August 13 – October 1, 2022

August 26 – September 25, 2022

‌As we near the 14th anniversary of Contemporary Art Daily, we haven’t had a donation drive in three years, not since we built Contemporary Art Library, a free public service for researching artists via our organized, easily searchable archive of nearly 500,000 pieces of documentation. In the year since the Library launched we’ve been inundated by submissions and requests to add archives, in addition to the ongoing work of creating Contemporary Art Daily. We’re thrilled to see the Library grow so quickly, but each archive takes time and labor, and for that, we need your help. Please make a tax deductible donation to our non-profit work here.

July 1 – September 10, 2022

The Woman King is a 'popcorn film with a social conscience'

How The Good Fight offers cathartic relief in a chaotic world

Ana de Armas stars in 'brutal' new film Blonde

The Father follow-up is "a well-meaning but hokey drama"

From Eurovision to Gen-Z "meme pop", Ukrainian musicians are making a difference

Our verdict on 'half-baked' thriller Don't Worry Darling

The actor 'richly deserves nominations' for his performance in The Whale

Bones and All is a tender tale of budding cannibal romance

New books by women interrogate female desire in different ways

Birdman director Alejandro G Iñárritu comes unstuck at the Venice Film Festival

LongShots spotlights short-form documentaries nominated by top film festivals

After a year-long controversy, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has approved a new definition for what makes a museum today, marking the first time in 15 years that the group has done so.

The new definition describes a museum as “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage,” adding that it is “open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.”

While the new standard mimics the definition’s previous structure, it includes mention of progressive concepts like “diversity,” “sustainability,” and “accessible”—terms that are meant to reflect recent debates around the civic role of museums.

In a press statement on Wednesday, ICOM president Alberto Garlandi called the revised phrasing a “great step forward” for the museum world at large, while also acknowledging the update is “not perfect.”

The revision passed with 92 percent vote of approval on the final day of ICOM’s General Conference held in Prague this week.

The New York Attorney General’s Office said it found evidence that at least a dozen clients were involved in an alleged tax fraud scheme led by Sotheby’s.

The investigation, which began in 2020, initially centered around a private collector who obtained a false resale certificate. Now, the AGO claims that that collector’s case was not an outlier.

The false resale certificate allowed the anonymous individual from the initial investigation to fraudulently pose as an art dealer. Doing so may have allowed the collector to avoid paying millions of dollars in tax revenue on the sale.

The new allegations were made public in a Manhattan court on Wednesday by an attorney working for the government agency, according to a report from Law360.

That complaint is related to a 2018 lawsuit in which Sotheby’s was accused of defrauding the state out of taxes on $27 million of art purchased by an offshore account Porsal Equities. The original complaint alleged that the auction house’s staffers knew the client was a private collector purchasing art for his personal holdings. Under New York City law, only dealers planning to resell art qualify for exemptions to city and state sales tax.

Art and architecture maintain a self-evident, though largely unarticulated, relationship. Paraphrasing and inverting Ad Reinhardt’s maxim applies: “architecture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a sculpture.” Yet the art world pays scant attention to buildings, at least when the conversation ventures beyond a new museum.

But unlike art—much of which lives in storage or on private walls—architecture is there for the seeing. And the world of architecture, like the world of art, is rife with untold stories and unknown work that unlike most under-recognized art, lies hiding in plain sight.

In March 2020, when the pandemic began and galleries closed, my wife Dyanne and I got into our car and went traveling to see architecture in the field. These trips started when the gallery’s Instagram account was created in 2015. Now they became the daily diary of our pandemic life. Since traffic was nonexistent in the disease’s early days, we ranged far and fast. Destinations were identified and corroborated using Google Street View. Could the building be photographed without trespassing?

Like art, architecture reveals itself in myriad ways. Since nothing comes from nowhere, and little is less nowhere than the built environment, anecdotal webs began to be woven, with the local emerging as an intricate historical document.

Below, a look at how 10 buildings and their architects can reveal the exigency of  the personal relationships, inclusive memory, and community recognition that lives in the architecture and art that surround us.