For much of the past decade, the art market behaved as though history had stopped. Collectors and speculators chased the wet paint with missionary zeal, convinced that the next studio visit might yield a future masterpiece (or a tidy return when flipped onto the secondary market). Auction houses obliged, turning evening sales into pageants for artists who barely had time to form a reputation.

That fever appears to have broken, according to the latest Art Basel & UBS Art Market Report, written by economist Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics. While the global art market returned to modest growth last year, reaching an estimated $59.6 billion in sales—a 4 percent increase after two years of decline—auction sales of postwar and contemporary art have continued to fall. Those categories generated $4.5 billion last year, compared with $8.5 billion in 2021.

Despite four consecutive years of decline, postwar and contemporary art remains the largest segment of the auction market, underscoring how central it has become to the trade over the past two decades.

For a decade, contemporary art seemed to eclipse everything else. Now collectors appear to be rediscovering the appeal of artists whose reputations were settled long ago. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works rose 47 percent at auction last year, while Old Masters climbed 30 percent, reversing several years of decline.

During the pandemic boom, recently created works flooded the auction market. Works made within the previous 20 years accounted for 34 percent of postwar and contemporary auction sales by value in 2021, up sharply from previous years. By 2025, that share had fallen to 19 percent. The number of works created in the previous two decades that sold for more than $10 million fell from twenty-one in 2021 to just three in 2025.

A federal lawsuit alleges that a government initiative created by the Trump administration relied on the generative AI software ChatGPT to help identify grants tied to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The lawsuit alleges that a grant awarded to the High Point Museum in North Carolina to replace its HVAC system was flagged as related to DEI and subsequently canceled.

According to a report by Fox 8 News, High Point received s $349,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to replace outdated climate-control equipment used to preserve its collections. The funding was later canceled after staff working for the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, reviewed grant proposals with the help of the AI chatbot.

The revelation surfaced in a lawsuit brought by the American Council of Learned Societies and the American Historical Association, which are challenging a broader wave of humanities grant cancellations. The groups argue that the cuts were unlawful and violated the First Amendment.

DOGE was established by executive order in January 2025 and was tasked with reviewing federal spending across government agencies, including humanities grants administered by the NEH.

In a deposition included in the lawsuit, DOGE staffer Justin Fox said employees used ChatGPT to analyze grant descriptions and determine whether they related to DEI programs. Staff recorded the chatbot’s responses, along with its explanations, in a spreadsheet that helped guide decisions about which grants to cancel.

The International African American Museum (IAAM) in Charleston, South Carolina, has officially acquired a set of 15 daguerreotypes, dating to 1850, that scholars believe to be the earliest known photographs taken of enslaved Americans.

The seven enslaved people photographed for the series are identified as Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack, Jem, and Renty; Renty and Delia were father and daughter, respectively, as were Jack and Drana. “The 1850 Daguerreotypes,” as the IAAM is now calling the collection, were taken by J. T. Zealy in South Carolina, where the sitters had been enslaved, more than 175 years ago, and just over a decade after the invention of the daguerreotype. The images show each subject from the waist up, shirtless, and from frontal and profile view.

They were commissioned by Louis Agassiz, a 19th-century natural historian and a professor at Harvard University, which owned the photographs until recently, to advance racist ideology about Black people. The images were rediscovered in Harvard’s holdings in 1976.

The IAAM hosted a reception to welcome the photographs to their new home on Wednesday, according to a report in the New York Times. In a release, the IAAM characterized its planned care for the photographs that would reframe them “from instruments of pseudoscience into portraits honoring the lives” of the seven enslaved people.

In a statement, IAAM president and CEO Tonya M. Matthew said, “IAAM is honored to take over stewardship of these images because preserving the stories of African American history and reckoning with the stories of the founding of our nation is not only our mission, but a call to action for all of us. The full interpretation of these images will be transformational, moving the narrative from one of dehumanizing intent to one of the intersections of trauma, resilience, self-determination, and authentic, empathetic memory.” 

Henry Darger left behind one of the strangest imaginative monuments of the twentieth century: a vast private cosmos teeming with angelic child armies, sadistic empires, blizzards, tornadoes, serpentine sky-beasts, and wars fought over the fate of enslaved children. After his death, the whole sprawling kingdom surfaced at once, like an inheritance no one knew to claim. Critics, encountering the hoard, have naturally reached for labels. “Outsider artist” is the one that tends to get slapped on him; others follow close behind—visionary, naïf, crank, madman. Each explains something and misses more. Henry Darger repels labels the way condensation repels paper on a soda bottle: the harder you press, the quicker it lifts.

