Shipwreck Riches and Biennale Disruptions
Today's Stories
- Controversy resurfaces in Colombia over treasure-filled San José shipwreck — The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
- Performance Cuts Through the Noise at the Venice Biennale — Hyperallergic
- The 21st Century’s Biggest Art Trend is Not a Style. But Once You See It, You’ll Notice It Everywhere. — ARTnews.com
Full Transcript
It is Monday, May twenty-fifth, two thousand twenty-six. Let’s dive in.
Colombia’s long-running fight over the San José shipwreck is flaring up again, and it’s not just an argument about gold—it’s about transparency, archaeology, and who gets to make decisions underwater. The Art Newspaper reports that the oversight group Veeduría Nacional para el Control Social del Patrimonio Cultural Sumergido de Colombia, or VNPCS, sent an open letter to Colombia’s attorney general alleging a lack of transparency, plus looting and unauthorised interventions in 2016 and 2022, and even claiming the site’s coordinates—treated as a state secret—have been disclosed. The Spanish galleon sank off Colombia in 1708 after being destroyed by the British during the War of the Spanish Succession, with almost 600 lives lost and cargo sinking more than 600 meters down.
Across the Atlantic, the Venice Biennale is reminding everyone that performance can still cut through institutional noise. A report from Venice describes a year that began in upheaval: in May 2025, artistic director Koyo Kouoh died, and the Biennale was hit by canceled pavilions, boycotts protesting Israel and Russia’s participation, and the jury’s resignation. In that atmosphere, two Giardini pavilions stand out. Florentina Holzinger takes over Austria with SEA WORLD VENICE, flooding the pavilion and building an aquatic circuit that implicates visitors—down to blue porta-potties feeding filtered urine into a tank where a scuba-masked performer stays submerged for hours. Nearby, Miet Warlop’s Belgian pavilion, IT NEVER SSST, becomes a bleacher-lined arena of “living sculptures,” chanting and hurling plaster tiles.
Staying with big-picture shifts, ARTnews argues that the century’s defining art trend isn’t a visual style but “systems art”—a way of making the invisible structures shaping life more legible. The piece traces the term to Jack Burnham, who coined it in Artforum in 1968, and links it to rule-based practices associated with artists he discussed, including Kenneth Noland, Robert Morris, and Dan Flavin. It also highlights Hans Haacke and Adrian Piper as key bridges to the present: Piper’s Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968) and Haacke’s Weathercube (1963), later refigured as Condensation Cube, map physical systems before both artists turned toward social ones after 1968. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. (1971) is central here—art as relations between people and their environment.
That’s the download for today. Links to all three stories are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for more, and until then, Chinga la migra