This episode of The Art Newspaper's podcast 'The Week in Art' covers three main stories. Host Ben Luke discusses the US House of Representatives striking down a bill to build the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum on the National Mall, a setback amid broader government interference at the Smithsonian under President Trump. He also interviews artist Oliver Beer and musician Rufus Wainwright about their collaboration for Beer's exhibition 'The Sky in the Cave' at Thaddaeus Ropac during London Gallery Weekend, and examines Jasper Johns's painting 'Painting with Two Balls' (1960), featured in the retrospective 'Night Driver' at the Guggenheim Bilbao.
The podcast matters because it highlights a significant political disruption to a major cultural institution—the Smithsonian's women's history museum—reflecting partisan divides affecting arts funding and heritage. It also showcases contemporary cross-disciplinary collaboration between visual art and music, and offers insight into a major retrospective of Jasper Johns, a pivotal figure in American art, at a leading European museum.