Museums Unmasked, Heritage Rewritten

The art world is mourning Betye Saar, the trailblazing Los Angeles artist who died on Sunday, 26 July, at age 99—just days before her centenary, The Art Newspaper reports. Known for sculptural assemblages exploring spirituality and mysticism, African American heritage, and the Black female experience, Saar forged her own path for decades before broader international embrace. Her family said she “passed peacefully of natural causes in her sleep at home amongst family.” Born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles in 1926, she grew up with strong matriarchal figures and an early devotion to objects as carriers of memory—“I feel that everything you find tells a story,” she told The Art Newspaper in 2022. She studied design at UCLA, graduating in 1949.

The Art Newspaper also reports Unesco has added 25 properties to its World Heritage List during the World Heritage Committee’s 48th session in Busan, South Korea, running from 19 to 29 July. Among the new inscriptions are sites in Iran, Palestine, and Lebanon, with the latter two—plus others—also placed on the World Heritage in Danger List under emergency procedures. Iran’s newly listed Alamut Castle and related fortifications—Alamut Castle plus Lambesar, Navizarsah, Sams Kelayeh, Qosṭinlar, Sirkuh, and Ilan—sit in the Alborz mountains in Qazvin province and were a political, military, and intellectual center of the Nizari Isma’ilis from the 11th to 13th century. Hamideh Choubak said protecting authenticity and integrity is now the top priority.

Across the Atlantic and into museum marketing, ARTnews reports the Harvard Art Museums tested a generative AI concept to animate an 18th-century painting as part of a visitor-engagement and membership push. The experiment centered on François Boucher’s Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour, a 1750 portrait, turned into a talking video version, along with a chatbot for conversation. John Connolly, Harvard Art Museums’ director of marketing, and Julian De Freitas, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, discussed it on Open Call, a Harvard Business Review podcast hosted by Brian Kenny. The museum beta-tested versions with participants but hasn’t publicly rolled it out; it’s not currently on the museum’s website or social media, though Connolly hinted, “It could suddenly drop.”

Another ARTnews story looks at radical transparency at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, where “Performing Conditions: Artistic Labor and Dependency as Form” greets visitors with a wall decal detailing the exhibition budget. Shaped like a receipt but organized like a spreadsheet, it lists expenses including artists’ honoraria—twenty five thousand dollars for 27 artists—plus items like framing (one thousand one hundred dollars) and vinyl (one thousand nine hundred twenty five dollars). The show broadens from money into the human costs capitalism ignores, framing interdependency and the invisibility of reproductive labor. Works include Blondell Cummings’s video Chicken Soup, Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment Performance Still 1–6 (2020), and interventions that highlight unseen museum labor, like Ghislaine Leung’s score prompting preparators to withdraw parts of their work. Curators Natalie Bell and Ramona Ngin keep the argument clear in labels and gestures.

In Madrid, Hyperallergic spotlights a new annual program at the Museo Reina Sofía titled History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Does Rhyme, which places Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” (1937) in dialogue with other artworks. The first installment pairs the 25-foot-wide anti-war masterpiece—an emblem of post-war Spanish identity since it became the painting’s permanent home there in 1992—with Dumile Feni’s “African Guernica” (1967), a large-scale charcoal drawing. Hyperallergic notes that while Picasso’s work responded to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, Feni’s drawing emerged from the pervasive violence of racism under South African Apartheid. The pairing revisits the universal political impulses behind Picasso’s painting while also foregrounding race as an urgent institutional issue in Spain.

Back in the United States, ARTnews reports the American Alliance of Museums has condemned the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on the Smithsonian Institution. The White House ordered signage outside the National Museum of American History to flag what an executive order calls “inaccurate information” in exhibits, following a 162-page Domestic Policy Council report released July 4 alleging “ideological capture” at NMAH. Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III refuted the report in a terse email to staff, and on July 21 NMAH director Anthea Hartig faced a two-hour congressional hearing about claims the institution failed to preserve and present the nation’s story. The AAM said the Smithsonian reflects “the highest standards of scholarship, stewardship, and public service,” warning that politicizing museum work threatens independence across twenty two thousand US museums. The UK’s Museums Association republished the statement Tuesday.

Staying in New York, Hyperallergic visits MoMA PS1’s famously barren courtyard in Long Island City, Queens, where Precious Okoyomon has planted a garden installation set to last for the next two years. The work transforms a concrete corner into a space the piece describes as joyful and exploratory—anchored by a giant teddy bear visitors approach from behind, sliding through its core and exiting through its mouth “like a tongue.” At a press event held on an overcast Wednesday with drizzle, Okoyomon put it bluntly: “The rectum isn’t a grave, it’s just a portal.” Hyperallergic notes the line riffs on Leo Bersani’s 1987 queer theory essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The installation invites bodies to move, play, and reconsider what a museum courtyard can hold beyond emptiness and heat.

And the performing arts world has lost a major figure. ARTnews reports that Simone Forti—artist, choreographer, dancer, poet, and a leading presence in New York’s Judson Dance Theater scene—has died in Los Angeles at 91, confirmed by her gallery, Raffaella Cortese, via social media. At Judson in Greenwich Village, Forti helped shape postmodern dance alongside artists including Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, and she described herself as a “movement artist,” with improvisation as a throughline. ARTnews highlights her “Dance Constructions” (1960–61), debuted at Yoko Ono’s Chambers Street Loft Series, built from task-based “rule games,” including the well-known Huddle (1961). Her practice also expanded into writing, video, sculpture, and holograms, reflecting a lifelong refusal to confine what “dance” could be.

Hyperallergic also flags a psychological study on “cancel culture” that found respondents reacted more punitively toward an artist accused of sexual assault than toward an artist accused of murder. The study’s key twist is that participants still judged murder as morally worse, yet deemed the sexual-assault–accused artist more deserving of censure. Hyperallergic frames the finding as evidence of a disconnect between moral ranking and social punishment—how people may separate what they say is worse from what they feel demands immediate consequence. The piece focuses on the study’s central result and the uncomfortable implications for how audiences evaluate artists and their work under public scandal. It’s a snapshot of how allegation type can shape perceived accountability, even when respondents acknowledge a different hierarchy of harm.

Finally, ARTnews turns to city politics and property: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s pied-à-terre tax is putting art world heavyweights in the spotlight. The debate was fueled by a New York City Department of Finance database published last week and first reported by Artnet News’s Katya Kazakina. Names listed as potentially subject to the surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes include Steven A. Cohen, Leon Black, Len Blavatnik, Mitchell Rales, art adviser Allan Schwartzman, dealers Larry Gagosian and David Zwirner, and Pace figures Arne Glimcher and Marc Glimcher. The DOF records show Gagosian’s East 75th Street mansion owned by Sugar Shack LLC and valued by the city at sixty three dollars million. The surcharge took effect July 1; rates range from 0.8% to 6.5%, with exemption deadlines August 21 and August 24, and bills due in November.

That’s the show for today. Links to every story are in the show notes—come back tomorrow for another download.

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