What Biennials Reveal About the Art World

We talk a lot about biennials. Art is in some ways a very local, in-person thing. Yet artists and creators and writers are also part of a global conversation, looking at and thinking about each other across borders, and these big, recurring art festivals can serve as an opportunity or a prompt to think about what that bigger conversation. One of the biggest, the Venice Biennale, is coming up next month. It’s centered around a show called “In Minor Keys,” curated by the late curator Koyo Kouoh. My colleague Jo Lawson-Tancred recently had an article looking at the artists in that show, comparing where they were from and how old they were to the last several editions, to see how the art conversation was evolving. Meanwhile, Ben Davis just published a big project this week, looking at the last four years of art biennials around the world, from the big ones in places like Istanbul, Gwangju, São Paulo, Sharjah, and Venice, to smaller or more experimental ones. He gathered all the names of artists to find out who has shown the most around the world since the 2022 Venice Biennale four years ago. Some are familiar names, some were total surprises. With Venice soon to open, Ben speaks with Jo to talk about what we’ve learned from our different projects about where the global art conversation has been and where it might be headed.

This interview with the painter Taina H. Cruz first came out for the opening of the Whitney Biennial, and on the occasion of the opening of Greater New York at MoMA PS1, where Cruz is also featured, we're resurfacing it. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young (born in 1998), and who just earned her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, critic Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise—that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.

What a difference 12 months makes! After years of declining sales in the auction realm, there are finally signs of life. The Artnet Intelligence Report: The Year Ahead 2026 reveals that global auction totals were up 13.3 percent in 2025 versus 2024. The full report, rich with new findings, is now available as a crisp PDF. The price? Free. (We hope that its contents will inspire you to subscribe to Artnet Pro, and to partake of the Artnet Price Database.) In the report’s cover story, “Dark Mode,” Artnet’s Art Detective columnist, Katya Kazakina, delves into the intriguing and shadowy world of private auctions, where big-league paintings (and cars, jewelry, and more) trade behind closed doors, for enormous sums. In some cases, only certain collectors are invited. Many in this clandestine business seem to enjoy it, and Kazakina charts the major players and their strategies. Meanwhile, in wide-ranging interviews, an auctioneer (maverick Joe Maddalena), an auctioneer-turned advisor (powerhouse Patti Wong), and an auctioneer-turned dealer (rainmaker David Schrader) share their insights on the changing state of play in public salesrooms. And Margaret Carrigan, who helms The Back Room newsletter for Artnet Pro, marshals data to explain the state of play in the art industry. There is more: Here’s the download link once more. On this week’s Art Angle podcast, Kazakina sat down with Andrew Russeth, Artnet Pro’s editor, to discuss private auctions, the Intelligence Report, and what to expect at the big May sales in New York.

The average metropolitan person now is exposed to more media in a single day than someone a few generations ago would absorb in a lifetime. Amid the deluge of hot takes and commentary on today’s image culture, and its effects on our brains, many people have also been looking back to an older figure for guidance, one who seems to have been something of a prophet: the philosopher Vilém Flusser. Born in 1920 in Prague, Flusser lived a fascinating life, working in São Paulo, Brazil for decades, before returning to Europe, where he died in 1991. In his writings of the 1980s, Flusser created a unique body of theory about how new genres of media were giving birth to a new form of consciousness, one defined by images over the written word. Flusser thought this transformation would reshape the world, and he developed a whole vocabulary to think about it, concepts like the “technical image,” “the apparatus,” and “techno-imagination.” These have had a huge impact on media studies, and yet remain under-known. Long in the works but now just in time to serve as a guide, Martha Schwendener’s The Society of the Screen: Vilem Flusser’s Radical Prescience, is just out from MIT Press. Schwendener is a teacher, an art historian, and a long-time art critic for the New York Times. The Society of the Screen tackles what Flusser’s wide-ranging and experimental body of thought means for art today and how his theories might help us find a way through our media-saturated moment.

Raphael is one of those names that everyone knows. He is the prince of painters, a master of the High Renaissance. And the Metropolitan Museum of Art has given him the full blockbuster treatment in a highly anticipated exhibition called "Raphael: Sublime Poetry." The show is the first comprehensive international loan exhibition ever dedicated to him in the United States. There are 237 works in total—33 paintings, 142 drawings—and his Sistine Chapel tapestries. There are loans from the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Prado, the Uffizi, and the British Museum. Many of these works, according to the Met, have never been shown together, and some have never previously left Europe. Curated by Carmen C. Bambach, it took 17 years to assemble. No one quite captured divine beauty like Raphael did. But what is the story within the story of this artist who left indelible mark on western art? Kate Brown is joined by art critic and podcast co-host Ben Davis, who has just published a review of the exhibition, to dive into that question. Register for the Intelligence Report live discussion: ⁠The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

