In October, Poland announced the choice of Ignacy Czwartos, who had planned to exhibit paintings that envision the country as having been oppressed by Germany and Russia throughout the 20th century. Instead, Open Group, a collective that includes Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, and Anton Varga, will now represent the country.

The Polish Ministry of Culture issued a statement this past Friday saying the decision had come after “analyzing the competition procedures for the exhibition design as part of the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice in 2024 and after getting acquainted with the opinions and voices of the communities.” Warsaw’s Zachęta – National Gallery of Art remains the institution in charge of organizing the show.

Czwartos’s pavilion was to include more than 35 works, one of which was to show German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin near a swastika, according to the project’s initial outline.

Many had criticized the project for echoing the nationalist-populist politics of the Law and Justice party (PiS for short) that, from 2015 until earlier this month, had reigned in Poland. Party members had taken control of the media and museums, and severely curtailed the rights of women and queer people.

After a general election held in October went in favor of the opposition party, many expected that PiS would leave power before the Venice Biennale opens in April. But it was not always clear whether Czwartos’s pavilion would be installed. Joanna Warsza, a curator of the 2022 Polish Pavilion, told the Guardian in November that the planned Czwartos presentation was the “end game of eight years of rightwing rule.” In that same report, Karolina Plinta, an editor at the art magazine Szum, called the exhibition “an anti-European manifesto.”

In an unusual development, the issue so severely split the jury that three members, including Warsza, were moved to issue a dissenting opinion on the matter.

Few details were announced on Friday about the new pavilion by Open Group, other than that it will be titled “Repeat after me” and curated by Marta Czyż.

Across the past four decades, Pope.L amassed an oeuvre of works that thwarted easy readings, offering up situations that alluded to the condition of Black Americans without outright stating what they were trying to communicate. The sculptures, installations, performances, and conceptual artworks that Pope.L created were often provocative and sad—and, more often than not, funny, too, in ways that could be shocking.

Despite the fact that his artworks were intentionally somewhat inscrutable, they amassed a wide audience, and were shown in venues ranging from the Whitney Biennial to Documenta. A 2018 profile of Pope.L that appeared in T: The New York Times Style Magazine said that he was “inarguably the greatest performance artist of our time.”

He cast his art as a larger quest to understand the opposed concepts of Blackness and whiteness. “Black folks’ political and historical circumstances are at odds with whiteness, whether we want them to be or not,” he said in a 1996 interview with the artist Martha Wilson. “There are societal limitations to how much one can reconstruct one’s conditions. We are born into whiteness. On the surface, it seems wholly to construct us, and the degree to which we may counter-construct sometimes seems very limited. But, I believe we can be very imaginative with limitations.”

Pope.L was most famous for his crawl performances, for which he traversed set distances on his hands and knees. These works, first begun in 1978, were staged in locales around New York City and beyond, and were always conducted outside art institutions, in the view of the general public. The formula for his crawl performances, though seemingly simple, ended up being flexible, broaching knotty issues about success, suffering, and Blackness.

Beginning in 2001, working in parts, he undertook the most epic of his crawl performances, making his way all the way from the southernmost of Broadway in Manhattan to his mother’s home in the Bronx. He wore a Superman uniform and a skateboard strapped to his back, and kicked off the performance at the Statue of Liberty, making his way to Manhattan by ferry. The work hinted at the difficulty of achieving freedom while also indirectly hinting at an exploration of the racism that hinders that quest.

He staged dozens of crawls, repeating the grueling act so many times that he reportedly ended up with several fused vertebrae. These performances rankled some onlookers: Pope.L once recalled that a Black viewer nearly kicked him in the face during one performance in which he crawled across a gutter. For some critics, his willingness to debase himself before an audience spoke to a larger exploration of his own value to society as a Black man.

“Pope.L uses his own body instead of crafting mute sculpture to reflect on the treatment of the self as an object,” artist and writer Aria Dean noted in an Art in America essay about Pope.L. “‘Am I, a black man, for myself? How much?’ his oeuvre asks. And it offers a pessimistic answer: potentially not at all.”

