Inspiración

A monstrous specimen of art as social commentary takes form when the work in question replicates the mechanisms the artist boasts about subverting, and at Art Basel Miami Beach, in a new section titled Zero 10 backed by the crypto marketplace OpenSea, Jack Butcher’s “Self Checkout” (2025) is its most shameless manifestation. Nearby, Beeple’s humanoid robodogs with the faces of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Andy Warhol, and the artist himself, born Mike Winkelmann, patter around in a playpen, occasionally excreting “certificates of authenticity.” Some of these certificates feature a QR code with — surprise, surprise — a link to a (free) NFT.  Cameras inside the robot pups are constantly photographing their surroundings, which are altered using AI and printed on the pieces of paper expelled from their rears. The robots are taking photographs of YOU. A wall text for Beeple’s work describes this AI slop as “memories” that are “reimagined and preserved on the blockchain,” adding to “the ever-expanding global data set that future AI will be trained on.” It says the work “probes the tension between control and autonomy … inviting us to reconsider the boundaries of art, identity, and the nature o

Today, however, the white of Cloud Dancer just feels like a commercialized equivalent of a landlord special. Slapping a fresh coat of paint over a wall of dings, chips, and nail holes doesn't fix them. Those “external influences” shape and change us, whether we want them to or not. Graduate arts students have access to generous financial support and paid teaching opportunities, state-of-the-art facilities, and New York City’s vibrant cultural scene. Inspired by Dalí’s vision and his engagement with scientific work, this program seeks to explore the limits of knowledge and imagination through dialogue between art and science. The first major retrospective of acclaimed artist Truman Lowe (Hoocąk [Ho-Chunk]), features nearly 50 evocative sculptures and drawings.

When Mernet Larsen was in her 70s, the project she had been working on her entire life met a moment. It was the 2010s, and painters everywhere were grappling with how the digital realm affected what we see. People seeing Larsen’s paintings for the first time often assumed that they were made using a computer, reading her signature blocky figures as robotic or pixelated—something a machine would create. But they are not computational at all. What Larsen has spent 50-odd years exploring is, in fact, much more general: the systems by which we humans have translated 3D spaces onto 2D surfaces across time and cultures. In a world newly dominated by screens, flattening began to exceed painterly problems and pervade everyday life.  Larsen, now 86, is amused by interpretations of her figures as robots or avatars, describing herself as a “Luddite.” If her paintings, with their flat colors and tessellated shapes, look digital, it’s because the computer is an extension of much earlier attempts to flatten and order the world onto a grid.  Word got out that she was good. Soon, young women in the dorms were asking Larsen to draw them nude, “as gifts for their boyfriends,” Larsen explained [...]

Her head is turned to her left, and her right eye (the one closer to the camera) is half-closed and cloudy, while her left eye seems directed toward something beyond the frame, drawing the viewer’s gaze there and then back to her sign. Above the sign is a small metal brooch. A human informant—disabled artist Finnegan Shannon—told me that they had “to zoom way in to read the text around [this brooch] but was able to make out that it says: licensed peddler and new york city.” Our sight is conditioned. Sarah Lewis describes this in The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America (2024), speaking of how what we see is shaped by history, habit, and ideology. We can learn to see (and “unsee”) things through photography. As with race, when we look at disability, what we see is conditioned by iteration and rhetoric. I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Walker Evans’s 1938 photograph of a blind accordion player in The Ongoing Moment (2005) by Geoff Dyer, who describes the subway busker as having “eyes [that] are clamped shut, downturned like the mouth of someone so habituated to unhappiness as to feel comfortable with it.” Yet not everyone sees unhappiness in [...]

