Reuters has conducted an investigation that claims to have identified the famously anonymous street artist Banksy. The report's key evidence is a police report from Banksy's arrest in New York City approximately twenty years ago.
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has opened "Marcel Duchamp," the first retrospective of the artist on this continent in over 50 years. Curated by Ann Temkin, Michelle Kuo, and Matthew Affron, the exhibition is organized strictly chronologically and features Duchamp's most famous works—including his revolutionary readymades like *Fountain* (1917) and *Bicycle Wheel* (1913)—often shown only in photographic reproduction or as later refabricated copies, replicas, and miniatures from his *Box in a Valise* series. The show highlights how Duchamp's original objects have been lost or dematerialized, forcing viewers to confront the very definition of an artwork.
The 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, titled "In Minor Keys," opens May 9 as a tribute to its late curator Koyo Kouoh. Alongside the Biennale, Venice hosts numerous concurrent exhibitions: Marina Abramović's "Transforming Energy" at Gallerie dell'Accademia (the only living female artist with a major show there); the Matthew Wong Foundation's inaugural exhibition "Interiors" featuring unseen works by the late Chinese Canadian artist; retrospectives of Michael Armitage at Palazzo Grassi and Lorna Simpson at Punta della Dogana; Hernan Bas's new paintings at Ca' Pesaro; Lu Yang's "DOKU The Illusion" at Espaces Louis Vuitton Venezia; and "Minimal Legends" at the Vincenzo de Cotiis Foundation, staging a dialogue among Minimalist masters.
Two record-breaking auctions closed a blockbuster year for the South Asian Modern art market. On 27 September, Saffronart in New Delhi sold 85 lots for $40.2 million—the largest single sale ever in South Asia—while on 29 September, Sotheby’s in New York sold 54 lots for $25.5 million, a record total for South Asian art in the West. These followed Christie’s March sale of M.F. Husain’s mural *Gram Yatra* (1954) for $13.7 million, the highest price ever for an Indian painting. India also enacted a major tax reform, cutting the Goods and Service Tax (GST) on art from 12% to 5%, further stimulating the market.
The Wagner Foundation has selected artists Tomashi Jackson, Lucy Kim, and Yu-Wen Wu as the recipients of its 2026 Wagner Arts Fellowships. Each artist, based in the Boston area, will receive an unrestricted $75,000 grant, professional development support, and will participate in a group exhibition at the Wagner Gallery in Cambridge from August to December 2026.
Shanti Escalante-De Mattei launches a new column called "Link Rot" in ARTnews, exploring the intersection of art, technology, and the internet. The first edition focuses on the fragility of digital and new media art, which faces rapid obsolescence as hardware and software evolve. New media art dealer Kelani Nichole, founder of Transfer Art Gallery (2013), has launched the Transfer Data Trust, a data cooperative designed to preserve digital artworks for up to 100 years. The Trust uses a combination of network-attached storage, decentralized file storage (IPFS, Filecoin), and a user-friendly browser to archive artist intent and conservation data, with pooled sales proceeds funding conservation efforts.
Philippe Vergne, the French curator who has served as director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto since 2019, will step down at the end of July 2026 at his own request. The Serralves Foundation announced that Vergne will continue contributing to exhibition curation until his departure, and the search for a new director will begin immediately. During his tenure, the museum presented major exhibitions of artists including Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, Cindy Sherman, Mark Bradford, and Maurizio Cattelan, and expanded its space with the Álvaro Siza Wing.
New York Art Week featured a range of exhibitions that blended banality with body horror, drawing comparisons to a malfunctioning theme park ride. The article highlights several shows that juxtapose mundane, everyday objects with grotesque, unsettling imagery, creating a disorienting experience for viewers. Artists presented works that explore the fragility and absurdity of the human body, often using visceral materials and jarring installations to provoke discomfort and reflection.
Tate Britain in London is opening a major retrospective of James McNeill Whistler, the largest exhibition of his work in Europe in 30 years. Featuring 150 works spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, and design, the show includes iconic pieces like *Arrangement in Grey and Black No.1* (commonly known as *Whistler's Mother*) and *Nocturne: Blue and Gold - Old Battersea Bridge*. For the first time, the exhibition examines Whistler's teenage years and also displays his personal notebooks, easel, paint palette, and collections of East Asian ceramics and Japanese prints. The exhibition runs from May 21 to September 27, 2026.
The Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) has opened a major retrospective on Korean abstract artist Yoo Young-kuk titled "A Mountain Within Me" at its Seosomun main branch. The exhibition, marking the 110th anniversary of the artist's birth, is the largest ever mounted on Yoo, featuring 178 works including 115 oil paintings and 15 canvases from the artist's family's private holdings shown publicly for the first time. Curated by Yeo Kyung-hwan, the show defies chronology, beginning in 1964 and moving backward through Yoo's Tokyo years and the lost decade after Korea's liberation, then forward through his geometric abstractions of the 1960s and 1970s, culminating in his late "mind-image abstraction" phase after 1980.
Tehran's Museum of Contemporary Art has opened an exhibition titled 'Art & War' featuring works by American Jewish artist Peter Saul, amid a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah. The show includes Saul's provocative paintings that critique war and political violence, marking a rare cultural exchange in a country where official rhetoric often opposes Israel and the United States.
The article examines the meteoric rise of artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, who broke auction records in 2021 by selling an NFT for $69.3 million at Christie's, becoming the third most expensive living artist. His robot dogs, featuring heads of figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach and are now on view at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie during Gallery Weekend. The show, titled "Regular Animals," has sparked controversy, with critics like Markus Lüpertz denouncing the works as trivial entertainment unworthy of a museum, while curators Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Lisa Botti defend the exhibition.
The article examines Marcel Duchamp's enduring influence on contemporary art, focusing on his readymades such as "Fountain" (1917) and "Bicycle Wheel" (1913/1951). It notes that a major survey co-organized by the Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 70 years after Duchamp predicted his true public would emerge in 50 to 100 years, reaffirms his status as the most influential artist of the past century. The piece discusses how Duchamp's practice of selecting and presenting ordinary objects as art—from a urinal to a snow shovel—once shocked the art world but now seems quaint compared to later works like Maurizio Cattelan's taped banana.
The Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis is marking its 25th anniversary with the exhibition 'Dialogues & Conversations,' organized by its founder and chair, Emily Rauh Pulitzer. The show features over 85 works by more than 30 artists, including Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning, and David Hammons, drawn from Pulitzer's personal collection, institutional loans, and works featured in past Pulitzer exhibitions.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) celebrated the opening of its new David Geffen Galleries with a star-studded gala that raised nearly $11.5 million. The event brought together architect Peter Zumthor, museum director Michael Govan, and a high-profile mix of Hollywood celebrities, artists, and major donors. The $720 million building, Zumthor's first major project in the United States, marks the culmination of a decades-long development process and is set to open to the public next week.
The April 2026 Art Diary highlights a global trend of exhibitions exploring the intersection of spirituality, art, and the environment. Key highlights include a new scholarly essay by Hassan Vawda reinterpreting the Kettle’s Yard collection through the religious beliefs of its founders, Jim and Helen Ede, and a major group exhibition at ICA LA titled 'Speaking in Tongues.' The latter features indigenous and diasporic artists from the Global South who utilize art as a conduit for the sacred, ritual, and ecstatic expression.
Art Basel Hong Kong opened with robust sales and high energy, signaling a strong recovery for the Asia-Pacific art market. Blue-chip galleries reported several seven-figure transactions early on, including a $4 million Picasso at Bastian and a $3.8 million Liu Ye painting at David Zwirner. The fair's debut of the digital-focused 'Zero 10' initiative and a significant presence of regional collectors underscored a diverse appetite for both postwar masters and contemporary digital works.
The Portland Art Museum has opened a major retrospective of David Hockney's work, featuring over 200 pieces spanning six decades. The exhibition, drawn from the collection of philanthropist Jordan Schnitzer, includes iconic works like the swimming pool series, iPad drawings, and photographic collages, and is designed with immersive, perspective-shifting gallery spaces.
The Portland Art Museum has opened an exhibition titled "David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation." The show features a significant selection of works by the renowned British artist, drawn from the extensive holdings of collector and philanthropist Jordan D. Schnitzer and his foundation.
The Courtauld in London is opening 'Seurat and the Sea,' the first exhibition dedicated to Georges Seurat's seascapes, on February 13, 2026. The show will feature 26 paintings, oil sketches, and drawings created by the artist between 1885 and 1890, including works like 'The Beach at Gravelines' and 'Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy.'
