Prize Glory, Museum Turmoil, and Royalty Revolts

The art world’s closest thing to the Nobel Prizes just dropped its winners list. Jenny Holzer has won the 2026 Praemium Imperiale award for painting, and British land artist Andy Goldsworthy has taken the prize for sculpture—each worth ¥15m, around £seventy thousand. The awards are made annually by the Japan Art Association under the honorary patronage of Prince Hitachi, and they recognize achievements across painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre/film. This year’s other recipients include actor Cate Blanchett, conductor Herbert Blomstedt, and architect Daniel Libeskind. Alongside the prizes, La Source Garouste—founded by Gérard Garouste and Élizabeth Garouste—will receive a ¥5m grant for young artists.

After a crisis-ridden decade of planning, Brussels’s Kanal-Centre Pompidou is finally set to open on November 28, after renovations costing more than €250 million. The new institution occupies a colossal former Citroën garage from the 1930s, near the low-income neighborhood of Molenbeek, and features a 90-foot-high glass façade. Artistic director Kasia Redzisz, formerly a curator at Tate Modern, describes the building as a place where “everything is a passage.” Two streets intersect the campus, and more than two hundred fifteen thousand square feet—including workshops, libraries, an auditorium, a cinema, food spaces, a rooftop bar, a bakery, and a playground by Assemble—will be ticket-free. Exhibition spaces total one hundred thirty thousand square feet.

Staying in the market, Bonhams has teamed up with Kasseem “Swizz Beatz” Dean and Alicia Keys on a resale royalty initiative ahead of the auction house’s marquee New York sales in November. Consignors can opt in and commit a minimum of 1% of the hammer price or five hundred dollars—whichever is greater—with Bonhams matching the percentage contributed. Seth Johnson, Bonhams’ chief executive, said artists have told them this is the direction they’ve wanted the market to take, and stressed that Bonhams wants the initiative to cost the auction house as a “visible measure of success.” The Deans have long pushed for resale royalties in the US, where such rights have largely stalled, despite being common in more than 90 countries.

In Washington, a policy shift is raising alarms across arts higher education. On 4 July 2025, President Donald Trump signed H.R. 1—the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—into law, now referred to as the Working Families Tax Cut Act. The changes include terminating the graduate and professional PLUS loans scheme, setting differential caps within the direct loans programme, and creating an earnings-based accountability framework that will govern which programmes qualify for federal financial aid. Implementation is staggered: from 1 July 2026, PLUS loans were cancelled and new loan limits began; the earnings test takes effect on 1 July 2027. Lee Ann Scotto Adams of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project calls it “a one-size-fits-all approach” that doesn’t work for artists, designers, and musicians.

In Los Angeles, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is facing a lawsuit that questions whether it truly qualifies as a private museum. The Los Angeles Times reports the institution is the subject of four lawsuits by contractors, including one by J.E. Snyder Electric, a subcontractor for Siemens Industry, Inc. The suit alleges the project was promoted and labeled as a “private, non-profit development” to bypass mandates in California’s Public Contract Code, Civil Code, and Labor Code, and argues it should be treated as a “public work” because it was paid for “in part out of public funds,” including public assets transferred for less than fair market value and a lease of public land at nominal rent. The suit points to a 2017 deal for a 99-year lease at thirty dollars a year.

The museum’s attorneys reject that framing. In a statement to the Los Angeles Times, a lawyer said the Lucas Museum is “one of the largest private cultural gifts in American history: more than one dollars billion, every penny of it private,” adding, “No public funds. No public financing. No public debt.” The museum also says it agreed to provide public benefits during construction, including paying two dollars million to cover a lack of surface parking, upgrading a nearby soccer park, and maintaining park space. Separately, the lawsuit contends J.E. Snyder Electric has not been paid by Siemens for work done on the project. The Lucas Museum focuses on “narrative art,” with offerings ranging from a Frida Kahlo self-portrait to Star Wars sculptures.

A major philanthropic transfer is reshaping public collections in Greece and Scotland. The D. Daskalopoulos Collection has announced a donation of 51 artworks to four museums, with most going to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Crete, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOMUS), and the National Gallery of Greece, and three works heading to the National Galleries of Scotland. The National Gallery of Greece will receive 29 modern artworks by Greek artists including Io Angeli, Konstantinos Andreou, Spyros Vikatos, George Vorres, Kostis Georgiou, Apostolos Yayannos, and Yiannis Psychopedis, spanning productive decades from the 1960s through the 1990s. MOMUS will receive 16 works by artists including Subodh Gupta, Seth Price, Kelley Walker, and Stefanos Tsivopoulos.

