Museum Money Games and AI’s New Frontier

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Raphael: Sublime Poetry” didn’t just happen—it took what one New York Old Master dealer, Robert Simon, summed up as “money and power.” Artnet reports the show is the largest U.S. survey of Raphael, bringing together 33 paintings and 142 works on paper, with loans from about 60 public institutions across 11 countries. Carmen Bambach, the Met curator, said it took eight years, and she was juggling research, loan negotiations, and fundraising at once. Her single-spaced wish list ran 68 pages. Major works come from places like the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the Prado, alongside private loans that include Raphael’s two most expensive auction works.

Over in Venice, the Biennale jury has ruled that Israel and Russia won’t be eligible for Golden or Silver Lion prizes this year. Artnet says the jury’s criterion is that any country whose leaders face charges of crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court will be excluded from prize consideration, and that this applies to both nations. The jury—Zoe Butt, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Marta Kuzma, Giovanna Zapperi, and Solange Farkas—linked the decision to the late Koyo Kouoh’s “In Minor Keys” curatorial ethos. The artist representing Israel, Belu-Simion Fainaru, said the policy has “created a hostile and degrading environment” and amounts to discrimination. Separately, the European Union is withdrawing €2 million in funding, affecting the 2028 edition.

In London, The Art Newspaper reports that the sonic investigations non-profit Earshot has been awarded a three-year studio bursary at Gasworks. Earshot was founded by Jordan-born artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and it uses sound in the defense of human and environmental rights. The bursary is backed by the Spanish patron Mercedes Vilardell, and it includes an annual stipend plus monthly studio rent at the south London exhibition and residency space. Abu Hamdan says the residency gives Earshot a platform to operate independently after an “incubation period” working with Forensic Architecture. He describes the work as spanning “legal accountability, scientific rigour, and cultural production,” and says the move helps them hold investigations, research, and commissions together.

Los Angeles is about to get a museum built specifically for AI art. ARTnews reports that DATALAND will open June 20 in the Grand LA complex in downtown LA, designed by Frank Gehry. The museum was co-founded by Refik Anadol and Efsun Erkılıç, and it’s positioned as a flagship space with five galleries totaling twenty five thousand square feet, plus another ten thousand square feet for the hardware and technologies needed to run the work. The first exhibition is a Refik Anadol Studio project called “Machine Dreams: Rainforest,” using a model trained on ecological datasets to create “interrelated sensory experiences,” and it runs through Jan. 31, 2027. DATALAND will also present an Infinity Room featuring a 1987 recording of a now-extinct Hawaiian bird species and AI-generated scents.

At the Park Avenue Armory, AIPAD’s Photography Show is leaning hard into the physical photograph. The piece describes 82 exhibitors and a fair that, in its 2026 edition running through Sunday, April 26, emphasizes artists from Latin America and its diaspora. On opening night, Jackson Fine Arts drew crowds with Sally Mann and Gordon Parks, including Parks’s Segregation Story series (1956), timed to the 70th anniversary of its publication in Life magazine. At first-time participant Ruiz-Healy Art, a 1991 black-and-white portrait of labor leader Dolores Huerta by Graciela Iturbide is priced at six thousand two hundred fifty dollars; gallery director Patti Ruiz-Healy says they omitted Iturbide’s portrait of Cesar Chavez after Huerta accused Chavez of rape in March. Nearby: Throckmorton Fine Art’s Frida Kahlo photos and Proyecto Calle’s camera project with unhoused photographers.

Collector Julia Stoschek is closing her Berlin exhibition venue after a decade. ARTnews says the three thousand-square-meter space in the former Czech Cultural Center has hosted 22 exhibitions and numerous public programs since 2016, welcoming about four hundred fifty thousand visitors. It will close at the end of October 2026, while her Düsseldorf venue—open since 2007—will remain. Stoschek says she’ll focus more on international presentations, pointing to “What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem” in Los Angeles, organized by guest curator Udo Kittelmann, which ran six weeks and drew more than thirty thousand visitors. Her foundation-managed collection, established in 2002, includes over one thousand works by 300 artists, spanning video, film, installation, performance, and virtual reality, from the 1960s to today.

At the MFA Boston, Hyperallergic reports that artist Xandra Ibarra’s “Nude Laughing” (2014–) sparked intense debate about the nude, consent, and museum etiquette. The performance took place Thursday, April 16, during the museum’s Third Thursday, when hours are extended and tickets drop to five dollars and it was presented within the exhibition “Subvert, Repair, Reclaim: Contemporary Artists Take Back the Nude,” organized by curator Carmen Hermo. Ibarra entered wearing a breastplate and yellow heels, dragging a stocking-like sack stuffed with blonde wigs, hyperfeminine accessories, and fake breasts—what she calls “white lady accoutrements.” She moved through galleries laughing, escalating into hysterics in the Art of Europe section, and ended at Gauguin’s “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” by wrestling into the sack on the floor.

On the High Line, a new sculpture is asking New York to sit with the weight of cultural loss. Hyperallergic says Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s “The Light That Shines Through the Universe” (2026) is the park’s fifth site-specific commission, selected from nearly 60 proposals, and installed at West 30th Street and 10th Avenue through Spring 2027. The 27-foot sandstone Buddha echoes the Bamiyan Buddhas, the monumental Afghan cliff carvings destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. Nguyen sourced artillery brass from Afghanistan through a friend’s network across the Bamiyan region, brought it over the Pakistani border, and recast it into mudras—hand gestures—before transporting it to Vietnam, where the sandstone was sourced and carved. The right hand signals Abhaya, or fearlessness; the left suggests Varada, compassion and sincerity.

At Gagosian in New York, Artnet reports a carefully calibrated move: a new, bespoke two thousand two hundred seventy five-square-foot street-level gallery at 980 Madison Avenue, a building that opened as Parke-Bernet Galleries’ home in 1949. After 37 years in a one thousand three hundred-square-foot space six stories up, director Millicent Wilner calls it a “new chapter.” Larry Gagosian told Elle Decor that artists found the upstairs space “a little off-putting,” and said, “So we’ve eliminated that.” The timing connects to bigger building politics: Bloomberg Philanthropies asked owner Aby Rosen to rent much of the building in 2023, and in June 2024 Michael Bloomberg bought it for five hundred sixty dollars million. The new gallery was designed by Jonathan Caplan with Dot Dash lighting, with ceilings reaching 12 feet, three inches.

At Bard College, ARTnews reports that President Leon Botstein has discussed a succession plan in meetings with students and workers after details about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein emerged in February—but there’s no timeline, and the Times Union said he “appears to have no plans of leaving soon.” Botstein has met with the campus in three town halls, a faculty meeting, and a meeting with operations and support staff. The Times Union reports staffers said Botstein has said or implied he’d stay on as faculty as a historian and musician after a successor is chosen, teaching and running performance programs, and moving out of the president’s house into another college-owned home. Bard’s board hired a law firm in February to review his interactions with Epstein; Botstein said a successor search would follow, with the review expected before the end of May.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use, and until then: Chinga la migra

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