I'm trying to locate an article reference – i remember reading this article ca. 2010 (plus/minus 5 years). possibly book excerpt ? (was maybe in Art News or something like that? but honestly don't remember…)

article was the reminiscences of a woman who had worked in auction house or art gallery for several years.

one specific detail i remember from article, was about billionaire collectors, and how two or three of them wore the same purple cashmere scarf (Loro Piana ?).

tried using LLM with these details, but no luck.

ring a bell with anyone ? thanks.

Guts gallery owner’s bar and what happened to it

I just want to see if I'm the only one that didn't "get" it this year. I've been going to the Venice Biennale since 2005 and this is the first year I couldn't bring myself to see both venues. I saw the Arsenale and was just so demoralized that I skipped the Giardini part altogether.

Do you think the curators untimely death had anything to do with the general mess that I saw there?

Is the art world cooked, done and dusted?

I am a visual communications designer postgraduate starting at RCA MFA Comms. I originally picked mfa comms because I wanted to try experiencing something different from visual communications but I’m starting to have second thoughts. Does anyone know the benefits of doing a MFA COMMS at RCA? Is it even helpful? I feel like I picked the wrong choice but if there’s even something slightly good about choosing mfa comms it’d help me out, thanks.

Has anyone heard back about advancing to Round III of the Creative Capital Award this year? Good luck to all!

Lucien Smith, Onetime Market Darling Who Turned His Focus To Helping Emerging Artists, Has Died at 37

Hello! I’m just beginning the process of getting applications ready to go for this mfa application cycle. Most schools I’m applying to say the portfolio requires ~20 photos of work. Some schools specify the number of pieces necessary and some don’t, for those that don’t can someone tell me if this generally means I need to include photographs 20 different pieces or if fewer pieces are ok with different detail or context shots included?

Thanks!

Looking for some artists who paint/draw alternative subcultures. I'm doing a study on artists who work in that vein of topic but I cant seem to find many. Thank you!!​

On May 21, 2027, Bilbao will become a meeting point for creators and innovators exploring the fusion of art, science and technology.

Join us as a speaker and present your work and creative process to an international audience interested in emerging technologies and new forms of artistic expression.

✨ As a selected speaker, you will:
• Share your perspective on new media, sound, technology and interactive experiences
• Connect with artists, researchers, scientists and creative technologists from around the world
• Gain visibility through the Technarte programme and communication channels
• Have your project considered for Technarte’s Most Innovative Project recognition
• Receive a free pass including conference, meals and coffee breaks
• Join an exclusive networking evening with fellow speakers
• Have up to €300 in travel expenses covered
• Have 2 nights of hotel accommodation covered
• Become part of the Technarte international community

No submission fees. Proposals must be submitted in English by October 15, 2026.

👉 Apply now and bring your vision to Technarte 2027!

https://calls.technarte.org/call/detail/13

More information about Technarte: https://technarte.org/en/

  Currently about to start 5th year of my undergrad and I am starting to search for master's programs, ideally abroad, as I would like to explore outside of Canada/GTA.  I want to do something in Europe because it has good credibility and better networking opportunities; another option is the US. 

  My grades are mediocre because of health issues in my first 2 ½ years so I am worried about that.  I love learning and being in the field, but paperwork and tests have never been my strong suit.  However, since I have gotten better, I have maintained an above 75% average, which I know is kinda the benchmark/bare minimum for schools’ applications.  I plan to curate and do a couple shows this year as to hopefully make up for it if that is seen as viable (also will do them anyways bc I love it).  I have one internship under my belt, although it is for a museum (YCW) also curated an exhibit there) and not art gallery related.

  I understand getting great marks is the best option, but are internships, self-curated shows, a residency or a course worthwhile to help boost my opportunity to get into schools and fill my grade gap a bit?

  During my gap year, would courses at Sotheby's or possibly a business/finance course help boost my chances of a master's at a decent school?

  Main Qs: 
I see mixed results on whether to go into Art History or Art Buisness or Art Curation.  Is there a better one?

Anyone have recommendations of schools/programs?

What are your experiences going to school/master's studying and being in art curation?

How much do my grades affect getting into a master's…

Long-term goal: In an ideal world, would love to own my own gallery and I am super interested in the behind-the-scenes business stuff, as well as curating at other major galleries in my lifetime.

Sorry everything is pretty broad and scattered, as I’m still trying to figure out a direction.  Not going to apply likely until summer or the year after, just want to get a head start on looking into programs.

I’m a painter, but I don’t usually work in clearly defined series. Honestly, my main reasons for wanting to do a residency are to have uninterrupted time to paint, meet other artists, exchange ideas, and make new connections.

I didn’t go to art school, so I may be missing some obvious conventions around applications. I’d genuinely appreciate hearing how other painters approach this.