In London, a two-day strike forced the Victoria and Albert Museum to close three sites. Unionized staff walked out last weekend, citing “Amazon-style” working conditions. The V&A preemptively closed the East Museum, the East Storehouse, and the Young V&A—its children’s museum in Bethnal Green—starting Friday, September 4, with closures extending through Saturday, September 5. About 700 workers, making up over half the organization’s workforce, participated through Prospect Union’s heritage division and the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS). Staff rallied outside the locations with signs calling for fair pay and access to water. Prospect’s national secretary for heritage, Paula Lamont, said the closures underscore how critical members are to museum operations and warned further strikes could include the flagship in South Kensington.

In Los Angeles, the Getty Center closed early after a fire broke out along the 405 Freeway. The Los Angeles Times reported the blaze was first reported to the city’s Fire Department at 4:30 p.m. and had burned five acres; an evacuation warning covered an area including the Getty Center. CBS News reported that visitors were asked to exit via the parking garage, and the museum closed at 4:45 p.m. A notice on the museum’s website said, “The Getty Center is closed due to a nearby fire.” Mayor Karen Bass urged residents in the area to prepare to evacuate if conditions worsened and to follow first responders’ instructions. The Getty Center campus includes museum buildings, the Getty Research Institute, and a Robert Irwin–designed garden.

The moment also recalls earlier close calls. In 2019, a wildfire near the 405 consumed 745 acres. The Getty Center, designed by Richard Meier, incorporated fire-conscious features such as crushed rocks on the roof, a travertine skin, and carefully selected plants—elements that have helped protect the campus in past fires. In 2017, Meier told the New York Times, “The safest place for the artwork to be is right here in the Getty Center,” as another fire neared the complex. This week’s incident is being referred to as the Getty Fire, underscoring how quickly a regional emergency can become a cultural one, at least in the public imagination, when a major museum sits inside an evacuation zone.

In Brazil, a new wave of figuration is being driven by women painters, with five names highlighted: Panmela Castro, Agrade Camíz, Márcia Falcão, Maya Weishof, and Gokula Stoffel. The piece situates their momentum after years when institutional attention often circled early-modernist figuration and mid-century abstraction—alongside global celebration of figures like Tarsila do Amaral, Anita Malfatti, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Mira Schendel. It also looks back to Brazil’s “return to painting” with the Geração 80, where strict geometric abstraction loosened and hybrid approaches took hold. What feels especially current here is frankness: depictions of eroticism and desire, and examinations of violence against women, handled with an urgency that makes figuration feel newly charged.

One artist, Panmela Castro, is discussed in detail through her 2021–22 solo show at Galeria Luisa Strina in São Paulo, curated by Daniela Labra, titled To Flaunt is to be alive. The framing of “flaunting” is intimate rather than status-driven—presenting the body candidly as an affirmation of resilience. Castro’s nudes sometimes depict a sitter twice, evoking how representation and archival absence can become political, especially for Black-Brazilian communities. Works mentioned include a neon sign reading “Cada Día Peor” (“Worse Every Day”), tied to “Vulcanica Pokaropa” from the Vigil series (2021), and a three-dimensional text sculpture reading “Eu Sobrevivi” (“I survived”) from the Residency series (2021).

And in St. Louis, the Counterpublic Triennial is opening its third edition, titled Coyote Time, tomorrow—Thursday, September 10—across five main sites, on view for three months. Artistic director and co-founder James McAnally describes Counterpublic as “an invitation to do more, to take action, and to operate differently,” with guiding concepts including accountability, access, climate, infrastructure, agency, and Native sovereignty. Instead of a standard curatorial team, Counterpublic uses a curatorial “ensemble” selected from 80 peer-recommended candidates, with members organizing thematic sections across the city. Projects range from Stefanie Hessler and Wanda Nanibush’s focus on the Mississippi River and watersheds, to Jordan Carter’s work in The Ville, to Raphael Fonseca’s collaborations with students and a refugee resettlement center.

McAnally also connects the triennial’s approach to a definition of “public” that echoes Vito Acconci: for something to be public, it should connect at least three people. When asked about influences, McAnally cited Richard Serra—pointing to Serra’s first permanent public work, “Twain” (1982), in downtown St. Louis—and also noted inspiration from intimacy in practices like Chloe Bass, whom he is married to, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Counterpublic itself grew out of The Luminary, which McAnally founded in 2007, first becoming an exhibition in 2015 and then a triennial launched in 2019, with a stated aim to move beyond critique and toward building alternatives.

That’s today’s download—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more dispatches from the art world’s front lines.

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