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A new artwork by Banksy was removed from its location in London shortly after the artist uploaded images to his Instagram account on December 22.

The new work by the anonymous artist is a metal traffic stop sign featuring three images of aircraft resembling military drones. It was installed on a street sign in the South London neighborhood of Peckham.

After images of the stop sign were posted on Banksy’s popular account (which has 12.1 million followers), commenters immediately responded that it would soon be taken and sold online.

Around 12:30 p.m., two people used bolt cutters and a Lime bicycle to remove the artwork. A witness named Alex told the Sun that one of the people initially tried hitting it with his hands and fell off the bike before returning with the bolt cutters.

The incident follows several other times Banksy has been in the news this year. A mural on Valentine’s Day about domestic violence prompted the removal of a chest freezer twice, a couple discovered a large seagull painted on their home would cost $250,000 to remove, a 500-year-old farmhouse with a large Banksy mural of a young boy was demolished in March, and a damaged mural in Venice painted in 2019 will be restored through private funding. Banksy’s identity was also recently revealed through an archival interview with the BBC.

This year saw a number of significant discoveries in the field of archaeology.

Perhaps some of the most interesting have involved innovative technology that has allowed archaeologists to dig deeper than before, such as the discovery of an ancient temple, now underwater, in a sunken city off Egypt’s coast and an ancient Greek catacomb found below the southern Italian city of Naples. Others, however, have been directly tied to current events, among them, the ancient Greek city Cyrene which emerged after floods devastated Libya.

Some early settlements like a Neolithic monument and a mysterious sanctuary were identified on Scotland’s Isle of Arran and in the Netherlands’ town of Tiel, respectively, offering deeper understandings of their ancient societies. There were also culturally significant treasures revealed like a 3,000-year-old sealed corridor in a massive Chavin temple complex in Peru, sixty mummified bodies that were found in two tombs in the ancient Egyptian city Luxor, and, while not a discovery, the Vatican’s reopening of an ancient Roman necropolis to the public.

While these have all been important, there are a selection that stood out among the rest. Below is a look at the ten archaeological finds that are likely to have an impact not just this year, but on our understanding of human history for years to come.

Prices at auctions this year have been shaky, leading to questions about whether there is a market slowdown, but that didn’t stop Julie Mehretu from setting and resetting records.

In October, the Ethiopian-born, US-based painter set a new record for an artist born in Africa when an untitled work from 2021 sold for $9.32 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. It beat the previous record, set by South African artist Marlene Dumas’s The Visitor (1995) in 2008, when it sold for $6.33 million at Sotheby’s London. Then, in November, Mehretu broke her record with a new one: her 2008 work Walkers With the Dawn and the Morning (2008) sold for $10.7 million at Sotheby’s New York.  

Mehretu’s records were a sign that the international market for African art was hot this year. That was also evident in October at Sotheby’s London when British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s auction record was reset by her painting Six Birds in the Bush (2015), which sold for $3.6 million—more than $1 million above its estimate.

The spotlight builds on the momentum gained in 2022. A 2023 report by the insurance company Hiscox revealed that Ivory Coast–born Abdoulaye “Aboudia” Diarrassouba was the top-selling artist in 2022, with 75 works sold at auction, beating out Damien Hirst. And an Artprice report issued in March stated that “contemporary African art has become a staple element of the global art market,” with top auction houses working to meet the demand. Hiscox estimated that $63 million was spent on works by artists born in Africa in 2022, compared to $47 million the previous year.

“Collectors continue to have interest because they have [finally] seen that artists from Africa and the diaspora have longevity and are also worth investing in,” said Adora Mba, an adviser specializing in contemporary African art.

A masterpiece hanging in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid has long sparked debates over whether it was the work of Raphael. But a group of researchers now claims to have finally solved the mystery through the use of an artificial intelligence algorithm.

The Madonna della Rosa (Madonna of the Rose) depicts Mary, Joseph, and the baby Jesus, along with an infant version of John the Baptist. Until the 19th century, the painting was attributed to the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, more often known as Raphael. Then doubts were raised over the Joseph figure “looking like an afterthought” and whether Raphael had painted the lower section.

The museum’s website page for the oil painting solely credits it to Raphael.

According to a new research paper published on December 21 in the journal Heritage Science, analysis of the painting using an AI algorithm with an accuracy of 98 percent found that the painting was entirely made by the Italian artist. But it “raised questions about whether Raphael indeed painted the face of Joseph in the painting.”