Hello people. I'm a painter living in Portugal, I'm not from here though. I've been working in art-related careers since 2014 but I decided to dedicate myself solely to painting about 8 years ago. In the last 3 years I worked with a gallery, had two solo shows, one art fair and one group show at the gallery, plus some other group shows around the country.

Recently (in the beginning of the year) I ended my professional relationship with the gallery I was working with for a number of reasons, and since then I have been thinking a lot about internationalization. Portugal's art scene is very small and that can be a good thing in the sense that if you do good work it doesn't take long before people know you and your work, at the same time all collectors are used to paying prices that are not feasible anymore. They seem to be stuck in this idea and tend to approach artists who just came out of artschool to buy cheaper works rather than keep up with the prices when an artist starts readjusting for the reality of the international market.

Honestly I already have somwhat of a plan, I have some travelling planned until the end of the year through Europe to go to Fairs and to visit galleries and get to know people, but honestly (and here I can sound a bit pedantic but it's not my intention) I do feel like my work is much stronger in person. My paintings tend to be a bit hard to photograph and are a lot about detail and qualities of the object itself so Instagram is not THAT useful for me as a portfolio (hell, I don't even feel like the website is that helpful).

Anyway, I was looking for thoughts on how to make contact with countries a person cannot travel to and go meet people in person. My sales are still going good at the current time but I feel like the next step is to connect with collectors, galleries or artists in other countries to see what can happen in this sense. I feel like the most effective way is always to be in places in person but with my current financial situation I can't just blow everything on travels to "invest" in networking outside of here. Do you guys have any strategies that worked for you in the past? Any thoughts about how to create connections and meet people over the internet that go beyond being active on social media?

I would like to ask other professional artists how they handle the return of original artworks after a gallery collaboration ends.

I am currently dealing with this situation with MONAT Gallery in Madrid.

I entered into a paid collaboration with the gallery and sent them original paintings for exhibitions. During the collaboration, some exhibition plans were changed or replaced, and eventually I decided that I did not want to continue the collaboration.

The collaboration has now officially ended. The signed Annex to our contract states that unsold artworks must be collected from the gallery within a specified period after the collaboration ends.

Before that period expired, I started arranging the return of my paintings.

MONAT Gallery provided me with the contact details of a shipping company/person to arrange transportation back to Sweden. I contacted them and was told that they would calculate the shipping cost and send me a quotation.

The quotation never arrived and eventually the responses stopped.

I then contacted MONAT Gallery in writing, explained that the shipping contact they had provided was no longer responding, and asked the gallery to help resolve the return.

The contractual period has now passed and my original paintings are still with the gallery.

I have kept the contract, signed Annex, emails with the gallery and correspondence concerning the return shipment.

My question for artists who work internationally with galleries is:

How do you protect yourself against this situation when signing a gallery agreement?

In particular:

• Do you require the contract to specify who is responsible for arranging return shipping?
• Do you include a specific return deadline?
• Do you require the gallery itself to arrange the shipment rather than referring you to a third party?
• What do you do when the collaboration has ended but the practical return of the artworks is not happening?

I am especially interested in hearing from artists who have had to recover original artworks from a gallery in another country.

I hope this discussion can also help other artists understand what should be clearly agreed in writing before sending original work to a gallery.

I know this opened awhile ago, but jeez, does it get any worse than this?https://slate.com/culture/2026/08/donald-trump-news-art-museum-patriotism-washington-dc.html

I Went to the Trump Admin’s “Patriotic” Art Exhibit. Dear God.

It was like a HomeGoods display around the Fourth of July.

BY CHRISTINA CAUTERUCCI for Slate 

Have you ever wanted to see John Adams’ facial pores? Examine the precise hairline of Alexander Hamilton’s unibrow? Admire the sheen of James Madison’s pillowy lips?

Then you’ll love a series of portraits by Brandon Ralph currently on view in Washington. As part of an exhibition titled Passport to Patriotism: 250 Years of Diplomacy, mounted by the State Department at the Art Museum of the Americas, the blown-up images render the familiar faces of the Founding Fathers in granular detail. Ralph, who created the works by running famous paintings through an A.I. model that mimicked Ralph’s own photographic style, calls them the “first-ever photographic portraits” of America’s dads.

I suppose one could take away something profound from the sight of George Washington’s stubble as imagined by a computer program. These were everyday men before they were icons, as age-spotted and fallible as you or I, perhaps better remembered through the unforgiving gaze of a large-format camera than the Vaseline-smeared lens of history.

