Collectors Unboxed, Stained-Glass Uproar at Notre-Dame
Today's Stories
- Jean-Marc Bottazzi on why good collecting is not about 'ticking boxes' — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- Claire Tabouret’s Stained-Glass Windows for Notre-Dame Divide French Society, with a Legal Threat Looming — ARTnews.com
- Whitney Biennial, Can You Hear Us? — Hyperallergic
Full Transcript
It is Sunday, March twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
Today’s first stop is the collector psyche, with The Art Newspaper profiling Jean-Marc Bottazzi, a Japanese bond trader based in Hong Kong after a stint in Tokyo. He says he grew up “without much money, in a cultural desert near Lyon,” and that his younger brother—painter Guillaume Bottazzi—sparked his love of looking and buying. His collection is around one thousand works, with deep holdings in abstraction and conceptual photography from Western Europe, the US, and East Asia, including Robert Motherwell and Simon Hantaï. From Japan, he favors Gutai-linked artists like Kazuo Shiraga, and pioneers like Ei-Q, including camera-less photographic works. Bottazzi says good collecting isn’t “ticking off boxes,” and points to his 100+ works by the 96-year-old A-Yo; he was a key lender to A-Yo’s monographic exhibition at M+.
Across the Channel, art, heritage, and politics collide at Notre-Dame de Paris. ARTnews reports that Claire Tabouret’s proposed stained-glass windows have sparked a “stained-glass quarrel,” with six 19th-century windows by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc slated for replacement. Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric and floral grisailles were installed during his restoration of the cathedral between 1844 and 1864, and the new plan—announced in late 2023 by President Emmanuel Macron, in agreement with Laurent Ulrich, the Archbishop of Paris—casts the swap as a “contemporary gesture.” From eight finalists, Tabouret’s figurative Pentecost designs were selected in late 2024 and are being translated into stained glass at the Atelier Simon-Marq. Bernard Blistène said Tabouret and the atelier are “ardently working in Reims,” aiming for completion and installation by the end of 2026—if a court fight doesn’t derail it, with Sites & Monuments ready to challenge any permit to remove the existing windows.
Staying in the United States, Hyperallergic’s newsletter “Whitney Biennial, Can You Hear Us?” frames a bigger argument about art and activism right now. Senior editor Valentina Di Liscia points readers to Steven Weinberg’s comic offering tips from artists and writers on making a protest sign for “No Kings marches,” and highlights Ed Woodham—founder of Art in Odd Places—on how social justice frameworks can be absorbed by profit-making entities, including a workshop at the School of Visual Arts about identifying predatory patterns and how to “slip quietly through systems of oversight.” In the same issue, Hyperallergic Editor-in-Chief Hakim Bishara takes aim at the 2026 Whitney Biennial, opening with a provocation: if you “landed from Mars” and walked into the show, would you be able to tell the country is “teetering on the precipice of fascism?” The roundup also notes that painter Pat Steir has died at 87.
That’s the download for today. Links to all three stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use.