4 takeaways art business conference hong kong

Hong Kong's inaugural Art Business Conference brought together government officials, legal experts, and financiers to examine the city's strategic advantages as an art trading hub. Key takeaways included the need to maintain cultural exchange as a national strategy under China's 14th Five-Year Plan, with the West Kowloon Cultural District receiving over $6.5 billion in government funding. The Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting 2025, authored by Clare McAndrew, revealed that ultra-wealthy collectors are now allocating up to 20 percent of their wealth to art, up from 15 percent in 2024, as an estimated $83 trillion in intergenerational wealth transforms art trading into a sophisticated professional network.

shanghai art week 2025 diary

Shanghai Art Week 2025 featured two major art fairs, West Bund Art and Design and Art021 Shanghai, alongside numerous satellite exhibitions and events across the city. The author navigated the sprawling metropolis by public bike, visiting highlights including “Artist’s Treat,” a cluster of 11 exhibitions organized by artist Xu Zhen in a repurposed French school, and Blunt Society, an artist-run space showing works by Ma Lingli and Alex Müller. The week was marked by a cautiously optimistic market mood, with dealers reporting better-than-expected sales and new initiatives like Art021’s SVIP preview for serious collectors.

zohran mamdani names arts culture transition committee

sylvia snowdens m street paintings command space at white cube new york

Sylvia Snowden's exhibition "On the Verge" at White Cube New York showcases her "M Street" series of paintings, created between 1978 and 1997. The works feature thick, impasto surfaces and muscular, whiplashed figures that emerge from oil pastel and acrylic, depicting anatomical crises rather than symbolic or allegorical subjects. The show was organized by Sukanya Rajaratnam, who conserved and restored the paintings from Snowden's archive in Washington, D.C.

chelsea art fair chelsea hotel 2025

The Chelsea Art Fair returned for its second edition at New York's Chelsea Hotel, with a VIP preview on Saturday and a one-day public run on Sunday. Organized by Platform (now owned by Basic Space), the intimate fair featured just five exhibitors—56 Henry, Lomex, Magenta Plains, Ramiken, and Castle—plus a special presentation by Off Paradise. Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody was the first to arrive, and other VIPs included Mark Ronson, Jamie Cohen Hort, and Whitney Museum curator Dan Nadel. Dealer Ellie Rines reported strong sales, swapping out a work after it sold within 30 minutes, and some 3,000 people registered for the event.

art basel hong kong 2026 exhibitor list announced

Art Basel Hong Kong has announced its exhibitor list for the 2026 edition, featuring 240 galleries from 42 countries and territories, roughly the same size as last year's 242 galleries. The fair runs March 27–29 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre, with preview days on March 25–26. New additions include 32 first-time exhibitors from Australia, Japan, Turkey, France, Germany, and the US, while 33 galleries from the previous edition are absent—some due to closures (Blum, Clearing, Kasmin) or acquisitions (Millan bought by Almeida & Dale). A new sector called Echoes will showcase works created in the last five years, and the Encounters sector will be curated by a team led by Mami Kataoka. Media artist Ellen Pau will oversee the film program for the first time, and Shahzia Sikander has been commissioned to create a public artwork for the M+ Museum facade.

sperone westwater gallery closing

Sperone Westwater, a pioneering New York gallery that launched artists like Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, and Francesco Clemente, will close on December 31 after 50 years. Co-founders Angela Westwater and Gian Enzo Sperone are pursuing separate endeavors. The gallery’s final show is a current exhibition for Long, and it will still participate in Art Basel Miami Beach next month. Founded in 1975 in SoHo, the gallery was known for championing Neo-Expressionism and transavanguardia, and later diversified its roster with artists like Joana Choumali and Gamaliel Rodriguez. Its eight-story Bowery building, designed by Norman Foster, faces an uncertain future.

paint drippings art industry news nov 14

This week's art industry roundup covers major developments across auctions, galleries, and art fairs. Highlights include $1.6 billion in art heading to auction at Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips in New York; the sale of the 'Mellon Blue' diamond for $25 million at Christie's Geneva; and the Vanderbilt jewels achieving $4.2 million at Phillips Geneva. In galleries, Sperone Westwater faces possible closure or transformation after 50 years, while Upsilon Gallery opens a new space in Milan. The IFPDA Print Fair expands to include drawings and rebrands, and Abu Dhabi Art will relaunch as Frieze Abu Dhabi next year. The Gallery Climate Coalition reports significant emissions reductions among its members.

