OLD NEWS

TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/5eyuemd3> _trailcam

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SORRY, NOT SORRY.
Newly revealed text messages and emails shed more light on what happened before University of North Texas (UNT) leaders decided to cancel an anti-ICE exhibition by Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez. Adam Schrader reports for Urgent Matter that the communications, obtained through a public records request, show school president Harrison Keller and provost Michael McPherson initially believed they could manage “any barking from Austin” over the show’s cancellation and at first considered removing only a selection of works. Instead, they ultimately opted to pull the exhibition entirely from the university’s College of Visual Arts and Design (CVAD), a move that sparked student protests and accusations of censorship. Transcripts from a faculty meeting suggesting the decision was an “institutional directive,” driven by concerns the university could become a target for elected officials. In one particularly cold calculation, CVAD dean Karen Hutzel advised gallery director Stefanie Dlugosz-Action on how to break the news to the artist, recommending a “personalized greeting that does not express regret or an apology.” _ARTnews

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FILTHY
<https://tinyurl.com/4pky3xwk> _DavidShrigley

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LAUREN HALSEY "SISTER DREAMER" OPENS by William Poundstone
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South Los Angeles has historically been a museum desert. That's changing, particularly as far as open-air public art spaces are concerned. This Saturday, Mar. 14, Lauren Halsey's Egyptian/Afrofuturist sculpture garden, sister dreamer lauren halsey's architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles, opens with a free block party. The artist considers sister dreamer to be the culmination of high-profile related installations at the Hammer, Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Met roof garden. The new space, at the corner of 76th St and Western Avenue, will feature film screenings, vegetable gardens, and wellness activities. More information here.
sister dreamer is about 2.7 miles from "outdoor museum" Destination Crenshaw (with work by Melvin Edwards, Maren Hassinger, Alison Saar, and Kehinde Wiley) and about a 20 minute drive from Simon Rodia's Watts Towers and the adjacent art center. It seems that LACMA is still considering a satellite location in Magic Johnson Park, not too far away; and Mr. Wash has plans to convert his Compton studio into an Art By Wash Studio & Community Center.
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<http://tiny.cc/bj90101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/46cet7mj> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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50. MIRADOR DE LA FLOR by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/2mb83k62>
She was raised speaking English, an American girl who learned Spanish phonetically to sing to her own people. The Tejano music star Selena embodied the hybrid tension—ni de aquí, ni de allá—of the Spanish and Anglo cultures that have rubbed against each other in Texas for two centuries.
When she was coming up, the Tejano world was dominated by accordion-driven polka rhythms and slow, soppy songs sung by older men. It had no obvious place for a young woman in a bedazzled bustier singing about confidence, independence, and flirtation on her own terms. But her youthful disregard for tradition allowed her to stretch the genre’s boundaries. She and her band Los Dinos infused Tejano with electronic pop, reggae, and cumbia. They transformed a regional genre into a crossover phenomenon that packed stadiums. Packed the Astrodome full.
The years of grueling toil behind that seemingly overnight success are invisible until you look for them. Her rise was really a family story: a tight-knit group who worked, toured, and sacrificed together. Their closeness made what followed shattering: she was shot and killed at age 23 by someone the family had trusted.
Her hometown of Corpus Christi built a memorial along the waterfront named for her signature song, Como la Flor. For the fans who continue to make the pilgrimage thirty years after her death, she was a superstar who looked like them and projected strength rather than apology. Her statue stands looking out over the water, and her music plays. _TheImpatientReader

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ROY LICHTENSTEIN, "VIRTUAL INTERIOR: PORTRAIT OF A DUCK," 1995
<https://tinyurl.com/3zz4nscr> _MichaelLobel

