Biennial Fault Lines and Museum Security Scares

If you’ve been waiting for a map to navigate the 2026 Whitney Biennial, The Art Newspaper points to red threads rather than an official theme. The show opened only a week after the US and Israel began their coordinated attack on Iran, and the questions of what “American” means—and what US power abroad leaves behind—run through the work of 56 artists, duos, and collectives. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer cite Daniel Immerwahr’s 2019 book *How to Hide an Empire*, with Sawyer describing the US as a “pointillist empire” built on hundreds of bases and territories. Artists from Afghanistan, Chile, Iraq, Okinawa, Palestine, the Philippines, and Vietnam appear alongside American peers, with politics often hinted at rather than declared.

Across the Atlantic, the British Museum was briefly evacuated Saturday after staff found what was described as a “suspicious device” inside a restroom, prompting a Metropolitan Police response. Officers were called to the museum’s Bloomsbury headquarters around 2:50 p.m. local time after reports of a suspicious package, according to *The Independent*. Police later determined the object posed no threat, and visitors were allowed back in shortly after 4 p.m., with normal operations resuming. The museum also said it had received “malicious communications” before the evacuation, and a spokesperson told *The Independent* that visitor, colleague, and volunteer safety is the top priority. No injuries were reported. The incident came less than a week after the museum postponed a lecture on ancient Israel scheduled for Jewish Culture Month due to security concerns.

Back in the US, ARTnews looks at what’s left to learn as full-time art critics all but disappear, focusing on a retiring and departed generation. When Christopher Knight retired as art critic at the *Los Angeles Times* at the end of 2025, the piece argues he marked the last exit among three influential post-1975 critics: Roberta Smith, who retired as co-chief critic at *The New York Times* in 2024, and Peter Schjeldahl, who died in late 2022 after writing for *The Village Voice* and *The New Yorker*. The author recalls Smith saying on a 2008 Frieze panel that there were about 30 full-time US criticism jobs, a number that kept shrinking—Deborah Solomon estimated fewer than 10 in 2013. The article dwells on what consistency, influence, and blind spots meant in that era.