jeffrey epstein emails leon black picasso gagosian

Newly released emails from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein reveal that he discussed a plan by billionaire art collector Leon Black to purchase a Picasso painting from Gagosian gallery for $100 million. In a 2015 email to Melanie Spinella, a representative for Black, Epstein questioned the lack of a written contract for the overseas transfer, calling it 'fishy.' The emails also show Epstein advising Black on broader art purchasing strategies, including assigning agreements to family members, and offering opinions on Artspace, the online art marketplace acquired by Black's publishing house Phaidon.

dirty looks fashion exhibition

A new London exhibition, "Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion," opens at the Barbican Art Gallery, exploring how designers have used dirt, distress, and imperfection as acts of defiance and new forms of beauty. Curated by Karen Van Godtsenhoven, the show features over 60 designers from Alexander McQueen and Maison Margiela to emerging upstarts, tracing moments like the rise of anti-fashion in the 1980s and trends like bogcore. It runs until January 2026 and is the Barbican's first fashion-focused show in eight years.

met conde m nast galleries costume institute art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute announced its spring 2026 blockbuster exhibition, "Costume Art," which will explore the relationship between fashion and the dressed body across visual art history. Curator Andrew Bolton explained that the show aims to correct the long-held belief that fashion must be disembodied to be considered art. The exhibition will inaugurate the new 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast galleries and will pair historical and contemporary garments with paintings, drawings, and objects spanning 5,000 years from the Met's other curatorial departments.

abu dhabi art 2025

Abu Dhabi Art (ADA) opens its largest edition to VIPs on November 18 at Manarat Al Saadiyat, featuring 142 exhibitors—up from just over 100 last year. This is the final edition under the ADA name before it relaunches as Frieze Abu Dhabi in 2025, marking a major transition for the Gulf's art market. Key international dealers like Pace are returning after a long absence, and the fair includes works by Robert Indiana, Arlene Shechet, and a teamLab installation. The event comes as Art Basel also plans its 2026 debut in Qatar, signaling a broader regional shift.

jenny savilles solo show at ca pesaro in venice in 2026 will be her fourth museum show in 18 months

The International Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice will host a major solo exhibition of works by British painter Jenny Saville in 2026, coinciding with the Venice Biennale. The show, curated by Elisabetta Barisoni, will run from March 28 to November 22 and feature around 30 paintings spanning Saville's career from the 1990s to the present, including a new series inspired by Venice. Mega-gallery Gagosian, which represents Saville, is supporting the exhibition.

katharina grosse joins white cube

London-based gallery White Cube has announced representation of German artist Katharina Grosse, with her first exhibition scheduled for April 2026 at its Bermondsey space. The gallery will also feature a new painting by Grosse at Art Basel Miami Beach next month. Grosse will continue to share representation with Gagosian, Galerie Max Hetzler, and Galerie nächst St. Stephan. White Cube founder Jay Jopling, who first worked with Grosse in 2002, expressed admiration for her evolving practice.

pace modigliani art basel paris restellini

Pace Gallery announced highlights for its Art Basel Paris presentation, including a major Amedeo Modigliani painting from 1918, *Jeune fille aux macarons (Young Woman with Hair in Side Buns)*, priced around $10 million. The work previews a new partnership between Pace and the Institut Restellini, founded by Modigliani scholar Marc Restellini. Restellini will collaborate with Pace on symposia in New York in 2026 and an exhibition in 2027, while his long-awaited Modigliani catalogue raisonné—authenticating 424 works—is set for publication in March 2025 by Yale University Press.

george condo spruth magers skarstedt representation

Galleries Sprüth Magers and Skarstedt have announced joint representation of artist George Condo, ending his six-year partnership with Hauser & Wirth. Condo has a long history with both galleries: he first showed with Monika Sprüth in 1984 and was represented by Skarstedt from 2004 to 2019. The announcement comes after a two-venue exhibition earlier this year that involved both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth. Condo's market remains strong, with recent auction sales exceeding $6 million and a current retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.