Upon close inspection, the work’s text is a list of words that have seemingly been banned by the Trump administration that first appeared in the New York Times in March, which has been adapted as Andrea Fraser’s latest project, titled Lexicon. The majority of these words revolve around the term “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) and related terms, like “racial diversity,” “activism,” “discrimination,” confirmation bias,” “women,” “cultural heritage,” “underserved,” “pregnant person,” “they/them”—the list goes on. Fraser is best known for her institutional critique work, like Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989), in which she acts as a museum docent named Jane Castleton who gives a tour of the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a way to interrogate how museums display their work, as well as the power institutions hold over the objects the own and the people who come to see them. More recently, she published 2016: In Museums, Money, and Politics, which provided data on museum boards across the country and the political donations during the 2016 presidential election. Fraser said she sees Lexicon as being related to her Museums, Money, and Politics project. (She is currently deve

As the country’s largest fair, Art Basel Miami Beach tends to have some high-profile works, though an interesting addition this year is mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth bringing a Picasso to South Florida. (A work by an artist of that ilk is typically saved for Art Basel’s Swiss fair in June.) But the fair’s best offerings are not those shinier, blue-chip pieces, generally. Some of the fair’s strongest presentations are in the Kabinett sector, which is spread throughout the convention center, taking over a wall or a small room in a given gallery’s booth. There’s also a robust selection of fiber art, a medium that has been on the rise in the market over the past few years and in institutions for a bit longer than that. For 45 years, William T. Williams didn’t work with a gallery, having retreated from the commercial art world because his work was discussed so frequently through the narrow lens of his race during the 1970s. About a decade ago, he began working with Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which has on view several new works by the artist, the first ones he has released from the studio in six years. On an exterior wall of [...]

As part of the restoration process, the statue was hidden behind scaffolding from February through late October. As reported by The Art Newspaper, “Emphasising how keenly her absence was felt, the chief architect and art historian Xavier David, who has worked on the church since the late 1990s, says they installed a blinking light inside the scaffolding—to replicate the Madonna’s beating heart.”

After it was vandalized, Claes Oldenburg‘s beloved 1969 sculpture Lipstick (Ascending) on Caterpillar Tracks will be relocated by Yale University from a public courtyard to the Yale University Art Gallery. The Yale Daily News, the school’s student-run newspaper, first reported on the removal this week. The sculpture, which is typically viewable in front of the Yale-run Morse College, was reportedly vandalized in October. Officials with the school discovered the letters “ATB” written onto the base of the piece, which resembles a tall lipstick on top of tractor treads. The steel sculpture was recently been reinstalled after several months of restoration. Now, the sculpture will be taken away from Morse College, though it isn’t clear whether the removal will be permanent. This time, the reason is mysterious markings found on the sculpture’s bottom. “Overnight, the underside of the sculpture was defaced by people who etched their group initials into the metal,” Catherine Panter-Brick, head of Morse College, told the Yale Daily News. “As a result, the Yale University Art Gallery will be removing the Lipstick from the Morse courtyard for conservation and care.” Even at a school with a ri

The Palace of Westminster, the oldest building on the United Kingdom’s Parliamentary estate, which has played a central role in 900 years of British history, still contains some secrets hidden below. “The history of Westminster is long, fascinating and well-documented. Discoveries such as these allow us to add to our knowledge of this ancient site. These archaeological investigations are an important part of the preparation work for the restoration and renewal of the Victorian building,” The Lord Speaker, Lord McFall of Alcluith, said in a statement. Experts additionally unearthed a Medieval leather boot, shoe soles, and straps; fragments of decorated clay tobacco pipes dating to the reconstruction of the Palace of Westminster after the 1834 fire; a Roman altar fragment believed to be over 2000 years old; a lead flowering heart badge from the 14th to 15th century; a 19th-century five-pint beer jug inscribed with “Geo Painter”, a tavern owner of the historic Ship and Turtle Tavern in London’s Leadenhall area; and decorated Medieval Westminster floor tile. “As we prepare for the restoration and renewal of the iconic Palace of Westminster, a huge amount of work is going on to understa

