Structures & Conditions
Oulu and Trenčín make the title year’s operating logic legible: authority routed through calendars and calls, cultural volume carried across territory and public space, and continuity tested once exceptional time releases its grip.
Industry Mapping
As privately governed mentorship systems consolidate technique, evaluation, community, and market sequencing within a single architecture, graduation becomes less a milestone than a structural threshold—redistributing how legitimacy is stabilized in contemporary art.
Field Notes
After seven years shaping the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá’s international profile, Eugenio Viola will leave in May 2026 following a board decision he links to concerns over working conditions.
Structures & Conditions
France’s €102.7 billion cultural sector is more than an economic milestone. The consolidation of creative industries into a single macroeconomic bloc reshapes bargaining power, internal hierarchy, and the terms of cultural governance.
Field Notes
At Helsinki’s Architecture & Design Museum, Escape to Moominvalley reframes Tove Jansson not as a nostalgic figure, but as a world-builder whose imagined environments trained generations in how to live with others.
Structures & Conditions
When renewable loans replace permanent restitution, expiry becomes the decisive moment—redistributing risk, recalibrating authority, and testing whether circulation can substitute for ownership.
Law & Politics
An edited version of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing appeared in the opening sequence of Italy’s Winter Olympics coverage, prompting parliamentary questions and renewed scrutiny of cultural authorship within Olympic broadcast governance.
Access Learning Lab & Critics Corner
What the inaugural edition installed once the week ended—how “Becoming” operated as governing grammar, how Msheireb functioned as an interface rather than a backdrop, and why the fair’s first closure mattered less as conclusion than as the proof condition for recurrence.
A new French restitution law does not threaten to empty museums. It reveals how deeply institutional authority depends on legal immobility—and what changes when permanence becomes conditional.
As California College of the Arts prepares to close as an independent institution, its final years reveal a widening gap between cultural vitality and institutional survivability.
How historic houses regulate access, allocate attention, and redistribute authority—reframing the rise of home-based exhibitions not as an alternative to institutional power, but as its reconfiguration.
How confidence operates as an institutional resource in contemporary art—stabilizing judgment under pressure while quietly displacing sustained perception.
How interpretive systems in museums function as institutional infrastructure, shaping authority, legibility, and the conditions under which judgment and perception are allowed to occur.
After overseeing the New Museum’s transformation and expansion, Lisa Phillips will retire in April 2026, following the institution’s public reopening.
A framework proposing shared language for understanding responsibility, authorship, and governance in digital art systems shaped by automation.
The New Museum will reopen in March 2026 with an OMA-designed expansion that doubles its footprint and reshapes its Bowery campus.
An examination of creative pedagogy as a psychological system, tracing how ideals of iteration, critique, and “learning to see” presuppose specific temperamental capacities while quietly shaping who persists within art education.
A critical examination of how personality stability challenges the art world’s belief in endless formation, adaptability, and transformation—and how development narratives quietly function as mechanisms of selection.
At its twentieth edition, Art Dubai shifts from expansion to orchestration. Rather than staging novelty, the fair coordinates modernism, emergence, and digital practice as a temporal system—testing whether time itself can function as cultural infrastructure.