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) announced that its David Geffen Galleries, designed by architect Peter Zumthor, will open on April 19, 2026, with a ribbon-cutting ceremony. The opening will be followed by two weeks of priority member access and a free day for NexGenLA youth members on May 3. The 900-foot-long building spans Wilshire Boulevard and will house LACMA's permanent collection, featuring approximately 2,500 to 3,000 objects across 110,000 square feet of gallery space. The inaugural installation is organized around the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic Oceans and the Mediterranean Sea, emphasizing cultural exchange and migration, and includes works by Georges de La Tour, Henri Matisse, Francis Bacon, Vincent van Gogh, and new commissions by artists such as Todd Gray and Lauren Halsey.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is preparing to open its new David Geffen Galleries in April, marking a major milestone in a two-decade transformation led by CEO and director Michael Govan. The opening coincides with the 20th anniversary of Govan's hiring and features Jeff Koons's outdoor sculpture 'Split-Rocker' as an anchor piece.
Art Basel is launching a new fair in Qatar, marking its first foray into the Middle East. This expansion occurs within a landscape already heavily shaped by decades of strategic, state-led cultural investment spearheaded by Qatar Museums and its chairperson, Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani.
The article highlights a curated selection of must-see art exhibitions across the Asia Pacific region in 2026. Key shows include Zao Wou-Ki's printmaking retrospective at M+ in Hong Kong, a major Cartier jewelry exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and a survey of Western landscape art from the Centre Pompidou collection. Other notable exhibitions feature ancient Egyptian treasures at the Hong Kong Palace Museum, as well as shows dedicated to Klimt, Van Gogh, and Vermeer in Taipei and Japan.
The Pulitzer Arts Foundation is celebrating its 25th anniversary with the exhibition "Dialogues & Conversations," which explores artistic exchange through the lens of curator and collector Emily Rauh Pulitzer. Featuring over 35 artists—including Edgar Degas, Willem de Kooning, Dan Flavin, Alberto Giacometti, David Hammons, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Medardo Rosso, and Doris Salcedo—the show presents around 90 works spanning the late 19th century to the present. These pieces come from Mrs. Pulitzer's personal collection, assembled with her late husband Joseph Pulitzer Jr., as well as from her curatorial work at Harvard Art Museums and Saint Louis Art Museum, and loans from The Museum of Modern Art and private lenders.
The article highlights 11 major museum openings and expansions scheduled for 2026, including the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (designed by Frank Gehry, focusing on modern and contemporary art from West Asia, North Africa, and South Asia), the New Museum in New York (reopening March 21 after a major expansion by OMA), the V&A East Museum in London (featuring a debut exhibition on Black British music history), and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. Other notable projects include the Memphis Art Museum and the Drift Museum in Amsterdam, reflecting a global surge in cultural infrastructure.
The Oregonian/OregonLive's winter arts guide highlights 10 museum exhibits and events across Oregon designed to bring light and joy during the dark season. Featured exhibitions include "Psychedelicatessen: A Powerful Dose of Art by Steve Marcus" at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, "Minidoka on Our Minds" at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, "David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation" at the Portland Art Museum, and "From Highway 101: Images of Oregon's Most Iconic Highway" at the Oregon Historical Society, among others.
The article presents a curated selection of upcoming art exhibitions across major global cities in 2026, highlighting key shows in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. In Paris, notable exhibitions include a Georges de la Tour show at the Musée Jacquemand-André, a Renoir retrospective at the Musée d'Orsay, and a Henri Rousseau exhibition at the Musée de l'Orangerie. New York features solo shows of Egon Schiele at the Neue Galerie, Thomas Gainsborough at the Frick Collection, and Paul Klee at the Jewish Museum, while Tokyo focuses on women artists from the 1950s and 60s at the National Museum of Modern Art and a centennial exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.
Frank Gehry, the legendary architect who transformed the global architectural landscape with his deconstructivist style, has died in Santa Monica on 5 December. The article traces his career from his early days remodeling his own Santa Monica home—a controversial project that used corrugated metal, plywood, and chain-link fencing—to his rise as a Pritzker Prize winner and the creator of the iconic Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (1997). Gehry, born Ephraim Goldberg in Toronto in 1929, studied at the University of Southern California and Harvard before founding Frank O. Gehry & Associates in 1962, and spent over six decades championing buildings that embraced emotion and movement over cold minimalism.
