The article reports on several developments in the art world: the Centre des Monuments Nationaux (CMN) loses management of Mont-Saint-Michel; the Venice Biennale opens amid controversy; a law on the restitution of cultural property looted during colonization is definitively adopted; the V&A East museum targets younger audiences; in Giverny, the Monet legacy does not benefit everyone; and the market for the Nabis artists is becoming more structured.
Jacques Gairard, a figure in the French art world, has died. The announcement appears in Le Journal des Arts, which also covers the opening of the Venice Biennale amid controversy, the final adoption of a law on the restitution of cultural property looted during colonization, the V&A East's focus on young audiences, the uneven economic impact of Monet's legacy in Giverny, and the structuring of the Nabis art market.
Maximilien Durand has been reappointed as head of the Department of Byzantine and Eastern Christian Arts at the Louvre Museum, a role that carries both internal museum responsibilities and national duties on behalf of the French state. Two decrees signed by Culture Minister Catherine Pégard formalize his renewal: one as head of the museum department, and another as head of the corresponding major heritage department, a status held by only nine of the Louvre's departments.
Le délicat bouquet de roses et de pivoines de Redouté et de Thilo Westermann à Malmaison
An exhibition titled "Roses & Pivoines" has opened at the Château de Bois-Préau in Malmaison, France, pairing the 19th-century botanical watercolors of Pierre-Joseph Redouté with contemporary glass-painting works by German artist Thilo Westermann. Redouté, famous for his meticulous rose and peony illustrations commissioned by Empress Joséphine Bonaparte, is shown alongside Westermann's pointillist technique on glass, which he developed from 2014 onward. The show also includes works by Jan-Frans van Dael and Cornelis van Spaendonck, plus scent stations for visitors to smell rose essences.
The article covers the retrospective exhibition of French artist duo Ida Tursic and Wilfried Mille at the Carré d'art in Nîmes. Titled "Dissonances à géométries variables," the show traces their career from student works at the École nationale supérieure d'art de Dijon to recent paintings, featuring a critical, humorous, and materially rich approach to figurative painting. The duo draws from press images, internet sources, art history, and archives, disrupting reproductions with paint splatters and odd details, and the exhibition is organized thematically from "happiness" to "melancholy."
Japanese writer-director Koji Fukada's new film *Nagi Notes* premiered on 13 May at the Cannes Film Festival. The story follows Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), who visits the remote town of Nagi to sit for a sculptor friend, Yoriko (Takako Matsu). The film explores how characters use art—from drawings to sculptural busts—as a medium to express unspoken desires, grief, and identity, with key scenes set at the Nagi Museum of Contemporary Art featuring a permanent installation by Arakawa and Madeline Gins.
Art in America, the sister publication of ARTnews, has announced its Summer 2026 "New Talent" issue, featuring 20 emerging artists selected by the magazine's editors. The list includes international artists working across various mediums, such as Joeun Kim Aatchim, Jenny Calivas, Kiah Celeste, Malo Chapuy, Mitchell Charbonneau, Isaiah Davis, Elizabeth Glaessner, Juliana Halpert, Craig Jun Li, Kinlaw, Koyoltzintli, Kyung-Me, Chyrum Lambert, Terran Last Gun, Satchel Lee, Claudia Pagès Rabal, Ren Light Pan, Emma Safir, Frank Wang Yefeng, and Alexa West. Profiles of each artist appear in the print edition and will be published online in the coming weeks.
Grayson Perry’s life story is being adapted into a stage musical titled *Grayson the Musical*, co-created with Richard Thomas, composer of *Jerry Springer: The Opera*. The show follows Perry from his childhood in Chelmsford to his rise as a Turner Prize-winning ceramicist and tapestry-maker, featuring his iconic dresses and his teddy bear Alan Measles. Perry wrote the lyrics, with a book by screenwriter Sara-Ella Ozbek and direction by Sean Foley. A workshop production will run for five performances in July at Soho Theatre Walthamstow, the east London borough where Perry once kept a studio and which inspired his famous work *The Walthamstow Tapestry*.
Marisol Mendez, a Bolivian photographer based in Paris, describes the creation of her striking 2019 photograph featuring Marta Salinas, a theatre actor, holding a bull costume in a field. The image is part of Mendez's series "Madre," which explores womanhood and challenges traditional feminine depictions in Bolivia. Mendez explains that the bull costume, inspired by the Bolivian dance waka tokori, symbolizes masculinity, and the photograph aims to portray a woman comfortable with her masculine energy. The work was inspired by a dream and executed with the help of Mendez's mother, who scouted the location. Mendez is the winner of this year's Saltzman-Leibovitz prize, and her work is featured at Photo London.
Bruno Bischofberger, who served as Jean-Michel Basquiat's exclusive worldwide dealer from 1982 until the artist's death in 1988, reflects on Basquiat's life and legacy in an excerpt from the forthcoming book *Basquiat: The World of Jean-Michel*, published by Assouline. Bischofberger contrasts Basquiat's raw, politically charged approach with Andy Warhol's detached, commercial style, and recounts personal memories of Basquiat's visits to Switzerland, where he absorbed everything from visual art to folk art and design.
