Heists, Restitution, and the Fall Exhibition Frenzy

Our big season-planning story comes from ARTnews, which just dropped a massive fall preview: 84 museum exhibitions and biennials to see. The roundup reads like a barometer for the artistic moment, with a clear thread running through it—how artists and institutions respond to turbulence and violence, and how to live with “world-chaos.” ARTnews points to shows for artists like Inji Efflatoun, Annemirl Bauer, Marion Wagschal, Ali Cherri, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, and Amar Kanwar, alongside exhibitions that lean into visual pleasure and historical re-readings. Highlights include “Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious” at Buffalo AKG, São Paulo Museum of Art’s “Latin American Histories,” and the Gwangju Biennale, among many others.

Staying in Europe, Vienna has a museum-security nightmare on its hands. The Art Newspaper reports that an Egyptian queen’s necklace—an Art Deco, bib-style piece made of pure platinum and set with 673 baguette-cut and brilliant-cut diamonds—was stolen from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK). The theft happened in a brazen daylight robbery on 27 August: two unmasked suspects bought tickets, entered the gallery, smashed the display case with a hammer, and walked out into the city streets. Austrian police have clear security footage, and Interpol has added the necklace to its database of stolen artworks. The necklace was on view in Glanzstücke: Van Cleef & Arpels High Jewellery x Masterpieces from the MAK Collection, which reopened the following day after a brief closure.

Across the Pacific, The Art Newspaper spotlights Oscar Ho Hing-kay’s Hong Kong Art: A Curator’s History (1987–2004), a curatorial memoir that fills a gap in broad histories of Hong Kong art. The book focuses on the period around the UK’s 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, while also grounding readers in earlier debates and movements. Ho describes returning from graduate studies in California in the 1980s to a scene where contemporary artists were “a minority” on the fringes. He recounts clashes over what counted as “sculpture,” and moments like artist Chan Ching Wah spray-painting her own painting black at an opening in protest at Hong Kong Art Biennial Exhibition selection criteria. Ho also details exhibitions he organised at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from 1988 to 2001, pushing boundaries around culture, identity, and experimentation.

Back to Europe for a tougher, necessary conversation. The Art Newspaper reviews Jeremy Harding’s essay collection Analogue Africa: Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination (Verso, published March 2026), which examines how artists and filmmakers have responded to European colonialism in Africa and what that history means for museums holding plundered goods. Harding writes about works like William Kentridge’s Night for Day (2003), describing the film’s stop-motion and reverse-motion effects as Kentridge draws, erases, and reinscribes lines. He also considers the 20th-century Malian photographer Seydou Keïta, noting how Keïta’s portraits were often collaborative and how props—including Keïta’s Peugeot 203—reflected social change and consumer access. A key case study is the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, and the lingering barriers facing Congolese researchers under strict EU visa regimes.

Still in the United Kingdom art orbit, The Art Newspaper has an expert’s guide to Anish Kapoor: five must-read books, selected by Hayward Gallery publisher Mary Richards, timed to the Hayward’s Kapoor exhibition (until 18 October). The guide points to core catalogues and studies that trace Kapoor’s five-decade career, from polished mirror sculptures and “impossibly black voids” to red inflatables. Richards highlights the 1998 Hayward catalogue featuring Homi K. Bhabha’s text “Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness,” and the 2009 catalogue tied to the Royal Academy survey that included Shooting into the Corner (2008–09). She also recommends Anish Kapoor: Versailles (2015), notable for pages that arrive sealed and must be cut open, plus later books that examine studio practice and Kapoor’s lesser-known painting.

Also from The Art Newspaper, a piece on the book world that feels quietly consequential: veteran bookseller and publisher Rudi Thoemmes has launched a new photobook imprint called Foxed Editions with Björn Andersson and Jessa Fairbrother. Thoemmes’s career has included antiquarian bookselling, setting up Thoemmes Press, and founding RRB Photobooks, which has published photographers including Markéta Luskačová and Jem Southam. Foxed Editions will focus on facsimiles of overlooked historical photobooks and new publications mapping neglected areas of photographic history. Its first titles include a republication of Fred Judge’s 1924 Camera Pictures of London at Night and Thomas Wiegand’s 66 Books from East Germany. Thoemmes frames the imprint as a convergence of long-running interests in reprints, rarity, and “lesser-known or so-called minor figures.”

And finally, Hyperallergic brings a mix of reflection, mourning, critique, and alarm in “Seeing Krasner and Pollock Together.” The newsletter’s senior editor Valentina Di Liscia introduces an essay by artist and writer Lia Strasser, who revisits her relationship to the story of Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock after the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its forthcoming exhibition Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous on Instagram, illustrated with a Hans Namuth photograph. Strasser describes initially wincing—wanting Krasner centered alone—then retracing her own steps, including a visit months earlier to the Pollock-Krasner House in Springs, East Hampton, where she arrived knowing far more about Pollock than Krasner. The same issue notes widespread social-media homages following Yayoi Kusama’s death last week at 97, and reports thieves taking a platinum and diamond necklace from Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts.

That’s the download for today—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more, and until then, Chinga la migra.

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