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MARCH BOOK BAG
<https://tinyurl.com/4jdkcxnp>
Amedeo Modigliani Catalogue Raisonné of the Oil Paintings, Marc Restellini, Institut Restellini/Yale University Press, six volumes, £2,000, (hb)
This long-awaited controversial catalogue raisonné dedicated to the notorious early 20th-century artist Amedeo Modigliani, available in a limited edition of 1,250 copies, comprises six volumes: volume one outlines the methodology used for compiling the catalogue while volumes three to five contain Modigliani’s paintings, each represented by a full-page reproduction and provenance details. According to the publisher’s statement, the author “Marc Restellini has made use of scientific and technological tools including spectrometry, infra-red, and x-ray imaging to authenticate 100 works not included in the previous catalogue raisonné [by Ambrogio Ceroni, 1938] and remove 15 others due to lack of definitive evidence attributing them solely to the artist.”
<https://tinyurl.com/kanz9e6s>
The Wallace Collection Catalogue of Arms and Armour from Asia, Africa and the Ottoman World, Thom Richardson and Paula Turner (editors), Bloomsbury Publishing, 560pp, £135 (hb)
Arms and amour tend to be overlooked in the Wallace Collection, the museum in central London housing famed works dating from the 14th to 19th centuries by artists such as Titian and Anthony van Dyck. “The pieces within the collection provide an expansive view of three key areas, Asia, Africa and the Ottoman world, and span the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries,” says a publisher’s statement. Objects featured include an early 17th-century jewelled dagger from north India, its guards (hilt components) sculpted in the form of lion heads, and a shield made from a single piece of translucent water buffalo hide dating from 1265, which hails from Iran.
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elative Ties: Mabel Nicholson, Nancy Nicholson, EQ Nicholson, Louisa Creed, Harriet Loffler, Paul Holberton Publishing, 112pp, £20 (pb)
This exhibition (Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, 6 March-6 September) and catalogue focus on four artists— Mabel Nicholson (1871-1918), her daughter Nancy Nicholson (1899-1977), Nancy’s sister-in-law EQ Nicholson (1908-1992), and EQ’s daughter, Louisa Creed (b.1937)—and how they are linked artistically and personally. “Relative Ties gathers the work of four women from three generations of one of 20th-century Britain’s most creative families, telling the story of how their artistic practice grew out of domestic life,” writes Rachel Polonsky, the acting president of the college, in the catalogue. Paintings, preparatory drawings, textiles, and wallpaper designs by all four women feature.
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The Artist's Roadmap: Practical Strategies for a Career in Art, Delphian Gallery, Thames & Hudson, 208pp, £12.99 (pb)
The Artist’s Roadmap, a guide to navigating the art world, addresses topics such as approaching galleries and representation as well as the basics of art business, such as tax affairs, shipping and insurance. The guide has been compiled by Delphian, which is an artist-run nomadic gallery and arts platform mainly based in London. Chapters cover areas such as “writing your artist statement”, “cataloguing, authenticity and proof” and “the trappings of social media”. Regarding selling work, the authors state that “selling in a high volume can be good for some things (money helps you pay bills) and harmful for others (with more sales, scarcity diminishes)”. _ArtNewspaper

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OPENING OVERHAUL SCHULENBURG, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/4d3387vk> _RuralIndexingProject