Later works would prod how white viewers considered Blackness. For an ongoing project known as the Black Factory, begun in 2004, he asked people to submit objects they associated with Blackness. What he amassed—extra-large condoms, bandanas—spoke to a range of stereotypes.

In an interview with the Guardian, he said of the project, “I realised that for a lot of white people, mostly white people, their experience of race is personal. I’ve never thought of my experience of race as just mine.”

Pope.L was born in 1955 in Newark, New Jersey, to a mother that he described as an addict and an alcoholic. (He initially began working as William Pope.L, then dropped the William. His surname draws its L from his mother’s last name, Lancaster; Pope was the last name of his father, who did not raise him.) He said that his early upbringing had ultimately moved him to create the work that he did.

“My family life was very uncertain,” he said in the 1996 interview with Martha Wilson. “I’ll never get rid of that uncertainty. We never knew from one moment to the next when we would move, what we were going to eat . . . You grow up scared. You realize that there’s not much difference between you and street people.”

Pope.L recalled that his grandmother, a cleaner, spurred on his interest in art by introducing him to one of her clients, a portrait painter.

Initially, Pope.L attended Pratt College, a prestigious Brooklyn art school, but he could not afford it and ended up dropping out before graduation. After working factory jobs, he finished out his undergraduate art education at what is now Montclair State University. He also attended the Whitney Museum’s hallowed Independent Studio Program, then received an M.F.A. from Rutgers University in 1981.

Pope.L’s earliest works were often staged in the street, beyond gallery walls. In 1978, he enacted Thunderbird Immolation a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece, for which he sat in the lotus position on a SoHo sidewalk. He surrounded himself with matches, a reference, seemingly, to the monks that set themselves on fire in protest of the Vietnam War.

Yet many of his initial experiments were waged in the world of theatre. He took classes at the famed Mabou Mines program, which is known for its experimental methodologies, and would go on to teach at Bates College in Maine. At that school, in 1990, he staged a production of the Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun, which memorably chronicles an African American family’s attempts to make an insurance payment while also preserving their unity and financial stability. Pope.L’s version contained a sly twist: the cast was composed not just of Black actors but white ones, too.

His breakthrough with an art-world audience came in 1991. Sitting in the front window of New York’s Franklin Furnace art space, Pope.L slathered himself in mayonnaise, a material that he said lent him a kind of “bogus whiteness.” The piece’s plainly funny title, I Get Paid to Rub Mayo on My Body, suggested self-commodification in the name of art.

So too did another legendary performance, 1997’s ATM Piece, for which Pope.L donned only a pair of Timberland boots and a skirt made of dollar bills, attached himself to an ATM by an eight-foot-long chain of sausage links, and doled out money to passersby. The work alluded to a newly passed law that made it illegal to panhandle within 10 feet of an ATM, and Pope.L seemed to know that he was flirting with trouble. He ended up being labeled an “E.D.P.” (emotionally disturbed person) by a police officer; a photograph documenting the performance preserves that very confrontation between him and a cop.

Pope.L’s work grew increasingly ambitious in the decades afterward.

Starting in 2000, he began creating a web-based project called distributingmartin. It could be accessed via a hidden portal on the website for the Black Factory, and involved attempting to disperse Martin Luther King, Jr.’s body. In typical fashion for Pope.L, when queried about the project by the digital art–focused organization Rhizome, he said that he wasn’t sure what the work meant.

In 2008, he produced Trinket, a 45-foot-long American flag that shreds itself as it blows in the wind; a version of it later acted as the backdrop to a performance by the rapper Kendrick Lamar. (Only recently did the work find an institutional home with the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, due to its unusual format.) And in 2017, he staged Flint Water, an installation and performance that involved bottling contaminated water from Flint, the majority-Black Michigan city that has been mired in crisis for much of the past decade. The bottles were produced as an edition and made available for sale.

