Quality-First Fairs and Medieval Scandal Mashups
Today's Stories
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It is Monday, April twenty-seventh, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
A lot of people love to talk about “market softness” like it is weather—something that just happens to you. But one of today’s themes is that the art world is choosing its weather, or at least choosing how to dress for it. Fairs are shrinking on purpose, publishers are betting on weirder stories, and the center of gravity is shifting from sheer scale to sharper identity.
ARTnews takes us to the 42nd edition of Art Brussels, running April 23–26, where director Nele Verhaeren openly acknowledged the fair’s smaller footprint: 138 participating galleries, 26 fewer than last year. Organizers framed the change as a “quality-first” shift and a push toward a slower, more legible fair experience. The reduction—about 15 percent—also meant all booths fit in one hall of the Brussels Expo instead of 1.5 halls. Verhaeren linked the recalibration to mounting operational costs and geopolitical and economic tensions, saying galleries have to think twice about which fairs to do. In that context, the fair also put added emphasis on visitor experience—aiming, as Verhaeren put it, to make it joyful.
Over in Art in America, there’s a very different kind of reframing: a novel that turns Monica Lewinsky into something like a saintly guide. The magazine spotlights Julia Langbein’s Dear Monica Lewinsky, out this month from Doubleday, which builds from Lewinsky’s public mortification in the summer of 1998 and begins later, in 2019. In the book, forty-year-old Jean Dornan—a translator—spirals after receiving an invitation from David, a professor tied to an earlier inappropriate relationship. As Jean rereads her 1998 diary, she confronts her own cruelty toward Lewinsky and begins to pray: “Dear Monica Lewinsky, please help me.” A haloed Monica appears, guiding Jean through memories of Plaisy, France, and stories of martyred women drawn from Jacobus de Voragine’s 13th-century Golden Legend.
That’s it for today’s download. Links to both stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for more. Chinga la migra