#art-historical-evidence

#art-historical-evidence

KAWS has shown an uncanny ability to connect with a wide variety of people. Younger buyers clamor for his $50 Uniqlo T-shirts, while trophy-hunting collectors shell out millions for paintings.

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

Bregman claims, 'Today the whole of Europe risks turning into one big Venice, a beautiful open-air museum. A great destination for Chinese and American tourists. A place to admire what was once the centre of the world.' This statement encapsulates the concern that Europe is losing its cultural significance.

On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.

designed by the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA) and philosopher Giovanbattista Tusa (Visiting Faculty, Independent Study and Dissertation director) for curators, artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners seeking to engage with the living context of the Venice Biennale. Over four days, participants will move through a sequence of philosophical orientations - Rooting, Growing, Branching, and Cultivating Futures- that frame art as a mode of world-disclosure and situated intervention.

An analysis of two paintings in museums in the US and Italy by the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck has raised a profound question: what if neither were by Van Eyck? Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata, the name given to near-identical unsigned paintings hanging in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Royal Museums of Turin, represent two of the small number of surviving works by one of western art's greatest masters, revered for his naturalistic portraits and religious subjects.

I take no pleasure in saying "I told you so." Really, I don't. But I was hardly shocked by this week's news that Tina Rivers Ryan, who was named editor-in-chief of Artforum in 2024 after the dumpster fire that was the magazine's handling of an open letter in support of Gaza, was stepping down (Daniel Wenger and Rachel Wetzler will step in as co-editors, scrapping the editor-in-chief title altogether).

Once again, A.I. and human experts are butting heads over the authenticity of a world-famous painting. A Belgian art historian has refuted claims made by Swiss company Art Recognition that two paintings have been falsely attributed to the Northern Renaissance master Jan van Eyck. The paintings in question are versions of Saint Francis of Assisi Receiving the Stigmata (ca. 1428-32) belonging to the Royal Museums of Turin and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Recently, AI decided that a painting long thought to be a copy of Caravaggio's The Lute Player is actually by the master, while another version of the same subject, previously thought to be authentic, is not. Both conclusions were disputed by the former Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. A similar debate erupted in March 2025 when AI declared that portions of The Bath of Diana, also long believed to be a copy, could have been painted by Peter Paul Rubens.

In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

As 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, the auction house Christie's is hosting multiple auctions later this month as part of "Americana Week." Was I the only one who didn't know that Jimmy Carter was also a painter? The lots include a painting by that president, Gilbert Stuart's portrait of George Washington for James Madison, and Grant Wood's original study for "American Gothic" (1930).

Marah Al-Za'anin, an 18-year-old Palestinian artist, has transformed a tent in Gaza City's Al-Rimal neighborhood into a studio. Al-Za'anin can't have been more than 15 or 16 years old when the genocide began, but she continues to pursue her passion for art and uses her brother's phone as a light source while she paints and draws late into the night. (photo by Saeed Jaras/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

In the autumn of 2022, Max and I walked up the iconic steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to visit Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color. As the young son of a professional classicist, and a burgeoning one himself, my museum partner already knew about the ancient history of painted statues when we began to explore the galleries. Max's knowledge seemed the exception rather than the rule.