September 9 – November 12, 2023

September 15 – November 12, 2023

From its humour to its hero, why Doctor Who is so quintessentially British

The brain wave that transformed Walt Disney's life

From alien chic to clown shoes, here are some of the year's most out-there looks

A wardrobe decoder of Prince's eclectic style

These radical women artists shocked – and made the city cool

Two stars for the final season of the Royals drama

Joaquin Phoenix stars in 'a proper, old-fashioned historical epic'

Breathing new life into your wardrobe doesn't have to mean new purchases

The Crown's movement coach on how she helps its stars become the Royals

How Coyote vs Acme is the latest film to be shelved despite already being shot

A number of ancient structures have been damaged in Afghanistan’s rural countryside following four deadly 6.3 magnitude earthquakes and dozens of aftershocks between October 7 and 15.

Ancient villages constructed from bricks and mud straw were destroyed during two initial earthquakes in the territory around Zinda Jan in the Herat province. At least 1,500 people died in the two quakes, and thousands were left injured, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. A total of 11 villages were decimated, while 114,000 people are in need of humanitarian aid.

The worst damage occurred in the Zinda Jan and Injil districts. Many villages in those districts were home to ancient vernacular architecture structures dating to the Safavid dynasty (16th to 18th centuries), with a few key elements dating back even further, to the Ilkhanate dynasty (13th to 14th centuries).

“There were windmills in this area that were around 600 years old … they are vertical windmills, which are truly one of a kind,” Arash Boostani, a project manager for the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Afghanistan, told the Art Newspaper.

Key monuments in the city of Herat also experienced damage due to the earthquake. Herat has been on UNESCO’s tentative list since 2004.

The director of Pennsylvania’s Frick Pittsburgh museum apologized on Friday for postponing a show about Islamic art across the centuries. The decision to do so, reported in late October by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, had been done in response to the Israel-Hamas war.

Elizabeth Barker, the museum’s leader, had initially said that she pushed the show back to 2024 because she feared that local Jews and members of other communities might take offense at the exhibition. But Jewish and Muslim groups across the nation, not just in Pittsburgh, ended up denouncing the decision to delay the exhibition.

Even the show’s organizer, International Arts and Artists, spoke tactfully about the postponement, with that nonprofit’s leader, Gregory Houston, telling the New York Times, “There is nothing wrong with the exhibition.”

The show, titled “Treasured Ornament: 10 Centuries of Islamic Art,” was to feature a millennium’s worth of glassware, metal objects, paintings, ceramics, and more, and was expected to open in November. It has now been rescheduled to August 2024, though until the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported on it, there had been no widely available announcement about it.

“I’m writing to apologize,” Barker wrote in a statement posted by the museum to Instagram on Thursday.
“Our failure to communicate clearly and openly about the postponement of Treasured Ornament hurt people we deeply respect in the Muslim community, Jewish community, arts community, and beyond.”

For the second time since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis, Documenta, one of the world’s top art festivals, publicly spoke out against an individual affiliated with it for engaging with pro-Palestinian causes.

On Friday, the German art exhibition denounced Ranjit Hoskoté, a member of the selection committee for its 2027 exhibition. Hoskoté, an Indian poet and critic, had been the subject of a report in Suddeutsche Zeitung published Thursday that resurfaced a letter protesting Zionism and Hindu nationalism, an ideology known as Hindutva, that he had signed in 2019.

The letter was put out by the Indian division of Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions, a group that advocates for Palestinian rights. In Germany, BDS has faced particularly severe pushback, with some politicians even seeking to render it illegal.

Documenta is still reeling from its 2022 show, which faced widespread allegations that works in it were antisemitic and that Israeli artists had been excluded, while Palestinian ones were let in. The curator of the show, the Indonesian art collective Ruangrupa, repeatedly denied these allegations, but a committee appointed by Documenta to investigate the claims said in a report that the show had become an “echo chamber” of anti-Israel sentiment.

