The arts and culture sectors represented more than $1 trillion of the US economy in 2021 and accounted for a record portion of country’s overall economic value, per new data from the government.

On Wednesday, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) published their latest analysis of the economic health of 35 industries within the arts. Additional emphasis was placed on measuring whether each industry had returned to pre-pandemic levels of economic performance—or if they had failed to recover. 

According to the report, between 2020 and 2021, the total economic value contributed by arts and cultural industries increased by 13.7 percent, vastly surpassing the gains of the wider US economy, which grew by just 5.9 percent over the same period. By the end of 2021, the arts industries made up 4.4 percent of the nation’s overall gross domestic product (GDP).

Of the 35 industries studied, ten—including independent performers and artists and performing arts organizations—recorded significant growth within 2021, however none reached 2019-levels of economic output. The NEA also reported that just under 4.9 million people were employed in the arts industries in 2021, representing an increase from 2020, when the pandemic curtailed economic activity in the arts worldwide. That too was still below the 5.2 million employed in 2019.

Performing arts workers and performing art venues, two of the hardest hit areas in 2019, grew in 2021 by 14 percent to about 230,000 employees in total. Again, a gain that was still below the 323,000 workers employed by the industry before Covid-19. 

Liste Art Fair has named the 88 galleries that will participate in its upcoming 2023 edition in Basel. A satellite of the larger Art Basel, Liste is scheduled to take place June 12–18 in Hall 1.1 at Messe Basel, where Art Basel also takes place.

Among the exhibitors lined up to take part are among some of the world’s most closely watched gallery programs known for showing rising artists, including François Ghebaly, Embajada, Addis Fine Art, Blindspot, Peana, Lodos, and Sultana.

Twenty galleries will take part for the first time, including Regards, Afriart Gallery, PHD Group, wanda, Ginny on Frederick, and Parc Offsite, Eli Kerr, while Bangkok’s Nova and Jakarta’s ROH Projects will return to the fair for the first time since the pandemic. Additionally, the patron group Friends of Liste will support 12 galleries’ participation in the fair, including Gianni Manhattan, Gallery Vacancy, Clima, Crisis, and Voloshyn.

In a statement, Liste director Joanna Kamm said, “For the past few years, artists seemed to have taken inward-looking gazes as their starting points, but this year we’re noticing a reversal to outward-facing gazes. With immersive installations, timebased media, AI and computer-generated images, as well as strong positions in painting and photography, they highlight how differently the world is seen when experienced from different perspectives, under different conditions and in different places. We are very excited to see the works by this sharp-eyed generation of artists at Liste Art Fair Basel 2023.”

The full exhibitor list follows below.

The remains of nine Indigenous people, unearthed by archaeologists on the small Dutch-Caribbean island of St. Eustatius more than 30 years ago, have been returned by the Netherlands, ABC News reports.

The first inhabitants of St. Eustatius (known locally as Statia) are believed to be Caribs, a people originating in the Amazon basin, though multiple pre-Colombian sites have been found on the island. Further European settlement began with the Dutch in the 17th century, and later came under the rule of both Britain and France. St. Eustatius is currently a special municipality of the Netherlands.

The island’s culture department requested the repatriation, which took nearly a year to complete. Uncovered during Dutch colonial rule, the island is making an effort to recover its stolen artifacts and human remains from institutional collections worldwide.

Some of the artifacts and bone fragments, including boxes containing remnants of ceramic and shell food, date back to the 5th century, according to the government press release on Monday, and were uncovered during an excavation at the capital Oranjestad airport between 1984- 1989.

The remains were flown back on a commercial airline by two professors from Leiden University in the Netherlands, while the artifacts are expected to be returned over the next few months. They will be reburied with the help of a local cultural heritage committee in close collaboration with local residents.

As the art fair calendar continues in full swing and a Johannes Vermeer retrospective at the Rijksmuseum sold out, a new report from Sotheby’s further confirms a robust recovery in the high-end art market.

The new report, published Tuesday, says the biggest area of growth for pieces sold at auction is the $20 million and up range, which accounted for 45.2% of all sales of $1 million or more in 2022.

For the report, art market analytics firm ArtTactic analyzed auction sales data from Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips between 2018 and 2022 in the categories of Impressionist, Modern, Old Masters, and contemporary art. Additionally, it includes information from Sotheby’s private sales department.

