An NSFW picture of Lorde has gone viral, stirring debate on social media about why the singer chose to bare it all for a special-edition release of her new album Virgin.

The photograph, which appears in the vinyl edition of that LP, shows Lorde donning a pair of see-through pants, without any underwear beneath them. Composed so that there is little to see beyond her waist, the picture echoes the album’s cover, an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis by artist Heji Shin.

Artist Talia Chetrit appears to be credited as the photographer of the picture in the liner notes for the vinyl, which were posted to Reddit by fans earlier this week. Chetrit previously photographed Lorde for the cover of one of the album’s singles, “What Was That,” featuring the singer’s face dripping with a translucent substance that may be water, sweat, or something else entirely.

Many of Chetrit’s photographs feature herself and others in various states of undress, often as a comment on how erotic desire and power play a role in how we see. “Power dynamics, agency, sexuality, and the psychology behind imagery have always been an important part of my work,” she told Flash Art in 2018. She has worked on commission for fashion magazines and shown her art in galleries.

Similar pants to the ones worn by Lorde here have also appeared in at least two other pictures by Chetrit, both of them self-portraits. In both, the artist artist poses before a mirror, spreading her legs and holding her camera to her face.

Of Plastic Nude (2016), Amanda Maddox wrote in Aperture last year, “While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, ‘is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.’ Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.”

Seen in that light, the new photograph of Lorde speaks to Virgin’s broader concerns with how much one is meant to reveal of their inner self, specifically when it comes to gender. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” Lorde sings on the opening track, “Hammer.” And of the album more broadly, she has said that, during its making, “I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.”

Throughout the run-up to the album, Lorde has subverted gender conventions. In the video for “Man of the Year,” she tapes her breasts and writhes around on a pile of soil that references Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), an iconic work of the Land art movement. That movement has always been aligned with a certain brand of masculinity, even though women such as Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt are also associated with it.

“Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark; women, however, never enjoyed that privilege,” wrote Megan O’Grady in 2018. Lorde’s mimicry of the De Maria piece seems to upend that notion, as does the closer of Virgin, a song called “David,” whose name may be an allusion to the Michelangelo sculpture, arguably the most famous male nude in art history.

The Virgin vinyl photograph also points up a contradiction: though Lorde has left little of her torso to the imagination, we still can’t see aspects of her gender identity. That much is also obvious based on the Shin photograph on the album’s cover, one of many X-ray photographs she’s taken. As Shin told ARTnews in 2019, “Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what’s going on.”

Most social media users haven’t engaged with the artful ideas broached by Chetrit and Shin’s photography for Lorde. Some have questioned why the vinyl’s picture did not gain the controversy that followed a recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover featuring that pop star kneeling before a man who can be seen grabbing her hair. (Carpenter later released new cover art that she jokingly said had been “approved by God.”)

One X post with 86,000 likes appears to mock the photograph as “groundbreaking” while labeling the Carpenter cover “anti-feminist.” Its poster, whose X page notes that they run a parody account, then wrote in a follow-up tweet, “today when us woman are still fighting for our rights, its bizarre that influential people do weird stuff like this for engagement. both covers are very odd.”

In response to that post, one user, apparently referencing Madonna’s 1992 Sex book, wrote, “No need for all the discourse. 90’s Madonna would kill you all.”

Other users have also poked fun at the Virgin picture. “when you open your Virgin vinyl and see lordussy,” reads one tweet accompanied with an iCarly clip in which the actress Miranda Cosgrove enters a room and is met with a blinding flash of light.

Liz Collins had her work cut out for her when she conceived the two 16-foot-long tapestries she showed at last year’s Venice Biennale. Both textiles feature mountain ranges whose peaks emit rainbows that twist through a dark sky, and though they were among the largest works in the Biennale, they were crafted with such elegance that they appeared effortless.

In 2022, when she began work on them at the TextielLab in the Dutch city of Tillburg, Collins envisaged the two textiles as one 40-foot weaving. She thought, “I’m just going for the mother lode. I want to make this huge.” Going for the mother lode quickly revealed itself to be no easy task, however.

