A current pocket exhibition at the Neue Galerie New York hearkens back to a time when the relationship between artist and patron was more direct, intimate, and collaborative than it is now that global capitalism has transformed art into an asset to enhance the ever-dizzying fortunes of billionaires. Today, art is merely a commodity, and by extension, artists are too.
Art Galleries & Museums
The Louvre has weathered both revolutions and occupations over the centuries. Yet, the past few months have exposed a different kind of vulnerability in its leaking pipes, aging cameras, and institutional drift. The world’s most-visited museum is struggling to find steady footing in the wake of a series of mishaps and misdemeanors.
Tavares Strachan approaches art the way he thinks about music—fluid, improvisational, and open to interpretation. “Because I grew up listening to so much music, I just love the idea that it frees you up,” he said in an interview at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). “It doesn’t put this constraint on what you’re looking at. It empowers you in a way that visual art doesn’t.”
“The Smithsonian is not going to show somebody like me right now — specifically me,” Catherine Opie says in a recent Teams interview from Los Angeles, her voice matter-of-fact. “I’m not welcome right now in America.”
In late January, the Smithsonian announced that it would return a Shiva Nataraja statue and two other Chola Dynasty bronzes to India from the National Museum of Asian Art under a “shared stewardship” policy introduced in 2022.
The idea that 18th and 19th century landscape painting could be the setting for one of art history’s fiercest rivalries may seem unlikely, but Turner & Constable: Rivals and Originals, the current exhibition at Tate Britain, explores the competitive relationship between two giants of British landscape painting, J.M.W.
“The pain passes, but the beauty remains,” said Auguste Renoir (1841-1919). In Sacha Guitry’s 1916 silent film, there is a chilling and moving excerpt of Renoir painting. The artist’s hands are severely and painfully crippled by arthritis as he holds a long paint brush and a cigarette.
Thailand’s first major institution dedicated to international contemporary art, Dib Bangkok, made a grand debut with a sophisticated crowd of museum directors, curators, collectors, critics, and artists attending the opening celebration on December 21, 2025. Guided by Purat “Chang” Osathanugrah, a prominent Thai business leader and educator, the museum preserves the legacy of his late father, Petch Osathanugrah, whose distinguished art collection forms its core.
The first major exhibition since 1955 of over 140 works by the great Florentine master Fra Angelico (1395-1455) was featured during the past year at the Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi and the Museo di San Marco, a Medici-commissioned Dominican convent in Florence where Angelico lived and worked. The event has created an opportunity for a unique dialogue between institutions and the region.
As artificial intelligence continues to reshape everything from consumerism to creative expression, the world’s first museum dedicated entirely to the exhibition of AI-generated art is set to open this spring. DATALAND will offer visitors a multisensory journey through machine-created worlds in each of its five galleries at a Frank Gehry-designed complex in downtown Los Angeles.
