Inspiration

This December, Sotheby’s will present Icons: Back to Madison, a first-of-its-kind exhibition bringing together some of the most iconic works ever sold under our banner—just one month after opening its new worldwide headquarters at the historic Breuer building. From 13 – 21 December, New York will welcome a remarkable gathering of masterpieces from both private and museum collections, many of which will be on public view for the first time new program of exhibitions, auctions, and events celebrating the city’s emergence as a global hub for art and culture. The Abu Dhabi presentation will feature a carefully curated selection of highlights in dialogue with the New York exhibition. Some works will be showcased in both cities, while others will be exhibited exclusively in one location, offering visitors unique perspectives on this extraordinary assemblage of works presented by Etihad Airways. The exhibition is a landmark “Back to Madison” moment, honoring Sotheby’s U.S. legacy: after acquiring the American

Horario habitual del museo La biodiversidad del archipiélago canario es de un valor incalculable, no solo por su riqueza en especies sino sobre todo por su singularidad. Un 30% de las especies terrestres y un 4% de la especies marinas son endémicas de Canarias y una buena proporción de ellas son además especies exclusivas de una isla, a menudo restringidas a una localidad. En definitiva, más de 4.000 especies únicas en el mundo y que contribuyen a poner en valor aún más si cabe el rico patrimonio natural de Canarias. Desafortunadamente, las especies nativas conviven en la islas con cerca de 2000 especies exóticas, casi un 20% de ellas invasoras o potencialmente invasoras. Además 215 especies canarias han sido catalogadas como amenazadas y en total más de 600 especies nativas están protegidas específicamente en las normas de aplicación. Esta exposición, organizada en el marco de las acciones de divulgación y difusión del Banco de Datos de Biodiversidad de Canarias, muestra y pone en valor las cifras de la biodiversidad de nuestras islas.

Half a century ago, Uranus-Izvor, a community atop Bucharest’s Dealul Hill, was a neighborhood of church spires and onion domes, of Rococo Habsburg elegance and Romanian charm. When a 1977 earthquake damaged buildings in the district, Romania’s oppressive Communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu seized the excuse to evict 40,000 residents and demolish the remainder of the neighborhood so that he could construct a massive vanity project, the House of the Republic, an eyesore of a palace most notable for being the third-largest administrative building on earth. Gone were the domes of the Orthodox Văcărești Monastery, the stately, neoclassical Brâncovenesc Hospital, and the entirety of the Jewish Quarter. Now, leering over Bucharest’s citizens was Ceaușescu’s monstrous edifice of broad, blocky white marble and steel. An impersonal, inhuman monolith inspired by North Korean architecture, the House of the Republic was a monument to Ceaușescu’s overweening narcissism and hubris, and, paradoxically, a testament to faceless anonymity in its soullessness. This week, history repeats itself, as President Donald Trump ordered the demolition of the East Wing of the White House for the supposed cons

The protest was a collective action led by Očéti Šakówiŋ activists to disrupt Donald Trump’s presidential rally at Mount Rushmore, held the day before the Fourth of July. The rally and highway blockage, of course, were escalated by aggressive police presence and eventually end in multiple arrests. By the end of it, the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office will have arrested 20 adults and one minor, mostly tribal citizens, including Ogala Lakota organizer Nick Tilsen. This is the energy I like to see: ongoing disruption of settler-colonial institutions and criticism directed at the monument. The rally echoed similar demonstrations that occurred in the early 1970s, when relatives camped at the base of the monument, poured paint on the faces, and demanded the return of stewardship of the Black Hills to the Očéti Šakówiŋ (Lakota-, Dakota-, Nakota-speaking tribal communities). The call for land back has been consistent since the monument was authorized for construction on the face of Tȟuŋkášila Šákpe, or Six Grandfathers, in March 1925, one year after the federal government forced American citizenship on tribal nations through the Citizenship Act of 1924 and around 50 years after the land

Last week, I told 13,000 supporters of Zohran Mamdani at Forest Hills Stadium the story of how museum workers in my union fought back against an attempt at layoffs. Then, I asked the artists and art workers attending the rally to cheer. The roars rippling through the crowd confirmed what I had suspected: This campaign is one of the most significant political gatherings of artists and creatives of our time. With sustained organization, it can be a blueprint. The first step is electing Zohran Mamdani. The next is building a movement for an affordable New York.  This movement has already begun with 90,000 campaign volunteers and the support of unions like District Council 37, which represents 150,000 workers in the city and in museums, including myself. It continues when we recognize art work as work, and most art workers as part of the working class — anyone who is just one medical bill away from bankruptcy. With organization, including unions, we can build the power to impact governance. To do that, we need to be able to pay rent and put food on the table.  Our city’s arts and culture sector is a $110 billion industry. This makes perfect sense [...]