ArtTactic produced the “insight report” for the auction house and similar surveys in the series are set to be released in the future.

The $1 million benchmark is significant because while the financial figure for art works represents just 4% of lots sold, the report notes that this tier “accounts for 74% of total sales by value in the collecting categories covered in this report.” While private sales of art at $1 million or greater fell to $1.05 billion in 2022, down from the peak of $1.41 billion in 2020, the report noted that is still 30.8% higher than that tier of sales in 2019 at $803.5 million.

Of all the discourse that permeates today’s never-ending newscycle, gender, identity, and race issues create the most heat. But, where there is heat there is light, and comedian and ARTnews Top 200 Collector Cheech Marin was happy to shed some during an on-stage conversation with ARTnews at the 2023 edition of South by Southwest Conference and Festival.

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Marin was there to discuss the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture at the Riverside Art Museum in California, which opened last year and is propelled by his vast collection of Chicanx art.

“You know, Chicano is a voluntary category,” Marin said, when asked about identity politics in the US. “There’s no box you can check on the census that says Chicano. So, I took that as a cue—well if that’s the case, you can have voluntary rules too. We can make this up as we go along.”

Marin followed that with a brief history of the term Chicano and how he came to associate himself with the expression in the inimitable way that has garnered him millions of fans starting with the turned-on comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

“Chicano was originally a derisive term from Mexicans–to other Mexicans,” Marin said. “The concept being that the Mexicans who had moved from Mexico and were now living in tin shacks along the border in Texas, and Arizona, and California, were no longer truly Mexicanos because they had left their country. They were something less. They were little satellite Mexicans, little Chicos, you know, that where the term came from—at least according to me,” he added with a laugh.

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When deciding on the best paint brush for your project, it’s important to consider the brush-head material as well as its size and shape. A quality brush will hold a good amount of paint, facilitate a smooth stroke, and won’t shed or split. Natural bristle brushes are made with coarse animal hair and are intended for oil and acrylic paints. A high-quality paint brush will feature bristle tips that have flagged, or split, ends that hold their shape and help hold and distribute paint better. The metal band joining the bristles to the brush handle is called a ferrule and keeps the bristles in shape and maintains their flex. Brushes come in many different shapes: from fan to round, with the most versatile being the trusted flat-headed brush. To help you choose, we’ve rounded up the best bristle brushes below. 

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The hand-shaped bristles of these hog-bristle brushes interlock for better pigment-holding ability and are double oiled for extra spring and endurance. The nickel-plated brass ferrules are rust-resistant and keep bristles from falling out or bending. Manufactured via certified green processes and constructed with extra-long sustainable wood handles, these brushes are not only artist grade but environmentally friendly.

Born in 1976 in Saigon, Nguyen emigrated with his family as a refugee to the United States in 1979, and grew up in California. He began regularly visiting Vietnam during college, and after receiving his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 2004, relocated to Ho Chi Minh City, where he cofounded the Propeller Group artist collective in 2006 and the nonprofit art space Sàn Art in 2007.

While there can be a certain melancholy among diasporic artists grasping at generalized ideas of a motherland, Nguyen circumvents that disappointment by rooting his work in specific histories that he rigorously researches in order to make room for poetry. In The Specters of Ancestors Becoming (2019), Nguyen worked with members of the Vietnamese community in Senegal, whose origins trace back to West African soldiers sent by French colonizers to fight against the Vietnamese liberation uprisings in the 1940s. Nguyen asked members of the community to devise and enact conversations with their elders, showing how fragmented consciousness of cultural inheritance is communicated between generations.

Such intergenerational transmission recurs frequently in Nguyen’s work. We Were Lost in Our Country (2019) features interviews with members of the Aboriginal Ngurrara community in Western Australia alongside testimony about the Ngurrara Canvas II, an immense painting made by 40 Ngurrara artists that depicts a map of their land created as evidence to reclaim that land from the Australian government. Many of the original artists having died, the painting serves as a complex dialogue between ancestors and descendants. The ways in which land bears witness also figure in The Island (2017) and The Boat People (2020), both of which look at two sites of former Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian refugee camps. Rather than aligning these sites solely with past traumas, Nguyen presents them as places of generative fantasy, where bodies are empowered by oceans instead of drowning in them and where the fate of being the last humans on Earth affords new communion with objects and the landscape. For refugees past and present, this type of ingenuity is a survival strategy.