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FORMER MOMA DIRECTOR GLENN LOWRY SAYS LEON BLACK IS A ‘SOLID TRUSTEE’ by Alex Greenberger
While collector Leon Black continues to face controversy over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, he has found a defender in Glenn Lowry, a former director of the Museum of Modern Art, the New York institution where Black is currently a board member.
Black was previously chair of MoMA’s board, but he left that position in 2021 following the publication of reports on his friendship and business relationship with Epstein. Prior to his departure from that position, activists and high-profile artists had called for Black’s ejection.
That year, Black also departed his role as CEO of the investment firm Apollo Global Management. In 2023, Black paid $62.5 million to the US Virgin Islands to settle all Epstein-related claims against him. Black’s lawyer said at the time that he had “engaged and made payments to Jeffrey Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services, which based on everything now known, he very much regrets.”
Black made yet more headlines in 2026, with the release of new Epstein-related files, one of which featured a lengthy list of works held by companies linked to Black. Though not accused of involvement in Epstein’s crimes, Black has been requested to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on his role in managing Epstein’s wealth.
With scrutiny over Black’s ties to Epstein continuing on, Lowry, who directed MoMA from 1995 to 2025, was queried about Black by the Wall Street Journal this week.
“As far as I know, Leon has never been charged with a crime related to Epstein,” Lowry said. “He’s certainly been subject to various suits, but he’s also been a very supportive trustee. He chose not to run for re-election for chair because he wanted to make a decision that was not going to be harmful to the museum. Our board looked very carefully at Leon and ultimately decided that he was a solid trustee and should remain.”
Pressed by the Journal to clarify whether Black was a “good trustee,” Lowry said, “In the middle of the pandemic, when institutions were laying people off, and many of our trustees brought up the possibility of laying people off, it was Leon Black who insisted, ‘We are not laying anybody off in the middle of a pandemic on my watch.’” (A Bloomberg report from 2020 stated that MoMA had shrunk its staff from 960 workers to 800, but MoMA said at the time that it made no layoffs.)
Black, who regularly appeared on the Top 200 Collectors list alongside his wife Debra, has provided significant support to MoMA across the years. In 2018, he and Debra gave $40 million to the museum in support of its renovation and expansion, which opened the following year. _ARTnews

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MASAO YAMAMOTO 山本昌男 - NAKAZORA #1254
<https://tinyurl.com/ck8p876h> _RabihAlameddine

