Museum Power Plays and a Shaky Art Market

A new report is raising the kind of museum-world question that makes everyone sit up straighter: who gets to decide what appears in a catalogue? Artnet News reports that London’s Victoria and Albert Museum removed content from exhibition catalogues after requests from Chinese censors, according to a Guardian report. The V&A agreed to remove images of historic maps and a photograph of Vladimir Lenin from two catalogues after they were flagged by Chinese censors. The issue is tied to printing: institutions including Tate and the British Museum work with printers in China and must comply with Beijing’s General Administration of Press and Publication standards. The V&A has described the edits as “minor,” but critics like Sam Dunning of U.K.-China Transparency and Jessica Ní Mhainín of Index on Censorship warned about the wider pattern and the risks of self-censorship.

Staying with big institutional news, Los Angeles County Museum of Art is preparing to bring its permanent collection back into public view after seven years, inside the new David Geffen Galleries designed by Peter Zumthor. The Art Newspaper describes east-facing windows that look out to the La Brea Tar Pits and a building that stretches across Wilshire Boulevard, connecting parts of the campus. The David Geffen Galleries are the largest and final element of a 20-plus year capital project: a seven hundred twenty dollars million building owned by Los Angeles County, with a one hundred fifty dollars million pledge announced by David Geffen in 2017 and other major contributions, including from Elaine Wynn and Steve Tisch. LACMA’s Michael Govan says the museum will rotate objects from its one hundred fifty thousand-piece collection to create new connections across continents and eras—all visible on one floor.

Artnet News also had a headline-grabbing update from the fair circuit: Art Dubai is downsizing dramatically as war reshapes plans. The report describes a revised format for the fair’s anniversary edition, with a smaller scale than originally planned. That kind of shift can ripple outward quickly—fairs depend on travel, shipping, and confidence, and when those conditions change, the structure of the event changes with them. The story frames the adjustment as a response to circumstances beyond the art world, showing how an international fair has to rework its plans in real time when the broader region is destabilized. Even without all the usual bells and whistles, the fair’s decisions this year will likely be watched closely as a measure of how cultural events adapt under pressure.

From there, the cultural fallout of conflict comes into sharper focus. The Art Newspaper reports that more than 200 scholars and cultural professionals signed a statement criticizing what they call “irreversible damage” to Iran’s heritage by the United States and Israel, and the statement warns the actions may give rise to violations of international law under the 1954 Hague Convention. The statement, provided to the Society for Iranian Archaeology, says responsibility also lies with states that fail to condemn and restrain violations. The article says US-Israeli strikes began on 28 February and are currently halted as part of a ceasefire; Iran’s forensic chief is cited as saying more than three thousand people were killed. The statement also claims more than 130 registered Unesco and national monuments and museums were damaged. Mehrnoush Soroush of the University of Chicago described frustration with the lack of decisive action, while Unesco pointed to prior statements expressing “deep concern.”

Back in the United States, Hyperallergic has news for researchers, teachers, and anyone who has ever fallen into an O’Keeffe rabbit hole: the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe has launched a free online platform, Access O’Keeffe, digitizing Barbara Buhler Lynes’s definitive catalogue raisonné from 1999. Lynes personally examined two thousand twenty nine works for that publication, and now the digital tool lets anyone browse through images of more than two thousand works, including paintings, handwritten letters, and early sketches held across institutions and private collections worldwide. Users can sort by color, medium, and theme, and the platform includes updated provenance and exhibition information as works have changed hands since 1999. Liz Neely, the museum’s curator of Digital Experience, said the idea was conceived a decade ago. The museum also navigated a funding disruption when a two hundred forty three thousand five hundred seventy dollars IMLS grant disappeared, then was restored after a lawsuit by attorneys general.