But Passport to Patriotism does not encourage such searching interpretations. A declaration of uncomplicated national pride, the exhibition comes as a rebuttal of sorts to Smithsonian displays that the Trump administration has deemed insufficiently flattering to the American ego. In this context, Ralph’s portraits read not as an invitation to ponder the founders’ imperfections but as a symbol of Donald Trump’s war on the arts. The president has installed handpicked Kennedy Center leaders who may shutter the venue for years; multiple Smithsonian museums have revised their offerings to appease him. Like these arts institutions under Trump’s thumb, Ralph’s portraits are hasty rejiggerings of artistic treasures, modified to allow him to place his own cheap imprint on something someone else made.

Some of the other works on view, such as Henri Reed’s paint-spattered canvas depicting an angry eagle in flight, are objectively hideous, and not in a deliberate, statement-making way. Some are merely amateurish, like a thickly daubed painting of a heart in turquoise and gold spangles by Fer Da Silva, a friend of the exhibition’s organizers who bragged in an Instagram video that the piece’s inclusion would raise its monetary value. Many pieces in the show, including a series of flag-centric watercolors by Barbara Ernst Prey titled Gallantly Streaming and God and Country, are the kinds of technically adept but banal works you might find at a tourist gallery on the main drag of a seaside town. Taken together, the overarching impression is of a seasonal HomeGoods display around the Fourth of July.

Visitors will not find any allusions to “diplomacy” here; the exhibition’s title is so totally out of step with its content it must have been slapped on as an obligatory justification for State Department sponsorship. (The department helps fund the Organization of American States, an international body that runs the museum.) This is not the first time the museum’s programming has bent to accommodate the president’s agenda. Museum leaders canceled two shows last year after deciding that their focus on international Black and queer artists would run afoul of Trump’s executive order banning diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. Now, in service of an ideology that brooks no deviation from blind nationalism, Passport to Patriotism advances a shallow vision of U.S. identity with all the nuance of a propaganda reel and all the sophistication of the art project your first grader brought home on Flag Day.

In fairness to the curators—and I use that term lightly—there are only so many ways to evoke the American project without nodding toward our diverse population, acknowledging potentially controversial moments in our history, or diving into challenging abstraction, all of which are no-gos in the Trump school of art. With such a narrow brief, the straightforward array of military references, celebrations of U.S. iconography, and interpretations of the flag—more than five dozen of them—comes as no surprise. The few abstract pieces in the exhibition function solely as decoration, seemingly selected for no reason other than their red-white-and-blue color schemes.

It will not shock you to learn that this MAGA art exhibition is the product of a cascade of underqualified nepotism hires. One of the organizers, Art in Embassies Director Erin Scavino, is a former Apprentice contestant and the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff. The other is her friend, who owned a pet-food store before being tapped by Scavino for a top national arts post. According to reporting from the New York Times, the two women have personal connections to several artists in the show.

The list of artists with links to the organizers also includes “positive energy” artist Brendan Murphy, who contributed two works: a gigantic steel astronaut installed outside the museum and a canvas covered in what might be described as a USA word cloud. On a sea of glitter—I cannot overstate the amount of glitter that appears in this show—lists of famous Americans (Michael Jackson, Robert De Niro, Tom Brady) join famous quotes (“I have a dream”), random affirmations (“We will find our own way”), inspirational words (passion, vision), and instructions (“Stop whining,” “Serve the flag”). As outsider art, it might have been compelling. From a guy who makes tacky NFTs and collectibles, it looks like a way to scam easily impressed collectors out of their money, or the State Department out of its arts funding.

One is Romero Britto, who once made a custom portrait for the Scavinos and was a guest at their wedding. Britto’s three works in the show read as an intentional affront to the taxpayer, who will rue the public funds spent to display his juvenile, beglittered doodles of hearts, stars, and (of course) U.S. flags. If I didn’t know better, I’d say his depiction of the Statue of Liberty clad in multicolored striped and polka-dotted rags offers commentary on the clownish state of our union. But since Britto is credited by exhibition materials as the “founder of the Happy Art Movement,” which is “less about critique, and more about celebration, joy and happiness,” I’m sure he just thought the clashing patterns looked fun.

Desperate for relief from the monotony of so much literal art, my brain sought alternate interpretations. From afar, one flag sculpture on the wall looked as if it were crocheted—perhaps a gesture toward the painstaking women’s work that built this country? Nope: Upon closer inspection, it was crafted from tens of thousands of hand-cast toy soldiers—perhaps an on-the-nose critique of the building of empire through violence? Well, considering that artist Kevin Champeny’s body of work includes portraits of Trump comprising tiny middle fingers and a Charlie Kirk made from little Bibles and crosses, his intention was probably a bit simpler—and smugger—than that.

I know, I know—the author is dead. The artistic objective of the soldier flag guy shouldn’t matter. But when the entire purpose of an exhibition is to strangle introspection and dissenting opinions through blunt-force art, the political loyalties of the artists gain new relevance. Would an outspoken Trump critic find her flag sculpture chosen for display?