The sentiments that drove his inspiring campaign should be familiar to any artistic soul. I don’t think the fact that Mamdani was born to a prominent artist, filmmaker Mira Nair, is a coincidence. Or that he is married to illustrator and ceramicist Rama Duwaji. Art is often the theory of the impossible, a land to which those who dream of our collective freedom immigrate in order to live and breathe without the burden of what has come before. We recognize this space because we live in it daily. In its profile of the politician’s parents, the Times of India laid out the connection between art and political idealism very clearly: During an interview in 1983, Joseph Beuys said, "Art, for me, is the science of freedom.” And we, all of us who dream and celebrate today, continue the tradition of linking art to liberation through the art communities we see and foster, while ignoring the noise of luxury commodification and its associated shills that seek to drive us away from their platinum sandboxes. Today, we reassert the power to let artists dream, because tomorrow the creativity and art we make in those homes, studios, or workplaces may just encourage someone [...]

There’s a moment I’ll never forget: Making the Band, early 2000s. Diddy orders a group of hopefuls to walk from Manhattan to Brooklyn to fetch him a cheesecake. The message wasn’t about the cheesecake. It was: If you want access, you’ll jump through any hoop, even degrading ones. That scene, absurd as it is, reflects how many experience art school. You pay in tuition, in labor, in self-doubt, in time, and hope a few crumbs of prestige will trickle down. To understand how we arrived at this point, it’s helpful to trace two histories: the rise of the MFA and the shift in higher education finance. The MFA became the “terminal degree” for artists in the mid-20th century. By the 1960s, schools like Yale, Iowa, and the newly formed California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) positioned the MFA as both a credential and a mark of prestige. Howard Singerman’s 2023 book Art Subjects describes how studio practice was absorbed into the university, producing not just art but “artists” as a professional category. The MFA wasn’t just a place to make work. It was a way to become legible to the art world and employable in academia. Art schools thrive on [...]

Trump has most likely never heard of the Caesar denarii, and likely knows little of the aspiring emperor's political views. Yet many of the creepy oddballs and second-rate academics who populate the ranks of think-tanks, providing impetus for the continuing authoritarian creep (more of a sprint these days), are more intimately acquainted. Michael Anton, director of Policy Planning for the Trump administration, Fellow in American Politics at the right-wing Claremont Institute, and secret clothes-horse, has admiringly pined for “a form of one-man rule” in his 2020 book The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return, a system he terms “Red Caesarism.” Little that is surprising or new here. When it comes to authoritarianism, Beard writes that Caesar was “cast in this founding role,” so that his proper name not only became the Roman title for an emperor, but also trickled through history in the titles for the rulers of other nations as well, from the “Kaisar” to the “Czar.” This curated selection of 13 Indigenous short films features stories of resilience, inspiration, and hope. Uman’s first solo museum exhibition debuts a new body of work, including paintings, works on paper, video, and

Titled simply Costume Art, the exhibition will reportedly pair 200 artworks from the museum's various collections with 200 garments and accessories. But the most important information about the show in The Met’s announcement appears below the description, in bigger and bolder font: “The exhibition is made possible by Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos,” with additional support provided by Saint Laurent and Condé Nast. The latter, I’ll remind you, was rumored to become a wedding present-slash-consolation prize for Mrs. Bezos after she lost her $10.1 million bid for the original Birkin bag. Speaking of which, this exhibition will inaugurate the 12,000-square-foot Condé M. Nast galleries. I almost admire how transparent it all is, how shameless.  It might almost be excusable if it brought a good show. The Costume Institute is certainly capable of it — Superfine: Tailoring Black Style was a strong exhibition despite its being sponsored by Louis Vuitton. But money always comes with strings, and Jeff Bezos is one of the worst people you could be attached to. Indeed, The Met’s exhibition description and press release might say pretty much nothing about what’ll actually b

In 1913, when Igor Stravinsky premiered his orchestral work The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Parisian audiences were so incensed by the discordant score that a riot broke out. Four years later, New Yorkers were only slightly more genteel toward French artist Marcel Duchamp’s submission of a ready-made upside-down urinal autographed by the fictitious creator “R. Mutt” to the inaugural exhibition of New York’s Society of Independent Artists. A symphonic paean to pagan energy and a urinal may seem disparate in intention, but both Stravinsky and Duchamp’s works expressed the radicalism of the early 20th-century avant-garde, questioning certainties and upending values — to paraphrase Karl Marx, making all that is solid melt into air. For Duchamp, “Fountain” wasn’t just a provocation, but also a philosophical comment about the nature of art itself: that a prosaic object can be elevated by framing alone. According to critic Margan Falconer in How to be Avant-Garde: Modern Artists and the Quest to End Art (2025), Duchamp was asking, “Why couldn’t art be a seamless, enveloping, immersive environment in which everyone will live and work?” Something as all-consuming, in o

