Biennale Brinkmanship and AI’s Ethical Abyss

The Art Newspaper looks at how museums and art institutions in Shenzhen and Guangzhou are becoming new connectors between Hong Kong and mainland China inside the Greater Bay Area. Since the 1997 handover, integration has been a government priority, but the piece says that since the pandemic, cultural exchange has also been growing more organically. It points to existing players like the Rem Koolhaas–designed Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou and the Tadao Ando–designed He Art Museum in Foshan, which opened in 2020 and has been staging conferences and exhibitions by mainland Chinese and Hong Kong artists. Two more museums are coming to Shenzhen: Tencent’s Róng Museum led by Pi Li, and JD.com’s JD Museum, due in 2027, with Robin Peckham as executive director.

The Art Newspaper reports that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is mounting Raphael: Sublime Poetry, billed as the Met’s—and America’s—first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael (1483–1520). The show runs 29 March through 28 June and includes 237 works, with 33 paintings and 142 drawings by Raphael. Big loans include The Alba Madonna (around 1509–11) from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514–16) from the Musée du Louvre, and studies for The Transfiguration from the Albertina, the Ashmolean, the Rijksmuseum, and the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth. Curator Carmen C. Bambach says she’s countering an “oversaturation” of Raphael’s Madonna imagery by placing it in a wider social and historical context, including objects addressing childbirth and childhood mortality.

The Art Newspaper spotlights British artist Simon Fujiwara’s survey at Mudam Luxembourg (Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean), titled A Whole New World, running 20 March to 23 August. A major new work reimagines Picasso’s Guernica (1937) using Fujiwara’s cartoon character Who the Baer, shown submerged amid bodies, bombs, and drones, with the artist describing it as “Guernica after the battle,” asking what comes after today’s conflicts. The exhibition is laid out like a theme park with different “lands,” which Fujiwara calls a distorted Disneyland connecting themes like porn, disease, and pandemics. Works include Syphilis: A Conquest (2020–23), where he addresses contracting syphilis and includes busts of Goya, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh, and Gauguin, and The Way (2015–26), commemorating Japanese gay porn star Koh Masaki, who died in 2013 aged 29.

The Art Newspaper reports that the French culture ministry blocked the sale of a newly identified drawing by Hans Baldung Grien at the last minute, declaring it a national treasure. The silverpoint portrait of a woman, 15.7cm by 10.4cm, had been set for auction at Drouot Paris with Beaussant Lefèvre on 23 March, estimated at €1.5m to €3m. A decree published 21 March bars it from leaving France for 30 months. Signed with Baldung’s monogram and dated 1517, it depicts Susanna Pfeffinger and has been in the Pfeffinger family for 500 years, discovered during a probate inventory by auctioneer Arthur de Moras. Patrick de Bayser attributed it to Baldung, and Christof Metzger and Dorit Schäfer validated the attribution. The export application filed in November 2025 was rejected, and the auction house suspended the sale while vendors seek a private sale to a French buyer.

Artnet News rounds up art-industry moves, led by word that Art Basel has been quietly planning an expansion that isn’t another fair. A new initiative called the Futurific Institute is set to launch in Basel in 2028 as a large-scale “global ideas festival,” backed by billionaires James and Kathryn Murdoch along with Art Basel’s parent company, MCH Group, aiming to convene figures from art, technology, business, and politics. The same roundup says Art Dubai is postponing its 20th edition by a month amid the escalating war in Iran; it will now run May 14–17 at Madinat Jumeirah, and some international exhibitors have pulled out. Artnet also notes fair and gallery shifts: Liste announced 106 galleries for June 15–21 at Messe Basel, and Brooke Benington closed its Fitzrovia space on March 21, planning an exhibition residency at Amici Studio in Hastings this summer for more ambitious, artist-led projects.