Toward the end of the 2010s, Pope.L’s art began to receive mainstream recognition, appearing in the Whitney Biennial, where he won its $100,000 prize, and in Documenta, where he showed Whispering Campaign, which emitted phrases uttered in hushed tones from speakers set throughout the German city of Kassel. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum, both in New York, staged what amounted to an unconventional mid-career survey. ArtReview reported that Pope.L had tried to name the show “How Much Is That Nigger in the Window?,” after a crawl piece from the ’90s. According to the artist, MoMA “had concerns,” so that title was nixed. The show ended up being called “member.”

Just this past November, Pope.L opened his first British institutional exhibition at the South London Gallery.

Many of Pope.L’s works involved linguistic games, enlisting puns and printed texts to befuddle viewers. His performance Eating the Wall Street Journal involved ingesting the copies of the titular publication while wearing only a jockstrap, and his “Skin-Set Drawings” played with the language used to describe Blackness and whiteness (“BLACK PEOPLE ARE TAUT,” for example). The curator Lowery Stokes Sims once called Pope.L the “the poet laureate of male performance artists.”

Artists typically produce biographies and statements for their curricula vitae. But Pope.L’s approach to disseminating information about himself was somewhat different. When he met people, he would hand them a business card. On it, he labeled himself “the friendliest black artist in America©.”

Bige Örer, who has been director of the biennial since 2008, is set to officially leave her position on January 15. The Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), which manages the biennial, announced her resignation on Wednesday.

“We warmly thank Bige Örer for her contribution throughout the years and wish her every success in her future endeavours,” the IKSV wrote in its announcement.

Within the Turkish art world, the Istanbul Biennial has been heavily criticized this year, with many alleging that the system for choosing a curator for the 2024 edition was marred by conflicts of interest. Much of the criticism came after an Art Newspaper report from August that revealed that curator Defne Ayas had been chosen by a group of specialists to organize the show, only to be rejected by the IKSV in favor of Iwona Blazwick, who was herself a member of that panel.

According to the Art Newspaper, the decision to reject Ayas may have rested on a past controversy over the Turkish Pavilion that she curated for the 2015 Venice Biennale. The catalogue for that pavilion, done by the artist Sarkis, included mention of the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government denies having taking place. After the government complained about the catalogue, it was taken out of circulation, and copies of it were made into a sculpture by Sarkis.

The Art Newspaper report led four artists to quit the 2024 biennial and many more to question why the biennial had not released the names of the selection committee members. It also had a ripple effect in the Turkish art scene, causing some to direct their attention to the 2024 Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, by the artist Gülsün Karamustafa. Karamustafa’s pavilion was initially curated by her dealer, who later departed her post to avoid “conflicts that may arise.”

As the pressure mounted, the IKSV committed itself to overhauling the process by which curators are chosen for future biennials, promising greater transparency along the way. But it also said that Blazwick would still curate the 2024 show and affirmed that the IKSV still had the right to nix the selection committee’s choices.

“Preparations for the 18th Istanbul Biennial continue as planned, under the coordination of the biennial team,” the IKSV said on Wednesday. It promised that a new director would be announced “in the coming days.”

Örer, the outgoing Istanbul Biennial director, previously curated the 2022 Turkish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Since 2013, she has been the vice president of the International Biennial Association, the organization that offers recommendations for how to facilitate global biennials and triennials.

One significant way the canon grew this year was through the addition of figures active before 1900, an area that has received less attention in major museums in past years. Female Old Masters were seen anew, especially in the case of a Baltimore Museum of Art show that spotlights women working in Europe between 1400 and 1800.

Yet the art-historical rewriting hardly ended there. It continued with fresh looks for modernists forewent in the past, as well as with retrospectives for artists who hailed from beyond Western Europe and the US. These shows acted as signs of changing times and increased curiosity on the parts of curators, and the momentum is likely to be felt in 2024 and the years afterward.

Below, a look at 10 artists who received their due in 2023.

The 1795 painting depicts Washington toward the end of his presidency, and is one of more than 100 portraits of him that Stuart painted. The Met, for its part, owns one more, also from 1795, that is more famous than this one; that work is among the most high-profile works in the museum’s holdings.

