A truism, almost an embarrassment, is that we know far fewer people than we pretend to—fewer artists still, and far fewer careers. I read that the influential British photographer Martin Parr, a central figure in contemporary photography and a prominent member of Magnum Photos, has died at 73 in his home in Bristol. I didn’t know him, and if I ever saw one of his images, I erased it, discarded it without ceremony.

Philately was one of the small devotions of my childhood. I inherited hundreds of stamps from my father. I could never say whether he collected them himself or simply bought them for my brother and me. Among all of them, one in particular held my gaze with disproportionate insistence: a reproduction of The Sleeping Gypsy, the 1897 painting by Henri Rousseau that I finally saw years later at the MoMA.

About 300 viewers attended the opening of "Double Homage" at the Favarola Museum at St. Thomas University in Miami before Miami Art Week got underway, but it is still on view. This posthumous exhibition features a series of drawings by Frank Izquierdo, created as an homage to the 18th-century Austro-German sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt.

Picking up the thread of the previous text, the RPS has bestowed its Centenary Medal on British photographer Susan Derges (London, 1955), in recognition of her sustained contribution to the medium. Derges is known for her camera-less work and for direct experiments with light, water and vegetation. Since the late 1980s she has developed series in which she submerges photosensitive paper in rivers such as the Taw, near her home in Devon...

Senegalese photographer Omar Victor Diop has received the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) Award for Achievement in the Art of Photography. It is a distinction granted each year to an artist in recognition of a notable personal achievement in the art of photography or moving image. It is not a lifetime award, but a prize for a group of works or for a particularly significant result.

What could I possibly say today about Wifredo Lam and the exhibition the MoMA has devoted to him? Little that hasn’t already been uttered—successfully or not—by the hundreds of critics and journalists who have read, interpreted, or merely circled around the curatorship of Christophe Cherix (David Rockefeller Director) and Beverly Adams (Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art).

I don’t know Miguel Rodez personally. Nor does the immense—if small—majority who read this blog. It’s possible I crossed paths with him more than once at Miami openings over the last four years. Our relationship is, essentially, a social-media one. For our regular readers, his name will likely be unfamiliar because he arrived in the United States in 1972, a thirteen-year-old adolescent ...

It is enough to walk long enough through the arteries of any major city for the iconic eyebrows of Frida Kahlo to emerge from some unexpected corner. Alongside the Virgin of Guadalupe and the poblano chili, they constitute Mexico’s leading exports and a confused symbol for millions of women worldwide. In her homeland her image circulates on banknotes, perfumes, and the most unimaginable supports.

The art market revolves around monumental sums. What captures the spotlight is usually the excessive sale, the broken record, the news that one artist or another has climbed the rankings. The tip of the iceberg. Behind these dazzling transactions lies the effort, talent, and dedication of one of its key figures: the advisor. A specialist who assumes he will never shine before the public...