1286 stories from 28 sources
The month in Arts and Culture
Longest running story: 35 days
Click on a headline to see stories that shaped it.
Threads
8 threads
Lee Krasner's exhibitions challenged the lone-genius story that had subordinated her to Jackson Pollock. Across the month, Indigenous, Black, Asian, female, queer Latino, formerly imprisoned, and other overlooked artists moved from supplementary context toward central cultural history.
Political pressure moved from disputes over public art and the Kennedy Center to an explicit purge at Colombia's National Museum and a threat to the Kennedy Center collection. By month's end, these conflicts had become public and legal contests over curatorial independence, national history, and institutional authority.
Returns of vessels, human remains, and antiquities gave way to renewed campaigns over the Parthenon Marbles and a wider set of claims involving Mesoamerican objects, Kandinsky, and Cranach. A database documenting more than one million returned objects recast restitution as a global institutional shift, while Nazi-looted-art disputes kept provenance and present responsibility in view.
The month began with arguments about whether AI could supply human meaning, then moved through fabricated quotations, suspected AI-assisted authorship, and a plagiarism admission. By the final week, cultural institutions were weighing human creativity against algorithmic sameness, while contracts and prizes started to define competing rules.
Cultural workers in Gaza rescued books and artifacts while attacks in Gaza and Ukraine damaged the systems that preserve collective memory. Palestinian artists used simultaneous exhibitions across Gaza and the West Bank to bridge enforced separation, and later efforts in Gaza and Sudan tied creative work to emergency preservation under war and displacement.
Sally Rooney's support for Palestine Action led her books to be repeatedly pulled from UK sales, widening an author's political stance into a dispute over protest rights, censorship, and publishing control. The books then surged amid the continuing UK political fight, keeping the controversy active beyond the initial removals.
A threatened Whitney strike joined contract gains at other museums, making labor standards a broader institutional test. The V&A then moved toward a two-day walkout across all four sites, linking pay and working conditions to whether expansion had benefited workers, before the strike was suspended.
Unrest first overshadowed Paris's major fairs, then forced Art Basel Paris to close early and prompted institutions to shut. Artists and cultural coalitions joined the protests, shifting the week from commercial spectacle toward direct political confrontation.
Week’s Recap