News

Roman Villa Near Rome Reveals Mosaics After Illegal Digging A damaged Roman villa has surfaced at Castel di Guido, a government-owned farm about 13 miles west of Rome, after police detected illegal excavations in February. What began as a looting case has become a rare archaeological recovery: officials say the site preserves an imperial-era residence linked to the Antonine dynasty,...

Art Basel’s Unlimited Sector Opens a New Chapter Under Ruba Katrib At Art Basel in Basel, the fair’s largest-format platform is entering a new phase. Unlimited 2026, staged in the vast halls of Messe Basel, is being organized for the first time by Ruba Katrib, chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1 in New York. She takes...

House of Criticism Turns Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith Into a Portrait of Art Criticism Itself At Tribeca Film Festival, Alison Chernick’s House of Criticism (2026) looks beyond two familiar bylines and into the private world that shaped them. The documentary, which had its world premiere last week, follows married critics Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith through the routines, conversations,...

Performance-Lectures Are Having a Moment — and Maya Man’s Sold-Out Brooklyn Show Shows Why A packed room at Roulette Intermedium in Brooklyn offered a clear sign that the performance-lecture has moved from niche format to something closer to a cultural language. In mid-May, artist Maya Man performed StarQuest, a work that grew out of her show StarPower, before an audience...

Joop van Caldenborgh’s collection began with a teenage purchase and grew into a museum Dutch collector Joop van Caldenborgh turned a paper route into a lifelong habit of looking closely. At 16, he used his earnings to buy a portfolio of prints by Peter Struycken, an early choice that already pointed toward the abstract and the exacting. Decades later, the...

Museum Tinguely in Basel turns to a long-neglected subject in a new exhibition: the visual language of women’s labor, from factory work and domestic drudgery to care, reproduction, and the body’s own memory of repetitive action. Labouring Bodies gathers work by 36 artists from the turn of the 20th century to the present, using machines and technology as a...

Art Basel Commission Turns Basel’s Messeplatz Into a Slower, Stranger Sculpture Field At the center of Art Basel’s most crowded public square, Nairy Baghramian is asking viewers to do something increasingly rare: stop and look. Her 2026 commission, Modèle vivant (S’empilant), transforms the Messeplatz fountain in Basel into a site of suspended forms, muted color, and deliberate hesitation. The Berlin-based Iranian...

Art Basel Launches Koyo Kouoh Fellowship for Emerging Curators Art Basel has unveiled a new fellowship honoring Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian Swiss curator who died in May 2025 and remained one of the most influential figures in contemporary art until the end of her life. The three-year program will bring one emerging curator, writer, or cultural practitioner to the fair...

Philippe Stern, the executive who helped define Patek Philippe’s modern identity, dies at 88 Philippe Stern, the former president of Patek Philippe who guided the Swiss watchmaker through a period of global expansion while guarding its independence, died on June 14 at age 88. For decades, Stern stood at the center of one of luxury watchmaking’s most closely watched maisons,...

Phillips Sets U.S. Watch Auction Record With $75.8 Million Sale Phillips has pushed the American watch market into new territory. The auction house’s two-day New York Watch Auction: XIV, held in association with Bacs & Russo, totaled $75.8 million and became the highest-grossing watch auction in U.S. history. The result surpassed the record Phillips set only last December, when a...