The Saltzman-Leibovitz photography prize, founded in 2025 by Lisa Saltzman and Annie Leibovitz, announces its winners and runners-up for 2026. Bolivian photographer Marisol Mendez wins for her series 'MADRE,' which challenges patriarchal representations of women in Bolivia through portraits of matriarchs and references to the Inca moon goddess. Runner-up Miranda Barnes documents African American debutante cotillions in Detroit, while other featured photographers include Bettina Pittaluga and Cole Ndelu, whose works explore body diversity and the fusion of Zulu cosmology with Catholicism. The exhibition runs at Photo London, Olympia, 13–17 May 2026.
Artist Bouke de Vries has created five unique sculptural porcelain bottles for Dries Van Noten's unisex perfume Soie Malaquais, which launched in 2022. The bottles, priced at £6,000 each, are sold at the designer's London and New York stores, with a limited-edition series also available online. De Vries, known for reassembling broken china fragments into dynamic objects, designed the bottles to reflect the fragrance's warm notes of chestnut, rose, blackcurrant, and cardamom, developed by perfumer Marie Salamagne.
Khaled Sabsabi has opened his exhibition 'conference of one’s self' at the Australian Pavilion of the 61st Venice Biennale, alongside a second installation 'Khalil' in the Arsenale. This follows a tumultuous period in which Creative Australia rescinded his appointment as Australia’s representative in February 2025, sparking widespread backlash from the art community. After being reappointed in July 2025, Sabsabi presents two monumental multimedia works inspired by Sufi practice, created in Bangkok and described as 'one body with two limbs'.
The article reviews Keith Haring's early work from 1980 to 1983, currently on view at the Brant Foundation in New York. The author reflects on initially dismissing Haring's graffiti-inspired style as trite and playful, but now sees darker, prophetic themes in pieces featuring apocalyptic imagery, UFOs, nuclear power, and mindless obedience to higher powers. The exhibition, curated by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, runs through May 31.
British artist Arch Hades has transformed the Scoletta Battioro e Tiraoro di Venezia, a historic palazzo on Venice's Grand Canal, into an immersive solo exhibition titled “Arch Hades: Return | Ritorno,” timed to the 61st Venice Biennale. The show features site-specific paintings, sculptures, and a soundscape, anchored by the monumental 22-panel painting *Return* (2025), which draws on Greco-Roman sculpture, Symbolism, Surrealism, and Romanticism, and echoes Gustav Klimt's lost “Faculty Paintings.” New works from Hades's “Confessions” series and the mirrored chrome piece *Sphinx* (2026) further explore themes of memory, connection, and existentialism.
The article is a diary entry from the 2026 Venice Biennale, focusing on the exhibition "In Minor Keys" curated by the late Koyo Kouoh. The author describes an emotional experience, beginning with a poem by Refaat Alareer on the Arsenale wall, and highlights works by Guadalupe Maravilla, Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka, and others that address themes of perseverance, healing, and survival. Maravilla's sculptures reference a child kidnapped by ICE, while Hatanaka's linocuts explore bipolar disorder as an adaptive trait. The show also features artist-led collectives like Denniston Hill and fierce pussy, emphasizing institution-building and world-making.
The German Pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale features a dual presentation exploring the country's layered political history. Artist Sung Tieu has cloaked the pavilion's fascist-era facade with a mosaic reconstruction of a GDR housing estate for Vietnamese contract workers, where she lived as a child. Inside, the late Henrike Naumann's immersive installation 'The Home Front' uses furniture and design to stage a confrontation between East and West German domestic and political ideologies. Naumann died in February 2025 at age 41, but her fully realized concept was completed collaboratively by her partner and curator Kathleen Reinhardt.
The article, part of the Artnet Intelligence Report: Year Ahead 2026, analyzes art market performance by price bracket in 2025. The $1 million-to-$10 million range was the strongest segment, with sales totaling $3.5 billion—a 20.8% increase from 2024. Sales above $10 million rose 36.1% to $2.3 billion, boosted by high-priced masterpieces at New York's November auctions. The $100,000-to-$1 million bracket saw $3.2 billion in sales, up 6%. Meanwhile, works under $10,000 and in the $10,000-to-$100,000 range grew less than 1%, indicating cautious buyer behavior.
Lubaina Himid's installation at the British pavilion of the Venice Biennale presents monumental paintings and a wall of painted oars depicting tailors, cooks, architects, gardeners, and sailors—figures who shape Britain. The work is accompanied by an audio piece of bucolic country sounds, but the black figures in the paintings exchange sideways glances of discomfort, questioning whether they truly belong. The exhibition is anchored by 26 philosophical questions on the wall, such as "Can flies settle here?" and "Can poison taste delicious?"
Fotografia Europea, the international photography festival in Reggio Emilia, Italy, has opened with 20 exhibitions and related events under the theme 'ghosts of the moment'. The festival features works by artists including Tania Franco Klein, Giulia Vanelli, Felipe Romero Beltrán, and Salvatore Vitale, exploring themes of memory, migration, identity, and the unseen forces shaping contemporary life. The festival runs until 14 June 2026.