At Christie’s, the Stuart painting is expected to sell for between $1.5 million and $2.5 million, making it one of the top lots of the auction. It is not, however, likely to displace Stuart’s auction record, set in 2018 by the sale of another Washington portrait that had been held by Peggy and David Rockefeller that was bought for $11.5 million.

The Art Newspaper first reported news of the Stuart painting’s sale on Wednesday.

Museum’s regularly sell works from their holdings in a practice known as deaccessioning. Typically, museums auction pieces that are deemed duplicates of ones they already hold or are no longer considered relevant to their institutional purview.

In the case of the Met, the money brought in through the sale of the Stuart work will support a fund dedicated to future acquisitions, putting it in line with Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) guidelines which stipulated that institutions can deaccession objects, so long as doing so aids in maintaining their collections.

During the pandemic, the AAMD loosened those guidelines, allowing museums to take greater liberties in selling art at auction. But doing so was periodically met with scandal, as was the case in 2020, when the Baltimore Museum of Art attempted to sell works by Andy Warhol, Brice Marden, and others in the name of diversity, only to toss out the plan at the last minute as pushback mounted.

The Met itself has deaccessioned works from its holdings in recent years, most notably a Pablo Picasso sculpture that sold at Christie’s for $45 million in 2022.

Claude Picasso died this year, along with his mother, the painter Françoise Gilot, and the notion that there is such a thing as too many Picasso shows. To mark the 50th anniversary of Picasso’s death, dozens of museums across the globe staged exhibitions devoted to the artist. Some were small, some were large. Some were widely seen, others largely ignored. All contained a familiar refrain: Picasso’s art still matters, like it or not.

But did we really need 50 exhibitions to figure that out? It was already self-evident based on museums’ permanent collection galleries, which almost always contain their prized Picassos. It was also obvious based on the glut of mid- and late-career Picassos that hit the auction block every year. (This year’s top lot was a $139.4 million Picasso painting of Marie-Thérèse Walter.) And by the way, good luck finding a museum bookstore that doesn’t have something Picasso-related, be it a 2024 wall calendar, a salt shaker emblazoned with his face, or a tea towel printed with his cutesy, pacifist dove image.

It’s safe to say that, because of all those shows, 2023 was the year of Picasso. But it’s also safe to say we learned just about nothing in the process.

Some museum shows tried to suggest that there was actually still more to be gained from studying Picasso. One was “Picasso in Fontainebleau,” a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through February 17) that surveys one summer spent at a commune in the south of France in 1921. This is a remarkably specific slice of Picasso history—it occupies about a dozen pages of John Richardson’s 1,800-page biography of the artist—but curator Anne Umland suggests that it can teach us a lot about his method. She fixes on the fact that he was creating two major works at the same time: Three Musicians (1921), whose sitters fracture into a dazzling array of intersecting shapes, and Three Women at the Spring (1921), whose sitters wear drape-like dresses reminiscent of ancient Greece instead of contemporary France.

What explains the fact that Picasso was navigating “multiple temporalities,” as Umland puts it in the catalogue—that he was shuttling between classicism and avant-gardism simply by walking the short length of his studio, whose walls were hung with versions of both pictures simultaneously? The exhibition seeks to get to the bottom of things, burrowing so far down the rabbit hole that Umland has even created a gallery that reimagines Picasso’s studio down to its precise, cramped dimensions.

“Picasso in Fontainebleau” gets points for art-historical nerdiness, and for digging up oddities such as studies for Three Women at the Spring that show off Picasso’s knack for painting fattened fingers and bulbous palms. The problem is that “Picasso in Fontainebleau” comes up short. You get a sense of how rapidly Picasso was able to transition between artistic modes, but anyone with even passing knowledge of the artist’s oeuvre already understands that. You want it to go a step further, showing why these two paintings unlock something mysterious about the inner workings of Picasso’s mind, which remain just that: opaque and unknowable.

Where “Picasso in Fontainebleau” is successful, however, is in its implicit exploration of Picasso’s supposed genius. With its panoply of studies and failed artworks, the show sands down the notion that Picasso produced masterpieces overnight, that his first stroke was his best stroke. That sets it apart from a show like the Guggenheim Museum’s “Young Picasso in Paris,” which probably would have rankled Claude Picasso.

