Tag Archives: The Week In Art Podcast

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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February 3, 2023: As we approach the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, The Art Newspaper has published an investigation that raises serious concerns that works of art taken by Russian troops from a museum in Kherson, Ukraine, in November 2022 may not be repatriated once the fighting ends.

Our London correspondent Martin Bailey tells us about his story. Plus, the Sharjah Biennial opens next week, and is the final biennial curated by Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019, but set the blueprint for the show, entitled Thinking Historically in the Present. We talk to Nadine Khalil about the biennial and Sharjah’s place in the Middle Eastern art ecosystem.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere (1991) by the American photographer Ming Smith, a key piece in a new exhibition of Smith’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Oluremi Onabanjo, the curator of the show, tells us about the work.The Sharjah Biennial runs from 7 February to 11 June.Projects: Ming Smith, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 4 February-29 May. Ming Smith: Invisible Man, Somewhere, Everywhere, by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 48pp, $14.95/£17 (pb)

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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January 20, 2023: Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in Tokyo are the subject of a legal claim in the US relating to Nazi loot.

The Art Newspaper’s London correspondent and resident Van Gogh expert Martin Bailey tells us why Sunflowers (1888-89) is at the centre of the dispute, 35 years after it was sold for a record price at auction, and why the heirs of the German Jewish banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, who owned it until the 1930s, now value it at a staggering $250m.

Our editor-at-large Georgina Adam has just returned from Singapore, where the first Art SG art fair took place last week. How successful was this new event in the art market calendar, and what does it tell us about Singapore’s ambitions to become an art hub?

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Portraits in a Chinese Studio, a photographic work by the artist Grace Lau. In the project, which marks Chinese New Year, Lau is subverting the tradition of colonial 19th-century portrait studios in a shopping centre in Southampton on the south coast of the UK.Grace Lau: Portraits in a Chinese Studio, Marlands Shopping Centre, Southampton, UK, 21 January-12 February

Art, Exhibitions, Museums, Podcasts, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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January 13, 2023: In the first episode of the year, we look ahead at the next 12 months. Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor at The Art Newspaper, peers into her crystal ball and tries to predict the fortunes of the art market this year.

Then, Jane Morris, one of our editors-at-large, José da Silva, our exhibitions editor, and host Ben Luke select the museum projects, biennales and exhibitions that they are most looking forward to in 2023.Events discussed:

  • The Grand Egyptian Museum: no confirmed opening date.
  • \The National Portrait Gallery reopens on 22 June.
  • Factory International, Manchester, also opens in June.
  • Yayoi Kusama’s You Me and the Balloons opens there on 29 June, as does the Manchester International Festival.
  • The Sharjah Biennial: Thinking Historically in the Present opens on 7 February.
  • The Gwangju Biennial: Soft and Weak Like Water opens on 7 April.
  • Celebration Picasso 1973-2023
  • Vermeer opens at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, on 10 February.
Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Museums, Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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It’s our final podcast of 2022 and so, as ever, we’re looking back at the worlds of art and heritage over the past 12 months.

Ben Luke is joined by three members of The Art Newspaper team: Louisa Buck, contemporary art correspondent, Kabir Jhala, acting deputy art market editor, and Ben Sutton, editor in the Americas. Among much else, they discuss the effects of the war in Ukraine,

Just Stop Oil’s activism, unionisation in US museums, the restitution of African and Native American (and Greek) objects, and the NFT crash. They also look at the big art shows and, finally, choose a work of the year. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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December 8, 2022: The Parthenon Marbles; it has emerged that George Osborne, the former UK chancellor and now chair of the trustees of the British Museum, has been holding talks with the Greek government about the ancient sculptures.

So might this lead to a breakthrough in the long-running dispute over their ownership? Ben Luke speaks to Yannis Andritsopoulos, the reporter for the Greek newspaper Ta Nea who broke the story. In Afghanistan, it is more than a year since the Taliban reclaimed power—so what has become of the heritage projects and art community in the country, which is consumed by a devastating humanitarian crisis?

We hear from Sarvy Geranpayeh, who has regularly reported from Afghanistan for The Art Newspaper, about art and archeology under the Taliban. And this episode’s Work of the Week is a group of five murals by the German-born US artist Kiki Smith. The works are about to be unveiled at Grand Central Madison, the new Long Island Rail Road terminal below Grand Central on Madison Avenue, Manhattan. Smith tells us about the origin and development of her series of vast mosaics. 

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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As Art Basel returns to Florida for the 20th anniversary of its Miami Beach art fair, Aimee Dawson, the acting digital editor at The Art Newspaper, talks to Anny Shaw, the acting art market editor, about the sales, news and talking points at the event that has become most synonymous with art-world excess.

