Art World
We Hit Publish on Thousands of Stories in 2024. Here Are Some of Our Favorites
These stories reminded us why art still matters.
Caroline Goldstein
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In 2024, we published nearly 4,000 stories. That’s 4,000 glimpses into the art world’s triumphs, challenges, and transformations—moments that made headlines, sparked debates, and gave us pause for thought in this fast-moving world.
Our writers brought you everything: from bold investigations and market shakeups to unexpected revivals and voices reclaiming their place in history. Here, we’ve gathered a selection of our favorites—the stories that reminded us why art still matters. Before we step into 2025, let’s take a moment to look back.
How the Provocative ‘Saltburn’ Is Renewing Interest in a 400-Year Old French Ceramicist
By Eileen Kinsella, January 4, 2024.
Barry Keoghan in Saltburn (2023). Courtesy of MGM and Amazon Studios. © Amazon Content Services LLC.
It’s a safe bet that, up until a few weeks ago, most of the world was not familiar with the word Palissy—the name behind a centuries-old series of French ceramics known for their wildly colorful palettes inspired by plants and flowers, often affixed with three-dimensional casts of crabs, snakes, fish, frogs, and lizards, to name a few creatures.
But the viral success of the newly released Saltburn, a gothic, intrigue-riven Talented Mr. Ripley-esque tale set in the English countryside, is quickly changing that. The class-skewering movie involves a wealthy Oxford student named Felix Catton, played by Jacob Elordi, who takes pity on a less fortunate student with the Dickens-esque name of Oliver Quick, played by Barry Keoghan, and invites him to Saltburn, his family estate, for the summer.
So, what is Palissy’s significance in the film? A Palissy plate, which we only see in a lightening quick shot, is the focus of a small but important subplot in which Quick first uses it to boast that he knows his Palissy.
“Do you mean Bernard Palissy? The 16th-Century Huguenot ceramicist?” Quick piped up when the plate is brought up.
“You know him?” the family’s patriarch, Sir James Catton, asked incredulously.
Artist Ryan Trecartin Built His Career on the Internet. Now, He’s Decided It’s Pretty Boring
By Annie Armstrong, January 21, 2024
Ryan Trecartin, Whether Line, 2019 (film still)
Commissioned by Fondazione Prada
Courtesy of Sprüth Magers and Morán Morán
© Ryan Trecartin
It’s a good time for Ryan Trecartin to make a comeback. The last time we heard from him, he had been making a splash as the young experimental artist taking internet culture by the horns through his boisterous and visionary films. Since his most recent missive Whether Line came out in 2019, Trecartin had been quiet, living in rural Ohio with his creative partner Lizzie Fitch. Now, there are rumblings of a return for Trecartin, as he recently switched up his gallery representation from Regen Projects to Morán Morán. We can anticipate a solo show at the gallery early next year. While he’s working on it, Artnet caught up with the artist to see where his head’s been.
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“The way everything is so algorithmic is no longer funny; it’s just depressing—these little trappings and prisons that are being generated that we reinforce just because they work. It’s just boring! It’s not interesting. I was never really pro or anti. But now it’s like, “Well, where’s the invention and where’s the experiment and the play at?” It’s just capitalism now. Which I guess it always was, but there was this moment where it felt like it could potentially not be.”
The Estate of Stuart Sutcliffe, Artist and Original Beatles Member, Is Selling Its Entire Collection
By Min Chen, January 29, 2024
Stuart Sutcliffe in Hamburg, Germany, 1961. Photo courtesy of Pauline Sutcliffe, supplied by Pacificcoastnews.com.
For more than two decades, Diane Vitale has helped steward the estate of artist and original member of the Beatles, Stuart Sutcliffe. At its heart is a collection that numbers hundreds of objects, comprising artworks, letters, notes, photographs, memorabilia, and other ephemera. “It really goes on and on,” she said of its contents, which document Sutcliffe’s life and work in vivid detail. But now, Vitale is ready to let it all go.
The Sutcliffe estate is currently seeking a buyer to acquire its entire collection—a trove that doesn’t just capture an abstract artist in bloom, but logs the formation of one of the world’s most beloved bands. It promises to be a goldmine for art as much as music historians, if they’ll bite.
“To be very honest with you, I’d love to give that responsibility to someone else,” Vitale told me over the phone, speaking about the management of a repository that consumes most of her days.
