Some 51,200 years ago on the ceiling of a limestone cave in the Indonesian Island of Sulawesi, art history was made. A wild pig was painted with crude red pigment, standing at peace beside three human-like figures.

This newly discovered artwork is now heralded as the oldest known cave painting, surpassing the previous record-holder by some 10,000 years, per a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The method is a significant improvement over other methods and should revolutionize rock art dating worldwide,” Maxime Aubert, archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and one of the lead authors of the study, told Reuters. 

According to the study, the scene in the Leang Karampuang cave in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi province features a pig measuring 36 inches by 15 inches. The pig depicted standing upright by the group of people. Several smaller images of pigs were also found in the cave, and were similarly dated using a laser to assess a crystal called calcium carbonate that develops organically on the pigment. Barring any future discoveries, the paintings represent the earliest example of narrative storytelling in visual art. 

“The three human-like figures and the pig figure were clearly not depicted in isolation in separate parts of the rock art panel,” Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, a fellow study leader, said in a statement. The relationship between the humanoids and the pig, however, is still unknown. 

Real estate mogul and arts patron Jorge Pérez slammed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, calling the politician’s recent slashing of arts and culture grants from the state budget “a horrible message to send” to the people of Florida.

As the chairman and chief executive of the Related Group, Pérez has built a real estate empire in Miami and donated hundreds of millions to arts organizations in the city, including $80 million to a contemporary art museum that bears his name.

“A lot of the people who are coming from New York are involved in the arts, participate in the arts,” Pérez, who has appeared on ARTnews’s Top 200 Collectors list, said in an interview with Bloomberg about the budget cuts. “We want to be a serious city, and serious means that we have great education and we have great exposure to culture.”

Last summer, Miami Beach sold $97.6 million of municipal debt to help fund theaters, concert venues, and museums, in push to cleanse the city of it’s “Spring Break or Bust” reputation.

Earlier this month, DeSantis vetoed more than $32 million in arts and culture grants from the 2025 state budget, which led both politicians and supporters of the arts to warn that the move could disadvantage institutions across Florida state.

Charges were dropped on Wednesday against 80 protestors who were arrested during a pro-Palestine demonstration at the Art Institute of Chicago in May.

During that protest, a group of students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago called on the university to “divest from all entities and individuals financially supporting the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

The school had reportedly asked the protestors to move an encampment they had set up, but they did not do so. A museum spokesperson said that some protestors “surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”

The museum called the police, and sixty-eight arrests on counts of trespassing followed. The institution previously said that the protestors were “given many opportunities to leave.” Shortly afterward, the museum requested that the charges be dropped.

According to ABC’s Chicago affiliate, the Illinois Attorney’s Office ultimately decided to drop the charges because the protests were peaceful, echoing the terminology used by the museum itself to describe the how it negotiated with demonstrators. The report included a quote from a police admiral who disputed this, accusing the protestors of vandalism and “assault,” and alleging that “several police officers were physically attacked.”

People still struggling to wrap their heads around NFTs, generative AI art, and other new forms of expression might just give up at the idea of collecting experiences as art. The mere mention of the concept elicits questioning, like the title of the panel discussion, “Can you collect experiences?” hosted by VIV Arts, a new sales platform supporting artists and collectors in the experiential art sector, which was held at Christie’s London on Wednesday evening.

At Christie’s, VIV Arts co-founders Carlota Dochao Naveira and Oliva Sartogo, were joined by Ana Ofak, a co-founder of “hybrid” art collective Transmoderna, and Nassia Inglessis, founder of Studio INI, which couples design and scientific research with public engagement through immersive installations. The all-female panel, sadly lacking artist and stage designer Es Devlin due to unfortunate logistics, was all smiles as Nicole Ching, specialist advisor of 20th/21st century art at Christie’s, introduced them.

“If one is able to collect experiences, I can’t imagine anyone discussing this hefty topic better than these women,” she told the 90 or so people in attendance.

Prior to the event, Naveira told ARTnews that experiential art has “existed since the advent of installation art, ‘artist environments,’ ‘happenings’—a term coined by Allan Kaprow in the late ’50s—and time-based performance.” (Naveira and Sartogo were part of the founding team of Miami experiential art center Superblue).

