The lobby of the Whitney Museum in New York became the site of a protest by arts and culture workers on Friday (May 23) following the institution’s recent cancellation of a pro-Palestine performance.

The protest, which was announced on Instagram by the group Writers Against the War on Gaza, began around 8 p.m. during the Whitney’s “Free Friday Night” event, which offers a pay-what you-wish admission between 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. From the mezzanine level, protestors quietly unfurled a Palestinian flag and a banner reading “Creativity Does Not Have to Rely on Death.” On the ground floor, activists distributed brochures with text printed in the Whitney’s house font that demanded “the removal of board members tied to genocide, militarism and apartheid,” as well as an end to “institutional artwashing, censorship, surveillance and policing of artists.”

Museum security briefly barred entry to the museum and its galleries. Meanwhile, activists formed a circle in the lobby and called out Whitney leadership for its cancellation of No Aesthetics Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, a piece by artists Fadl Fakhouri, Noel Maghathe, and Fargo Tbakh, on May 12, two days before it was set to take place as part the programming for an exhibition organized by the Whitney’s Independent Study Program.

Since the cancellation of No Aesthetics, scrutiny has also been paid to the demotion of Gregg Bordowitz, an artist who formerly served as director of the ISP. According to Artnet News, Bordowitz was demoted in February, but it remains unclear why he was removed to director-at-large. He has publicly spoken out against the cancellation of the performance, calling it an “intrusion” by the Whitney.

The performance was described by those involved as an invitation to mourn the roughly 50,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, and those who have suffered over the decades of Israeli occupation in Gaza and the West Bank. During the hour and half-long duration of No Aesthetics, performers were to interpret “scores” written by Natalie Diaz, Christina Sharpe, and Brandon Shimoda that conveyed the themes of grief, endurance, and defiance.

A recent Sotheby’s sale of 55 Old Masters works, collected over decades by Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III, yielded just $64.7 million, far below the initial estimate of $80 million to $120 million.

The single-owner sale on May 21 featured works spanning the 16th to early 19th centuries, and included works produced across Europe. Two of the sale’s 43 lots were withdrawn ahead of the auction, while 17 did not sell once the event took place. That yielded a sad sell-through rate of 58.5 percent; the number is even lower with the withdrawals taken into account. All the works had house guarantees, and 16 lots had third-party guarantees.

Fourteen additional works from the Saunders collection came to auction in a day sale on May 22. All of the lots had guarantees from Sotheby’s, but five of them did not sell, making for a sell-through rate of 58.3 percent.

Experts said the low sell-through rate for the evening sale was due to a combination of overly high estimates, changing tastes among buyers of Old Master works, the auction’s timing, and the large number of guarantees.

“Buyers don’t respond well to guarantees, whether they’re in-house or third-party guarantees,” art dealer Nicholas Hall, the former head of Christie’s Old Masters department, told ARTnews. “I think buyers prefer to make up their own mind as to how they value a picture. A guarantee can actually be, in some ways, a deterrent to potential buyers.”

Sebastiao Salgado, a photographer whose memorable images of worker exploitation, environmental destruction, and human rights abuses gained him widespread acclaim, has died at 81.

His death was announced on Friday by Instituto Terra, the organization he cofounded with his wife Lélia Wanick Salgado. The New York Times reported that he had health issues since contracting malaria in the 1990s.

Salgado was considered one of the most beloved photographers working today. His lush black-and-white pictures were taken in seemingly every corner of the world, from the Sahel desert to the Amazonian rainforest to the farthest reaches of the Arctic. In bringing his camera to places many hear about but rarely see, Salgado provided the world with irrefutable glimpses of all the horrors man had unleashed upon the earth.

He worked within a lengthy tradition of documentary photography, using his images to tell the truth about the sights he observed. But whereas many documentary photographers and photojournalists purport to retain objectivity, Salgado got close to his subjects, holding lengthy conversations with the people who passed before his lens and waiting for long periods to get the right shot.

“What sets Salgado’s images apart from this work is his engaged relation to his subject, a product of his life-long commitment to social justice,” wrote critic David Levi-Strauss in Artforum. “The emotional static that allows us to turn away from other photographs of starving people, for instance—their exploitativeness, their crudity, their sentimentality—is not there to protect us in the case of Salgado’s reportage.”

An art historian who chaired Louisville’s public art commission said he would leave his post amid plans to restore a statue of King Louis XVI graffitied by protestors in 2020 following the police killing of Breonna Taylor.

In an op-ed published in the Courier-Journal, Chris Reitz, a scholar who has published two books on painter Martin Kippenberger, accused the city of Louisville, Kentucky, of attempting to “erase all evidence” of those 2020 protests on their five-year anniversary. He raised concerns about the cost of restoring the sculpture, which he described as being “beyond repair,” and questioned the true motivation for paying the sum.