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THE ART MARKET OF THE '90S WAS AN ALTERNATE DIMENSION by Tim Schneider
Among those of us who can still read—don’t roll your eyes, things are getting spooky out here—one of the great benefits is encountering ideas that turn out to have much more longevity and value than you realize in the moment. You know the feeling, right? A single offhand observation keeps bubbling up in your mind long after you’d thought you’d processed it and moved on, meaning it takes weeks, months, or even years to realize that what you once thought was only kinda interesting might in fact be something closer to a revelation.
This is the experience I’ve had with a now year-old Guardian interview with Lubaina Himid, the former Turner Prize winner whose work exploring racial and gender inequities, cultural memory, and its blind spots will command the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale starting in less than two months.
What sparks the exchange below is Himid saying that major curators in the UK “knew all about” the work she and her collaborators were doing for the last couple decades of the 20th century. The issue, she adds, is that “they didn’t want to take the risk” of actually platforming it, a comment that spurs interviewer Sarah Crompton to ask…
Why not?
In the 80s and 90s, Black women artists were not part of the mainstream debate. The YBAs were incredibly strong and making very dynamic work that spoke to the moment.1 I think people thought our moment had passed, but we kept going and we kept talking to each other. We kept hanging on to the things that were important.
Were you ever bitter about being ignored?
I felt that we missed a trick. We set out to show our work to as many people as we could. But we were not thinking about selling it. It didn’t occur to us. We didn’t understand the system of commercial art at all, whereas the YBAs were wired into selling art as well as making really brave stuff. I was cross because we had no idea that was the way to do it. I felt I had been stupid.
There are 15 sentences in that excerpt, and two of them have been periodically flitting around my skull like a pair of mischievous hummingbirds for (checks calendar) the past 53 weeks: “But we were not thinking about selling it. It didn’t occur to us.” And it’s taken until recently for me to articulate why I haven’t forgotten them yet.
The first reason is that Himid casually stakes out a third way in which artists used to be able to relate to the art trade, some distance off from the two equally narrow, equally aggressive positions that tend to dominate the discourse today: “The Market Is Evil” versus “The Market Is Everything.”
Just don’t mistake her position for the type of weaponized “I don’t think about you at all” that gets deployed like a nuke in the worst interpersonal skirmishes, either. Instead, Himid sounds like she genuinely regrets ignoring the market machinations that helped propel the careers of the YBAs so far and so fast. She actually lightly berates herself for it (“I felt I had been stupid”) while praising Damien Hirst et al from both creative and strategic standpoints (“the YBAs were incredibly strong and making very dynamic work that spoke to the moment,” along with “the YBAs were wired into selling art as well as making really brave stuff”).
On its own, the nuance here feels rare but not necessarily earth-shaking. What amplifies the shockwaves dramatically, at least for me, is that the type of agnostic absenteeism Himid adopted in the ‘80s and ‘90s quite literally seems impossible for almost any artist anywhere in the world today. Awareness (if not hyper-awareness) of market mechanisms hasn’t just seeped into the groundwater of art-making; it’s done the same in just about every aspect of modern life.
Sure, part of the story is that arts journalists get press pitches and social media notifications about the auction results of artists who are 10 years old or not even human (RIP Pigcasso, you would’ve loved RFK Jr’s red-meat-centric dietary recommendations). But the mutation has swept way beyond taking a commerce-first mentality to absurdist extremes in the art market alone.
We now live in a culture so financialized that you can take out small-dollar loans to fund your burrito orders. Struggling West African farmers are hawking their crops on TikTok. Entire online platforms have been created so that we can openly gamble on even the gravest world events, including the timelines and consequences of intercontinental airstrikes.2 And not coincidentally, all of this has happened as the information flow has become suffocating and sufficient access to social services, jobs that pay a living wage, and even basic human connections have slid deeper and deeper into the incinerator for more and more people every year.3
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Amid all this, can you imagine an artist anywhere in the world looking back on their approach in the 2020s and saying about their work, “We were not thinking about selling it. It didn’t occur to us”?
And yet, this was a realistic position for an incredibly smart, hardworking, and ambitious artist and curator like Himid to occupy at a point in time recent enough that people were regularly using personal computers and the internet. Maybe it’s just my own personal brainrot talking, but that combination of factors now sounds fantastical enough to border on speculative history—even though I lived through it myself.
Thankfully, Himid’s career continued, no doubt through intense dedication and perseverance. And now, a few decades later, she’s representing the UK in the most prestigious international art biennial around.
Would conscious engagement with the market in the ‘80s and ‘90s have made her a better or more successful artist? It’s impossible to say, even if we could agree on a universal definition of “better” and “successful.” But it inarguably would have made Himid a different artist than she’s become.
Just as important, she probably made her choice at the last time in history that anyone producing art could have continued on unaware of the alternative—and quietly, everything we’ve seen since has been shaped by that change. _TheGrayMarket

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MONKEY ALBRECHT DÜRER
<https://tinyurl.com/yc3u8bn2> _RabihAlameddine