One of the most recognizable faces in American culture returned to the site of his making on Wednesday, when Lévy Gorvy Dayan sold Andy Warhol’s Muhammad Ali (1977) for $18 million during the VIP Preview of Art Basel Miami Beach. The painting—autographed on the reverse by Ali and once owned by Richard L. Weisman, who commissioned Warhol’s “Athletes” series—hung only a few hundred feet from the place where Ali became Ali. Over sixty years ago, in February 1964, the 22-year-old then known as Cassius Clay shocked the sporting world in the Miami Beach Convention Center when he knocked out Sonny Liston. The Convention Center’s own archive describes the moment as “a clash of personalities… a politically charged spectacle during the height of the Civil Rights Movement,” with Ali standing over Liston in a moment now “etched into history as one of the most iconic photographs ever taken.” To heighten the effect, the gallery kept the consignment quiet until the last possible moment. “There was a tactic, obviously—to announce it very quickly… a surprise,” he said. And it worked: the painting became a gravitational point in the booth, drawing both serious buyers and crowds of people paying homa

During a week when all eyes (art world ones, at least) are on Miami, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) has announced a pair of substantial gifts in support of the museum’s Caribbean Cultural Institute (CCI). The Mellon Foundation (which helped PAMM establish the CCI in 2019 with a $1 million gift) has continued its support with a further $2 million, and the Green Family Foundation (GFF) has gifted $5 million to the institute, which will be renamed the Green Family Foundation Caribbean Cultural Institute. The funds will be used on the CCI’s operating expenses and in support of its endowment. The Green Family Foundation was founded in 1991 by Steven J. Green (the ambassador to Singapore from 1997 to 2007) and Dorothea Green. The foundation is well-established philanthropically in Miami: Florida International University’s Steven J. Green School of International and Public Affairs is named for the family; Green Space Miami, an art space dedicated to the creative community in Miami-Dade County, opened in 2020; and Dorothea Green became a PAMM trustee in 2023. The foundation’s gift will support PAMM’s ongoing collaboration with Florida International University. Artists and researchers wo

This suggests whiteness as a baseline—the color, if it is indeed a color, to which everyone must compare themselves. And it is certainly a choice at a time when the US has a President who, in 2020, reposted a tweet from a conservative publication that read, “Sorry liberals! How to be Anti-White 101 is permanently cancelled!” In his second term, he’s made good on that promise, calling for an end to government-funded DEI programs and denouncing a Smithsonian museum whose wall texts included a mention of “White culture.” Pantone’s announcement brought back memories of an art exhibition I saw in 2018 at the Kitchen in New York: “On Whiteness,” curated in collaboration with the Claudia Rankine–founded Racial Imaginary Institute. That show took as its jumping-off point a 2007 Sara Ahmed essay in which she asked: “If whiteness gains currency by being unnoticed, then what does it mean to notice whiteness?” Among the artists in the exhibition was Charlotte Lagarde, whose 2018 project Colonial White, in which the artist provided participants with a paint chip for a tone labeled Colonial White and asked them to send back a picture comparing the chip to sights seen in the wild. Images of napki

Dulaney filed a complaint with the Cook County Circuit Court on December 1, alleging wrongful termination following her repeated criticisms of the museum’s operations under CEO and president Perri Irmer. The lawsuit was first reported by Chicago-based news outlet the Triibe. The lawsuit accuses Irmier and the museum of violating the Illinois Whistleblower Act and of retaliatory discharge, and seeks reinstatement, back pay, front pay, compensatory damages, punitive damages, civil penalties under the Illinois Whistleblower Act, as well as attorney fees. Additionally, it seeks injunctive relief, meaning a court order that would prevent the museum from committing further alleged violations. In a statement made to Chicago Crusader, the museum said, “The allegations made by Kim Dulaney on October 7 are outrageous and categorically false.” It continued: “The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center maintains strict financial controls, conducts regular audits, and is subject to oversight by both internal and external parties to ensure that all funds are used appropriately and in full compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and grant requirements.” The DuSable Museum was foun

On Wednesday, London’s National Gallery announced plans to raise nearly $1 billion for Project Domani, the institution’s new initiative to collect art from the 20th and 21st centuries, along with a new wing to house that part of the collection. Booth framed Project Domani was a critical addition for the museum to stand out against competitors. “Project Domani will bolster the significance of both the National Gallery and the UK within a highly competitive international cultural landscape,” Booth said in a statement.