“There are legitimate reasons to care for this statue, but, from where I sit, they do not justify the high price tag of that care,” he wrote. “Indeed, it is hard to imagine that anyone would support this expense if the statue had been damaged by accident or act of God.”

Moreover, Reitz wrote, “I fear that the real aim of these funds to send a message that our city is hostile to anti-police protests and that we prefer to pretend Ms. Taylor’s killing never happened than face the fact that not enough has changed to prevent such tragedies in the future.”

The statue of Louisville’s namesake was damaged on May 28, 2020, the same day that the city released the 911 calls from Taylor’s boyfriend and neighbors describing her killing. Taylor was fatally shot by on March 13, 2020, during a police raid on her apartment. Her family was awarded $12 million by the city of Louisville later that year; one of the officers who opened fire during that raid was found guilty of using excessive force in 2024.

Nikolai Chesnokov, chancellor of Moscow’s State Academy of Physical Education, died on Thursday at the site of a World War II–era monument in the Russian city of Volgograd, according to reports in the local media. He was 68.

Chesnokov had traveled to the city to attend a national sports event associated with the school and took part in an unofficial visit inside a 279-foot Soviet-era statue, which stands atop Mamayev Kurgan, the site of the Battle of Stalingrad. According to local outlets, he collapsed while while touring the statue’s interior.

After being pronounced dead at the scene, authorities launched a preliminary investigation, but no foul play is suspected. The cause of his death has not been disclosed.

The local channel Baza, citing sources within Russian law enforcement, claimed the visit inside the statue was not formally authorized. The internal structure is rarely accessed by the public and requires navigating ladders and confined maintenance corridors. ARTnews could not independently verify this.

Erected in 1967, The Motherland Calls remains Europe’s tallest statue and a symbol of Soviet resistance during World War II. It commemorates the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the bloodiest events in the country’s history, where over 1 million soldiers and civilians are estimated to have been killed.

A new museum dedicated to the life and art of Frida Kahlo will open in Mexico City’s historic Coyoacán district this September.

The museum will be set in the Casa Roja, a private residence purchased by Kahlo’s parents and passed down through the family over generations; it has been turned into an art institution by the Rockwell Group, a New York–based architecture firm. The house was gifted by the artist’s grandniece Mara Romeo Kahlo, whom the Kahlo family said was the artist’s closest living relative and heir.

“This is a dream long held by our family,” said Mara Romeo Kahlo in a statement. “Frida’s legacy belongs to the world, but it begins here—on this land, in these homes, and in the culture that shaped her. Museo Casa Kahlo will allow us to tell new stories, share family secrets, host new voices, and build a future that honors her spirit.”

The space stands adjacent to another important space central to Kahlo’s legacy: Casa Azul, the home where Frida Kahlo was born, raised, and lived with her painter husband Diego Rivera, as well as the site where she died.

Casa Azul was built by her father Guillermo and will continue to be part of the museum, which is managed by the Fideicomiso de los Museos Diego Rivera y Frida Kahlo trust and administered by the central bank of Mexico. It boasts a collection of artworks by Kahlo, Rivera, and other artists, along with the couple’s Mexican folk art, pre-Hispanic artifacts, photographs, memorabilia, and personal ephemera. 

Sotheby’s is selling what it’s calling “one of the most significant offerings of Napoleonic material ever to come to market” on June 25 in Paris.

Around 100 lots from the private collection of prominent French antiques collector Pierre-Jean Chalençon will hit the auction block. They span imperial furniture, Old Master paintings, and “deeply personal relics that reflect the inner world of [Napoleon Bonaparte],” Sotheby’s said in a statement.

“Echoing Napoleon’s words—‘What a novel my life!’—this collection reads like a vivid historical epic, unfolding across battlefields and boudoirs, ceremonial halls, and intimate chambers, alternating a chronicle of power, politics, and pageantry, to the vulnerabilities, ambitions and contradictions of the man behind the myth,” the house said.

The standout lots include one of Napoleon’s iconic bicorne hats. Unlike other French army officers who wore their bicornes front to back, the general famously sported en bataille (with the wings parallel to his shoulder). It has a high estimate of €800,000.

“This bicorne, crafted by Poupard, Napoleon’s official hatmaker, was personally gifted by the Emperor to General Mouton, one of his most trusted and courageous commanders,” the house said. “Following General Mouton’s decisive role in the Battle of Essling in May 1809, Napoleon reportedly praised him with the words: ‘My mouton is a lion.’”

A herald sword and stick used during Napoleon’s 1804 coronation ceremony at Notre-Dame de Paris with a high estimate of €400,000 will also be sold. So too will his personal gold and ebony seal (high estimate: €250,000). And for anyone who wants to get even more personal with the French general, Sotheby’s is also selling his worn stockings and portable camp bed.

