Driftwood Beasts and the Collector Temptation

Welcome to The Daily Art Download—your daily update on all of the art world news you need to know… I'm your host Percival Snortworthy.
It is Sunday, February twenty-second, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.

Artnet News takes us into the world of sculptor James Doran-Webb, who makes animal sculptures out of driftwood. The piece, titled “How James Doran-Webb Carves Creatures Out of Driftwood,” links his work to Gladwell and Patterson and also mentions Peter Wileman. From there, it focuses on the basics of his process: he collects driftwood and turns it into creature forms through carving and assembly. The appeal is seeing a rough, weathered material become something recognizable and deliberate, with the original wood grain and irregular shapes still visible in the finished animal. It’s a reminder that for some artists, the hunt for the right material is part of the practice, and the final sculpture keeps the shoreline’s history embedded in every piece.

Artnet News also looks at the market side of things with “Can Performance Art Win Over a New Generation of Collectors?” The article’s premise is straightforward: performance art has been sellable for decades, but galleries now see new potential in attracting Gen Z collectors. The story frames this as a question of how something live and time-based gets translated into a collectible format, and why that translation might appeal to younger buyers right now. It highlights that galleries are thinking strategically about positioning performance for a new audience, not treating it as a niche sideshow but as a category with real commercial promise. The big tension the article points to is the same one collectors always face with performance: what, exactly, is the object of ownership when the work is an event?

Across the arts press, ARTnews.com reports the death of Jasmine Little at 41. The headline describes her as an artist who “Painted Lush Still Lifes and Sculpted Etched Ceramics,” and the piece keeps that focus—on her work in painting and in ceramics with etched surfaces. Rather than turning her practice into a single label, the article emphasizes the range implied by those two bodies of work: still lifes that lean into lushness, and ceramic sculpture where surface and mark-making matter. It’s an obituary that situates her through what viewers would have encountered most directly—images and objects—and it underscores how much of an artist’s identity lives in those repeated choices: genre, medium, and the tactile commitment of making.

Finally, Hyperallergic’s “The de Sades Among Us” is presented as a wide-ranging newsletter-style roundup. The description attached to the piece flags the topics it moves through: “The seeds of evil that brought us Epstein,” “blatant censorship at the University of North Texas,” “the problem with wall labels,” and “a Black Medieval angel of love.” The throughline is how power gets exercised and justified—sometimes through overt restriction, sometimes through the quieter ways institutions frame what can be said or seen. And it doesn’t stay purely bleak: that last reference, to a Black Medieval angel of love, signals the kind of corrective attention Hyperallergic often brings to what art history leaves out, or what institutions fail to foreground.

Links to all four stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for another download of what matters in art, right now. Chinga la migra