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The artist's solo exhibition 'Latitude/Longitude' opens in Le Havre next month. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal

The unionization wave across museums in the United States just scored major wins. Workers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), who announced their intent to unionize on October 29, won their union election on December 16 with 96% of the vote, while workers at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced their campaigns on November 4 and November 17, respectively. These workplaces are behemoths among museums, and unions have the power to materially change the realities of the thousands of people working at these institutions and to profoundly shift labor-management relations in the sector.  In a testimony to the power of their organizing work, 100% of union elections at private, nonprofit art museums in the US have been successful since the contemporary unionization wave began in 2019. You might think, then, that museum leadership would recognize the futility of forcing a union election in hopes that workers will vote “no.” Only 21% of campaigns to date, however, have received voluntary recognition; museum leadership has instead insisted on holding elections. Why would management do this, especially given that it guarantees negative pr

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday. While Li’s auction history remains short, the artist has become one of the more closely watched young painters over the last two years, even as much of the ultra-contemporary category has fizzled. After becoming the youngest artist on Pace’s roster in September 2024, they began to see their first results at auction, with works from 2021 and 2022 entering sales in Hong Kong and New York that fall. So far, Li’s work has appeared at auction 12 times so far, with eight of those appearances in Hong Kong. Nearly every appearance has exceeded expectations, often decisively. Pictures with conservative estimates—sometimes at levels aligned more with current caution around emerging artists—have doubled, and in some cases nearly tripled, their high estimates. The clearest signal that Li’s market is more than a blip came during Hong Kong’s annual fall sales. Both Sotheby’s and Phillips auctioned works that sold for more than double their high estimates. The work at Sotheby’s, There Was One Summer Returning Over and Over; There Was One

Both events had run for four years and were known for spotlighting digital art, digital galleries, and AI-generated works. At NFT Paris, for example, Superchief Gallery NFT teamed up with Claire Silver for an exhibition showcasing 39 AI-enabled artists, while artist Jeff Davis turned generative algorithms into physical stained-glass panels, crafted by Ateliers Loire de Chartres. But in recent years, the conferences had started to shift toward a broader tech and blockchain focus. “Art represented only a very small share of its ecosystem, likely less than 5 percent of NFT Paris’s sponsors,” John Karp, organizer of the Non Fungible Conference, told ARTnews. “From that perspective, its cancelation does not say much about the current state of NFT art itself.” Karp said that “recent signals show that NFT art remains present and relevant within more established art contexts,” noting that Zero 10, a digital art initiative that debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach last month, and the digital section at Paris Photo “have both demonstrated strong interest. If we look specifically at NFT-only and NFT art–focused events, the Non-Fungible Conference in Lisbon continues to grow and attract a committe

Longstanding questions about an episode surrounding a Robert Motherwell painting in Spain have finally been answered: the Franco regime really did try to censor the Abstract Expressionist’s work, proposing an altered title for one work with a name that explicitly referred to the Spanish Republic. The drama centered around Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 35 (1954–58), one of more than one 150 paintings in a series of abstractions that obliquely refer to the Spanish Civil War via black ovals and expanses of white. Related ArticlesMoMA Adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to Its Collection, Becoming Latest Major Museum to Acquire Onchain ArtARTnews Awards 2025 Historical Artist of the Year: Jack Whitten Now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the painting was one of several by Motherwell that appeared in “The New American Painting,” a legendary exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition’s tour, which was facilitated by the US government, has been credited with bringing Abstract Expressionism beyond the United States. (Many have claimed the show was American propaganda, with ArtCurious podcast host Jennifer Dasal writing that it was “a way to cement allia

“I feel like I’m being ragebaited by this book cover,” reads the name of a viral Reddit thread devoted to Mona Eye’s, which is about a girl who journeys through Paris’s museums with her grandfather, fearing that she may soon go blind.Related ArticlesLouvre Walkout Targets Proposed 'Mona Lisa' Gallery as Tensions Rise Over Museum's Planned RenovationFrench Culture Ministry Admits Stolen Louvre Jewels, Valued at $102 M., Are Not Insured As the thread’s writer, a Redditor named so_adorbs, correctly points out, The Girl with The Pearl Earring (1655) is not held in Paris. The painting, sometimes considered to be Johannes Vermeer‘s masterpiece, is in fact held at the Mauritshuis in the Hague, and has been since the early 20th century. The cover of Mona’s Eyes can be folded out to reveal a diagram enumerating every one of the 52 works seen by Mona and her grandfather. They are all exhibited around Paris, in museums ranging from the Centre Pompidou to the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. That cover doesn’t include The Girl with The Pearl Earring. The thread was posted to an art history subreddit with a following that is sizable—106,000 members—but modest by comparison

David Zwirner Gallery now represents New York–based artist Amy Sillman. Sillman, whose colorful paintings and drawings expertly straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. In a statement, David Zwiner praised Sillman’s practice as “endlessly intelligent” and said he admired her “remarkable ability to mine the entire history of [painting] in the process.” While Sillman has been showing her work internationally for decades, Zwirner specifically mentioned her recent show the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany. The two-part show (which debuted at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2024) featured Sillman’s paintings, drawings, prints, collages, large installations, and animations from the past decade, as well as a companion exhibition of works chosen by Sillman from the museum’s collection. “Using the museum’s walls as a support for her painterly gesamtkunstwerk, Amy managed to reframe the art of her colleagues with a deep sense of humanity and humor, creating an environment that was entirely novel and contemporary,” Zwirner said in the statement. Sillman’s work is in the collections of museums around the world, and she has won many prestigious awards, including those from the Pollock-Krasner F

