UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, has granted “provisional enhanced protection” to two Ukrainian heritage sites, the Odessa Literary Museum and the National Historical and Memorial Reserve Babyn Yar, as the Russia’s war on Ukraine approaches its three-year anniversary.

One of the cultural properties, National Historical Memorial Reserve Babyn Yar in Kyviv, honors the more than 33,000 Jews, as well as Roma and Soviet prisoners, killed by the Nazis in a two-day massacre in 1941. In March of 2022, a Russian projectile hit close to the site, killing five people. A monument to Holocaust victims was not directly struck, but a nearby building the center planned to use for a new museum was damaged.

“Cultural property under the enhanced protection of UNESCO benefits from the highest level of immunity from attack and use for military purposes. Non-compliance with these clauses would constitute a ‘serious violation’ of the 1999 Second Protocol to the Hague Convention, opening the possibility of prosecution,” UNESCO said in a statement.

In February of this year, UNESCO reported that 341 cultural sites—including 26 religious structures, 150 buildings of historical or artistic importance, and 31 museums—across Ukraine have been damaged since the outbreak of war in February 2022. The following year, Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general, promised more than $10 million to rehabilitation efforts.

“In times of war, international solidarity is crucial to protect threatened cultural heritage,” Azoulay said in a statement. “This decision will make it possible to further strengthen the safety of these two Ukrainian cultural sites, including a major site for Holocaust remembrance.”

A total of 38 photographs by Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019) was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), the institution announced in a statement last week.

The acquisition includes 34 photographs donated by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, and four works that were purchased using donated funds from the former Citibank chief executive John Reed and his wife Cynthia.

The 38 images were made while Frank was in Paris in 1949. Some offer glimpses of street scenes such as children watching a blind street performer and a “circus” trolley car. Though Frank is primarily known for his highly influential 1958 book “

The Americans, which captured post-war American society, the recently acquired photographs were taken when he returned to Europe after living in New York for two years.

“We are thrilled to add these important photographs to the Museum’s collection which give insight into Frank’s career while contributing to our ability to tell the story of artistic transatlantic connections,” said Kristen Gresh, Estrellita and Yousuf Karsh Senior Curator of Photographs at MFA Boston, in a statement. 

Jesse Krimes vividly recalls the moment he chose to identify as an artist. During a year in solitary confinement, awaiting sentencing for non-violent drug-related charges, he had a life-defining realization: he would be an artist, no matter what.

“I decided very early on that I was going to use every minute of my time [in prison]—whether I got five years, twenty years, or a life sentence—to create something positive in the world,” Krimes recently told ARTnews. “Everything could be taken from me, except my ability to create.”

Prior to his indictment, Krimes had earned a BA in art from Millersville University in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he developed a profound interest in conceptual art and a wide-ranging exploration of materials—an approach he continued to refine while serving a six-year prison sentence, and despite facing significant constraints to accessing traditional art materials.

Purgatory (2009), one of his most ambitious installations to date, was created while in solitary confinement by using hair gel and toothpaste to hand-transfer images of individuals labeled as offenders in newspapers onto 292 bars of prison-issued soap. The soap bars were then embedded into carved playing cards to examine an array of issues, including fate and the many failures of the American justice system. It serves as the centerpiece of Krimes’s current survey, “Corrections,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (on view through July 13).

In the book Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, author and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood reflects on the significance of the materials Krimes selected for Purgatory. “In his use of materials, Krimes references the notion of penitence, out of which the first penitentiaries emerged, and also the colonial and racist violence of the government mandating the use of soap by forcibly held captive and colonized peoples. Soap denotes a history of racializing pathologies and imperial and institutional ideas of cleanliness,” she wrote. 

PARIS — Louis Vuitton is betting on a dose of Y2K nostalgia to perk up luxury consumers on New Year’s Day, when the reedition of its seminal collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami will land in stores in tandem with a campaign fronted by Zendaya.

Murakami and Pietro Beccari, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton, spoke with WWD about reuniting more than two decades after the launch of the line that set the mold for collaborations between artists and luxury brands. 

“Young people are reviving that era, and we want to connect with them through this re-release,” Beccari said in an exclusive interview conducted via email.