Before the speakers dissected the topic at hand, the room was quickly profiled via a quiz entered by scanning a QR code on a flyer to reveal each audience member’s “artistic persona.” Answering a series of multiple-choice questions led to one of four personality outcomes: “aesthetic enthusiast”; “modern maverick”; social collector”; or “experiences explorer.” When the results came in, a show of hands indicated most people were the latter. Things were off to a good start.

“We launched VIV Arts this year with a mission to support artists creating experiences, and what we mean by experiences is essentially putting audiences at the center of artistic experiences.” Naveira said. “Having them become active participants of the experience instead of being passive viewers of arts.”

Is being a “passive viewer of art” becoming passé or even unacceptable? Naveira would probably argue so, and not just in the field of art. In an email she sent ARTnews prior to the event, she wrote that numerous reports have pointed to the “growing importance of experiences in many luxury and consumer industries.” (A survey released Tuesday by Dotdash Meredith and market research firm Ipsos, for example, found that luxury consumers, particularly Gen Z, value “experience over product.”)

Naveira gave the floor to Ofak. She explained that Transmoderna, which she co-founded with DJ Steffen “Dixon” Berkhahn in 2018, is both an artistic collective based in Berlin and also a small studio comprised of a team of artists, “developers from the computational realm,” engineers, and sonographers. They “explore the possibilities that arise from merging electronic music with computational arts.”

“Transmoderna is moving away from our home in the digital realm into a hybrid of sound imaging and media setup,” Ofak said. “We have tried, uncommonly, to intervene in the scene of clubbing and dance music. When we started, we wanted to break with DJing and introduce something more involved in internet and digital art, meaning introducing VR and AR into dance experiences.”

When I was a boy, the most obvious thing, in almost any situation, seemed to be something that wasn’t named. This unspoken thing usually had to do with desires or strong emotions that appeared to run under people’s words. In a stained glass window, the least striking element is often the very scene being depicted. People could have that quality when I was little, resembling stencils marbled with glowing hues. Where did their hidden longings end? Where did mine begin?

As I got older, I often lived like a cashier behind Plexiglas. I came to study people from a certain remove. That I had barely made my own wishes known, even to myself, became clear a few years before I turned forty, when, for the first time, I fell in love.

On an early date, the woman I fell for and I were joking about past lives. We sat at the counter of a breakfast place in Dallas, eating pancakes. She said she thought your previous life must relate to something you did a lot as a kid, because you were that much closer to the other side. I said I was probably a neurasthenic in a sanatorium in Europe writing thin volumes of philosophy. She said, “I think you were a dancer!” In fact, I love to dance, and as a child, danced all the time.

Around the time this relationship suddenly ended, my friend Sam told me about the theory of personality that is attached to the enneagram. If I had been introduced to this system seven or eight years earlier, I would have assumed it was stupid. Or if I hadn’t been so torn up and turned around, I might not have been desperate enough to take the enneagram seriously. What I found, however, was a deep and dynamic model, and one that spoke intimately to my intuition about what lurked beneath the surface.

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THE HEADLINES

EARLIEST NARRATIVE PAINTING. New evidence backs findings that the earliest known cave paintings were not made in Europe, and reveals they were older than first thought. Thanks to new dating technology, researchers have determined that a newly discovered artwork in the Indonesian Leang Karampuang cave on the island of Sulawesi is now the world’s oldest-known cave art, reports Reuters. The dark red depiction of a large pig and three small, human-like figures was created a minimum of 51,200 years ago, according to researchers using new laser dating technology, which analyzes calcium carbonate crystals on top of the painting. This makes the image the oldest evidence of narrative storytelling in art. “There is something happening between these figures. A story is being told,” said Griffith University archeologist Adam Brumm, one of the study leaders who published their findings in the journal Nature. Another cave painting in Sulawesi was re-dated using the new technology to be at least 48,000 years old, all of which predate the earliest, undisputed European cave paintings. “This discovery of very old cave art in Indonesia drives home the point that Europe was not the birthplace of cave art, as had long been assumed,” said Brumm.

VIRGIN MARY VANDALISM. A new, wooden statue depicting Mary giving birth to Jesus, conceived by Esther Strauss and carved by Theresa Limberger, was beheaded with a saw on July 1, in Linz’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, not long after it was installed. Police have begun an investigation and are looking into an apparent letter of confession posted on the platform Telegram, signed “Catholic Resistance,” reports the dpa and the German Press Agency. The controversial statue was intended to encourage discussion, as part of a project about female roles and gender equality, according to the National Catholic Reporter. The vandalized art piece showing a Mary in labor, her full belly and spread legs exposed, will remain on display until mid-July, though it will now be kept in the dark and placed behind a glass door. “You shouldn’t see the image of the destroyed sculpture,” a spokesperson told dpa, adding no photos were published of the beheaded statue. “This violence is an expression of the fact that there are still people who question women’s rights to their own bodies. We must take a firm stand against this, said the Vienna-based Strauss in a statement.

