Noticias de interés

La visita guiada a la muestra «Hortus Hesperidum» —a cargo del comisario de la misma, Manolo Yanes—pondrá el broche final a este proyecto expositivo en el Museo de Naturaleza y Arqueología, MUNA.

In an age of visual overload, it’s easy to forget that endlessly available pictures of people, places, and things were once exceptionally rare. So scarce, in fact, that artistic representations were mostly reserved for religious ritual and sacred spaces, for specialized education, or for the very wealthy. Printmaking was arguably the first, and most lasting, innovation counter to such exclusivity. Holly EJ Black’s The Story of Printmaking: A Global History of Art (2026) traces a medium that has too often been under-appreciated. It’s been relegated as secondary to painting or sculpture, for example, even as prints have been essential to the dissemination of religious belief, intellectual history, and artistic understanding, and functioned as engines of propaganda and protest. As prints were the first mass-duplicated and widely distributed art objects, the history of printmaking is fundamentally a history of the democratization of art. And we could all use a little more democracy right now. Black’s book is an ideal introduction to the art form. While the lofty title is a lot to live up to, the author wisely leans on the “story” component to paint an engaging picture of time and place

Following the New York Knickerbockers’ historic win in the 2025–26 NBA season finals, Sotheby’s New York sold a jersey worn by point guard Jalen Brunson on Wednesday for just over $1 million. It was the Knicks’ first championship win in 53 years, and the jersey set a new record for any piece of Knicks memorabilia. The house’s expert, Brahm Wachter, had estimated it could make in excess of $1 million. A jersey worn during game one by Brunson’s teammate OG Anunoby fetched $256,000. Anunoby’s fame increased at a press conference after he made the game-winning shot in game four, when, asked how it felt, he deadpanned, “Uh, it feels cool. I mean, everyone’s pretty excited. I’m excited too.” A Karl-Anthony Towns jersey fetched the same price. While Sotheby’s originally listed the game-winning ball from game four for sale, dubbed “The Hand of OG,” the lot was later pulled from the sale. An NBA spokesperson told ARTnews on Thursday that the ball will remain with the team “as a lasting piece of franchise history.”

Heritage Auctions posted more than $1.41 billion in sales during the first six months of 2026, the highest midyear total in the company’s 50-year history and a 47 percent increase over the same period last year, putting the Dallas-based auction house on pace for what could become another record year.  For years, categories like video games, trading cards and comic books occupied the margins of the auction business, existing alongside more traditional markets for fine art, rare books and historical artifacts. Heritage’s latest results suggest that distinction is becoming increasingly outdated. Rather than displacing traditional collecting, those categories appear to be expanding the auction market by attracting new generations of buyers. Traditional collecting categories, meanwhile, continued to perform strongly. Heritage highlighted a group of 18 Norman Rockwell works led by Study for Cheerleaders, which sold for $600,000; a record-breaking sale of the David Aronovitz science fiction and fantasy library; more than $8.47 million in Americana auctions tied to the nation’s 250th anniversary; and a 1911 Chinese pattern dollar that realized $4.88 million, the most valuable world coin th

\“I did well up a little bit when I saw it coming off the lorry,” said Millie Horton-Insch, curator of the museum’s Bayeux Tapestry exhibition. The physical transfer of the embroidery took months of careful planning, as experts weighed in on how and whether it was too risky to move the highly fragile artwork, which already suffers from multiple tears and holes. Even the late artist David Hockney voiced his opinion, calling the endeavor “madness.” But, in the end, following a failed legal challenge to the project by a French heritage group, the road was cleared for the tapestry’s journey. “For the past year, curators, restorers, engineers and teams from France, the UK and other European nations have worked with remarkable dedication and ingenuity. Together they drew up the protocols enabling the artwork to travel and be exhibited under the best possible conditions in terms of security and conservation,” added Macron. He went on to describe the transfer as “a gesture of trust, a tangible expression of a long-standing friendship and a sign of our shared desire to see France and the United Kingdom build their future together.” Earlier, he also posted a photo on social media of the Brit

South African artist Kate Gottgens recently took to social media to accuse Cape Town gallery SMAC of failing to either pay her for works the gallery had sold or return the works if they were still in the gallery’s possession.  On July 2, she posted an image of her painting Audible Doom (2011) to Instagram. In the green-hued, hazy scene, a female figure, apparently with a bag over her head, stands on a ledge, seemingly addressing several other shadowy figures. Gottgens asked, “Has anyone seen this painting?” She said that SMAC displayed it at the Miart fair in 2022 and that it did not sell. It was not returned to her “in spite of many requests over the last 4 years,” she wrote in the post, which she has since deleted.  She said that since she left the gallery eight months ago, the gallery had repeatedly promised to either pay for the work or return it, but that it had done neither. Several other paintings are also unaccounted for, she says, though the gallery has told her they are “on the way back.” Only after her Instagram post, the artist told ARTnews, did she hear from the gallery, which paid her up to [...]