“Napoleon has acquired rockstar status. As one of the most famous people in the world, his life and achievements continue to capture the imagination of so many, including leading film directors,” Marine de Cenival, head of sale, silver, at Sotheby’s Paris, told ARTnews.

We look to history to chart the future.

I came to this basic reaffirmation while reading J. Hoberman’s latest, addicting, grand cultural history, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers. But while in the throes of its semi-nostalgic, breathless invocation of the exciting art times of the 1960s, I couldn’t help but reflect on those first three titular words in the Now when this book greets us, on how then might become now.

Hoberman has gifted us scintillating analyses of various art epochs in his books on the culture of midnight movies, the paranoid 1960s, or the milquetoast movies of Reagan’s 1980s. The protagonist stalking his latest New York Now is Jonas Mekas, a mentor of Hoberman’s, the grand doyen of the city’s experimental cinema, and a self-styled poet who found beauty in what others had so unimaginatively dismissed as pornography (Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures), celebrity navel-gazing (Yoko Ono’s still-underrated films), or a waste of space and time (Andy Warhol’s Empire).

Mekas also co-founded New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where J. Hoberman will, in June, present a selection of shorts that he discusses in Everything Is Now. The book, indeed the era, is lined by films that offered up-to-date reflections of the period back to its people: Shirley Clarke’s portrait of the Black gay gigolo Jason; Jack Smith’s and Paul Morrissey’s mordant, hilarious send-ups of cheap-o B-Hollywood glamour; Mekas and Robert Frank’s diaristic films of their friends, shot as if the camera were at last a pencil. There were also the attention-frizzing “Happenings,” wild strobe and light shows, music chaotically blaring out the guitars of the Velvet Underground or Goldie and the Gingerbreads, partygoers doing the Frug as home movies of hot people were projected upon dancing bodies. The key thing here is proximity, the Manhattan jamming of hip-to-hip, café-to-dance-hall, making life in the city so chaotically synchronous. Amid the mishmash of the 1960s, ideas for alternative futures flowed.

Reading Everything Is Now is like facing a rolling avalanche that doesn’t care whether you live(d) or die(d): outrageous events in the downtown diaspora are strung one after the other, popcorn-string-style, with little commentary or judgement from the author. An uprising in Harlem coincides with a run of the Harlem-set Cool World (1963) by Shirley Clarke and produced by Frederick Wiseman; a week later, Warhol and Mekas sit in a building all night filming Empire, the ultimate American film: eight hours of the phallic Empire State Building shrouded in dark, then illumined by dawn.

Vincent van Gogh made a surprise appearance at the first address by Pope Leo XIV—in spirit, at least.

On Wednesday, the Chicago native’s speech pondered the Post-Impressionist’s 1888 painting, The Sower at Sunset, in which a sinking celestial body washes a field in golden light. “What strikes me,” he said, “is that, behind the sower, van Gogh painted the grain already ripe.”

Van Gogh returned to pastoral imagery throughout his career, capturing in quick, thick brushstrokes sunlight and shadow as it passed over two of his favorite subjects, millet and its farmers. He diligently chased the example set by Jean-François Millet, whose 1850 painting The Sower was greatly admired by van Gogh.

The sunset scene cited by the Pope was a turning point in van Gogh’s series because he moved away from the blue, violet, and gray hues he’d favored that year—the same one in which he famously cut off his own ear.

Pope Leo spoke of the painting’s namesake, “The Parable of the Sower,” a story told by Jesus to his followers in the New Testament. In that story, a farmer goes to sow his seed but encounters unyielding soils. Determined to grow his crops, he searches until discovering fertile land. The center of the story, the Pope said, was not the sower, but the sun, depicted by van Gogh in his work as a vast orb that occupies most of the horizon. The painting should be a reminder, he concluded, that “God drives history, even if He sometimes seems distant or hidden.”

The Mediterranean Alliance for Wetlands launched a campaign to protect the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve from an extension of the Guggenheim Museum, which has been trying to expand its Bilbao outpost.

“A planned extension of the Guggenheim Museum into the Special Area of Conservation of the Biosphere Reserve risks undermining biodiversity, water quality, and the integrity of conservation frameworks,” a social media post explains of the situation as “77 organisations warn UNESCO, Ramsar Secretariat and the Spanish government about the irreversible consequences of this expansion on biodiversity and water resources.”

Linked to the post is a petition that has been signed by some 2,400 people and counting as of the time of this post.

“It is a project that has been imposed from outside, that does not respond to the needs of the inhabitants of the area and is intended to benefit only a few people. Nor is it related to the conservation, social and economic objectives of the reserve, which would be significantly and irreversibly affected,” the petition argues.

The proposed museum is slated to span the town of Guernica and the Urdaibai reserve. It is expected to bring in at least 140,000 visitors annually.