gagosian teams up with movie director wes anderson to reimagine joseph cornells new york studio in paris

Gagosian has partnered with filmmaker Wes Anderson to recreate the New York studio of Joseph Cornell at its Paris gallery space on 9 rue de Castiglione. The exhibition, curated by Jasper Sharp and titled “The House of Utopia Parkway,” will run from December 16 to March 14, 2026, transforming the gallery into a tableau that blends a time capsule with a life-size shadow box. It marks the first solo presentation of Cornell’s work in Paris in over four decades, featuring iconic glass-fronted “shadow boxes” such as *Pharmacy* (1943), *Untitled (Pinturicchio Boy)* (circa 1950), and *A Dressing Room for Gille* (1939).

artissima art fair turin 2025 report

Italy's largest contemporary art fair, Artissima, opened its 32nd edition in Turin's Oval Lingotto arena with 176 international galleries from 36 countries. The fair is the first major international art event in Italy since the government slashed VAT on art sales from 22% to 5% in July, a move long sought by galleries and dealers. Early sales included works by João Gabriel, Silvia Capuzzo, and Simon Pasieka, and the fair attracted top curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist and Massimiliano Gioni, as well as prominent Italian collecting families. However, some gallerists noted a lack of American collectors, echoing trends seen at Art Basel in Switzerland.

christopher kulendran thomas moma gagosian new museum

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.

cai guo qiang centre pompidou activists respond

Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang staged a fireworks performance titled *Le Dernier Carnival (The Last Carnival)* outside the Centre Pompidou in Paris on October 22, during Paris Art Week, to mark the museum's five-year closure for renovations. The show, created in collaboration with White Cube gallery, used pyrotechnics, paint, and a custom-built AI model. Activists from Students for a Free Tibet France protested the event, condemning Cai for a previous pyrotechnic stunt in Tibet that sparked environmental concerns and led to the dismissal of four Chinese officials.

louvre heist security experts prevent art theft

On Sunday at around 9:30 a.m., robbers broke into the Louvre's Apollo Gallery using a cherry picker and an angle grinder, stealing nine pieces of jewelry worth an estimated $102 million in less than eight minutes. ARTnews consulted security experts who noted that the theft exploited systemic vulnerabilities, pointing to a pattern of recent museum heists including the Natural History Museum in Paris, the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, and the Dresden crown jewels theft in Germany. The Louvre had previously faced staff walkouts over inadequate security staffing, and director Laurence des Cars has requested a police station be installed at the museum.

gagosian reunites with richard diebenkorn

Gagosian has announced representation of the late American painter Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), marking the artist's return to the gallery more than thirty years after his final solo exhibition there during his lifetime. To celebrate, the gallery will mount a career-spanning exhibition at its Madison Avenue flagship opening November 8, curated by Jasper Sharp in collaboration with the Richard Diebenkorn Foundation. The show will feature works from every period of Diebenkorn's six-decade career, including early California landscapes, wartime watercolors, and the celebrated Ocean Park abstractions, with highlights such as a 1943 watercolor, a monumental 1960 canvas, and late works on paper.

centre pompidou fireworks display cai guo qiang

On September 22, the Centre Pompidou in Paris closed for a five-year renovation, marking the occasion with a daytime fireworks display titled “The Last Carnival” by Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. Organized with White Cube gallery and set during Art Basel Paris, the three-act gunpowder spectacle—The Banquet, The Dawn of AI, and The Last Carnival—was conceived using Cai’s custom AI model, cAI™, and turned the museum’s façade into a monumental painting.

frieze london 2025 big galleries report strong sales afternoon

Frieze London 2025 opened with strong VIP preview sales, as major galleries reported brisk business by early afternoon. Thaddaeus Ropac sold a Robert Rauschenberg work for $850,000 and a Tony Cragg sculpture for $420,000, while Hauser & Wirth moved multiple pieces including a George Rouy for £275,000 and an Ellen Gallagher for $950,000. Gagosian sold a new Lauren Halsey sculpture before noon, and White Cube reported six sales. The fair's layout, which places mega-galleries at the back to encourage foot traffic to smaller booths, returned by popular demand.