Now to the art-tech business desk: ARTnews reports that Beowolff Capital is bringing Artsy and Artnet under the same ownership, consolidating two major online art platforms across data, media, auctions, and e-commerce. The companies say they’ll continue to operate as separate brands while combining infrastructure and data. The move follows Beowolff’s acquisition of a controlling stake in Artsy and its decision last year to take Artnet private. Jeffrey Yin, who has led Artsy since 2024, will be chief executive of the combined company, with Beowolff founder Andrew Wolff as chairman. ARTnews notes the broader consolidation trend in art tech, pointing to last year’s Artlogic–ArtCloud merger. Together, Artsy and Artnet say they reach more than 7 million monthly users in more than 190 countries, with an early focus on tools for small- and mid-size businesses.

Museum programming at ARTnews takes us to a very specific, very dramatic setting: the Metropolitan Museum of Art will stage an Alberto Giacometti show in the Temple of Dendur this summer, a rare use of that space for an exhibition. Titled “Giacometti in the Temple of Dendur,” it will include 17 sculptures—14 from the Fondation Giacometti and the rest from the Met’s collection. The Met’s modern art wing is currently closed for renovation and expansion, and the show is framed as a major occasion that also links the distant past with the modern era. Starting June 12, Giacometti’s Walking Woman (I) (1932) will appear in the offering hall, and Women of Venice (1956) will be shown on the terrace. The Temple of Dendur dates to around 10 BCE and went on view at the Met in 1978. The show is a co-production involving Aude Semat, Stephanie D’Alessandro, and Fondation Giacometti curator Emilie Bouvard.

ARTnews also notes that Time magazine’s 2026 list of the 100 most influential people includes artist Cao Fei and photojournalist Lynsey Addario. Time editor in chief Sam Jacobs writes that there’s “no single metric” for influence, and that selections are led by the stories shaping the world each year. Cao Fei’s background in the story includes a retrospective at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in 2021 and solo exhibitions at MAXXI in Rome in 2021, SCAD Museum of Art in 2024, the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2024, Centre Pompidou in 2019, and MoMA PS1 in 2016, plus appearances in the Venice Biennale in 2015 and Sharjah Biennial in 2023. For Time, Miuccia Prada writes about Cao Fei’s ability to analyze modernity. Addario’s work has appeared in the New York Times and National Geographic, and she received a 2009 MacArthur grant and Pulitzer Prizes in 2009 and 2023.

On the market-and-museums front, ARTnews looks at the Met’s upcoming exhibition “Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous,” which the museum frames as a “story of equals.” Set to open in October, it brings together 120 works from more than 80 lenders, with a stated focus on Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner “on their own terms” while also placing them in relation to each other. ARTnews contrasts that with the market reality: Pollock’s auction record is sixty one dollars million, while Krasner’s is eleven dollars million, set at Sotheby’s in 2019 by The Eye is the First Circle (1960). The article includes comments from Saara Pritchard, now a partner at Fair Warning, about buyers seeking “a colorful Krasner under three dollars million.” It also traces market efforts tied to Kasmin’s representation arrangement through the Pollock-Krasner Foundation beginning in 2016, and notes how significant sales have happened privately, according to Pritchard and Christie’s deputy chairman Sara Friedlander.

Finally, a street-level protest story from Hyperallergic: “Boycott the Bezos Met Gala” posters have been wheatpasted across New York City ahead of the 2026 event. The posters target the gala’s lead sponsors, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez—who have also been appointed honorary co-chairs—and they criticize Amazon’s alleged exploitation of warehouse and delivery labor, plus the company’s links to Immigration and Customs Enforcement through Amazon Web Services. The designs come from the British political activism campaign Everyone Hates Elon, which made them available as free downloadable files and said it crowd-sourced over ten thousand dollars in a week for a cross-city sweep. One design includes a urine-filled plastic water bottle, referencing long-standing concerns about Amazon delivery drivers, and another depicts a tear gas canister with the line “brought to you by the firm that powers ICE.” The article notes it’s unclear how effective a boycott will be, and recalls that in 2024, dozens of pro-Palestine protestors were arrested outside the event.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for another round of art world headlines and context you can actually use. Chinga la migra

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