The Louis Vuitton x Murakami collection is set to roll out next week with pop-up activations in seven cities worldwide that include experiences such as cafés, cinemas, care stations and vending machines where clients who purchase a piece from the collection can win gifts like stickers, Tamagotchi or trading cards. 

In Milan, the French luxury brand will take over two trams, one with a café and one with a cinema screening remastered versions of the artist’s original “Superflat Monogram” and “Superflat First Love” short films, released in 2003 and 2009, respectively. 

Until the 1960s, the word computer indicated a worker—often a woman—who entered calculations into a mainframe. An exhibition now at MUDAM in Luxembourg and traveling to Kunsthalle Vienna, “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991,” unearths the history of this gendered workforce, while also highlighting those women artists experimenting with or “musing” those same machines. Taking a broad view of the computer in art history, it includes artists who used the computer as tool and as subject, as well as those who simply “worked in a computational way.”

The exhibition is divided into five thematic sections, organized roughly chronologically. “Zeros and Ones” shows early experiments in computing, mostly in the form of wall-based works, but it also includes Liliane Lijn’s kinetic sculpture Man Is Naked (1965), a fragile work from her “Poem Machines” (1962–68)series rarely seen in operation. In the “Hardware” section, paintings by Ulla Wiggen and Deborah Remington evoke the mysteries of various technologies hidden behind their shiny exteriors, while “Software” returns to weaving as the origins of the “soft wares” that have come to define computational output. “Home Computing” traces the availability of the computer to artists who were making screen-based works via novel programs. And finally, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” which takes its name from Donna Haraway’s 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” explores the repercussions of the computer on the (female) body, via the likes of Valie Export’s photomontages and Analívia Cordeiro’s algorithmic choreographies.

The show is organized around a technology rather than a genre, movement, or medium, which makes for unexpected and captivating inclusions. A computational rendering of Isa Genzken’s Ellipsoid (1977), for instance, is displayed alongside the sculptural object that it produced. The pairing underscored her ambition to make sculptures she called “mathematically correct.” Elsewhere, The House of Dust (1967), a computer-generated poem by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, is displayed on a vintage printer, alongside Katalin Ladik’s Genesis 01-11 (1975), comprising enchanting sonic interpretations of various circuit boards rapidly obsoleting.

Some of these early experiments betray an uncertainty about the status of “artwork.” Beryl Korot—cofounder of the magazine Radical Software, from which this exhibition takes its title—displays Text and Commentary (1976–77) as sketches, woven textiles, and videos, alongside documentation of the process. It is unclear where the art object ends and the idea begins, a move in line with the conceptual art movement of the time.

The exhibition positions the advent of computing as a process that eradicates any separation between fine art and craft. This rupture is welcome, as women have historically been excluded from the former category. This argument is most clearly articulated in the links the exhibition makes between computing and weaving: digital artist Charlotte Johannesson, whose work is shown as woven fabrics, digital drawings, and digital images displayed on impressive LCD screens in the sculpture garden, asserts that the screen’s pixels correspond to the warps and wefts of the loom.

The AI Art Magazine, a new, 176-page biannual publication dedicated entirely to art made by artificial intelligence (AI), has launched. It’s publisher, Mike Brauner, said in a statement that it will “serve as a vital chronicle of this transformative moment in art history.”

Its website says it “celebrates the fusion of human creativity and intelligent machines. Freezing the moment of art in a tangible printed form while AI is evolving rapidly.”

Hamburg-based creative studio, polardots.studio, and Christoph Grünberger – who wrote the book The Age of Data: Embracing Algorithms in Art & Design – were instrumental in getting the project off the ground.

“[The magazine] showcases remarkable works and accompanying essays that set the benchmark for today’s AI-generated art, from surprising visual experiments to conceptually refined pieces that push the boundaries of this rapidly evolving field,” the project said in a statement. “The magazine reveals what happens when humans and machines get creative together. We’re throwing the doors wide open believe it’s going to be a big party – come in and let’s dance.”

It costs 22 euros and is independently funded to ensure “editorial independence and creative freedom,” Brauner added. “While our first issue is advertisement-free, we’ve established meaningful partnerships with partners who supported us and received customised editions for their clients.”

