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...

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.

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...

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.

Left to itself, matter organizes into the sphere. With no purpose other than being, it expends upon itself the least possible energy. A sphere contains any volume beneath a minimal surface, reaches maximum stability, and slips beyond the reach of any avoidable or unnecessary disturbance. It is optimal: the celestial bodies that drift and gravitate in the void are all spherical. One only has to look at them.

When I was researching for my book La acera del sol: impactos de la política cultural socialista en el arte cubano 1961–1981, Professor Adelaida de Juan granted me an interview. We spoke for several hours, and among everything she told me, one remark stood out: for her, the most significant visual production of the 1960s had been neither painting, nor printmaking, nor photography, but graphic design—the posters produced by ICAIC, Casa de las Américas, and the National Council of Culture.

There is, in underwater life, a captivating otherness, and these images from the Underwater Photographer of the Year competition bring it forth with admirable clarity.
The first photograph captures a clownfish parent keeping vigil over the moment when the eggs it had tended so carefully begin to hatch. A scene which, according to the judges, they had never encountered before...