The perennial temptation is to treat him as a puzzle to be solved. How did a menial worker in Chicago, working in near-total obscurity, produce a 15,145-page epic and hundreds of sweeping, panoramic paintings? What species of solitude allowed him to incubate armies of child rebels? Biography, as a form, tends to flail here. It inventories facts—born 1892, a childhood punctured by institutionalization, decades cleaning hospital floors—but sheds little light on the compulsive, burrowing labor that produced the work.

Yet it is biographical facts that structure Bughouse, a new play about the artist running at Vineyard Theater in New York through April 5. John Kelly stars as Darger in this one-man play, portraying him as a puttering, vaporous presence. His voice rarely rises above a murmur as he reels off facts about his life, sourced from his 5,000-page autobiography (The History of My Life). His early years were marked by rupture: his mother died shortly after he was born, in 1892; his father became ill and, increasingly unable to manage him, placed him in Catholic institutions, including an asylum for “feeble-minded” children in Illinois.

At the asylum, Darger was subjected to a regime of discipline that he chafed against. He ran away several times, once legging it for miles along rail lines in a stubborn bid for self-determination, before eventually making his way to Chicago, where he would spend the remainder of his life isolated in rented rooms. Unfortunately, in playwright Beth Henley’s rendition, Darger is confined to a room that feels smaller than his imagination ever did.

The stage is an obstacle course of towering stacks of books and newspapers, the residue of a lifetime’s compulsive accumulation. The walls are an exhausted shade of purple. A pride of miniature religious icons stands stiffly on the mantel above a defunct fireplace, as if awaiting orders. Two grimy windows look out onto a gray nowhere. The building appears one code violation away from being condemned.

When the Victoria and Albert Museum’s newest branch, known as the V&A East, opens in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London next month, visitors will be greeted by a monumental sculpture by the London-based artist Thomas J Price. A Place Beyond, an 18-foot-tall bronze figure, stands to the left of the museum entrance and is Price’s tallest sculpture to date.

Like many of Price’s most well-known pieces, A Place Beyond depicts a young Black person in casual, contemporary dress. She is holding a cell phone—also a recurring attribute in Price’s work—and calmly looking out into the distance, her face coolly vacant, her pose almost regal. According to a statement from the museum, the woman in Price’s sculpture was “created from an amalgamation of images, 3D scans and observations,” rather than depicting a specific individual.

“This commission is especially meaningful to me as I was taken to the V&A as a child with my mother and it has shaped much of my critique of museum collections,” Price said in the statement. “I’m excited to be part of the next chapter in the V&A’s evolution in east London.”

Price’s work has been exhibited in museums and outdoor public places around the world, from Sydney, Australia, to Florence, Italy, to Reno, Nevada. In the summer of 2025, his 12-foot-tall sculpture Grounded in the Stars, installed in New York’s Times Square for six weeks, was the subject of viral social media posts, many of which were overtly racist.  

The online and in-person responses, wrote ARTnews’s Alex Greenberger at the time, “suggest that Grounded in the Stars has struck a nerve with a certain slice of the public that would rather not see monuments such as this one. That is a deeply unnerving and deeply flawed position.”

On Wednesday, Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) and Chuck Schumer (D-New York) sent an open letter to Ed Forst, administrator of the General Services Administration questioning the organization’s management of its Fine Arts Program and the Fine Arts Collection.

The GSA cares for over 26,000 artworks and artifacts owned by the US government, including murals, paintings, sculptures, and environmental artworks by artists from Mark Rothko and Louise Nevelson to Jacob Lawrence and Philip Guston.

In the letter, the senators note that the GSA has posted 46 buildings that have been identified for “accelerated disposal,” a process that expedites the sale of the properties, which are home to numerous artworks.

Of particular concern to the senators is the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which contain several murals celebrating the Social Security Act of 1935, a landmark piece of New Deal legislation. Among them is a suite of murals by Ben Shahn titled The Meaning of Social Security, with three panels depicting the ills of society before the New Deal, followed by several panels illustrating an idealized New Deal vision. The building also contains a large mural by Guston, Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family, as well as two by Seymour Fogel, Wealth of the Nation and The Security of the People.

