“Fridamania” is reaching new heights as museums, opera houses, and cinemas across continents celebrate the enduring legacy of Frida Kahlo in 2026. This collective reckoning with her highly curated self-image and body of work comes at a time when many are searching for personal meaning and unity in an age of simultaneous hyper-connectedness and geopolitical division.
Art News
A good art magazine should do more than show beautiful things. It should help readers understand why those things matter.
Western art history doesn’t move in a straight line toward improvement. It advances through breaks—moments when artists reject inherited assumptions and redefine what art is for. The visible changes are stylistic, but the deeper shifts are conceptual: how artists understand representation, what counts as truth, and the role the artist is meant to play. This account begins with the Renaissance because it sets the terms of the conversation.
Although museums have long housed clothing in “costume institutes” removed from their painting and sculpture galleries, a series of exhibitions and events is collapsing the distance between fashion and art this spring.
The art world is full of wonderful things to discover, but it can also be hard to keep up. New exhibitions open, artists gain attention, auctions make headlines, museums announce major shows, and important stories can easily get lost in the noise. Art & Object’s weekly newsletter helps make sense of it all.
Attention to detail, subtle shifts of perspective, angles of surface, and objects overlapping or jutted up against one another; Giorgio Morandi’s sheer inventiveness with ordinary objects is distinctive.
The allegorical manifestation of "the four continents" is a visual staple of Western art from the colonial period and the 18th century in particular. Used to uphold the idea of European superiority and justify colonialism itself, the iconography associated with each continent is deeply rooted in racism.
A quiet ceremony at the Canadian Conservation Institute in Ottawa marked a turning point in international cultural property law in recent weeks.
Nestled in the sagebrush-dusted mountains of northern New Mexico, more than 5,000 feet above sea level, is a small, quaint city constructed mainly of adobe and dating back to 1607 that just happens to be one of the world’s biggest and most vibrant art centers. Italy has a term for its urban cultural treasures—città d’arte, or art city.
The 82nd edition of the Whitney Biennial opened to the public on March 8, 2026. Curated by Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, Sawyer comes to the Whitney after several years at the Brooklyn Museum, and Guerrero took on her role in 2022—the first Latina to co-curate the Biennial. With press and VIP previews starting as early as March 3, the arts media was flooded with wildly varied opinions on this iteration, most leaning towards the negative.