In October, Documenta accused two Ruangrupa members of liking, then unliking, social media posts made in support of Palestine, an activity it called “intolerable and unacceptable.” The art exhibition used similar language on Friday to describe Hoskoté’s signing of the BDS India letter.

Editor’s Note: This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

The children playing by the 1920s-era carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park had no idea what was about to fill their ears when guitar tones and drones from a violin started surrounding Nicholas Galanin’s imposing public sculpture nearby. Raven Chacon and Laura Ortman—two friends of Galanin who had been commissioned by the Public Art Fund to perform this past Sunday afternoon—were positioned with the iconic bridge as a backdrop, but the structure most integral to the proceedings was In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra, a 30-foot-tall sculpture made with the same kind of steel used for border walls between the US and Mexico. The work, with the word “LAND” rendered in the style of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture, has a commanding sort of beauty about it. But there is a darkness—a disquieting acknowledgement of the violence and forced separation perpetrated in conflicts related to land—in it too.

Chacon and Ortman improvised a set of music that came just two days after Galanin and fellow artist Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to remove their work from “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” a survey that counts as the first show of contemporary Native art at the institution in 70 years. Offered as a protest against America’s plans to provide funding to Israel for its military actions in Gaza, the move was a way to show how, as Galanin (Lingít/Unangax) and Johnson wrote, “the work we do as artists does not end in the studio or with our artist statements, it extends into the world.”

Chacon (Diné) and Ortman (White Mountain Apache), for their part, played noisy, spikey, discordant music that was impressively uninterested in the kind of uplifting style you might imagine at a daytime performance in a public park. They had just a few speakers at their disposal, but their sound was loud—and very much in line with the mood of a day that was both triumphant (it was the same day as the New York City Marathon, always an incontrovertible celebration of humanity) and distressing (it was yet another day when what seemed to be protest-provoked shouts in the distance signaled increasing unrest).

At one point, between spells of distorted static and shrieking lead lines that wouldn’t have been out of place at a heavy-metal concert, Chacon was hunched over his bank of guitar pedals when he looked up and spied a helicopter in the sky. He kept on looking, craning his head and twiddling the knobs at his feet while waiting for the chopper to follow its flight pattern and circle back. When it rounded a bend and crept closer, he locked his sound into a digital delay—whoomp, whoomp, whoomp, whoomp—that he timed almost perfectly with the slashing of the blades. Through these sounds, it was as if the earth and the sky had become one, with machinery brokering an accord that it also managed to mangle beyond recognition.

Christie’s New York staged a marathon two-and-a-half-hour sale of 20th-century art on Thursday night that netted $640.8 million and notched new auction highs for Fernando Botero, Richard Diebenkorn, Arshile Gorky, Barbara Hepworth, Joan Mitchell, and Joan Snyder. All but two of the 63 works found buyers and two lots were withdrawn. 

The night was notable for the depth of bidding both in the room and on the phones; American bidders were an especially strong presence throughout the evening, the house saidat a post-sale press conference. Applause broke out no fewer than six times in the course of the evening, including a round of applause for auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen, who helmed the first half of the sale and gave his final performance before retiring after 38 years with the house. 

“It was a solid performance,” advisor Todd Levin told ARTnews on his way out of the sale room. “They did a good job with the estimates, and it was livelier than the last two nights.”

Advisor David Norman described the sale as “quite remarkable, especially when world events are so perilous.”

“It was an excellent sale, with lots of good, fresh material, which is exactly what the market wants,”  Norman told ARTnews after the auction. “Works that were making a repeat performance, like the Magritte, did extremely well,” he added, referring to L’empire des lumières (1949), which sold for a $30 million hammer price, or $34.9 million with fees, just shy of its high estimate.

Anticipation surrounding the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute exhibition has come to a close with the reveal of its latest annual theme. A preview held Wednesday morning at the museum featured Andrew Bolton, the curator overseeing the Costume Institute’s extensive fashion collection, as he announced the title for the much-awaited annual showcase: “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion.”