The collection was begun and built by Sutcliffe’s younger sister, Pauline Sutcliffe, over the decades following his untimely death in the 1960s. Her main goal, Vitale emphasized, was to establish her brother as an artist apart from the Beatles. This, she accomplished with exhibitions of his work, the 2001 book The Beatles’ Shadow, and Sutcliffe’s inclusion in Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Pauline died in 2019. Since then, Vitale has been single-handedly administering the estate as CEO and fulfilling Pauline’s other wish: to keep the collection intact. It remains top of mind as she embarks on its sale.
“I’d like to keep it together,” she said. “That was Pauline’s dream from the very beginning.”
The Exquisite Life of Photographer David Seidner
By William Van Meter, February 29, 2024
Portrait of photographer David Seidner by Simon Bocanegra
In the mid ’70s, Adelle Lutz managed the front of what she calls the “family restaurant.” Mr. Chow in Beverly Hills was like the Studio 54 of Chinese cuisine, a glitzy convergence of all creative vectors. Lutz’s sister, Tina Chow, was married to the artist and restaurateur Michael Chow. “Everyone came in from old Hollywood to the young flashier Hollywood. I was in the catbird seat,” Lutz recalled. “I was in a position where I could observe everyone and see how they treated each other and pick and choose who I wanted to know.”
One customer stood out: a teenage David Seidner, who would regularly come in by himself. “At the time, he was very gangly and uncoordinated. He would become much more elegant,” she remembered. “He was awkward. I don’t know how we started having our conversations.” Before long, she started posing for him.
“The first photo I remember doing with him I was wearing his mother’s silk dress and lying down in their driveway,” Lutz said. “I remember it was, ‘No makeup! Only put Vaseline on your eyelids.’ And I’m going, ‘What? Why is this kid telling me I have to lie down in the driveway? It just all seemed wrong.’ And then… he took these beautiful photos. That’s when he was starting to do those segmented images, the composites.”
“He was incredibly gifted and mature for his age, and I’m not just saying that because he was my brother,” Jaime Seidner said. “He was into photography from a very early age, and he had drug me with him to a darkroom that you could go to and pay by the hour.”
Seidner became intertwined with Lutz’s family for the remainder of his life and photographed the sisters multiple times. “I still come across these little notes and postcards that David would send to my parents from India and images,” Lutz says. “He was generous with his work. David wasn’t just a talented photographer. He wanted to have an exquisite life. His writing was very precise, very beautiful. His interiors were unlike anyone else’s. He could find the one great piece out of a total snarl of junk. He was methodical. He loved perfection. He had an eye and a rigor and an appreciation of classics. You could see that in his photography, the way he would have people pose, it tended to be very classical—like statues.”
‘It’s Not a Soft Landing’: Contemporary Art Prices Come Crashing Down. Is This the End?
By Katya Kazakina, March 22, 2024
Ed Ruscha, The End (1991). Photo: artnet auctions.
The fog of flipping is lifting, and the emerging landscape is littered with casualties.
Just look at any number of contemporary art auctions that occurred this month. “Contemporary Curated” at Sotheby’s on March 1: 82 percent of lots sold (after 22 lots were withdrawn). “New Now” at Phillips on March 12: 72 percent sold by lot (after 12 withdrawals). “Postwar to Present” at Christie’s on March 13: 73 percent sold by lot (with 8 lots withdrawn). And much of what did sell went for well below previous highs.
“There’s a bit of a carnage in the market at the moment,” one collector told me, as we reviewed the results. “Many things are not selling at all or selling for a fraction of what they used to.”
A glaring example: Emmanuel Taku’s painting Sisters in Pink, which I featured in a column about the soaring prices for emerging African artists two years ago.
The painting first hit the auction block in 2021, the year it was painted, after a couple of rapid-fire flips. It fetched a whooping $189,000 against a top estimate of $35,000.
Its new owner had no such luck this month: Sisters in Pink hammered at just $8,000 against an estimate of $10,000 to $15,000.
Let that sink in: Someone who bought the painting for $189,000 sold it for $8,000 three years later. No, I am not missing a zero.
That stark result got me thinking about how people in the art industry think about prices, myself included.
Why Asian Artists Are More Visible Than Ever in Venice
By Vivienne Chow, April 12, 2024
Lap-See Lam with dragon tail by Lu Guangzheng for “The Altersea Opera.” Photo: Mattias Lindbäck/Moderna Museet.
A one-day event set to take place at the highly anticipated 60th Venice Biennale on Saturday, April 20—the first day the event will be open to the public—sums up a major feature of this edition’s art extravaganza: a major presence of Asian artists.