December 2, 2022: Meanwhile, after Arts Council England announced its funding allocation in November, arts organisations across the country, and especially in London, are reeling. Ben Luke talks to Jenni Lomax, the former director of the Camden Art Centre—the north London non-profit gallery whose funding has been cut by more than 30%. They discuss the effect of the cuts, and why the response from the visual arts community is relatively quiet compared to the uproar in the worlds of theatre and opera.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Oleksandr Bohomazov’s Sharpening the Saws (1927), a work from the National Art Museum of Ukraine in Kyiv. The painting is among a host of works moved from the war-torn country to the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid for the exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. Katia Denysova, the co-curator of the show, tells us about the picture, and the extraordinary journey it took from Kyiv to the Spanish capital.Art Basel in Miami Beach until 3 December.In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, Madrid, until 30 April 2023. 

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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Ben Luke talks to Hannah McGivern, a correspondent for The Art Newspaper who has just been to Qatar, about the vast number of public art projects that will accompany the FIFA Men’s World Cup that begins there on Sunday 20 November.

She also discusses the museums that Qatar plans to open by 2030. How does this explosion of cultural initiatives sit with Qatar’s record on human rights and treatment of low-paid migrant workers in the building of its cultural venues and World Cup stadia? It has been a heady fortnight of auctions in New York.

Ben speaks to Georgina Adam, an editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper, about the highs and lows, and whether we can expect even more sales of blockbuster collections in the coming years.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is an untitled painting by Luis Meque, an artist born in Mozambique who came to fame in the 1980s and early-1990s in Zimbabwe. Tandazani Dhlakama, the curator of the exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town, tells us about Meque’s painting and his brief and brilliant life.When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa, 20 November-3 September 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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This week: uproar over the National Gallery in London’s building plans—is it a sensitive makeover or like “an airport lounge”?

We talk to the director of the National Gallery, Gabriele Finaldi, about the gallery’s controversial plans for changes to its Sainsbury Wing, and to Rowan Moore, architecture critic at the Observer, about his views on the designs by the architect Annabel Selldorf, and how they respond to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s original Post-Modern building.

Tokini Peterside-Schwebig, the director of Art X Lagos, tells us about the contemporary art scene in Nigeria’s most populous city, and how the fair is addressing the climate emergency, as devastating floods wreak havoc in West Africa. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Marc Chagall’s The Falling Angel (1923/1933/1947), the centrepiece of a new exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany.Art X Lagos, Federal Palace, Lagos, Nigeria, 5-6 NovemberChagall: World in Turmoil, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany, until 19 February 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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This week: we talk to Emma Brown of Just Stop Oil about why the group targeted Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers in the National Gallery, London, for its climate emergency protest.

Stacy Boldrick, assistant professor of museum studies at the University of Leicester, discusses the climate protests in the context of the long history of iconoclasm and attacks on works of art. The first version of Paris+, Art Basel’s fair in the French capital, opened this week, and we ask Melanie Gerlis, a columnist for the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper, how it compares to Paris’s previous fair, Fiac, and to the Frieze fairs in London last week.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is Frank Bowling’s Suncrush (1976), which features in an exhibition of the Guyana-born artist’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Reto Thüring, the curator of the show, tells us about the painting and Bowling’s 10-year stay in America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Links:juststopoil.orgStacy Boldrick, Iconoclasm and the Museum, Routledge, 212pp, £27.99, $35.96 (pb)Paris+, until 23 October.Melanie Gerlis, The Art Fair Story: a Rollercoaster Ride, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99, $34.99 (hb)Frank Bowling’s Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 22 October-9 April 2023; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 13 May-10 September next year. Related shows: Equals 6: A Sum Effect of Frank Bowling’s 5+1, University Hall Gallery, UMass Boston, 14 November-18 February 2023; Revisiting 5+1, Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, Staller Center for the Arts, Stony Brook University, 10 November-23 February 2023.

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Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

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This week: Georgina Adam joins Ben Luke to discuss the intriguing story of the bankrupt entrepreneur and art collector, the museum scholar and a host of Old Master paintings given new attributions.

We talk to Suzanne Pagé, the curator of Monet-Mitchell, an exhibition bringing together the Impressionist Claude Monet and the post-war American abstract painter Joan Mitchell, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is a 1583 painting of Elizabeth I of England, known as the Sieve Portrait, which is one of the highlights of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York’s exhibition The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England. The show’s curators, Elizabeth Cleland and Adam Eaker, tell us about this richly layered picture.

Monet-Mitchell, Joan Mitchell retrospective, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, until 27 February 2023. Joan Mitchell: Paintings, 1979-85, David Zwirner, New York, 3 November-17 December.The Tudors: Art and Majesty in Renaissance England, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 10 October-8 January 2023 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.