The theme, set to serve as the visual centerpiece for the Costume Institute’s annual Met Gala in May, the museum’s largest fundraising event, hinges on the concept of the senses and the natural world, Bolton told guests during the preview. Bolton elaborated that the exhibition would draw from the museum’s vast 33,000-item fashion archive and that curators selected 250 pieces that, in varying ways, relate to the “range of human senses.”

The primary aim, he added, is to “reanimate” historical and contemporary garments— once worn on living bodies, but now exist as artifacts for study within the museum’s archives.

Bolton emphasized that the theme is focused on garments alluding to the natural world, referencing a number of pieces the museum has selected: a 1958 hat produced by American designer Sally Victor, which doubles as a floral arrangement, a dress by Italian designer Elsa Schiaparelli bearing reproductions of floral postcards, and a 2011 Alexander McQueen piece embellished with artificial butterflies wings made from feathers.

The “impermanence” of fashion will also be a focus, the Met said. Adding to the exhibition’s focus on the senses, the Norwegian Berlin-based artist and chemist Sissel Tolaas will be a collaborator. Tolaas, who has collaborated with Balenciaga, will be tasked with reengineering scents associated with vintage clothes using geochemistry.

The photographer Nan Goldin said on Thursday that she had called off a project for the New York Times Magazine, accusing the newspaper of a pro-Israel bias in its reporting on Gaza.

“Yesterday, I canceled a big job with the New York Times Sunday magazine — a cover shoot of a musician I admire — because of the NYT’s reporting on the war on Gaza, which shows complicity with Israel,” she wrote on Instagram. “For what they report and don’t report, and how they question the veracity of anything Palestinians say.”

She tagged Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG), a group of journalists, critics, and more that have “committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” according to a description on its website, which accuses the New York Times’s editorial board and others of having created a “perversion of meaning” since the October 7 Hamas attack that killed 1,400 Israelis and involved the taking of around 200 hostages.

Following that attack, Israel has launched airstrikes on Gaza, killing more than 10,000 people there, according to the local health ministry. The writers’ group linked out to a regularly updated page by the Committee to Protect Journalists that collects the names of journalists who have been killed during the conflict since October 7; the page now lists around 40 names.

On her Instagram story, Goldin alluded to these killings, writing, “I respect the NYT journalists who are on the ground reporting the reality. I mourn the dozens of Palestinian journalists who have been targeted and killed in the last weeks. As long as the people of Gaza are screaming, we need to yell louder so they can hear us, no matter who attempts to silence us.”

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.

When financier Arthur Samberg died in July 2020 at 79, he was best known as the founder of Pequot Capital Management, one of the largest US hedge funds in the early 2000s. But court documents reviewed by ARTnews reveal that, behind the scenes, Samberg and his family were quiet major art collectors, owners of blue-chip works by Jackson Pollock, Constantine Brancusi, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Edward Hopper, among others.

Beginning in February 2021, Samberg’s estate began selling off holdings to select galleries, according to public records filed in New York at the time. Among the works consigned were Jenny Holzer’s Go where people sleep and see if they are safe, a red granite bench first produced in 1983, and an untitled LED sign from 2003, both of which were privately consigned to Hauser & Wirth. Around the same time, the estate also consigned Joyce Pensato’s 2016 painting Flashy Donald to Friedrich Petzel in New York.

Samberg founded Pequot in 1998. By 2001, the firm was reported to be the largest hedge fund in the world, with $15 billion in assets. Only eight years later, Pequot closed following an SEC insider trading probe, Samberg and Pequot agreeing to a settlement that included a $28 million fine and barred him from association with an investment adviser.

Samberg and his wife, Rebecca, were noted philanthropists, particularly for major Jewish organizations and higher education. Though they were noted supporters of organizations like Jazz at Lincoln Center and the Jacob Burns Film Center, and Rebecca served as a trustee at the Katonah Museum of Art in Upstate New York, they never cultivated reputations as cultural patrons in the art world, either as collectors or supporters of major arts institutions. For example, the Sambergs never featured on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list. (A representative from the Katonah Museum of Art did not respond to an ARTnews inquiry.)