An important collection of modern art amassed by Werner Merzbacher, a Swiss collector who died in 2024, is currently the subject of a legal battle centered around the late businessman’s will and who really gets the right to control the paintings he owned. Since 2018, much of the collection he and his wife, Gabriele Merzbacher-Mayer, stewarded has been on long-term loan to the Kunsthaus Zurich, one of Switzerland’s most important museums. At the time, the museum called the loan “a gesture of gratitude to Zurich and Switzerland.” The collection is reportedly worth 600 million francs, or roughly $742 million. As NZZ reports, Merzbacher’s fortune and art collection are being vigorously debated in court, with much of the discussion centered around businessman’s will. Per NZZ, the will was “repeatedly amended,” allegedly in a way that benefited his asset manager, who was not named in the article. “Instead of the estate being divided three ways (among the two children and the descendants of the deceased daughter), it was to be split four ways,” NZZ reported. “Consequently, [the asset manager] stood to inherit a sum in the hundreds of millions.” It is not the only private collection loan t

The bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease has been detected in a cooling tower at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, though museum officials say the building remains safe for visitors and staff.  According to an internal email obtained by the Art Newspaper, routine testing earlier this week found Legionella in the museum’s cooling tower. The Guggenheim said it immediately carried out the remediation required by the city and stressed that the tower poses no risk to the public because it is accessible only to facilities staff.  In a statement, a museum spokesperson said the Guggenheim complies with all New York City regulations governing cooling towers and has been advised that no further action is needed. Facilities employees who work near the tower have been notified and are taking appropriate precautions.  The museum also briefed UAW Local 2110, which represents Guggenheim employees. Union president Olga Brudastova said she was satisfied with the museum’s response, noting that the cooling tower has already been treated and will be retested next week to determine whether additional remediation is necessary.  The health scare arrives at a tense moment for the museum. Last

For the first time in over 20 years, the International Council of Museums has revised its code of ethics to address new and pressing issues facing institutions, including “the rise of digital technologies, the climate crisis, and the ongoing need to address the legacies of colonialism through responsible and ethical museum practice,” per a press release. The revised code was officially adopted in late June at the organization’s 41st Ordinary General Assembly in Paris, following a years-long development process spearheaded by its Ethics Committee and overseen by the executive board. ICOM first adopted a code of ethics in 1986 and last revised it in 2004. The new code—approved by more than 85 percent of participants and developed between 2019 and this year—puts front and center the “global challenge of the climate crisis,” calling on members to achieve carbon neutrality and arguing they “must address the role museums have played during the colonising process.” The new code also formally incorporates ICOM’s revised museum definition, controversially adopted in 2022, which holds that a museum is “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collect

It was June 2020, and a wave of iconoclasm was sweeping the United States. Minneapolis police had murdered George Floyd, an African American man, the month before, and protesters argued that monuments to Confederate soldiers and leaders, slaveholders, and similar figures didn’t just mark important parts of American history, but rather promoted their white supremacist views.Related ArticlesNew York Mayor Zohran Mamdani Announces a Record $323.8 M. in Culture FundingMayor Mamdani Teams Up with Whitney on World Cup Poster Project Prominent in this discussion were monuments to Italy’s Christopher Columbus, who, as the Progressive Magazine put it in 2017, “engaged in enslavement, outright theft and the genocide of this hemisphere’s indigenous peoples.” A BBC discussion of his legacy points out that he was “exceptionally cruel” and that “his behaviour became so barbaric that the Spanish authorities actually intervened and Columbus was eventually arrested.” Among those calling for the removal of monuments to Columbus was Mamdani, then just a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who had campaigned for Palestinian City Council candidate Khader El-Yateem. In 2020, he would be

After gracing the ramps of the Guggenheim with their pop-projecting presence, BTS have turned their eyes to another museum as part of a marketing campaign for its latest world tour. This time, the K-pop group is in league with the British Museum in London, where visitors can see a showcase of artworks in the institution’s Korea Foundation Gallery, chosen in collaboration with curator Sang-ah Kim. The Guggenheim gambit was a private affair during which BTS performed amid a Carol Bove retrospective, for the cameras of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. The British Museum move, meanwhile, is a public happening organized as part of a citywide art trail to promote a world tour around BTS’s latest album. As stated on the British Museum’s website, “BTS’s fifth studio album ARIRANG takes its motif from the Korean folk song that has become an enduring symbol of Korean identity and cultural heritage. So, in celebration of our new show-stopping exhibition ‘Korea,’ exploring 2,000 years of creativity on the peninsula, we’ve created a trail around The Korea Foundation Gallery of five objects exploring those themes.” The “Korea” exhibition cited opens in October, and the five objects showca

On Wednesday, the Indonesian Consulate in New York hosted an event celebrating the return of two 8th-century bronze sculptures to Indonesia. According to an announcement from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, the Buddhist sculptures were originally taken from archaeological sites in Republic of Indonesia by an organized looting network and sold to Douglas Latchford, the British dealer who died in Thailand in 2020, a year after he was indicted for trafficking antiquities, particularly from Cambodia. Latchford sold the bronzes, along with dozens of other looted objects, to an unnamed collector between 2003 and ’07.

Using optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), the archeologists were able to tell that the enclosure’s ditches were first cut in the Early to Middle Neolithic period, around 3800 BCE. The upper layers of fill in the ditches date to the much later Beaker period (2450–1800 BCE), indicating that the monument was part of the landscape long after its initial construction.

Chua Mia Tee, known for his sympathetic depictions of the people of Singapore during the country’s early period of self-rule, has died, age 94. The artist’s daughter, Chua Yang, told the Straits Times that her father was recently hospitalized for pneumonia and died at his Bukit Timah home on July 10. No less than Singaporean president Tharman Shanmugaratnam posted on Facebook about the artist’s passing, expressing “much respect” and saying, “He gave everyone, from the shipyard worker to the elderly dumpling seller, their portrait and place in Singapore’s history.” Shanmugaratnam continued, “He contributed in that way to the building of our national identity, when we were a young nation and society in the making.” (Long under British control, Singapore gained self-governance in 1959.) “His paintings also helped to connect younger Singaporeans with the past,” the president added, concluding, “I hope his art stays in our minds.” In 2021, the National Gallery Singapore mounted a survey of the artist, titled “Chua Mia Tee: Directing the Real,” calling him “one of the leading realist artists in Singapore’s art history.” The artist depicted everyday scenes and portrayed Singaporeans durin