Art News

Do archaeological exhibitions always require a theme? Of course, there needs to be an overarching subject justifying and advertising why a selection of material has been brought together. Themes help to tell stories, create an argument, and give meaning to seemingly disparate collections of objects. The narratives constructed by curators allow items, especially mundane ones, to take on increased relevance by placing them in a broader context.

Over four hundred years ago, Peter Paul Rubens painted a bloody, yet tender biblical scene of Saint Sebastian being tended to by two angels. But the painting’s ownership history and its frequent change of hands in the eighteenth century led to its eventual loss of all provenance and therefore loss of the artist of this work’s identity for three hundred years.

The world’s most prestigious art fair, the 2023 edition of Art Basel kicked off with the opening of Unlimited, a section of the fair that presented monumental projects in a space that was big enough to display 76 large-scale installations by a mix of celebrated and emerging artists working in a variety of media.

With over 120 artworks from 25 museums and private collections from around the world, visitors of Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in Art at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco experience the encompassing role of dance in South and Southeast Asian cultures. 

“I have never been in a city that gave me the same sense of freedom as Venice,” Peggy Guggenheim wrote, “Venice is not only the city of freedom and fantasy but it is the city of pleasure and happiness.”

An essential pilgrimage for art enthusiasts is the fair Art Basel, which is taking place this week in Basel, Switzerland. Like a bustling carnival filled with visual art, sculpture, and installation, this renowned event traces its origins back to the 1970s in Switzerland, when a group of art lovers and artists decided to breathe life into the small town’s art scene.

A while back, NASA trained its giant James Webb Space Telescope on several distant galaxies that emerged a mere 500 to 700 million years after the universe came into being 14 billion years ago and found them to be much larger and more mature than they should have been according to

Documentation of art-induced fainting episodes dates back to the nineteenth century; the most famous account is that of French author Marie-Henri Beyle (1783–1842), whose pen name was Stendhal.

With news of the oil and gas company BP beating predicted revenue streams this year with over $5 billion in the first three months of this year, it is hard to believe that such a move comes at a time when Americans and Europeans alike find themselves facing the highest energy

  "This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. "Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map" brings together nearly five decades of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date." - Via