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...

Human genius can be observed in many of its works. Nowhere is it more detectable than in the arts: music, literature, and the visual arts. As a species, seen from above, we are all fairly clever. But some are—or were—truly exceptional. What did they require to rise above the rest? What made them singular, beyond the reasoning most of us share?

I have not the faintest idea why The Times, in its February 16 edition, informs us—by a delay so un-British—that Damien Hirst’s Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain has been installed in the Camellia House at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Not only that work: The Watchtower, by Auke de Vries, and Muamba Posy, by Vanessa da Silva, both outdoors in the Country Park.

The Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, part of University College London (UCL), houses one of the most important collections of Egyptian artefacts in the world. It preserves more than 80,000 objects recovered from excavations conducted between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among them are hundreds of shabti, small funerary figures that formed part of the ritual equipment of tombs in ancient Egypt...

A beautiful vista of Havana Bay, framed by the large window beside the entrance, catches the first-time visitor at once. Nothing more is needed for the restless collector of unrepeatable instants: views that do not tolerate staging—views that do nothing but awaken the desire to contemplate them, to capture them, to possess them. A coffee becomes an invitation for the newcomer. We already have something in common.