In February, I was at my computer refreshing the National Park Service webpage for the Stonewall National Monument in New York City with a sense of foreboding. By Valentine’s Day, the agency had quietly removed the “T” and “Q” in “LGBTQ+” from descriptions of the site’s significance. Designated in 2016, Stonewall is the first United States landmark dedicated to LGBTQ+ rights and history. A targeted act of bureaucratic editing attempted to alter that narrative. Anyone who knows queer history understands that erasure rarely begins with a blaze; it often begins with omission. As a nonbinary and transgender artist who has spent more than two decades making work about systems of power that circulate around sex and gender, the removal landed like a direct threat. So I did what artists do: I responded in my studio. Using salvaged building materials removed during the renovation of the new Stonewall National Monument Visitor Center, I constructed a six-foot-tall (~1.8-meter-tall) letter, titled “Capital T,” a literal restoration of what the federal government attempted to disappear. Built from materials that once formed a queer dance floor at the original Stonewall Inn, the sculpture remin

In an ArtNews report from September, Daniel Cassady asks if art market writers are getting it wrong, arguing that the market is not as distressed as reported ad nauseam. He quotes Kenny Schachter, who suggests that the data is skewed; some noteworthy gallery closures in New York City do not represent a market that is doing just fine. Cassady points out that all these articles of doom and gloom may be feeding the downturn. I started collecting art in my early 20s in medical school, buying by working weekend jobs and taking out loans. There were no art databases, nothing to check auction history. I overpaid substantially for our first contemporary purchase — Kenneth Noland’s “Shift” (1966). The third purchase my wife, Livia, and I made was Ellsworth Kelly’s “Chatham VIII” (1971), which required a three-year bank loan. How was I to understand the reasoning behind its price when we were the only buyers of the 14 new Chatham works? How did galleries determine prices? I set out to learn this and the intricacies of auctions: hidden reserves, chandelier bids, guarantees, authenticity, and iffy condition reports.   Livia and I were offered Donald Judd’s first stacks, standing at 10 feet (~3

Last week, Christie’s staged its annual November spectacle, a double-header 20th-century sale that brought in roughly $690 million once buyer’s fees were added. The numbers were reported with breathless enthusiasm. Headlines announced a 42% increase over last year’s equivalent sales. The press framed the evening as a triumph and a sign that the art market was healthy again. Watching the coverage felt like watching a magic trick you have already seen too many times. A staggering figure appears on the screen, and the audience nods along. The illusion works because everyone agrees not to ask what the number actually means. It works because the number is the performance. Auction houses rely on this sleight of hand. Their job is not to measure value. Their job is to perform it. Sarah Thornton wrote about this clearly in Seven Days in the Art World (2009), where she describes auctions as rituals rather than markets, spaces where belief is manufactured through choreography. Reading her work changed how I saw these rooms. The scripts, the coded gestures, the artificial suspense, the carefully timed applause, the way the room breathes in unison. None of it reflects the truth of what art is

I thought I’d found a safe place to make art. Instead, I entered a theatre where most perform the role of liberated artist while swallowing institutions’ diversity scraps. When I first arrived, the city’s sadness felt honest. A man drinking a Sternburg at any hour of the day was refreshing. I thought I’d found a safe place to make art, not realizing I’d entered a theatre where most perform the role of the liberated artist, with work as deep as the Instagram carousel for which it was made. One day, it hit me: I could be surrounded by artists and no one needed to be real. Perhaps that’s why club culture is the beating heart of Berlin’s scene; people escaping the dungeon of themselves on 72-hour benders that leave no room for reflection, only exhaustion and cum stains instead of sincerity. Love in hell is endless pleasure without joy, and Berlin is the hedonistic capital serving the devil’s every whim. The devil is the coolest performative male in a room full of White leftist queers and the token BIPOCs who talk about poverty yet always have money for rent and drugs. The devil and its cronies practice nudity as artistic [...]

In 1982, the Museum of Modern Art staged the first-ever major retrospective dedicated to the work of Louise Bourgeois. She was 70 years old. The overdue exhibition was intended to solidify Bourgeois’s legacy, to recognize more than half a century of creative output. But Bourgeois would live another 28 years, and would make art until the day she died. What’s more, the pieces from the final stretch of her life were among her best and most innovative. Bourgeois was far from the only artist who continued to evolve right up until the end of her life. Gubar, a feminist scholar and literary critic, argues that women artists have historically found tremendous freedom in old age, liberated at last from domestic obligations, sexual objectification, and the dominion of men. Grand Finales profiles nine such women — including two visual artists, Bourgeois and Georgia O’Keeffe — to establish a lineage of creatives who reinvented themselves in their final years.  Gubar, herself 80 years old, doesn’t romanticize the experience of aging: She knows firsthand that with it comes a parade of losses, from our strength and mobility to our loved ones. But she takes heart in the dynamism and adaptability o