Spring is upon us. March has seen a burst of big art events—the true start of a busy year. This week, Kate Brown and Ben Davis are joined by senior writer Eileen Kinsella to discuss some of the biggest art stories of the month. In this episode, will be discussing: — The 2026 Whitney Biennial, which opened at the beginning of the month. It always gives a snapshot of who’s in and who’s out, and what’s on curators minds. (I've written two pieces on it, here and here) — The rise of a new art historical art star: the Flemish baroque painter Michaelina Wautier (1604–1689). — And a new investigation that claims to definitively, absolutely, positively once and for settle the question of who Banksy really is. Do we think they did it? Does it matter? Register for: The Intelligence Report, Year Ahead 2026 Edition

The New Museum opens its new building this week. And it’s doing so with a big show called “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” about how artists rethought what it means to be human through technology. It’s a topic on a lot of people’s minds. Among the many artists whose visions feature in the show is Christopher Kulendran Thomas. Kulendran Thomas has a lot going on. Aside from the New Museum, he’s got another video installation up at the Museum of Modern Art right now, while last fall, his work “Peace Core” showed at Gagosian Gallery in New York. He also runs a project space, Earth, on the Lower East Side in New York and in Echo Park in L.A. Kulendran Thomas's works are complicated. They often feature paintings, inspired by A.I.-generated images. His video installations at MoMA and the New Museum involve deepfake interviews with celebrities like Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or even other artists, together with documentary footage about Sri Lanka, where his family is from. Beneath all these complex parts, Kulendran Thomas is weaving together an ambitious and maybe even unsettling argument, about political systems, philosophy, technology, human creativity, post-human creativity, and where we might be heading in the future—as artists and as a civilization.

Kim Gordon—artist, musician, writer, and co-founder of the iconic rock band Sonic Youth—is one of the most restlessly creative figures in American culture. Over the past four decades moved between mediums with an ease that few can achieve. She published her memoir Girl in a Band in 2015 to wide acclaim. Her visual work has been shown at institutions including the Andy Warhol Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and the Busan Biennale. Her 2024 solo album The Collective, a record built on trap beats and with sharp cultural commentary, earned her two Grammy nominations, a career first. But Gordon was always an artist first. Now, she is the subject of two concurrent exhibitions now open at Amant, the Brooklyn-based arts organization. The first is her solo survey "Count Your Chickens," which brings together painting, ceramics, film, and readymades spanning nearly 20 years of work. The second is "Folded Group," a group show she co-curated with Bill Nace, her collaborator in the experimental guitar duo Body/Head, featuring 19 artists and artist-musicians many of whom, like Gordon, have never accepted the boundary between making art and making music. Her third solo album, Play Me, is out on March 13. In her conversation with senior editor Kate Brown, Gordon discusses her visual practice, her relationship to the art world and the music world, and what these two universes share and where they diverge. She reflects on album art as a curatorial act, on how the internet has transformed what it means to make and disseminate work, and on what it has meant to spend a career resisting every category people tried to put her in.

The Whitney Biennial is here. That would be the Whitney Museum’s big curated show which every two years brings together dozens of artists, always closely watched by critics and public as a statement about what is important now in art. Hot on its heels, next month, MoMA PS1 is staging "Greater New York." That event happens every five years, bringing together dozens more artists to take the temperature of art in New York. Taína H. Cruz, my guest today, is featured in both these shows at once. For the Whitney, she is even, in a way, the face of the show: a work by Cruz, a green-tinged close-up painting of a grinning child, called I Saw the Future and It Smiled Back, is blown up on a billboard outside the museum in the Meatpacking District. This is a lot of attention for an artist who is relatively young, born in 1998, and just getting her MFA from the famed Yale School of Painting last year. She’s worked in a variety of media, but is known now for paintings, often featuring images of Black female figures with a moody, woozy, sometimes unsettled or unsettling atmosphere. Sometimes Cruz works in suggestions of African American and Caribbean folklore, or intimations of horror and fantasy. Sometimes, she’s played on the images of celebrities like Halle Berry or Tyra Banks. Sometimes she reworks her own personal photos of neighbors from New York. Since Cruz is an artist that the curators of these big shows are looking to, art critic, Ben Davis, wanted to get a sense of the influences—from art and otherwise— that are shaping her approach to art, and what she makes of all the attention.

It’s time for our monthly news roundup where we discuss some of the biggest stories emerging in the art world. On the heels of the first-ever Art Basel Qatar, we will be discussing the Middle Eastern art market and the regional art scenes. Is this simply another fair on the global circuit, or something more structural—an attempt to recalibrate where cultural power sits? We will doing a vibe check on the Ultra-Contemporary art scene’s current obsession with Old Masters, art history, and dead artists. As market pressures mount and institutions increasingly turn toward estates and historical figures, we’ll ask whether this is a genuine intellectual reckoning or a marketing strategy dressed up as scholarship. Maybe it is both? Finally, we will rove over to Rome, Italy, where where a church fresco featuring an angel that bore a striking resemblance to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni was abruptly removed, sparking debate within and well beyond the church about restoration, iconography, and the politics of sacred imagery. We reminisce about the great many botched art restorations of years past. To discuss these topics, Ben Davis and Kate Brown are joined this month by London-based Artnet News editor Margaret Carrigan. Carrigan is the host of our sister podcast, the Art Market Minute, and co-author of our weekly Artnet Pro market newsletter, The Back Room.