That small exhibition, which closed over the summer, asserted that Picasso père was more or less born with talent, with works that date to his early 20s. Some really are that good: Moulin de la Galette (ca. 1900), featuring revelers who flit through the darkness of a bar, remained striking. But others, like The Diners (1901), with its female figure who melts into the white table beneath her due to Picasso’s ill-defined brushwork, are slapdash and slack.

These were two of just 10 works in the entire exhibition, but you wouldn’t know it based on the crowds. When I visited the exhibition in June, visitors jostled for an unobstructed view of Moulin de la Galette. Meanwhile, Gego’s 160-work retrospective lining the rotunda was much more sparsely populated. Her wire sculptures swayed gently in the wind, with few onlookers to observe them as they did so.

Of the 50 shows mounted in the “Celebración Picasso” series, none were retrospectives. This didn’t mean there were no big shows—the Centre Pompidou in Paris, for example, has a blowout survey featuring around 1,000 works on paper by the artist. But mostly, what we got were scraps related to Picasso’s legacy, the result being that nothing felt grand enough to say anything major.

The tendency was particularly pronounced in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has a world-class collection of Picassos in its arsenal, mounted a one-gallery show devoted to the Picasso masterpiece that never was: a vast commission for Hamilton Easter Field’s Brooklyn home. Field would’ve had a fabulous library lined with Cubism of the highest order were it not for his mother, whose conservative aesthetic sensibilities ended up influencing his own. The whole thing gradually came apart; the show (through January 14) endeavors to understand what could have been.

What we are left with, at the Met, are some of the works made in the run-up to the commission: tangles of brown and grey forms that cohere to form female nudes and still lifes (with the help of explanatory wall texts). Anna Jozefacka, the curator of the exhibition, makes a compelling case for how Picasso tried to fit his rough-hewn avant-gardism into a refined patron’s digs, finding along the way that the two were fundamentally incompatible. The show does provide an interesting case study for Picassoheads, but without the finished product, it all comes off a bit staid.

The Met’s Picasso show aims to unravel a side of Picasso that no one ever saw—in this case, because the work doesn’t exist. But in the case of “A Foreigner Called Picasso” at Gagosian gallery (through February 10), the side of the artist explored—his identity as an immigrant—was not always easy to see because Picasso sometimes hid it away as best he could.

The show is curated by art historians Annie Cohen-Solal and Vérane Tasseau; the former is the author of the terrific book Picasso the Foreigner, finally released in English this year after publishing in France in 2021. The book traces how Picasso, a Spaniard by birth, refashioned himself a Frenchman, only to unknowingly lead an antagonistic relation with the French state, whose officers surveilled him for years because of perceived connections to Communism. (In reality, he was not much of an activist for most of his career.)

Cohen-Solal’s book is a massive contribution to the crowded field of Picasso studies, which generally does not view the artist as a political subject. Unfortunately, the Gagosian show doesn’t offer the same thrills as its related book. That’s because much of what Cohen-Solal deals with in her writing isn’t all that visual: official documents, letters, and the like.

The exhibition attempts to provide a visual armature for all that text, but it’s not always easy to understand the relationship between the Picasso paintings and the Picasso file kept by the Sûreté General—especially because the show itself contains almost no captions at all. A section about how Picasso hunkered down during World War II, for example, is mainly composed of paintings of Dora Maar and Marie-Thérèse Walter. Notably, the exhibition does not discuss his failed attempts at becoming a French citizen during that period much, even though that is the subject of an entire chapter in Cohen-Solal’s book. This is a shame, and all the more so because the show is the kind of gallery exhibition many might describe as “museum-quality,” seeing as it has loans of important works from the Met and other institutions.

Not far away from the Gagosian show, Pace also has its own Picasso show (through December 22), this one focused on 14 sketchbooks. The sketchbooks included are meant to provide insights into Picasso’s process, with one dating to around the time he made Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) intended to illuminate elements that didn’t make it into the final product. But these are simply sketches after all, and it’s worth remembering that although Picasso did periodically rip some from his notebooks and claim them as artworks in their own right, many are not major, since they were meant only for private consumption. Yet the show, with its darkened lighting, has the feeling of a space meant to inspire contemplation in the face of greatness.