The HeadlinesPAY TO PLAY. As The Art Newspaper points out, Dominican American artist Lucia Hierro’s ambitious recent commission, a 7.5-foot chair installation, illustrates a growing crisis in the US art world: artists are increasingly expected to raise the funds for institutional projects. Fabrication costs for her work far exceeded the commissioning museum’s budget, forcing her to secure funding through a fund for alumni of the Miami-based Fountainhead Arts’s residency program. But Fountainhead had only $125,000 available for its inaugural set of grants, not close to matching the need of 96 applicants who sought a collective $1.8 million. This new reality, according to TAN, reflects a broader structural breakdown: cuts to federal and state arts funding, underfunded DEI initiatives, and rising living costs have shifted the burden of financial risk onto artists. Institutions still want ambitious work, but production gaps are often borne by creators, disproportionately affecting those without gallery representation or generational wealth, including historically marginalized artists. Experts describe this as unprecedented: while artists have long subsidized institutions, the scale and

Taking the title “In Interludes and Transitions,” this edition of the Biennale will be curated by Nora Razian and Sabih Ahmed and feature more than 65 artists, alongside over 20 new commissions. Razian, deputy director and head of exhibitions and programs at Art Jameel, and Ahmed, projects director of the Ishara Art Foundation, have positioned the exhibition around the movement of histories, knowledge, and artistic practices across time and place. The artist list brings together historic figures, established mid-career artists, and emerging voices working across painting, installation, film, sound, architecture, and publishing. They include Pacita Abad, Etel Adnan, Samia Halaby, Raven Chacon, Dineo Seshee Bopape, Petrit Halilaj, Daniel Lind-Ramos, Guadalupe Maravilla, Nour Mobarak, Gala Porras-Kim, and Raqs Media Collective. The announcement comes amid a surge of cultural and market activity across the Middle East, where global art institutions are ramping up their presence. Art Basel will stage its first Middle East fair in Doha in February 2026, while Frieze has confirmed plans to launch Frieze Abu Dhabi in November 2026 by rebranding the long-running Abu Dhabi Art fair. The Gugg

As reported by the Art Newspaper, the protest in the Piazzale degli Uffizi was convened after some temporary workers at the museum—assigned to roles in security, reception, ticketing, the bookshop, and the coatroom—lost their jobs following a change in service providers at the institution last fall. That raised the ire of the trade union Sudd Cobas, which organized the protest and wrote on Instagram: “New Year’s resolution: continue working together with the workers of the Uffizi Galleries. What’s at stake is a different idea of work, of the city, of culture.”  The union also claimed that “the working conditions of permanent employees have also worsened following the last change of contract. It is necessary to completely overcome the model under which the contracts for Florentine museums have been managed for the last twenty years, a model that has produced an army of precarious workers and created a division between ‘first-class’ and ‘second-class’ workers who perform the same tasks with different contracts and salaries.” According to TAN, the change that led to the protest related to the Uffizi leaving Opera Laboratori Fiorentini, a company that managed ticketing, surveillance, a

When the fire reached Diana Thater’s home in Altadena last January, there was no time for triage. As she and her husband, the artist T. Kelly Mason, evacuated ahead of the flames, Mason grabbed what he could carry: a server and several hard drives. Thater took the cats. Everything else—decades of raw footage, master tapes, installation manuals, ephemera, paintings—was left behind in a temperature-controlled garage that burned to the ground. A year later, as Los Angeles marks the anniversary of the fires that devastated Altadena and the Pacific Palisades, Thater’s experience has come to stand for a broader, unresolved problem in contemporary art: how fragile media-based practices remain once they leave the studio, and how little infrastructure exists to support artists when catastrophe strikes. In the months after the fire, Thater began working with the Canyon Media Art Conservation Center (CMACC), a new nonprofit conservation laboratory opening in 2026 that is devoted exclusively to time-based media art. Led by Cass Fino-Radin, a longtime media art conservator and former staffer at the Museum of Modern Art and digital arts nonprofit Rhizome, CMACC is designed to address what might

In a historic military operation that flouted international law, the United States invaded the South American nation of Venezuela early Saturday morning, seizing the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife, Cilia Flores, who will face federal charges in New York. US President Donald Trump has openly said that his administration will “run” the country until a favored administration takes control, and said that the US will revive the crumbling petrochemical infrastructure in a nation that sits on some of the world’s largest oil reserves, even noting that he informed oil industry executives before the military strike, while not letting Congress know until the deed was done. A cultural capital for much of the 20th century, Caracas has several notable museums, and the country historically robustly funded the arts. That has not been the case since Chávez took control. Contemporary artists are seen as enemies by the state because they are thought to be under the influence of capitalism. Artists, art dealers, and arts administrators in Caracas and in cities from Miami to Madrid are closely watching the situation.  “Caracas was the capital of the cultural scene in Latin America. Not