gulf art scene global force

The article reports on the rapid expansion of the Gulf art scene, with a packed calendar of events from November to March including Abu Dhabi Art, the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Noor Riyadh, Desert X AlUla, Art Basel Qatar, Art Dubai, and the Sharjah Biennial. Institutional buying is surging as Abu Dhabi prepares to open its Guggenheim, Qatar Museums acquires for the Art Mill, and Saudi Arabia buys for multiple planned museums. The number of collectors is also growing, driven by a "Covid bounce" of high-net-worth individuals relocating from Europe and India to tax-efficient Dubai and Doha, with 6,700 millionaires moving to the UAE in 2024 alone.

vancouver art gallery and walker art center nan goldin

The Vancouver Art Gallery and the Walker Art Center have jointly acquired Nan Goldin's *Stendhal Syndrome* (2024), a slideshow-based video work with an original soundtrack. The acquisition was funded by the Curators’ Council Fund for Women Artists and the Jean MacMillan Southam Fund at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The work will make its Canadian debut at the Vancouver Art Gallery. First presented at Gagosian's New York gallery in September 2024 as part of Goldin's exhibition "You never did anything wrong," the piece pairs two decades of the artist's photographs with a personal voiceover, exploring the emotional power of art. It features images of classical, Renaissance, and Baroque masterpieces from institutions such as the Galleria Borghese, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Prado, interwoven with portraits of Goldin's friends, family, and lovers.

david adjaye museums open without starchitect

René Magritte's surrealist masterpiece *La Magie Noire*, unseen on the market for nearly a century, will be auctioned at Sotheby's Paris later this month with an estimate over $8 million. The painting was originally purchased by the family of WWII resistance heroine Suzanne Spaak, who supported Magritte during a financially difficult period. Separately, three major museums designed by star architect David Adjaye—the Princeton University Art Museum, the Museum of West African Art in Benin City, and the Studio Museum in Harlem—are set to open this fall, but institutions are downplaying Adjaye's involvement following sexual misconduct allegations he denied in 2023. Other news includes Pace Gallery closing its Hong Kong space, Colnaghi opening in Riyadh, and the death of ARTnews owner Milton Esterow.

times square statue thomas j price statue debate

A 12-foot-tall bronze statue of a Black woman by British sculptor Thomas J. Price, titled *Grounded in the Stars* (2023), has been installed in Times Square, sparking a polarized public reaction. Online, conservative commentators and social media users have labeled the work a sign of a "very sick society" and a "death of civilization," with racist AI-generated and Photoshopped images circulating. In person, the sculpture has drawn both affirming responses—such as a Black woman mimicking its defiant pose—and disrespectful acts, including a white man groping the statue's buttocks for a photo. The work, which stands near permanent monuments to white male figures, will be on view until June 17.

sally mann warns of government censorship

Photographer Sally Mann has spoken out about government censorship after her photographs were seized from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas earlier this year. The controversy stemmed from her 1990s images of her children, which included nude depictions that some critics characterized as "child porn," leading to their removal from an exhibition following an open letter from the conservative Christian advocacy group Danbury Institute. Though the photos were returned and charges dropped, Mann expressed deep concern about the future of American museums, warning of a "new era of culture wars" and describing the situation as "Orwellian." She noted that social media has given censors more tools, and that the Trump administration is actively rolling out policies targeting museum programs, including a review of the Smithsonian.

art market open door policy jeff magid

Jeff Magid, a New York, Los Angeles, and Mexico City–based art collector, plans to open Cuernavaca Tres, a public art foundation in Mexico City, in 2026. In an opinion piece for ARTnews, he argues that the current downturn in the art market—marked by declining sales and gallery closures—is not due to economic cycles or financialization, but rather a simple mismatch: there are more galleries, auctions, fairs, and artists than ever, while the number of buyers has not kept pace. Magid criticizes the luxury retail model adopted by many galleries, which prioritizes exclusivity and status signaling, and contends that this approach fails to attract enough new collectors to sustain the market.