Titled “A World of Many Worlds,” the event is presented by the Asia Forum and the London-based Asymmetry Art Foundation, which also supports the collateral event with the Bagri Foundation. It will explore the broad topic of “pluriversal possibilities of a global Asia.” According to Michèle Ruo Yi Landolt, director of Asymmetry Art Foundation and one of the event’s co-organizers, the assembly is based loosely on a traditional conference model “but interjected by performances, screenings, and interventions.” It features a stellar line-up of artists and arts practitioners of Asian heritage will table an opportunity to “reconsider what it means when we talk about Asia and all these different perspectives on Asia.”
Perhaps there’s no better occasion to platform a much-needed conversation about Asia than at this year’s Venice Biennale—a typically Eurocentric, or at least Western-focused, event—in which a noticeable number of artists who are based in Asia or of Asian descent are included. Across the city, collateral events also feature an exciting lineup of shows and exhibitions that aren’t just presenting big names, but also shining a spotlight on artistic talents from regions that have long been overlooked and underrepresented. There’s also an abundant number of exhibitions starring Asian artists staged across the City of Water outside the biennial’s official program.
The Vatican’s Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Is Set Inside a Women’s Prison. Who Is It Really For?
By Naomi Rea, April 18, 2024
A mural by artist Maurizio Cattelan is seen outside Giudecca Women’s Prison hosting the Holy See pavilion during the pre-opening of the 60th Venice Biennale art show, on April 18, 2024 in Venice. Photo by Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images.
As I surrendered my mobile phone to a police officer at the women’s detention center on Giudecca island, and submitted to being scanned with a handheld metal detector, I felt suddenly grateful for the freedom of the press. I have no qualms stating that I recoiled when I heard that the Vatican was using a functioning women’s prison as the backdrop for its pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
For all of the national posturing and virtue signaling that typically pervade the biennale, the idea felt more than usually grotesque. While art can, of course, bring about positive enrichment to incarcerated people, the limited autonomy and agency they have over their lives raises ethical concerns about the dynamics in play here. As if involuntarily submitting to state power wasn’t enough, one of the world’s most influential art organizations and one of its largest religious institutions is in the mix.
Performance Optimisation: Are Algorithms Changing Performance Art?
By Kate Brown, June 17, 2024
Göksu Kunak’s work VENUS by Jiri Abendt
Meta’s Instagram has become the place for connecting and succeeding in the art industry, our very own LinkedIn for artists and all the curators who find them and show them, the dealers who represent them, and the collectors who buy them. By now, the art world is well into its DM-era, and it is also growing into its reel-era. But as the UX of the program has evolved, the image-loving platform has tipped its hand in favor of video content. And while this is showing itself to be boom time for performance art, it comes at a cost as our view and collective memory of dynamic pieces are increasingly fragmented by shorts and edits, and the artwork is also beginning to change.
We are in a feedback loop in which social media edifies and dictates taste. In a time of strained attention, where every next post in the feed threatens to be a succession plan for what came before it, content makers (in the case of the art world, artists, the places that host them, and the professionals that orbit them) are looking to land on the grid and stick there.
Inside the 20th-Century French Psychiatric Hospital That Saw the Birth of Art Brut
By Annikka Olsen, July 23, 2024
Romain Vigouroux, Francesc Tosquelles on the Roof of a Building at the Saint-Alban Psychiatric Hospital, Holding a sculpture by Auguste Forestier (1947). Collection of Family Ou-Rabah Tosquelles.
The term art brut—meaning “raw art”—was first coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet in the 1940s, broadly referring to art created by those entirely outside the art world’s sphere of influence. The inspiration behind Dubuffet’s term, however, has largely been overlooked—but can be traced to one of the most fascinating moments in art history when geopolitics, art, and psychiatry converged.
This specific moment is the subject of “Francesc Tosquelles: Avant-Garde Psychiatry and the Birth of Art Brut,” presently hosted by the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM) in New York, the traveling exhibition’s only stop in the United States, on view through August 18, 2024. Co-organized by the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, the show centers on the psychiatric hospital in Saint-Alban-sur-Limagnole in France, which was helmed by the Catalan psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles beginning in 1940.
“Marisol Reclaims Her Spot in the Pop Art Canon at a Vast New Show“
By Sarah Cascone, July 23, 2024
Harry Mattison, Portrait of Marisol, December 1976 (1976). Photo ©Harry Mattison. Digital Image courtesy of Bill Katz
An exhibition six years in the making has come home at long last to Western New York, with the arrival of “Marisol: A Retrospective” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
It’s the largest show of its kind for the mononymic Venezuelan American artist, who grew up between her birthplace of Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. Born María Sol Escobar, Marisol (1930–2016) was a darling of the Pop art movement.Embraced by the art establishment—in 1968 alone she was in both the Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, West Germany—Marisol also achieved mainstream fame, with more press than Andy Warhol in the 1960s. But she retreated from the New York art world and fell into obscurity.Like too many women artists, she was basically written out of art history. “Marisol: A Retrospective” looks to right that wrong.
