November 4 – December 30, 2023

November 10, 2023 – January 6, 2024

November 4 – December 22, 2023

November 18 – December 23, 2023

How the disturbing 1973 cult hit The Wicker Man refuses categorisation

The famous steam engine turned 100 this year – why is it such an enduring icon?

From Prince Harry's Spare to Gwyneth's trial: what really got everyone talking

How the studio hit the rocks in 2023, with box office and critical flops galore

In 1914, British and German troops halted fighting in a moment of humanity

Why Tracy Chapman's Fast Car is more popular than ever

Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott are heartbreaking in All of Us Strangers

The photos that shocked or moved us in 2023

Jason Mamoa stars in sequel that 'goes through the usual blockbuster motions'

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.

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.”