Hyperallergic reviews Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum in New York, where the show’s most famous work is defined as much by its owner as by its maker: “Angelus Novus” (1920), which Walter Benjamin bought in 1921 and later used as the basis for his “Angel of History” passage in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940). The exhibition’s theme is Klee’s political thrust and his search for artistic freedom in the 1930s, but “Angelus Novus” is currently absent—represented by a reproduction—because the original from Jerusalem’s Israel Museum has been delayed due to “current conditions affecting international transport.” The piece contrasts Klee’s Nazi persecution—he was not Jewish but was disparaged as a “Galician Jew,” fled to Switzerland, and was dismissed from his post—with Benjamin’s more precarious exile and suicide in Spain in 1940, questioning how tightly the show binds Klee’s work to Benjamin’s text.

ARTnews tours the Venice Biennale’s newly renovated Central Pavilion in the Giardini, completed ahead of the 2026 edition opening in May. The overhaul cost €31 million and took 16 months, beginning in December 2024, with public funding from the Italian Ministry of Culture’s National Plan for Complementary Investments under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR). The project is also part of the ministry’s “Great Cultural Heritage Attractors” program tied to 22 Biennale-connected Venetian sites. Architect Arianna Laurenzi and engineer Cristiano Frizzele led the work for the Biennale, with consulting teams including BuroMilan’s Massimiliano and Maurizio Milan, plus Fabio Fumagalli, Labics’s Maria Claudia Clemente and Francesco Isidori, and landscape designer Stefano Olivari. Key changes include concealed technical systems, new skylights with motorized shades, and added outdoor altane structures connected to the café and multipurpose areas.

Hyperallergic asks whether there’s an ethical path for AI art, anchored in the exhibition Imaging after Photography at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts in Houston. The essay argues that AI can fuel real innovation when artists engage it critically, and quotes executive director and co-curator Alison Weaver saying, “Technology is not neutral,” because it reflects human bias—and that corporate interests have dominated AI, while artists’ voices need centering. The show is described as a snapshot of seven contemporary artists working through AI’s implications for photography since 2020, making the case for a post-photographic moment where photorealism no longer guarantees truth. The piece emphasizes an ethics-minded approach: artists train algorithms on their own images or on material largely in the public domain. It highlights Sofia Crespo’s works built from Anna Atkins cyanotypes, Joan Fontcuberta’s What Darwin Missed (2024), and Nouf Aljowaysir’s AI interventions into orientalist photographs and mislabeling systems.

Hyperallergic’s Whitney Biennial coverage includes editor-in-chief Hakim Bishara’s view that this year’s edition is “muted, somber, moody,” and that, “barring a few exceptions,” it feels like the Biennial is “hiding from the world today instead of reflecting on it.” The broader roundup also notes a call for applications from the Vilcek Foundation for two hundred thousand dollars in grants to nonprofits uplifting immigrant contributions, with applications due by April 30, 2026. It includes John Yau’s remembrance of Thaddeus Mosley, emphasizing community and what it means to be an artist. In the news items, Hyperallergic reports that Latine artists and cultural institutions are facing a reckoning in the wake of allegations of sexual abuse against labor leader Cesar Chávez, and that Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism has reportedly moved to ban artist and NYC First Lady Rama Duwaji from entering the country.

ARTnews reports that Venice’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, has warned Russia that its pavilion will be shut down if it engages in propaganda at the upcoming biennial. He spoke at the opening of the revamped Central Pavilion and told the Ansa press agency, “If the Russian government were to carry out propaganda, we would be the first to close the pavilion.” Russia is reopening its pavilion for the first time since invading Ukraine four years ago, a move that has polarized the art world. Brugnaro said he is “pro-Ukrainian,” noted Venice has twinned with Odessa, and called Russia “the aggressor,” while also saying art should remain open and the biennial a place for dialogue. ARTnews says the pavilion will present a musical program of folklore and world music with more than 50 musicians, poets, and philosophers, curated by Anastasia Karneeva, according to Putin cultural envoy Mikhail Shvydkoy.

That’s the download for today. Links to every story are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for another quick hit of art-world reality. Chinga la migra

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