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AFTER TWO YEARS OF DECLINE, THE ART MARKET EDGES BACK
The global art market clawed its way back to modest growth in 2025, reaching an estimated $59.6 billion in sales, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report, by economist Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics. The total represents a 4 percent increase from the previous year, breaking a two-year slide in sales—though the market still sits below its 2022 peak.
The recovery, however, came with an asterisk. While auctions bounced back strongly, galleries barely budged, and much of the market’s growth came from a small number of very expensive works.
Public auction sales rose 9 percent, helping lift the overall market. Dealer sales grew just 2 percent, reaching $34.8 billion globally. Private sales at auction houses, meanwhile, fell 5 percent, reversing the previous year’s trend, when collectors had increasingly opted for discreet deals behind closed doors.
The number of transactions barely changed. Sales rose only 2 percent, to roughly 41.5 million, suggesting that the market’s growth had less to do with a surge in activity than with higher prices for a relatively small number of big-ticket works.
As in previous years, the art trade remained concentrated in a handful of markets. The United States, the United Kingdom, and China together accounted for 76 percent of global sales by value. The U.S. retained its position as the world’s largest art market, with $26 billion in sales, or 44 percent of the global total. The UK followed with 18 percent, while China accounted for 14 percent.
Much of the market’s growth was driven by a revival of high-value transactions, particularly in New York. The combined value of works sold at auction in the United States for more than $10 million jumped nearly 40 percent, a reminder that trophy works still play an outsized role in shaping the market’s fortunes.
The same pattern was visible along the breadth of the auction sector. The value of works selling for more than $1 million rose 21 percent, while sales above $10 million climbed 30 percent. At the other end of the spectrum, sales of works priced below $50,000 slipped slightly, widening the gap between the top of the market and everything beneath it.
The year’s strongest auction sectors were those anchored by historically established artists. Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art surged 47 percent, while the Old Masters market rose 30 percent after two years of decline. By contrast, the once red-hot Postwar and Contemporary category slipped 2 percent to $4.5 billion, an extension of the cooling that followed the pandemic-era boom.
The shift hints at a market growing more cautious. In uncertain economic times, collectors tend to gravitate toward artists with long track records rather than newer names still riding waves of speculation.
That caution showed up among galleries as well. Dealer sales returned to growth overall, but results varied sharply depending on size. Smaller galleries with annual sales under $500,000 reported some of the strongest percentage increases in sales. The middle of the market, however, remained largely stagnant. Dealers with turnover above $10 million managed a modest 3 percent increase after two years of decline.
Meanwhile costs kept climbing. Dealers are selling more but reported higher expenses for shipping, logistics, and art fairs, pushing average operating costs up around 5 percent in 2025, faster than sales growth can keep up.
“In past reports, much of the conversation focused on sales and revenue,” said Art Basel CEO Noah Horowitz. “This year’s data shows sales recovering and confidence returning. Yes, the performance is mixed. Some parts of the market are stronger than others, and cost pressures remain a real challenge. But the trend is up.”
Horowitz said those rising operation costs are shaping how galleries approach the market. Even as sales begin to recover, higher expenses for shipping, logistics, staffing, and art fairs are forcing many dealers to operate more strategically and manage costs more carefully.
Despite several widely publicized gallery closures, the report suggests the overall ecosystem remains relatively stable. New gallery openings still outpaced closures, indicating a market that is reshaping itself rather than shrinking. “I’m not going to underestimate the impact of Tim Blum, Venus over Manhattan, or Clearing closing their doors,” Horowitz said, “But when you start seeing new galleries opening at a faster pace, younger galleries come into the scene, and innovative ventures being formed, that suggests the market is renewing itself. It’s a good sign.”
Art fairs, meanwhile, remain central to the business. Fairs accounted for 35 percent of dealer sales in 2025, up from 31 percent the year before, reinforcing their role as the industry’s main marketplace for connecting galleries with international collectors.
The pandemic-era rush toward digital sales also continued to fade. Online-only transactions fell to $9.2 billion, their lowest level since 2019, accounting for 15 percent of the market, well below the 25 percent peak reached in 2020. _Daniel Cassady_ARTnews

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THE TROPICS, BY HENRI ROUSSEAU, 1907
<https://tinyurl.com/3kztd9e8>_RabihAlameddine

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LOOK WHO’S HEADED TO PERROTIN GALLERY
The French gallery with outposts in Paris and New York has announced the latest addition to its roster: Utah-born, Mexico-based sculptor Alma Allen, who raised eyebrows when he agreed to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale under the Trump administration’s highly compromised selection process. Allen’s former galleries, Mendes Wood and Olney Gleason, reportedly dropped the artist after he accepted the State Department’s nomination. Look, when Trump calls for art that promotes “American exceptionalism” and censors exhibitions that confront this country’s violent legacy, it says something about Allen’s work that it was deemed acceptable — namely, that it is antiseptic and probably politically vacant. (Or maybe just shiny.) In social media comments last year, Allen said nothing about the ethical line many feel he’s crossed, and instead strawmanned critics by accusing them of bias against his “working-class” and “self-taught” origins. What about all the artists who fit that description and aren’t represented by a mega-gallery? _Hyperallergic

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TRAILCAM
<https://tinyurl.com/mwrp8u3d> _trailcam