Collins quickly realized that her ambitions had outstripped what was actually possible, leading her to split her planned mega-tapestry in two. After an initial trial that didn’t look quite as she wanted, she switched to a lighter yarn. She was pleased with the final product, which she brought home to New York in duffel bags, not yet aware that curator Adriano Pedrosa was interested in showing them at his Biennale.

During a recent visit to her Brooklyn studio, Collins was transparent about the difficulty of producing these textiles, titled Rainbow Mountains: Moon and Rainbow Mountains: Weather (both 2023). But despite the arduous process of making the works, she also spoke of the resulting pieces as being transcendent and transporting. She described both as representing “this monumental space of distortion” and said her mountain ranges evinced “a persistent duality for me: the idea of danger, precarity, horror—the bad things—alongside joy, euphoria, the force of life, being alive, love and community and passion and emotion. Awe and wonder are in the mountains, but they’re also in the rainbows.”

The textiles depict “the promised land—this idea of something you’re looking toward that’s always a little out of reach,” as Collins put it.

Since the 1990s, Collins has been creating fiber art that attempts to reach that promised land. She has crafted wearable garments, painting-like weavings, and performance pieces involving collaborators, many of whom have knit large textiles as a collective. She weaves queer themes into her work—rainbows and Pride flags recur throughout—and often creates textiles that have a corporeal quality, with spills of yarn that recall locks of hair or rivulets of blood.

These labor-intensive pieces have been featured at commercial galleries, art fairs, and design expos and will now be surveyed by the museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, where Collins did both undergraduate and graduate work and later was a faculty member in the textiles department. The RISD survey, opening on July 19 and running through January 11, 2026, coincides with the Museum of Modern Art’s iteration of “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction,” which features three works by her.

To create such elegant art requires physical and mental endurance (and sometimes the help of mills in Italy, Peru, and other foreign nations). The RISD exhibition’s catalog features an essay by Zoe Latta, cofounder of the clothing label Eckhaus Latta and student of Collins who participated in one of the artist’s “Knitting Nation” performances, for which Latta and others helped produce a giant red weaving using a loom in the auditorium of the Institute of Contemporary Art. “At some point,” Latta writes, “I remember that my machine was turning red and I realized my hands were bleeding from blisters popping on the handle of the carriage.” (Museum workers bandaged Latta’s wounds, and she returned to the performance thereafter.)

From such burdensome labor spring weavings in shades of deep crimson, gleaming pink, and alluring blue. The fact that Collins is able to spin pain into beauty has not been lost on her collaborators. The artist Nayland Blake, for example, once enlisted Collins to fix a beloved sock monkey torn apart by a dog and filmed Collins’s hands in close-up for a video called Stab (2013).

Kate Irvin, the curator of Collins’s RISD survey, said that for the artist, “the idea of labor leads to this idea of magic, of alchemy—of creating form or structure out of a line of fiber.” Irvin compared Collins to a trickster, saying, “She’s finding a pathway to other places that are generative and creative and safe.”

Collins herself said that the physicality of her process has helped to root her in her body—and that she even welcomes the tedium that accompanies weaving. “Either it’s boring, or you find a way for it to be transformative,” she said. “You can transcend the monotony.”

Collins was born in 1968 in Alexandria, Virginia, and spent her childhood visiting Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C. “It was so much a part of my life to experience art,” she said, recalling such formative experiences as attending the National Museum of African Art, where, during one visit, she viewed a video about men who make kente cloth.

She described an early compulsion to make “something with the heaviness of painting.” But she eventually found herself dissuaded from taking up that medium. As part of her required foundational studies as a freshman at RISD, she tried painting, but “there was something about it that felt stressful to me—the rectangle, the rigid rectangle,” she said. She found herself gravitating toward modernists like Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Anni Albers, and Sonia Delaunay, all of whom fluidly translated their abstractions across paintings and textiles. Those artists “really helped me know that I could do that too,” Collins said.