Greatness, however, is decidedly not what is on view. Take one 1956 ink drawing of a couple caught in an erotic embrace. Unlike Picasso’s paintings, whose conflations of torsos, legs, arms, genitals, and facial features do offer their pleasures, this drawing comes off as a sloppy, testosterone-induced mess. Why, I wondered, does this man’s thigh awkwardly disappear into his lover’s crotch? Then I realized I had thought too hard about a work that Picasso himself probably tossed off—and maybe didn’t even want the public to see at all. For a man who is estimated to have made tens of thousands of artworks, it only makes sense that some of them don’t merit closer attention.

But no one can forget Guernica, or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or Picasso’s portraits of a sobbing Dora Maar, or his painting of a stoic Gertrude Stein, or his Cubist still lifes, or his Blue Period harlequins. That’s the implicit assertion of many exhibitions that appeared in museums and galleries this year that aimed to show Picasso’s enduring influence on contemporary artists. The sheer existence of these shows suggests that dealers, artists, and curators still cling to Picasso’s legacy, even as they critique it.

Yet some may wish to forget Picasso altogether, and one of those people is the comedian Hannah Gadsby, who, in their 2018 Netflix special Nanette, dressed down art historians for continuing to worship at the altar of a man who inflicted physical and emotional abuse on the women he called his lovers. Gadsby’s Brooklyn Museum show “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” arguably the most talked-about Picasso show of the year, was meant to expand the critique made in Nanette. It did so by putting art by the “passionate, tormented, genius man ball-sack”—the comedian’s words—alongside feminist works from the institution’s collection.

On paper (and without an embarrassing pun for a title), this is actually not a bad idea for an exhibition. If only Gadsby had succeeded in highlighting genuine connections between Picasso and, say, Nina Chanel Abney, whose work here alluded not to his art but to Édouard Manet’s. It was clear that the women artists in the show didn’t pay much mind to Picasso—the painter Joan Semmel even admitted to as much in a companion guide to the show. Ironically, Gadsby seemed to center Picasso within art history more than these artists did.

But let’s say you really wanted to move on from Picasso. What might that look like? The French artist Sophie Calle faced that quandary when she agreed to take over the whole of Paris’s Musée Picasso several years ago. This fall, she ended up coming up with one of the very few interesting Picasso-related shows mounted this year.

Calle told Art in America that she did not want to cancel Picasso. Her solution: empty the museum of his art and fill it with her own belongings and art. She kept a select few pieces by Picasso on view, but she relegated them to the basement and concealed some of them beneath paper. In Calle’s hands, those Picassos look more like objects packed for transport than they do immovable masterpieces. They are now things that are temporary, ready to pass on to another place.

If one was to visit the Musée Picasso right now, expecting to see Blue and Rose Period paintings and Cubist experiments, they might come away peeved and underwhelmed. In a strange way, that seems to echo Claude Picasso’s words from 2018: “Many people expect to make discoveries that, at the end of the day, they do not make, and they are not satisfied with what is on offer.” Perhaps Calle, in draining the Musée Picasso’s galleries of almost all things Picasso, had diagnosed the problem and found the only possible remedy for it: a temporary pause on the Picasso festivities that would allow for some actual thinking to occur. Finally, a moment of contemplation.

The gallery/collective, known as Eltiqa, posted pictures of its destruction on Facebook two weeks ago. In the images, a smashed-up car appears amid rubble and broken shutters. A spokesperson for the Israeli Defense Forces did not respond to request for comment, and the IDF has not confirmed whether it was responsible for the destruction of the gallery.

Eltiqa itself had been included in Documenta by the Palestinian artists’ collective the Question of Funding, which “aims to rethink the economy of funding and how it affects cultural production both in Palestine and the world,” according to a description on the exhibition’s website.