Much like her acclaimed 2016 memoir, Hold Still, Mann’s signature blend of self-effacing wit and poetic elegance flows through Art Work, along with photographs, diary entries, and correspondence with photographer Ted Orland. Born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1951, Mann often returns to the landscape of the Shenandoah Valley in her photographs, including those of her three children, sometimes nude, that provoked an outcry of controversy when they were shown in the 1992 exhibition Immediate Family at Houk Friedman Gallery in New York.  Though none of Mann’s subsequent exhibitions achieved quite the same fever pitch of attention, she has quietly and consistently continued making art and — to the point of Art Work — living a life. In the prologue, she asserts, “... the creative life invariably includes a rich, overflowing, varied, and complicated other life.” Throughout the 12 chapters that follow, Mann uses stories from her “other” life to illustrate points of mentorly wisdom. In discussing the role of luck, she tells how her first plane ride, at 26 years old, led to her seat-mate Ronald Winston (son of the “King of Diamonds” Harry Winston) tossing her the keys to hi

"Gubar, herself 80 years old, doesn’t romanticize the experience of aging: She knows firsthand that with it comes a parade of losses, from our strength and mobility to our loved ones. But she takes heart in the dynamism and adaptability of her subjects, many of whom produced their most ambitious and original art as they approached the end of their lives. The book’s in-depth analyses of some of these works can slip into a rather academic register, and may seem dauntingly dense to readers seeking straightforward inspiration, but for the lit crit lovers among us, they prove wonderfully enlightening. Among Gubar’s most interesting findings is how the constraints of getting older can present opportunities to explore new artistic modes. Bourgeois’s late-life sculptures, for example, 'grew humongous until, toward the very end of her life, they shrank into small proportions that could be handled at a table in a wheelchair.' Meanwhile, the elder O’Keeffe 'often found watercolor, pastel, and graphite easier to use than oils' after losing her central vision at 84." —Sophia Stewart "The Wound Man might strike contemporary viewers as a gruesome spectacle, an archaic precursor to the Saw movies,

A new monograph on the nonagenarian American painter is a well of bliss. Then, finally, I catch a glimpse of it. A monograph on American painter Lois Dodd has landed on my desk. Lois Dodd: Framing the Ephemera accompanies the artist's exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag in the Hague, Netherlands, through April 6, 2026, her first major retrospective in Europe at age 98. It will be published by Hannibal Publishers on November 11 and is available for pre-order online and through independent booksellers. This curated selection of 13 Indigenous short films features stories of resilience, inspiration, and hope. Uman’s first solo museum exhibition debuts a new body of work, including paintings, works on paper, video, and sculpture. This fair will showcase a diverse selection of nearly 140 galleries, art spaces, and nonprofit organizations spanning 30 countries and 65 cities.

“I decided to write how the Greeks wrote, as if Yorubaland were the whole world,” the artist told Hyperallergic in an interview about her new book. How do you start creating a world? It’s a question Los Angeles-based artist Harmonia Rosales had to ask herself while crafting  Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (2025), a superbly fantastical book. The collection gathers 41 intertwined tales of African gods and goddesses, nature and power, and the evolution of human beings alongside the primordial development of the Earth. In Rosales’ telling, this epic tale combines the mythical with historical, putting known past events in the context of the Orishas’ world. Peppered throughout are Rosales’s 30 full-page, full-color illustrations that further enliven the legends and figures.  An ambitious vessel for Afro pantheology and diasporic spirituality, Chronicles of Ori is a potent extension of Rosales’s signature style portraying regal, mythological tales. Her paintings repurpose Baroque and Renaissance techniques to exalt brown-skinned bodies as their focus, with rich colors leaping from her canvases. The foundation of Rosales’s artistry lies in the heart of these tales, which instilled in

I’ve taught for 30 years in colleges, residencies, and sex parties. I’ve come to view teaching as a necessity, a way of putting back into the world the culture and ideas the world has poured into me. The bedrock of teaching art is the assignment. And the basis for my own work as an artist is being able to give myself assignments. The right assignment at the right time can answer a need we ­haven’t been able to articulate to ourselves. The assignments we need tell the story of how we view the work and the world, even if they tell it slant. I give my students assignments that ­were given to me directly in school as well as others that I’ve gleaned from the writings of artists and thinkers in vari­ous fields. Finding a good assignment provides a thrill. I give them to ­people for vari­ous reasons — to build a par­tic­u­lar skill or to perhaps lead someone to a dif­fer­ent sense of how they could look at what they do. Some of ­these I’ve honed over years of classes in vari­ous disciplines; some are for no one but myself. When I doubt what I do or am unable [...]