The researchers, led by University of Bradford visual computer professor Hussan Ugail, noted that the AI analysis supported earlier work by art historians who had “previously questioned the full attribution of this painting to Raphael alone, suggesting that his associate, Giulio Romano, might have had a hand in it.”

It was a great year in Black art from New York to the San Francisco Bay. In 2023 it was featured throughout the country in a wealth of blockbuster exhibitions that garnered considerable attention, establishing Black artists as some of the most esteemed in the world.

Black art speaks to diverse audiences about the lived experiences of Black artists and Black people. It is an ideal way to connect to and understand the conditions under which they exist through unadulterated dialogue between artists and audiences.

Fresh off her epic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022, Simone Leigh was given a retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; it traveled to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and will continue to move audiences as it travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2024. “Wangechi Mutu: Intertwined,” the astounding mid-career retrospective showing the dynamism of Mutu’s skills in artistic mediums including painting, sculpture, and video art, debuted at the New Museum in New York City and will move to the New Orleans Museum of Art early next year. At the Baltimore Museum of Art, “The Culture: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art in the 21st Century” celebrated hip-hop’s 50th anniversary with almost 90 artists exhibited, including Mark Bradford, Carrie Mae Weems, and Arthur Jafa. There were also noteworthy exhibitions of Faith Ringgold, Kehinde Wiley, Charles Gaines, Amoako Boafo, Charles White, and Betye Saar.

Unfortunately, not all the exhibitions featuring work by Black artists can be covered in a single article. Unlike Leigh and Mutu’s retrospectives, which were surrounded by much hype, the artists below had major exhibitions—equally expressive of the Black experience—that deserve more notice.

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After years of starts and stops, the Bardo National Museum, often called the “jewel of Tunisian heritage,” finally reopened this year. Located in a 17th-century Beylic palace in the suburban city of Le Bardo that is also home to the country’s parliament, the newly renovated museum has welcomed several thousands of visitors in the months since its reopening in September.

The Bardo’s most recent closure came about two years ago following President Kais Saied’s decree to shutter parliament, which shares the same building. That was the latest in a series of recent closures that began during the 2011 revolution. It closed again in 2015 for a brief period following a terrorist attack at the museum that claimed the lives of at least 25 people, and that also caused damage to the building. The museum once again closed in 2020 because of pandemic lockdowns, when Saied dismissed the country’s prime minister and suspended the Assembly of the Representatives of the People.

During this most recent period of closure, the museum carried out a building conservation and restoration project that included expanding the museum’s exhibition spaces, with new works going on view and relocating some of its most-visited objects. Updates include a new hall of sarcophagi and reimagined displays for the Islamic department, improving the presentation of objects. Several of the museum’s display cases which had been damaged in the deadly terrorist attack in 2015 have now been restored, signalling a desired return to normalcy.

The Bardo Museum, which was first established under French colonial rule in 1888, had faced a severe drop in visitorship—and tourism to Tunisia more broadly—since the 2015 terrorist attack, but visitors have begun to return, both of locals and tourists. The Tunisian Ministry of Cultural Affairs reported 2,700 visitors in the museum’s first week of reopening, 900 of which visited on opening day. Bardo Museum director Fatma Naït Yghil said she was “proud of the work carried out” by her team, adding that police and civil defense units have been deployed “to ensure the safety of visitors.”

The palatial Bardo Museum contains Tunisia’s national archaeological and ethnological treasures, with a diverse collection spanning 40,000 years of civilisation, including the world’s largest collection of mosaics, many of which are monumental in scale and hang covering the walls and ceilings. Among the highlights are Virgil’s Alcove, depicting the Roman poet with his muses, and The Triumph of Neptune, which pictures the triumphant sea god Neptune in a chariot, framed by women representing the four seasons in each corner, surrounded by agricultural scenes and blossoming plants.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently announced that it had initiated the return of 14 sculptures to Cambodia and two to Thailand that were associated with the art dealer Douglas Latchford.

The returns were the result of an agreement between the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and the museum.

The items being returned are Khmer artifacts “made between the 9th and 14th centuries in the Angkorian period and reflect the Hindu and Buddhist religious systems prevailing at that time”, according to a press release from the museum. The group also includes statutes from the Koh Ker archaeological site, including a 10th century sandstone goddess.

Several of the sculptures, including a bronze sculpture The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara Seated in Royal Ease (late 10th–early 11th century), and a large 7th century Buddha head—will remain on view at the museum’s Southeast Asian art galleries while repatriation arrangements are being made.