As ARTnews reported in December, the building—a D.C. landmark on both the National Register of Historic Places and the D.C. Inventory of Historic Sites—was put up for sale by the Trump administration as part of cost-cutting measures. The administration has also considered demolishing the building and selling the land.

Despite global unrest and a continually worsening conflict in the Middle East, dealers surveyed by ARTnews in their stands at the TEFAF art fair in Maastricht, when willing to discuss sales, were more than pleased—even if, as one dealer observed, collectors from the Middle East may have been unable to travel. (Another quipped, “There’s email. There’s WhatsApp.”) The show must go on.

“The caliber of collectors is extraordinary,” said first-time exhibitor Alison Jacques, of London, who noted a greater international attendance than she expected. By the end of day one on Thursday, the dealer had placed works by Eileen Agar and Sheila Hicks. Also on offer are pieces by Pacita Abad, Ana Mendieta, and Dorothea Tanning, among others.

Jörn Günther, a rare books dealer from Basel who has exhibited at TEFAF for thirty years, said this year was his best.

The fair is marked by luxurious wide aisles, and expansive stands that are built out at an incredibly ambitious level by the dealers, this year numbering 277 from 24 countries. In hopes of keeping acquistive visitors at the convention center, the fair offers a one-star Michelin seafood restaurant, an Italian bar, a pastry bar, a sushi bar, a raw bar, an oyster bar, and, of course, roving oyster shuckers with an array of dressings.

It’s true that there are enormous items on offer, such as a grand 18th-century Neapolitan crèche at Porcini of Naples with dozens of richly attired miniature figures, and a gigantic 18th-century sleigh at Rudigier Fine Art of London. But dollar for dollar, inch for inch, it’s possible that some of the most valuable and remarkable works at the current edition are the smallest.

At TEFAF Maastricht, the Van Gogh Museum acquired Virginie Demont-Breton’s L’homme est en mer, a painting from 1887–88 that now counts as only the third painting by a woman in the institution’s collection, according to Artnet News.

As reported by senior editor Kate Brown, the painting of a woman looking longingly while holding an infant—presumably pining for the titular man at sea—was purchased by the Amsterdam museum with public funds dedicated to acquisitions for a price between €500,000 and €1 million ($543,000 and $1.1 million). The sale on TEFAF’s opening day was brokered by Gallery 19C from Dallas-Forth Worth, where the work had been in a private collection for 20 years.

“Van Gogh had seen Demont-Breton’s painting, which was made in between 1887 and 1889, reproduced in black and white in a magazine about French salon paintings and he was so inspired by it that he copied it,” according to Artnet. “It is one of the only paintings by a woman artist that he is known to have emulated.”

About the work, Lisa Smit, the Van Gogh Museum’s curator of paintings, said, “Van Gogh was a big fan of the work of Demont-Breton’s father, Jules Breton. He would have seen a lot of sentiment in this work. It is heartfelt, it is truthful. You can immediately feel for the figure. It is a depiction of motherhood that is not idyllic.”

Demont-Breton’s L’homme est en mer previously sold at Christie’s in 2000 for a price of $99,500. In an essay accompanying the lot at the time, Christie’s wrote, “While her subject matter ranged from religious compositions, genre scenes and landscapes, she had a particular penchant for her heartfelt depictions of family life.”

“Turner and Constable,” a show at London’s Tate Britain museum that pairs works by J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, has become a smash hit, with some 185,000 people attending since its opening in November. Now, it turns out one of those visitors was none other than King Charles himself.

He visited the show on Tuesday, the Tate announced Friday, confirming reports in the British media that he’d been toured around “Turner and Constable” by Amy Concannon, a senior curator of historical British art with the museum network.

According to the Independent, the King let out a “wow” before a painting by Turner, whose seascapes and landscapes move perilously close to abstraction—an avant-garde gesture during the early and mid-19th century, when his career reached its zenith. The work that awed him was The Rising Squall, Hot Wells (1792), which Turner produced when he was still a teenager. It is one of nearly 200 pieces in the Tate show.

The painting was thought to be lost before it arrived at auction last year at Sotheby’s, where it sold for £1.9 million following a failed bid to acquire it by the Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Before the auction, the painting resided in Tasmania.

“How many others of these have they got lurking in Australia or something?” King Charles reportedly asked. A jovial Concannon laughed in response, the Independent said.