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Art News

Banksy Returns Under Cover

May 1st, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I suppose that waking up to find the night has birthed a new Banksy is, by now, almost routine. This time, however, something is different. He has literally moved up a step. He has planted a life-size sculpture in one of the most heavily guarded spaces in London. No witnesses.
The piece appeared in the early hours of Wednesday at Waterloo Place, an avenue in central London halfway between Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace.

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Baselitz takes his leave. The world stays on its head.

May 1st, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Somewhere between Salzburg and the history of postwar German art, Georg Baselitz died yesterday at 88. His gallery announced it on Thursday. The family stated that he passed 'in peace'. The cause was not made public.
Baselitz was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Saxony, under the name Hans-Georg Kern. In the first years of his life, during the war, four thousand tonnes of bombs fell on his village...

The Bitter Fate of William Blake

Art News

The Bitter Fate of William Blake

April 29th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

There is something bitterly ironic, and in some way unjust, in the posthumous fate of William Blake. An extraordinary poet and engraver, he spent his life defending imagination as a sacred faculty, denouncing slavery, and dreaming of a spiritual Jerusalem on earth. He has nevertheless ended up recast, in the contemporary imagination, as a numen, or tutelary spirit, of evil. His name and his images appear tattooed on the skin of serial killers, whispered into the ears of victims in television series...

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Sotheby's pawns what it has yet to collect

Art News

Sotheby's pawns what it has yet to collect

April 26th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The auction house Sotheby's has just secured a credit line of up to one hundred million dollars from the private capital firm KKR, offering as collateral the commissions its clients still owe it on auction purchases. It is a form of financing worth attending to, because it discloses where in the cycle one of the two houses that have set the pulse of the global art market for decades now finds itself. When a company begins to collateralise its receivables in order to access immediate liquidity...

The Persistent Landscape

Midwest

The Persistent Landscape

April 24th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Art historiography in the American Midwest often relies on preservation institutions that consolidate particular versions of the past. This year, the Taft Museum of Art subjects its founding narrative to review through the integration of “domestic” aesthetics into the historical texture that defines it.

Art News

On Rembrandt in Black and White: The Silent Laboratory of Printmaking — Taft Museum of Art

April 12th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have yet to visit the exhibition Rembrandt: Masterpieces in Black and White. Prints from the Rembrandt House Museum, which opened on February 7 in the Fifth Third Gallery at the Taft Museum. Almost every day I find myself thinking I should go. Opportunities like this are not common, especially when dealing with a major figure of Dutch art.

My Fellow Pharaohs

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My Fellow Pharaohs

April 12th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have a couple of friends named Ramses. I met them in Cuba, and both ended up in Spain. I’m not sure if they are still there, probably. But what continues to strike me is not the trajectory. How is it that I have two friends with the name of a pharaoh? How is this possible?
I tend to think it has to do with Ramses II—the pharaoh who ruled Pi-Ramesses (Nile Delta) between 1279 and 1213 BC. Western civilization had little awareness of his existence until the early seventeenth century.

Art Attack Hamilton

Midwest

Art Attack Hamilton

April 8th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

According to multiple sources, Art Attack Cincinnati emerges in the early 2020s, within a broader moment of cultural reactivation following the pandemic. It can be understood as a punctual exhibition format that enables the direct sale of artworks. It has no fixed venue and unfolds across informal sites in the city, with recurring presence in places such as Braxton Brewing Co. Cincinnati.

Art News

The Body Isn’t a Battery That Discharges Upon Death

April 5th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Presented by The Annex Gallery, The Body Isn’t a Battery That Discharges Upon Death unfolds as an exploration of what time gradually dissipates—traces and residues—and of what still resists, its resonances.
The brochure—printed austerely in black and white on tinted stock—sets out, with clarity, the exhibition’s aesthetic and conceptual framework...