The cover of the first issue features an artwork by Japanese AI artist Emi Kusano, who discusses her practice in an interview. There’s also a “curated gallery” of 50 works chosen from an international open call by jury including Mexican graphic designer Adriana Mora and a jury member created by AI called Xiaomi.

Several of the selected artworks are accompanied by essays written by the jury members. For example, American graphic designer David Carson’s contribution is titled “If someone gives a command to a machine, is that person then an artist?” The essay focuses on US artist Kevin Esherick’s work, Somewhere in Michigan, and “demonstrates the depth of critical engagement we aim to foster,” Brauner said.

Vincent Valdez’s studio in East Los Angeles is packed with large canvases, some still in progress. There’s a painting titled Supreme of the Supreme Court with portions unpainted and sketched on the canvas. On the same canvas, there are glimpses of the Rockefellers and depictions of Manifest Destiny. Another wall has a painting of Michael Jordan mid-dunk circa 1988, shining in the sea of darkness behind him. His canvases of various sizes are stacked and leaning against the walls, at times five works deep.

“What you see here is the most work that I’ve ever had at a single time inside my studio,” Valdez told ARTnews in October ahead of his first major museum survey that opened at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston last month and will travel to MASS MoCA next May.

Valdez has kept the room intentionally warm, hoping to speed up the drying of the oil paints in the Jordan piece. It’s crunch time. With “Just a Dream…” as its title, the exhibition will bring together 25 years’ worth of work; for Valdez, it’s an apt time to reflect on the arc of his artmaking, thinking through how connected his works are. He sees them as chapters in one giant novel, the United States its protagonist. From the Zoot Suit Riots to the Iran-Contra Affair, his work interrogates all the country represents, its brutal histories of racism and the inciting incidents that brought us to where we are today.

“This work, although it is complex in its nature and heavy in its subject matter, has been the very thing that has kept me at peace,” he said. “It is the truest form of freedom that I’ll ever know in this life, being in the studio and talking about the absurdities outside of the studio.”

Born in San Antonio in 1977 and now based between LA and Houston, Valdez started working with CAMH and MASS MoCA, the exhibition’s two organizers, nearly five years ago to bring this show to life. When cocurators Patricia Restrepo and Denise Markonish approached him about a survey exhibition in 2019, he felt he wouldn’t have much to say for a retrospective. “But then I started to love the idea about re-collecting 25 years of work to be seen together for the very first time,” he said.

In terms of art forgeries, 2024 belonged to the Russian avant-garde market, the increasingly questioned umbrella term for modernist art from post-Soviet and Eastern European countries. This recess of the art market is riddled with fakes; several dealers told ARTnews that as many as 95 percent of the paintings currently in circulation aren’t legitimate.

One art lender said he was invited to Israel by one collector-dealer who showed him a warehouse stacked to the rafters with Russian modernist paintings with dubious attributions. (The collector-dealer allegedly was trying to pass them off as genuine to use as collateral.) This year saw a slew of investigations into Russian art forgeries that illuminated the extent of the issue, including “The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection”, from the BBC, and ARTnews‘ own investigations.

The rest of the art world also suffers from fakes, just not to the same degree. The tech sector, meanwhile, is tackling the problem with (occasionally controversial) tactics, including facial recognition software and patented algorithms. Some of these firms argue that replacing subjectivity with objectivity in art authentication is the answer. In other words, they think human judgement will soon be obsolete in this game.

Below are eight of this year’s most interesting stories of art world forgeries.

October 16 – December 21, 2024

The thoroughly British winter favourite is in demand more than ever – here's why

Quannah ChasingHorse talks modelling, activism and making a difference

Why Shaboozey's A Bar Song (Tipsy) dominated the charts in 2024

How Oscar-tipped new film Nickel Boys offers a revolutionary new perspective

A five-year-old actor signed with Fox Studios and became a superstar

November 16 – December 21, 2024

November 23, 2024 – January 18, 2025

Portrayals of gay characters in film and TV were 'messier' than ever this year

This prequel to a re-make is 'pointless', and 'never picks up momentum'

November 16, 2024 – January 19, 2025

November 15 – December 21, 2024