In 2022, many seized on the collective’s presence in the exhibition, claiming that it was an example of an antisemitic, anti-Israel bias because Palestinians were being spotlit at the exclusion of Israelis. (Ruangrupa, the Indonesian collective that organized the show, denied that the exhibition was antisemitic; a panel appointed by Documenta to review the controversy found that the show acted as an “echo chamber” for anti-Israel sentiment.) In part because of the controversy surrounding the Question of Funding and other works in the show, the group’s presentations received attention from critics. Artist Mohammed Al-Hawajri, a Gazan artist participating as part of Eltiqa, drew notice for works that compared Picasso’s painting Guernica to the conflict in the city in which he is based.

Mohamed Abusal, another Eltiqa member who showed at Documenta, reposted the images of the gallery’s destruction on Facebook, noting that Eltiqa is one of the very few art spaces in Gaza.

On Wednesday, the Question of Funding wrote on Instagram that Eltiqa’s space had been “bombed and destroyed by Israeli forces.” The collective said it had been able to contact artists who run the gallery, and that these artists had asked around about the space’s state.

“They were told that local people have entered the gallery and took out paintings and furniture to make fire out of them to make heat and bake bread,” the Question of Funding wrote. “They said they are sad to know that their artworks have been burnt, but they also asked what is meaning of art now? Aren’t peoples’ lives far more important?”

Since October 7, when the militant group Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took more than 200 hostages, Israeli forces have continued to lead air strikes and a ground invasion on Gaza. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 20,000 Gazans have been killed in the process.

On December 6, the city of Las Vegas said that its council had officially approved an agreement that could lay the groundwork for a museum in the city, to be located in Symphony Park, in the heart of the city’s Downtown district. Elaine Wynn, who appears on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list, is attached to the project as a partner, along with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The city council’s approved agreement was negotiated with a developer who now has a six-month period to devise an official plan for the museum. That means the institution is not set in stone yet, but it is closer than it ever has been before to becoming a reality.

In its current form, the museum is projected to cost $150 million and is likely to span 60,000 square feet to 90,000 square feet. It is slated to open in 2028.

Through its partnership with LACMA, the Las Vegas Museum of Art could potentially borrow works from that institution for its shows and presentations.

As it currently stands, Las Vegas is the largest American city without an art institution that is a member of the American Alliance of Museums. Heather Harmon, a former deputy director of the Nevada Museum of Art who is acting as a representative for the project, called the new planned institution a “great next step in our cultural chapter” during the city council meeting.

In 2019, there were plans to build a Las Vegas museum as a branch of the Nevada Museum of Art. Harmon had been hired in 2019 to lead that project, which came with a $250 million price tag and an area of around 125,000 square feet to 150,000 square feet. A spokesperson said for the Nevada Museum of Art told ARTnews that this forthcoming Las Vegas Museum of Art has no affiliation with the institution.

Technically, this is not the first art museum to open in Las Vegas. There was already once an institution known as the Las Vegas Museum of Art that opened in 1997, but it closed just 12 years later, having run out of funding.

If this Las Vegas Museum of Art does succeed in opening, it could prove itself a significant addition to the city.

“The move could see America’s most notorious city join Des Moines, Omaha, Fort Worth, and other midsize cities in having a boundary-pushing art museum,” Christina Binkley wrote in a 2019 profile of the efforts to build the museum for ARTnews. “It would follow an era of hope that fizzled even as casinos hosted megawatt art collections from the Guggenheim and the Smithsonian to draw tourists to the Las Vegas Strip.”

Correction, 12/21/23, 12:15 p.m.: A previous version of this article stated that the planned Las Vegas Museum of Art was a branch of the Nevada Museum of Art. A spokesperson for the latter institution clarified that there is no relation between the two.

The drama over West’s art began not long after he died in 2012 and has involved two conflicting entities: the Franz West Private Foundation, which the artist formed during his final days, and the Franz West Archive, which was established during the late ’90s. After West’s death, the Franz West Archive began seeking control of his art, launching a number of lawsuits against the foundation, which is directed by his former studio manager.

West is considered a crucial figure in recent art history, with his work notably receiving a retrospective at Tate Modern in 2018. Many of his works bridge the gap between sculpture and design, showing where distinctions between the two fall apart.

