers and attracted a diverse crowd, including many high school and college students, with a casual atmosphere far removed from typical art fair elitism. Freeman emphasized teaching the city how to use an art fair, prioritizing accessibility and long-term engagement over immediate sales.

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Ayoung Kim's video "Delivery Dancer's Sphere" (2022) captures the experience of delivery workers during the Covid-19 pandemic in Seoul, following two female riders navigating the city via app-based systems. Kim shadowed real delivery workers to create the work, which blends documentary footage, anime-style animation, and AI-generated imagery. The video is part of a series that will be featured in Kim's first US solo exhibition at MoMA PS1 in New York, opening this week, and she will also debut a new motion-capture piece at the Performa festival later this month. Kim recently won a $100,000 award from the Guggenheim Museum and LG.