Iranian-Canadian visual journalist and artist Parisa Azadi describes her process of creating protest photographs during the 2022 Iranian revolution from exile in Dubai. Unable to return to Iran, she used open-source protest footage from social media, isolating frames and printing them with a Fujifilm instax camera to transform ephemeral digital images into physical objects. In January 2026, after state massacres and executions, she began burning these prints as an act of mourning, scarring their surfaces to echo the violence they depict.
Ana Viladomiu, a 70-year-old writer, is the last remaining tenant of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Milà (La Pedrera) in Barcelona, a UNESCO World Heritage site that receives about a million visitors annually. She has lived in the luminous apartment since 1988, originally moving in with her then-husband Fernando Amat, owner of the iconic design store Vinçon. Viladomiu holds a rare renta antigua (fixed-rent contract) that allows her to stay until she or Amat dies, after which the not-for-profit foundation managing the building will take ownership. The rest of the building now houses offices and cultural event spaces.
Rutherford Chang, who died last year at age 45, is the subject of a posthumous survey at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art Beijing titled "Hundreds and Thousands." The exhibition centers on Chang's socially engaged works that explore value, circulation, and systems through the deceptively simple form of the square. His best-known piece, "We Buy White Albums" (2013–25), involved amassing roughly one percent of the first pressing of the Beatles' "White Album," highlighting how objects accrue personal and economic worth through use and history. Other works include melting 10,000 copper pennies into a cube and assembling Wall Street Journal portraits from 2008 into a grid that captures a year of crisis and change.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has announced details of its inaugural exhibitions, set to open on September 22, 2026. Founded by filmmaker George Lucas and his wife Mellody Hobson, the museum will feature over 1,200 objects across 30 galleries, tracing the history of visual storytelling from ancient sculptures to Renaissance paintings, photography, comics, and manga. The collection draws from Lucas's personal trove of more than 40,000 works of illustrator art, including pieces by N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, Beatrix Potter, and Jack Kirby, as well as large-scale murals and photography by artists like Judy Baca and Dorothea Lange. The museum, designed by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, also includes archives of Lucas's film sets, props, and costumes.
The article critiques the rise of AI-generated political imagery, such as Donald Trump depicted as Jesus and viral Lego videos of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, arguing that these shallow, generic visuals fail to provide meaningful or lasting cultural commentary on current conflicts. The author contrasts this with the inventive, humorous resistance seen during the 2013 Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, which later influenced a generation of Turkish artists.
Giorno Poetry Systems, the nonprofit founded by artist John Giorno in 1965, has launched a new need-based grant program called the Treat a Stranger Grant. The inaugural round awards $4,545 each to 12 artists, including Jacolby Satterwhite, Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo), Samiya Bashir, Malcolm-X Betts, Pe Ferreira, Mercy Kelly, the late Agosto Machado (whose funds go to his estate), Gavilán Rayna Russom, Keioui Keijaun Thomas, Christopher Udemuezue, and two anonymous recipients. The program revives the spirit of Giorno's AIDS Treatment Project from the 1980s and '90s, which provided direct financial support to artists affected by the epidemic.
An exhibition at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne, titled "Poetry Goes No Further Than Language: a Historical Moment of Art Becoming Art Again," brings together the complete artistic output of the New Measurement Group, a pioneering Chinese conceptual art collective from Beijing, alongside four conceptual experiments by Shanghai-based artist Qian Weikang. Curated by Carol Yinghua Lu and artist Liu Ding, the show aims to reassess early Chinese conceptual art, featuring works by the New Measurement Group (Chen Shaoping, Gu Dexin, Wang Luyan), pieces from the New Wave art movement, and new commissions by Melbourne artist Darcey Bella Arnold. The curators faced challenges locating the group's five publications, including one purchased on eBay from Europe, and used re-enactment and re-fabrication to recreate lost works like Qian's "Ladder Poem" (1990).
Belarus Free Theatre (BFT), an exiled troupe based in London, is presenting its first major visual art project, titled 'Official. Unofficial. Belarus.', at the Venice Biennale. The installation, masterminded by the founders' daughter Daniella Kaliada, features contributions from former political prisoners, painters, sculptors, composers, and world-renowned chef Rasmus Munk, who created a dish evoking detention under an authoritarian regime. The work includes a giant ball of banned books, surveillance cameras attached to an iron crucifix, and a custom scent of a freshly dug grave, all reflecting the terror of life under Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
An experiment using a custom AI model to evaluate artistic value independent of market context found that the model assigned a seven-figure price to an unknown street artist's work while valuing a Picasso at under $1,000. The project, run by an art journalist with a data scientist and an AI expert, trained a Fine Art Large Vision Model on millions of images and price data. Without metadata like artist name or gallery affiliation, the model's predictions were technically interesting but commercially useless; only when those market signals were added did predictions align with real auction outcomes.
The article reports on the best-selling Old Master paintings at auction in 2025, highlighting Canaletto's *Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day*, which sold for $43.8 million at Christie's—three times the next-highest Old Master price. Other notable sales include a $7.55 million triptych of Jesus performing miracles by an unknown 15th-century artist, noted for its exceptional condition and quality.