A Neo-Rococo Movement Is On the Rise—But What Does It All Mean?
By Katie White, August 16, 2024
Flora Yukhnovich, Folies Bergère (2024) © Flora Yukhnovich. Courtesy the Artist and Victoria-Miro.
When facing the guillotine In December of 1793, Madame du Barry, the last mistress of King Louis XV, infamously made her final request, “Please, Mr. Executioner, just a little moment more!”
Du Barry, who was born Jeanne Bécu, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress who, as a courtesan, rose to the highest ranks of the French court, seemed to encapsulate, in those words, the fleeting pleasures of the Rococo age: Facing death just two months after her courtly rival Marie Antoinette’s grisly demise, du Barry seemed only to want the party to last a bit longer.
And the Rococo had been quite the party. Almost three centuries later, the luscious trappings of the era—sinuous ornaments, pale pinks, courtly paramours, and primroses—still captivate the cultural imagination. Last year, in 2023, Jeanne du Barry, a film about this infamous mistress, was somewhat controversially released in France, starring director and actor Maïwenn in the titular role, and Johnny Depp starring as Louis XV. At Sotheby’s, auctions of Marie Antoinette’s furniture in 2023 and her jewels in 2018 shattered presale estimates. Not to mention, the decapitated queen had a scandalizing cameo at the Olympic opening ceremonies just a few weeks back.
By Jo Lawson-Tancred, October 6, 2024
Samia Halaby in her studio. Photo: Lara Atallah.
The international art world was shaken at the start of 2024 when an imminent retrospective dedicated to the Palestinian-American artist and scholar Samia Halaby was abruptly canceled by Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. The museum cited “safety concerns,” presumably in reference to heightened tensions around Israel’s war in Gaza. The decision was widely condemned, with PEN America branding it “an alarming affront to free expression.”
The exhibition was to be the 87-year-old artist’s first solo show at a U.S. institution, recognizing her achievements not only as a well-established abstract painter but as a bold pioneer in the then-fledgling field of computer art. No matter her medium, Halaby has always been clear about one thing: “I am an abstract painter by strong persuasion. It is the way forward for exploration in the art of picture making.”
A Trump Win Could Reshape the Cultural Sector. How Is the Art World Preparing?
By Brian Boucher, October 21, 2024
Former President Donald Trump tries his hand serving food at a drive-thru window during a campaign stop at a McDonald’s in Feasterville-Trevose, PA on Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. (Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
When Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election in 2016, many in the art world were taken by surprise. Trump had talked little about the cultural sector during the campaign, but his administration would have profound effects on it. Right after assuming office, he placed a ban on visitors from a number of majority-Muslim countries that blocked entry for artists in every discipline and drew strenuous protests from U.S. artists, museums, and other culture workers. Later, he pursued attempts to eliminate federal culture funding. Anti-Trump art and demonstrations proliferated.
Less than a month out from the next election, polls suggest that the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is tied. Art types are doing many of the same things they did eight years ago—and four years ago. Star artists from Jeff Koons to Amy Sherald and Hank Willis Thomas donated works to help fund pro-Harris efforts, and artist Brian Andrew Whiteley’s Trump tombstone has come out of storage.
How will the arts be affected if Trump wins? Given the former television star’s wildly unpredictable nature, it is hard to know exactly what to expect. The Republican Party’s official platform has no mention of culture, nor does Project 2025, a Trump administration wishlist put together by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The Trump campaign’s press office did not respond to a request for comment.
However, a few lessons can be gleaned from the past.
Unlocking the Secrets of Art That Gives You Chills andWhy Only Some Artworks Give You Chills—And Most Just Don’t
By Ben Davis, October 25, 2024 and October 28, 2024
Olivia Rodrigo performs at the Olivia Rodrigo “GUTS” World Tour at the Kia Forum on August 14, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Billboard via Getty Images)
“A rush of emotion”: The “aesthetic chills” effect seems very tied to time-based media. To have the experience of revelation or of a burst of new feeling that typically triggers a chill, it helps to be working in a medium where patterns are built up, so that they can be broken in an exciting way. And this is just easier to do in songs or stories, and harder with single images or objects.
“Connected with intense personal feeling”: Art’s ideal of prestige still associates emotional restraint with high status. More subtly, not all types of feeling are equally conducive to chills. In particular, the experiences that museums are best adapted to—contemplation, contentment, delight—tend not to be associated with the quick movement between different emotional states associated with chills, because they are equilibrate.