The Met also said it was “continuing to review its collection of Khmer art and will be exchanging information on sculptures with officials in Cambodia and Thailand as part of that ongoing research.”

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art will sell a Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington that it has held for 80 years during a Christie’s auction of American art this January.

The 1795 painting depicts Washington toward the end of his presidency, and is one of more than 100 portraits of him that Stuart painted. The Met, for its part, owns one more, also from 1795, that is more famous than this one; that work is among the most high-profile works in the museum’s holdings.

At Christie’s, the Stuart painting is expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2.5 million, making it one of the top lots of the auction. It is not, however, likely to displace Stuart’s auction record, set in 2018 by the sale of another Washington portrait that had been held by Peggy and David Rockefeller that was bought for $11.5 million.

The Art Newspaper first reported news of the Stuart painting’s sale on Wednesday.

Museum’s regularly sell works from their holdings in a practice known as deaccessioning. Typically, museums auction pieces that are deemed duplicates of ones they already hold or are no longer considered relevant to their institutional purview.

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.

Late last month, I found myself on the outskirts of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in the town of Diriyah, standing in front of the recently opened Museum of Contemporary Art (SAMOCA) and looking out at a vista that, as one local arts professional observed, captures what the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is all about. Before me, I could see the tranquil Wadi Hanifah valley where the locals of Diriyah gather for leisure activities, all the way to the distant towers of the $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District (KAFD) development in central Riyadh. SAMOCA is situated in Diriyah’s JAX District, a creative hub of warehouses that now hold art and film studios but, until recently, was home to car repair shops. Diriyah itself, considered the historic birthplace of the kingdom, is a $63 billion development that will feature multiple museums and hotels. It all makes for a dizzying layer cake of past, present, and future.

I was in Riyadh for the opening of the third annual edition of the two-week-long Noor Riyadh, a citywide festival of artworks involving light by both Saudi and international artists. The festival couldn’t help but illuminate the array of projects currently underway as part of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s sweeping Vision 2030 initiative to reduce the country’s reliance on oil and diversify the economy.
 
Weeks before my arrival, news broke that Riyadh would likely host the 2034 World Cup. On the day I arrived, it was announced that the city would host the World Expo 2030. In Paris, Laurent Le Bon, president of the Centre Pompidou, and Amr Almadani, CEO of the Royal Commission for AlUla, signed a formal agreement to collaborate on a new contemporary art space to open in AlUla in 2027. Early this coming February, the third edition of Desert X AlUla opens, as will, a few weeks later, the second edition of the Diriyah Biennale, KSA’s first art biennale, in Riyadh. Then, in two to three years, Wadi AlFann (“Valley of the Arts”), a 40-square-mile site featuring monumental site-specific permanent land artworks, will open at AlUla. At his studio in the JAX District, Saudi artist Ahmed Mater showed me renderings for his project for Wadi AlFann, an enormous structure that produces a mirage.
 
It can be difficult to remember what entity oversees which project in KSA. SAMOCA, an 18,000-square-foot kunsthalle, is a project of the Museums Commission, which is run by the Ministry of Culture. So is the still-in-development museum for modern and contemporary art that, with its permanent collection, will dwarf SAMOCA. The Diriyah Biennale Foundation, also under the Ministry of Culture, is partnering with real estate developer ROSHN, a company set up by the Kingdom’s Public Investment Fund to increase home ownership across Saudi Arabia to 70 percent by 2030. Noor Riyadh, meanwhile, falls under the public initiative Riyadh Art, which is overseen by the Royal Commission for Riyadh City, whose board chairman is bin Salman. It takes an org chart just to keep track it all.
 
And there is more: directly across the street from the JAX District, during Noor Riyadh, the ATHR Foundation opened the eighth and largest edition of its Young Saudi Artists Exhibition, showing 25 emerging talents drawn from an open call. The ATHR Foundation was set up last year by the founders of the Jeddah-based ATHR gallery, one of KSA’s most prominent commercial spaces, with a mission to help artists navigate the art system, as well as to advise local private and public entities on their cultural endeavors. The exhibition took place in a residential building called ETHR, which is part of the ATHR mission to help arts professionals (both homegrown and international) seeking access to the JAX resources.
 
