The Week in Art

Apr 17 2025 337 ep. 56 mins 2.2k
The Week in Art Podcast artwork

From breaking news and insider insights to exhibitions and events around the world, the team at The Art Newspaper picks apart the art world's big stories with the help of special guests. An award-winning podcast hosted by Ben Luke. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

  Arts
RSS feed Share
Copy RSS


Subscribe on Podcast Addict


Christine Sun Kim and Thomas Mader, teamLab in Abu Dhabi, Vermeer’s final painting?

Apr 17 2025 52 mins  
ollowing on from opening her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which continues until August, the US-born, Berlin-based artist Christine Sun Kim this week opened a show in London in collaboration with Thomas Mader. The exhibition, 1880 THAT, uses a notorious historic conference in Milan in 1880, which effectively outlawed sign language in Deaf education, as a springb

Trump’s assault on museums and libraries, the art market’s 12% fall, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett

Apr 10 2025 58 mins  
In two-and-a-half months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a series of executive orders and other initiatives have attempted systematically to eliminate and defund some of the federal agencies responsible for the distribution of federal money to museums, libraries and other organisations. The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, joins Ben L

Museum visitor figures—highs and lows, William Morris mania, Marguerite Matisse, the unsung hero of her father’s art

Apr 03 2025 60 mins  
he Art Newspaper’s annual report on museum visitor figures is out and shows that the slow build-back after the Covid-19 closures is over, and museums are back at what we might consider their “natural level”. Host Ben Luke talks to the co-editor of our report, Lee Cheshire, about what that means, and who were last year’s big winners and losers. A new exhibition at the museum

The Frick: Annabelle Selldorf interview and our review. Plus, Taiso Yoshitoshi

Mar 27 2025 60 mins  
After a five-year closure, the Frick Collection in New York will reopen to the public on 17 April and this week opened its doors to the press. The Gilded Age mansion, created on Fifth Avenue for the industrialist Henry Clay Frick, has been restored and enhanced by Selldorf Architects, with the executive architect Beyer Blinder Belle. It is the biggest upgrade to the building since

Jack Whitten at MoMA, New York, Paris Noir at the Pompidou, Arpita Singh at the Serpentine

Mar 20 2025 69 mins  
The largest ever exhibition of the work of Jack Whitten opens this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. Ben Luke speaks to Michelle Kuo, the curator of the show, about the political and experimental commitment that drove Whitten’s remarkable body of work. In Paris, one of the final exhibitions to open at the Centre Pompidou before it closes for five years was unv

The big art slowdown, Dutch funding crisis, Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow

Mar 13 2025 54 mins  
After a challenging year in which international galleries, auction houses and museums have been forced to scale back their operations and make redundancies on an alarming scale, a slower, more considered approach to business seems to be emerging. So are we into an era of longer, more in-depth exhibitions and bespoke events concerned more with authentic connection than flashy specta

Censorship and Australia’s Venice Biennale pavilion, a controversial AI auction, and Elizabeth Catlett in Washington

Mar 06 2025 68 mins  
It seems absurd that more than a year ahead of the next Venice Biennale, one of the major pavilions in the Giardini might be empty for next year’s event. But that is the dilemma facing Creative Australia, which is responsible for that country’s Biennale presentation. Last month, it announced the team comprising the Lebanese-born Sydney-based artist Khaled Sabsabi and the curato

Leigh Bowery at Tate Modern, Ukraine and art—three years on, Max Beckmann and the Gothic Modern

Feb 27 2025 70 mins  
Tate Modern this week opened a vast exhibition exploring the life and work of the maverick Australian-born performance artist, fashion designer and self-styled “club monster”, Leigh Bowery, as well as the variety of cultural figures in his orbit in London. It coincides with other related London shows: one analysing the fashion work of Bowery and his collaborators and peers at t

Gee’s Bend quiltmakers, “Degenerate” Art in Paris, and Mel Bochner remembered

Feb 20 2025 63 mins  
Shows opening in Washington and Dublin this month explore quiltmaking by African American women. Ben Luke talks to Raina Lampkins-Fielder, chief curator for the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, and the organiser of the exhibition Kith & Kin: The Quilts of Gee’s Bend at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), about the history of quiltmaking in this small part of Alabama, and the g

Anselm Kiefer, Hoor al Qasimi on Sharjah, a Picasso Blue Period mystery

Feb 13 2025 74 mins  
Next month, the German artist Anselm Kiefer will be 80, and the first of a number of shows internationally to mark this landmark moment opened this week at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK. It focuses on his early works, and Ben Luke visits Oxford to discuss this pivotal moment in his career with Lena Fritsch, the curator of the exhibition. The latest edition of the biennial in the