“Presented in a novel way”: Contemporary art has considerably diversified in form, and now does feature time-based media, from video to performance to sound art like Forty Part Motet. However, that very diversity may well mean it suffers from too much novelty, not too little. It is no surprise if an artist shifts styles radically between or even within works. There is much that is positive in this freedom—but you can’t have the experience of rupture that triggers a chill if there are no rules in the first place.
“Found in an unexpected place”: Wall labels often fundamentally serve as spoilers, telling you the right thing to think, so you never have the experience of being productively unmoored (part of why people are so fixated on spoiler warnings in film or TV is because you might have a potential chill ruined). It is possible to have an unexpected experience in a museum—in fact, I often say that the best museum method is to wander, find one thing that unexpectedly seizes you, and just stay with that feeling. But in practice, the art experience is often more about “demonstrating your ability to recognize things already understood to be important” than having a personal and unexpected encounter with those same things.
Bananas for Bitcoin? What the Recent Crypto Rally Means for the Art Market
By Margaret Carrigan, November 16, 2024
Artist Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian on view at Sotheby’s. Photo: John Nacion/Getty Images.
Crypto is having a renaissance. Let’s recap some of the rapid developments of the last few days:
– The price of Bitcoin surged to an all-time high this week, exceeding $90,000, and rising by more than a third since Donald Trump’s re-election last week. (Yes, that was only a week ago.)
– The global crypto market topped $3 trillion for the first time by Thursday. (Yes, that’s a pandemic-era high.)
– Dogecoin, Elon Musk’s favorite meme coin, rose 150 percent in value since election day and further still after Trump tapped him and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a new advisory group called the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge for short. (Yes, seriously.)
This turn of events is the latest in a boom-and-bust cycle that saw Bitcoin below $20,000 last year, in the depths of a so-called “crypto winter” that cast a stultifying chill over the art world’s growing NFT market. A report published in August by NFTevening said that since the dramatic downturn in 2023, the average NFT owner has experienced a 44.5 percent loss on their investment and 95 percent of NFT works are considered “dead.” Could there be a crypto rebirth in the art trade on the horizon?
Streetwise: Artist Peter Doig on the Thrilling Show He’s Organized at Gagosian in New York
By Andrew Russeth, November 22, 2024
Balthus, The Street, 1933. © 2024 Balthus/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York
When the art dealer Larry Gagosian asked Peter Doig if he might be interested in doing something together, the famed painter responded with “a bit of a challenge,” Doig told me one recent afternoon. Would it be possible to borrow Balthus’s infamous 1933 painting The Street from the Museum of Modern Art? If so, he would organize a group show featuring the piece.
Doig was perched on a rolling chair in Gagosian’s Uptown Manhattan gallery as he relayed this a few weeks ago, and that astonishing painting was hanging on the wall in front of him. The show he ended up assembling was almost complete. Art handlers were awaiting a few more deliveries, and Doig’s wife, Parinaz Mogadassi, who runs the cloak-and-dagger gallery Tramps, was taking in the exhibition, as was Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, where the artist will show next year.
The Balthus is strange and unsettling, a Paris scene with nine figures, each lost in their own psychic world. A man in white carries a plank through its center, a besuited boy marches toward us, and a chef (a mannequin?) wearing a toque stands sentinel in the distance. Balthus made it “during Surrealism,” Doig told me, almost whispering. “He’s not really a Surrealist, but maybe he’s more surreal than a Surrealist.”
Artists and Organizers of the Planned Gaza Biennale on What Their Initiative Means
By Adam Schrader, November 27, 2024
An installation view of work by Aya Juha in her studio in North Gaza. Photo courtesy of the Forbidden Museum
“There are all these artists in Gaza who are working,” Andre Ibrahim recalled. “So, a network started to develop to connect artists in Gaza, which eventually led to the project. Calling it a ‘biennale’ during the early planning phase was the best way to describe what we were trying to undertake collectively. The term was debated for a bit and it sort of stuck. It has evolved from there into a real biennale with more than 50 artists.”
Organizers consider the biennale to have begun, even if they do not yet have institutional partners to show the work inside Gaza. Ibrahim said participating artists are more interested in having their work reach a wider audience in Europe or the United States, and he’s leading the efforts to find the biennale a home, seeking institutional partners both at home and abroad. The initiative is raising $90,000 to fund the artists.
“It is a message to the art world that there are artists working under unbelievable circumstances, facing obstacles and the harshest conditions, and still creating work, talking about art, teaching art, and running workshops with kids,” Ibrahim said.