Nguyen is never satisfied with research as a static mode of exposition: when archival footage is interwoven into his films, it is in part to question the motives of the camera and the coercive tactics of the moving image, while conjuring distinct power in the refusal to present a single truth. In an interview over Zoom during a family visit in Orange County, California, Nguyen—the subject of a solo show opening at the New Museum in New York this coming June—spoke about his long-term relationships with his collaborators, using a biennial as a civic tool, and the potency of sharing personal histories.

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LUMI TAN For the sake of a shared vocabulary, how would you define “research” as it figures in your practice?

This week, three reviews on damaged art, art out of time, art of our time, and enjoying the void. 

We’re in a particular phase of “pandemic art” now—I don’t mean work that portrays the spread of disease (I’ll leave The Last of Us to another writer) but the work that artists made while they lived in hibernation: writers at their desks with no social obligations to draw them out into the city, artists in their studios with the endless horizon of hours receding. Now they are showing what they made. Tara Donovan’s stunning “screen drawings,” on view last month at Pace Gallery in Chelsea, are a project begun in that period. The “drawings” are made from typical aluminum insect screens, cut and tweezed into intricate geometric patterns—layered lines, swirls, and cutouts—that shimmer and morph as you walk through the gallery. They are subtle optical illusions cut from the humblest everyday material. Their connection to the period of “high quarantine” strikes me immediately: time spent looking out the window onto silent streets, time spent feeling intensely aware of the need for protection. The discourse around “screen time” is of course fatiguing, but Donovan’s drawings for me reinvigorate the multiple meanings of the phrase. Before we came to understand the screen as the portal that brought the outside infinity into our personal space, screens were more often for keeping something out: a fugitive look, a bothersome fly. (I saw Donovan’s work around the same time as I became aware of an interesting but disquieting TikTok trend of overlaying TV clips with ASMR videos, in case you didn’t have enough stimulation.) What else do they continue to separate from us? A special quality of Donovan’s manipulations is that no photo of them can do them justice—they look good in two dimensions, but in person they are almost hypnotic in their immersive power. They’re hardly capturable as digital artifacts, and so much the better.

—David S. Wallace, contributing editor

Climate change tends to be visualized in Western culture in a few clichéd ways: a montage of graphs (the line goes up indicating rising temperatures), the chemical structure for carbon dioxide, scientists in white coats, a starving polar bear, and more increasingly, news stories accompanied by pictures of houses submerged in water after major storms or burnt down after raging wild fires.

The artist Minerva Cuevas, however, imagines a different way to visualize it, one that is probably unexpected. For her latest exhibition, “in gods we trust” at Kurimanzutto’s New York outpost, Cuevas insists that climate change be represented by the companies that are responsible for causing it, from oil companies like Shell to financial institutions like Chase Bank.

In a series of appropriated works, Cuevas displays ads from the oil and gas industry from the 1950s and ’60s: Mobil oil flows down a pristine snow-banked stream, slick tar is scooped with a spoon in a promotion of Shell’s new “recipe” for asphalt, and Humble oil (now known as Exxon) brags that “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!” Given that oil companies spent the ensuing decades denying that the burning of fossil fuels cause climate change, these prophetic promotion of their sins is a tad on the nose.

These appropriated works give us a glimpse into Cuevas’s intense research process which is the basis of her art-making. In other works, like The Trust, Cuevas takes symbols of oil industries and submits them to her local context of Mexico. By alluding to ancient art practices that involved tar and the current oil industry in Mexico, climate change is not just a global phenomena but an act of pollution that speaks to a country’s past, present, and future.

To learn more about the exhibition, which is on view until April 15, ARTnews spoke with Cuevas to discuss her process and the role of the artist in times of crisis.

Patrick Vieira’s out! On St Patrick’s Day of all days. Marcus, Andy and Luke ask whether David Moyes has ever been sacked on St David’s Day and (of course) make the case for Roy Hodgson’s return.

Elsewhere, there’s news that Arsenal man Nuno Tavares has accidentally signed a petition to get rid of one of his own teammates and unconfirmed news that Charlie Kane has made the same mistake on a new Spurs contract for his brother. Plus, biznezz time in the FA Cup and a new England squad! Looks a lot like the old one, mind…

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