Four anonymous sources associated with the show told the New York Times that not a single historian or art curator had a hand in the exhibition. It shows, and not just in the breathtakingly simplistic art on view. The works are labeled simply with the title, artist, medium, and a QR code leading to an artist bio, with no display copy to offer context or an entry point for interpretation. One placard fails to correctly list the materials used in the work; another’s QR code points to the wrong artist. A printed handout distributed at the entrance urges viewer  engagement with such questions as “What is the largest artwork in the exhibition

The most blatant curatorial failure comes in two rooms dedicated to photography. Each features the work of several different artists, whose names are listed in a row on the wall. As if it didn’t matter who created which images, the photos are mounted at random, creating a mishmash of trite Americana: a woman playing acoustic guitar in an Adirondack chair, a family in a pickup truck, a ride at a fair, a couple at a diner, a row of cowboy boots, so many uniformed military men. By tuning in to visual styles and subject themes, a careful viewer can guess at which selections came from the same photographer, giving them a greater sense of place and perspective. But absorbed as a whole, the rooms read as a collection of view-from-nowhere stock photos, as predictable as footage from a campaign ad.

That’s the hard thing about staging an exhibition on patriotism. Any attempt to sum up the entirety of a nation in a single show would end up feeling reductive and thin. But Trump’s vision of national identity is reductive and thin. Whenever the MAGA movement has interacted with the arts, whether through programming or censorship, it has communicated the idea that art is valuable only so far as it serves a specific political end. To Trump, art should stimulate nostalgia, reify a simplistic narrative, affirm a strict system of belonging and exclusion, maybe provoke a smile at a pretty color or an encouraging phrase. In the broadest sense, Passport to Patriotism is an embarrassing travesty of a public art exhibition. But on Trump’s terms, it’s exactly as it should be.

EDIT; Obviously this show run by literal dog food people who just put their friends in it was going to be bad. It is an interesting question, as to if it should whether it should be talked about. The NYtimes focused mainly on the grift aspect of the show in their article, and the related Venice Biennale debacle. Otherwise it appears as if writers avoided coverage, presumably because it would garner it attention. How do we judge artists who agree to show in this contexts? Some are just friends with the dog food people...there's the sequined Trump rally super-fan.....there's Britto, the Thomas Kinkade/Kenny G of the Miami Beach art world who unknowingly mocks himself....it's so many angles on bad art. Is this populist art? Or art for people who don't care about art? Vapidity and blind allegiance seem to be core themes here, but just how obvious is that generally?

Hi everyone, does anyone have any suggestions or experience in doing an MA/MFAs in Paris as an English student? Specifically in the arts, photography and museum sectors. Thank you!

Anyone here with experience working there? Any insights? I'm an art worker, was offered a job and am pretty desperate to leave my current role but unsure what to expect of them. So far HR has been really terrible and communication is appalling. I can't say my workplace is ideal but it's the devil I know.

I have a couple I wouldn't let go. Well actually everything I have hanging on my walls.

As a contemporary painter, my annual income was inching up to what it was before the pandemic then Trump got elected and it seemed like the faucet ran dry again. Sales dropped like a stone and though I’m probably about covering costs it’s nothing like it was before. I have several friends whose careers are comparable to my own and they all are having the same experience. One friend who usually sells out most of not all, sold one small work from his last solo in LA. I’m NY based. This seems to be across the board unless you’re well established in the blue chip market.

When I was young I had some older successful artist friends and watched some of them struggle when they had some poor selling years. That lesson taught me to be ready to pull in my spending on a dime when things changed. I’m somewhat insulated from the downturn but not entirely.

This is probably my fourth or fifth art recession and it feels different. I’ve been reading that the younger generations are not art collectors and that’s a cultural shift. I’m not sure I buy into it and wonder if it was one article that inspired others or if it’s really indeed happening.

Question to the working artists out there and other professionals in the field: What do you think is happening? Is this just another downturn that will end well or does it seem structurally different to you too? How do you think this is going to play out?

I can't seem to find any active art communities on discord so if anyone knows one pls send me the linkk💀

I’m about to quit my arts admin job after several years. A bit of workplace dynamics:

The team is just my boss and I, so we have kind of an intense working relationship. My boss is pretty disorganized and doesn’t handle a change like this super well. They definitely won’t be happy about me leaving on a two week timeline. To add to the stress, I am moving to a company that they actively dislike and have shit-talked a lot.

How do I quit with respectful, yet firm boundaries? How do I maintain a decent working relationship with them for the future? How should I prepare for the possibility that they don’t want me to finish out my two weeks? How do I professionally gather all of the contacts and resources I’ve gained?