The majority of the pieces in Noor Riyadh were brand-new, and several were spectacular, but, for me, the one that stole the show was older: Fühlometer (Feel-o-meter), a 2008 piece made by German artist Julius von Bismarck in collaboration with experimental designer Benjamin Maus and filmmaker Richard Wilhelmer. On the roof of a building in the KAFD, von Bismarck had installed a 26-foot-high smiley face illuminated with fluorescent tubes. Visible from miles away—and a nice diversion while stuck in traffic on one of the many highways that loop around the city—the face changes its expression using software that analyzes peoples’ expressions gathered from surveillance cameras set up around the area. The face smiles when the city smiles, frowns when the city frowns, and displays every emoji-able expression in between. The artwork would seem to be a direct reference to KAFD’s rapid development as a smart city: it was reported in September that Orange Business, the French telecom company that has moved aggressively into big data and AI, had closed a deal that will see it building geolocation-based sentiment analysis of social media and other features into the existing KAFD digital infrastructure.
 
Another poignant piece in Noor Riyadh was in the tranquil Wadi Hanifah park, where French artist Bruno Ribeiro erected a 65-foot-high sculpture of an oil derrick on which foreboding light patterns coordinated to the sound of an ominous booming techno soundtrack. The piece was called All Is Well.
 
It was only as I was leaving KSA that I realized how close I’d been, in the JAX District, to a space dedicated to showing the Saudi public scale models and computer renderings of The Line, a 110-mile-long “linear smart city” that is part of the futuristic $500 billion, 16,000-square-mile sustainable living giga-project NEOM. Unable to visit, I watched a video presentation of The Line on my phone on the way to the airport, thinking how easy it was to chalk it all up to some kind of utopian—or perhaps dystopian—sci-fi fantasy. The project is proposed to have some 9 million people living in a car-less urban area serviced by a high-speed rail system. But then, at the airport, I spoke with a UK-based adviser/contractor at a Starbucks who claimed to be working on The Line. He’d seen trucks there, he told me, he’d seen materials. He said “it’s real.”
 
If, instead of heading back to New York, I had taken a two-hour flight east, to Dubai, I would have arrived just in time for the start of the UN Climate Summit. In the weeks that followed, the Saudi contingent at the conference went on to lead a group of major oil exporters in resisting a deal calling for a complete phaseout of fossil fuels. (In the end, a compromise deal was reached that, while still historic, calls instead for “transitioning away from fossil fuels.”) The New York Times, in a story on the negotiations, pointed to what analysts say is an obvious paradox: “Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is spending tens of billions of dollars to try to diversify the Saudi economy, investing in industries like renewable energy, tourism, entertainment and artificial intelligence. Paradoxically, that means the government needs oil revenue to fund its plans for life after oil.”

In 2018, Claude Picasso, son of the artist Pablo Picasso, said there were too many exhibitions devoted to his father. He fretted that his dad’s works would suffer damage because they were traveling so frequently and worried that few of these shows contributed much in the way of new scholarship. “Many people expect to make discoveries that, at the end of the day, they do not make, and they are not satisfied with what is on offer,” he said. “Among the exhibitions held, there is a load that are not necessary.”

Claude Picasso died this year, along with his mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, and the notion that there is such a thing as too many Picasso shows. To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, dozens of museums across the globe staged exhibitions devoted to the artist. Some were small, some were large. Some were widely seen, others largely ignored. All contained a familiar refrain: Picasso’s art still matters, like it or not.

But did we really need 50 exhibitions to figure that out? It was already self-evident based on museums’ permanent collection galleries, which almost always contain their prized Picassos. It was also obvious based on the glut of mid- and late-career Picassos that hit the auction block every year. (This year’s top lot was a $139.4 million Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter.) And by the way, good luck finding a museum bookstore that doesn’t have something Picasso-related, be it a 2024 wall calendar, a salt shaker emblazoned with his face, or a tea towel printed with his cutesy, pacifist dove image.

It’s safe to say that, because of all those shows, 2023 was the year of Picasso. But it’s also safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process.

Some museum shows tried to suggest that there was actually still more to be gained from studying Picasso. One was “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through February 17) that surveys one summer spent at a commune in the south of France in 1921. This is a remarkably specific slice of Picasso history—it occupies about a dozen pages of John Richardson’s 1,800-page biography of the artist—but curator Anne Umland suggests that it can teach us a lot about his method. She fixes on the fact that he was creating two major works at the same time: Three Musicians (1921), whose sitters fracture into a dazzling array of intersecting shapes, and Three Women at the Spring (1921), whose sitters wear drape-like dresses reminiscent of ancient Greece instead of contemporary France.

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