THE DIGEST

England vs Switzerland isn’t the only big English sporting event happening this weekend: it’s also the British Formula 1 Grand Prix!

P1 with Matt and Tommy is the world’s biggest F1 podcast and another brilliant show on the Stak network. So, ahead of the race this weekend, we thought it’d be the perfect time to introduce the lads to those of you who might not already listen. So here’s their preview of the British Grand Prix and a taster of what you can expect from P1 across the entire F1 season. Whether you’re a diehard F1 nut or have only seen a few episodes of Drive to Survive, don’t worry - Matt and Tommy have got all you need to know about a sport just as chaotic as football.

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We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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No sooner had Tokyo Gendai thrown open the doors to the VIP preview of its second edition on Thursday than ARTnews Top 200 Collector Takeo Obayashi could be seen admiring a striking Robert Longo drawing of a tiger at the booth of Pace Gallery, and collecting couple Shunji and Asako Oketa were wandering through the booth of Blum. They weren’t the only machers on hand. Also making the rounds were the likes of Yoshiko Mori, chairperson of the Mori Art Museum; Jenny Wang, head of the Fosun Foundation; Simian Wang, founder of the Simian Foundation; and many others. The fair, in other words, opened on a high note. The extent to which that will translate into sales is best measured in ARTnews’s report tomorrow, as the fair continues through Sunday. In the meantime, here is a roundup of some particularly compelling booths.

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in Breakfast With ARTnews, our daily newsletter about the art world. Sign up here to receive it every weekday.

The flight to Japan from art world centers like New York, London, and Paris isn’t exactly short. Those that do make the trip this year, however, won’t be disappointed with the art offerings, which span modern to contemporary. This week, during the Tokyo Gendai fair, the shows to see in the city are dominated by strong sculpture.

First up on the itinerary: the Artizon Museum’s exhibition of Constantin Brancusi, the first proper survey of the Romanian-born sculptor’s work in Japan.

Brancusi’s The Kiss has it all: it’s cute, it’s romantic, it’s profoundly Instagrammable. Made at the turn of the twentieth century, it also happens to mark the starting line of modern sculpture: from The Kiss’s economy of means, the rest was a sprint, from Picasso to Moore to Giacometti all the way up through Eva Hesse and Rachel Whiteread. So it’s no surprise that the Kiss is situated front and center at the Artizon show.

The exhibition neatly charts Brancusi’s wiggling free of Rodin’s influence and taking flight: the show culminates in a section dedicated to the form of the bird, represented by the rightly famous Bird in Space, an elegant skyward swipe of bronze. There are also photographs, and a section dedicated to recreating Brancusi’s Montparnasse studio. Purists will gripe about the large number of posthumous casts but, for a lay audience, the show serves as a decent dose of beauty and a fine introduction to a titan of modern sculpture.

They say history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes—and 2024 is, no matter how inconvenient for an embattled Joe Biden, resonating deeply with 1968. From anti-war protests on campuses to the Democratic National Convention being hosted in Chicago, these two distinct years, though decades apart, are drawing eerie comparisons, as I explain in my new video:

Biden’s disastrous debate performance last Thursday sparked calls for him to drop his reelection bid. While it’s uncertain if Biden will follow Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1968 footsteps and step aside, the fallout has added another dimension to the historical parallels. Team Biden insists the 81-year-old is in it until November. But on Tuesday, Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas became the first elected Democrat to call for Biden to reconsider, doing so from “the heart of a district once represented by Lyndon Johnson.” Others Democrats have since joined him.

On paper, Johnson and Biden share few similarities. Biden sailed through a relatively uncontested primary, while Johnson faced significant challenges from Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy. Biden, like Johnson, indeed faces a persistent anti-war movement. But 1968 campus protest organizer Juan Gonzalez assured me recently that the two eras, in this regard, are not the same: “I think people need to understand that there were significant differences,” he said. While the US is funding and supporting Israel’s war on Gaza, “back in 1968, the US was directly participating in the Vietnam War, leading to the deaths of over two million Vietnamese.”