Pop Icons, Print Power, and Culture Wars
Today's Stories
Full Transcript
It is Monday, March thirtieth, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
If you’ve been watching Asia’s art scene lately, Artnet frames it as a fast-moving mix of fairs, galleries, and institutions. ART OnO is set to return to SETEC in Seoul from April 3 to 5, with a VIP preview on April 2, marking its third edition and bringing commercial galleries together with non-profit institutions and museums—plus exhibitors expanding in from Tanzania, Romania, and Finland. Art Basel Hong Kong also returned this week, with packed aisles and major sales, even as buyers take their time amid a cautious market and geopolitical unrest. Highlights include Pablo Picasso’s *Le peintre et son modèle* (1964) at Bastian for about €3.5 million, and multiple seven-figure placements by David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, and others.
Across the Pacific, New York’s spring print season is getting a spotlight at the IFPDA Print Fair, returning to the Park Avenue Armory April 9–12. The fair brings together 80 exhibitors from Singapore to Stockholm, spanning 500 years of drawings, prints, and editions, and it arrives as the organization rebrands as the International Fine Prints & Drawings Association. Longtime members including Hill-Stone, David Tunick, Inc., and William Shearburn Gallery are expanding into more master drawings. New exhibitors include drawing dealers Mireille Mosler and Jill Newhouse Gallery, bringing Edward Hopper’s intimate charcoal *High Noon (Study)* (1949), one of only five known drawings tied to his painting *High Noon* made the same year. Talks include Julie Mehretu in conversation with curator Susan Dackerman on Saturday, April 11.
Staying in the United States, “The MAGA Theory of Art” argues that it’s a mistake to imagine fascism as inherently sleek or aesthetically refined—and that the more accurate throughline is often farce and kitsch. The essay revisits how critics like Susan Sontag wrote about the allure of Nazi imagery, and how theorists such as Walter Benjamin described fascism as an effort to aestheticize politics. But it stresses that official Nazi art policy ultimately criminalized “degenerate” modernism and favored “Blut und Boden” realism—idyllic landscapes and portraits of ruddy peasants by artists like Werner Peiner and Arthur Kampf—while leaders embraced an ostentatiously folksy style. It then contrasts that history with Trump’s pageantry and media instincts, and turns to film as mass politics, noting Joseph Goebbels’s insistence that all films were political.
That’s today’s download—links to all three stories are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for your next dose of art-world signal through the noise, and until then: Chinga la migra