Influencers and aspiring ones live attentive to whatever happens, eager to reheat it and serve it back to the feeds as if they had just discovered the principle of buoyancy. But few like the man from Syracuse, and very little capable of provoking a genuine eureka.

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.

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...

Before art, there was the image. The wind has been drawing linear patterns on the dunes for millions of years, always different and yet always recognisable. Water has polished stones into lovely pebbles, full of nuance. Polyps shape the corals themselves, raising branched, almost labyrinthine structures of extraordinary beauty out of blind secretions of calcium carbonate. Arabesques that art can imitate but never surpass...

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...

I have known for several days. We waited for the foundation’s official publication, where it is formally announced that Leticia Sánchez Toledo has been awarded once again. This time, by the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation.
As many know, Leticia is a figurative visual artist who works primarily in oil on canvas. Through its decision, the foundation supports one of the projects she currently has in development.

Mónica has summited something enormous today. And I am probably just as happy as she is, as happy as the people who love her most. Whether she shares it is her call. I want to share this joy by retrieving some words I once wrote about her work, when she was just beginning at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the Americas.

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...

Though it isn't always evident, behind every prize-winning photograph several images coexist. The one captured by the photographer, perfectly visible, and the ones the system of recognition produces over time, deciding what that image will end up meaning.

A couple of days ago I was sent a Hypermedia article signed by Jorge Camacho in which he “interprets some little-known phrases by the Cuban writer —referring to José Martí!— with the aim of drawing attention to that dark, invisibilized side of his personality that neither Cuban institutions nor Cuban artists have shown any interest in exploring.”

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.

On December 10, I published a text on a photograph that, to my eyes, could stand without difficulty among the best of the year. Not long after, I encountered another article presenting the final selection for the World Press Photo Exhibition 2026. The photograph in question was among them. What remains now is a single doubt. Whether it will ultimately be chosen as Photo of the Year.

On April 26, 1986, I was almost certainly bored out of my mind, sprawled in some corner of my apartment in Havana’s Vedado district. What I remember from those days is fear. A dense, persistent fear. The certainty that I could be swallowed by three years of mandatory military service. I clung to a girl whose face recalled Mariko-san —Yoko Shimada’s, not Anna Sawai’s— and I could not imagine allowing the distance between us...

A few weeks ago I met Leticia Sánchez Toledo (Cabaiguán, Cuba, 1985). The friend of a friend who is turning into a friend. We are somewhere inside that passage.
The first time I saw her work was in her living room. Some paintings hung on the walls. Others rested on the floor, leaning against pieces of furniture, as though they had not quite finished deciding where to be...

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.