An ongoing legal saga has embroiled West’s legacy for much of the past decade. Those close to him have debated whether the foundation really obeyed the artist’s wishes, and Austrian courts have even scrutinized the structure of the organization, with the country’s Supreme Court even dismissing its board in 2016 after accusing some of its members of paying themselves “suspicious” six-figure sums.

Much of the legal action has centered around whether West’s family should have the rights to his art. Tamuna Sirbiladze, West’s widow, sued the foundation, claiming that she and her children owned his work, not the foundation. She died in 2016, as legal claims continued to pend. The year afterward, a court ruled that the foundation had been formed without a proper contract.

But according to the Art Newspaper, the new court decision now grants more control to the foundation. The court reportedly has named West’s sister, Anne Gutjahr, who died in 2021, as his legal successor, meaning that his children did not have the rights to his work. She had called for the estate to be transferred to the foundation prior to her passing.

Because West’s current galleries will still be able to sell his art through the arrangement, the new decision is important for a gallery as large as Gagosian, which will be allowed to keep West on its roster. In 2001, Gagosian famously lured West away from David Zwirner, the dealer that had helped make the sculptor famous.

“A key protagonist of the Arte Povera movement and an artist of the Gallery for 39 years, Anselmo pursued and explored his practice in relation to nature, the finite and the indefinite, the visible and the invisible,” the gallery said in a statement.

Like many in the Arte Povera movement, Anselmo crafted oddball, highly memorable sculptures that combined industrial and organic matter. Many of Anselmo’s works subject materials—stones, steel, lettuce, fabric, glass, and more—to the forces of gravity.

Torsion (1968), a work held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, contains a wood block with leather wrapped around it. The leather is encased within a giant cement cube, and the block is leaned against the wall, establishing a delicate balance that keeps this bizarre object in place.

Untitled (Sculpture That Eats), a work made that same year, includes a low rectangle of granite with a cube of the same matter attached via a piece of wire. Sandwiched between the two is a piece of fresh lettuce. Over time, the lettuce decays, gradually causing the smaller granite element to slip until it falls onto a bed of sawdust beneath.

Anselmo’s works had a metaphysical dimension that he described as being borne from a larger philosophical inquiry. “I, the world, things, life—we are points of energy, and it is not necessary to crystallize these points as it is to keep them open and alive, functioning in our life,” he once said.

Born in 1934 in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, Italy, Anselmo started out as a self-taught painter before turning to sculpture. He also produced conceptual works such as La Mia Ombra Verso l’Infinito Dalla Cima Dello Stromboli Durante L’Alba del 16 Agosto 1965 (1965), for which he ventured to a volcanic island off the coast of Sicily and photographed himself as the sun hit him. He added pencil lines to his pictures that suggested the rays emanating toward him, effectively visualizing something that was normally impossible to see.

Arte Povera, as theorized by the curator Germano Celant, made use of cheap, “low” materials as a reaction to bourgeois forms of art-making like painting, which is more permanent. Some art historians now view these works as responses to the Italian condition after World War II.

As his star ascended alongside Arte Povera figures such as Jannis Kounellis and Michelangelo Pistoletto, Anselmo started to show widely in Europe. He figured in four editions of the Venice Biennale, including the 1990 one, at which he won the Golden Lion for painting. He also featured in two editions of Documenta, the taste-making exhibition that happens once every five years in Kassel, Germany.

At the time of his death, Anselmo was working on a survey for the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. The show is currently slated to open in February. His work will also be included in a major Arte Povera exhibition, curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, will open at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris next fall. “I loved him enormously. He oriented, showed me the meaning of ultramarine blue, beyond the sea, oltremare, far away and yet here, now, alive,” Christov-Bakargiev wrote on X.

A number of works by Anselmo took the form of stones embedded with compasses—cryptic objects that pointed up the searching quality that recurred throughout the artist’s oeuvre. Of one 1967–68 sculpture titled Direzione, he once said, “The work begins in the place where it is, and ends where the Earth’s magnetic fields are, the center of the planet.”