ARTnews

Some 200 million visitors streamed through the 100 top-attended museums around the world in 2025, according to the latest attendance ranking by the Art Newspaper. That figure is still down a bit from the 230 million who punched their tickets in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic shut museums down for months, indicating that overall museums haven’t quite regained their footing even five years later. Many new museums in the Middle East and Asia, which are relatively new to museum-building, attracted tons of visitors, according to TAN, but so did museums in places like New York and London, already well known for their rich institutional landscape. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eAtGfPdT

“I thought of Rose Salane’s ‘60 Detected Rings’ (1991–2021) when asked to inaugurate a column called Revelations because the word is so close to ‘revaluations,’ ” Ben Lerner said, when we asked him to single out one artwork that impacted him. ⁠ ⁠ “Salane achieves something I aspire to in writing: a reframing, a recontextualization, that reminds us that our world might be weighed differently. Great works of art melt value so that it can be reformed. ”⁠ ⁠ Read the beloved novelist on Salane’s “60 Detected Rings”: https://lnkd.in/ehtwV57J

The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair has announced the more than 20 galleries that will participate in its upcoming edition, scheduled to run May 13–17 at the Starrett-Lehigh Building in Chelsea. The fair takes place in tandem with Frieze New York at the Shed, and another fair, NADA New York, will also be on view at the Starrett-Lehigh. 1-54 returns to the iconic Chelsea building after last hosting its 2024 iteration there. The fair will feature a mix of returning galleries, like 193 Gallery, Galerie Myrtis, and Kates-Ferri Projects, alongside first-time participants, like Adegbola Gallery (of Lagos), Aura (São Paolo), The Current: Baha Mar Gallery & Art Center (Nassau), and Picture Theory Projects (New York). Read more: https://lnkd.in/eKBGZYK4

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we look back on the history of American art. Rather than presenting a single master narrative about this country of many cultures and contradictions, we invited esteemed contributors to write the history of American art through some of the terms that defined it, arranged from A to Z. C, Adrian Piper writes, stands for “Conceptual Art.” “Conceptual art is distinguished by the artist’s central preoccupation with the concepts and ideas that inspire and inform the work, rather than with the exploration of its materials,” Piper writes. “Conceptual art in this view valorizes clarity and simplicity of form as a conduit for depth and power of conceptual content.” Read more about our American art alphabet: https://lnkd.in/dSDA3FGn

The Basque regional government has formally asked Spain’s Ministry of Culture to authorize a temporary loan of Pablo Picasso‘s "Guernica" to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, according to Ara, a Catalan-language newspaper. If the move is approved, it would mark the first time the painting has traveled since it was installed at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía in 1992.⁠ ⁠ The proposed transfer would take place between October 2026 and June 2027, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica, the Basque city whose destruction by Nazi and Italian Fascist air forces on April 26, 1937, inspired Picasso to paint the antiwar canvas.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://lnkd.in/eRuQ2xC4

For the second consecutive year, Christie’s, Phillips, and Sotheby’s aligned their marquee spring auctions in Asia with the week of Art Basel Hong Kong. The strategy clearly worked, with the three houses generating a combined $164.9 million across their modern and contemporary art evening sales. That result marked a significant rebound from last autumn’s $136.3 million — the lowest total in eight years — and also surpassed last spring’s comparable total of $139.9 million. Read more: https://lnkd.in/e4rg-VFy

A painting long thought to be a “workshop copy” of a cherished Rembrandt in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago has been attributed to Rembrandt himself by a scholar with significant credit to his claim. Gary Schwartz, who has written books on Rembrandt and Dutch painting and will deliver a talk on Monday at the National Gallery in London, said a canvas in a private collection in the UK is in fact a Rembrandt in the same way as Old Man with a Gold Chain (1631) at the Art Institute. Both of the works (the former on panel, as opposed to the canvas owned by collector Francis Newman) share the same title and were brought together for a display that opened late last year at the museum in Chicago. The canvas has been considered a replica copy “likely by one of the students in [Rembrandt’s] workshop for the competitive Amsterdam art market,” according to the Art Institute. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eBQRxrFg

The British filmmaker and artist Steve McQueen is this year’s winner of the Erasmus Prize, given annually by the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation, a Dutch cultural institution. The award comes with a 150,000 euro (about $172,000) cash prize plus “adornments”—in this case, a folded paper booklet printed with text in the 16th century Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus’s script. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eirmZEyz

As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we look back on the history of American art. Rather than presenting a single master narrative about this country of many cultures and contradictions, we invited esteemed contributors to write the history of American art through some of the terms that defined it, arranged from A to Z. B, Eva Díaz writes, stands for “Black Mountain College.” The college, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina, from 1933 to 1957, “endures in the small but exceptional canon of profoundly unconventional places in America, sites in the cultural imagination where radical artistic innovation and vanguard social communitarianism fostered alternative visions of what creative, progressive, democratic culture can be,” Díaz writes. Read more about our American art alphabet: https://lnkd.in/eYX6h4NY

In late 2023, following the 2019 blaze that nearly engulfed all of Notre-Dame, French president Emmanuel Macron announced a project to commission a new set of stained-glass windows by a living artist for six of the seven stained-glass windows in the chapels along the southern side of the nave, as a “contemporary gesture” to breathe new life into the centuries-old structure.⁠ ⁠ From eight finalists, Claire Tabouret’s six painted designs, which offer a figurative retelling of the Pentecost and will be translated into stained glass by master artisans at the Atelier Simon-Marq, were ultimately selected in late 2024. They will replace Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc’s windows, geometric and floral-patterned stained-glass grisailles, which were installed as part of his major restoration of Notre-Dame between 1844 and 1864.⁠ ⁠ But it's unclear if Tabouret’s windows, on view at the Grand Palais through Sunday, will make into the Notre-Dame as planned. These two sets of windows are at the center of a so-called “stained-glass quarrel,” as the French media regularly calls it, or the more poetic “windows of discord,” as Le Monde put it.⁠ ⁠ Read Devorah Lauter on the controversy—and the legal battle looming ahead: https://lnkd.in/e3xZadRb