Early December means one thing in the art world: Miami Art Week is upon us again. While Art Basel Miami Beach remains the epicenter of the city’s activities, at least when it comes to art-dealing, there is no shortage of satellite fairs, celebrity-studded parties, beachside performances, brand collaborations, and product launches happening throughout the city.

It seems Art Basel Miami Beach has perfected the art of the scroll-by spectacle. This year, the collective gasp was at the new Zero10 digital art section, and it happened every time one of about a half-dozen robot dogs “went.” Beeple, whose practice often makes the symbolic embarrassingly literal, has built a working model of our algorithmic present: machines that see the world through tiny cameras, reinterpret it instantly, and spit out the results as if meaning were just another form of waste management. Kept in a thick plexiglass pen, the robots continuously capture their surroundings and output images in the style of the head they wear, mirroring the way digital platforms nudge billions toward seeing reality through curated lenses. (For example, the Warhol dog spits out Warhol-esque images, and the same goes for Picasso. Though I never did see what a Muskian or Zuckergian image looked like.) “This is the clearest example of the lack of scholarship in the industry. Sure, it’s nice that people care about it, but this whole project tramples on the history of digital and video art and makes it a bit,” they said. “It’s kind of sad.” The market, of course, loved it. According [...]

MUSEOS DE TENERIFE NATURALEZA Y ARQUEOLOGÍA LA CIENCIA Y EL COSMOS HISTORIA Y ANTROPOLOGÍA CENTRO DE DOCUMENTACIÓN DE CANARIAS Y AMÉRICA CUEVA DEL VIENTO 22, 23, 26, 29, 30  de diciembre de 2025 y 2 de enero de 2026  Horario: 9:00 a 14:00 horas. Permanencia de 7:30 a 9:00 h y de 14:00 a 16:00 h (incluida en el precio) Los participantes que hagan uso de la permanencia hasta las 16:00 horas deberán traer el almuerzo  Edad: 4 a 12 años. Preinscripción abierta: hasta 17 de diciembre de 2025. En efectivo o con tarjeta bancaria en la taquilla del MCC o del resto de los centros pertenecientes a la red de Museos de Tenerife, o bien por transferencia bancaria.  Una vez cumplimentado el formulario, recibirá un correo en el plazo máximo de 48 horas confirmando su preinscripción y detallando los pasos a seguir para completar la inscripción definitiva.  Excepcionalmente, aquellas personas que no tengan acceso a Internet podrán recoger el formulario y cumplimentarlo en el Departamento de Educación y Acción Cultural, previa cita telefónica: 922 315 080   Finaliza un año más, y desde el Museo de la Ciencia y el Cosmos traemos los campamentos de vacacionales «Abierto por Navidad», [...]

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. On Wednesday, Art Basel Miami Beach opened its VIP preview with something the art market hasn’t felt much lately: momentum. The skies were clear outside, while inside a queue of well-heeled attendees snaked around the convention center, waiting for the doors to open. A cluster of extravagantly dressed older collectors, many sporting multiple large glinting rings, swarmed the entrance, scanning for acquaintances who might let them edge ahead. A tanned woman in gold heels and a skin-tight yellow-and-pink leopard-print dress put it best, muttering as she stepped inside, “Lord, I haven’t seen it this busy in years and the fair hasn’t even started yet.” Whether there were actually more attendees than in previous years—or simply the feeling of more—the mood was undeniably buoyant, bolstered by a $2.2 billion November auction season in New York. Perception is reality, as the political strategist Lee Atwater once said, and in the art world that goes double. The excitement from last month appears to have continued into December, des