When she became a textiles major in her second year, she finally found her purpose. She learned to weave using a warp board and found the experience of running yellow yarn through it “so special and new and perfect for my body,” as she says in the RISD catalog.

Yet even the textile program left something to be desired: She wanted to create clothes, and all her teachers were fiber artists or designers. “I wanted to work with Jean Paul Gaultier, who could take my magical fabric and turn it into a magical garment,” she told me. Despite being unable to find a Gaultier-like mentor on RISD’s faculty, Collins followed her own intuition. When she was assigned to create a “political piece” for one class, she took camouflage-print fake fur and slashed it. She has since continued to produce weavings with gashes in them.

After graduating with an MFA in 1999, Collins launched a knitwear company that briefly made her a fixture within the world of fashion. “I had this meteoric rise to visibility and recognition, because my work was very unusual,” she said. “I was breaking rules. I was hand-making things with knitting machines, not using factories, and making these very unusual constructions that people hadn’t seen.”

Many of those constructions aspired toward liberation. A tight-fitting bustier from 1999 that appears in MoMA’s “Woven Histories,” for example, features red veins that run across the torso and over one shoulder; sheer dresses donned by runway models featured dangling red threads and gaping holes. “I came out as a queer person through my clothing,” Collins said. “It was a raw expression of my emotional landscape, my sexuality, my anxiety, my repression.”

Her clothes entered the mainstream, with the rapper Lil’ Kim wearing a pink silk and wool top designed by Collins in a 2000 music video. Some in the art world gained appreciation for them, too, including the art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson, a longtime friend who dedicated her 2017 book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, to Collins. “When I want to feel at my most fierce, protected, and glamorous, that’s when I choose to wear a Liz Collins garment,” said Bryan-Wilson, whose wedding dress was designed by Collins. “They are witchy and eye-catching. They’re statement pieces. People are always, like, ‘Oh, my God, what is that you’re wearing?’”

But Collins began to feel burnt out by the business of fashion. She wasn’t making enough money, and she had grown exhausted by customers who placed specific demands on her, not realizing all that went into the production of her clothes. Collins knew she could not make it on her own anymore, so she applied for work with other designers, including Donna Karan. But when she came across a position in RISD’s textile department, “everything shifted for me,” she explained. She recalled having “slowly segued” out of fashion while continuing to take on projects with designers such as Gary Graham, with whom she crafted the Pride Dress (2003), which was made from a tattered American flag.

Bryan-Wilson herself donned the Pride Dress for Knitting Nation Phase 1: Knitting During Wartime (2005), the first in a series of performances that helped cement Collins’s place within the art world. Staged on Governors Island, Knitting During Wartime involved many collaborators working together to knit an American flag that was then laid on the ground, trod upon, and defaced. Collins intended the piece as a response to Sunny A. Smith’s The Muster, a series of artworks interrogating Civil War reenactments. Smith aspired to answer the question “What are you fighting for?” Knitting During Wartime appeared as many Americans were asking something similar of themselves while the United States continued its conflict in Afghanistan. Bryan-Wilson recalled Knitting During Wartime as a “ruckus” highlighted by the loud noises of knitting machines and said she understood the piece as a “critique of wartime nationalism and the feminized labor of knitting.”

Future “Knitting Nation” performances involved producing Pride flags and heaps of red fabric. Collins said that, with these performances, she was “focused on telling a story about the physical labor of making fabric and laying bare this medium that I thought was like alchemy, taking a spool of yarn and then putting it through this machine.”

Collins staged the last “Knitting Nation” performance in 2016 and has since produced a range of dreamy textiles. In 2017, working on commission for the Little River Cafe in New York, she produced Inheritance, a group of hanging white textiles that dangle over the heads of diners. (These were an allusion to the sails of boats like the one manned by Collins’s father when she was a child.) That same year, for a New Museum show called “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Collins made Cave of Secrets, an installation bathed in bluish lighting that included two chairs of differing heights yoked together by violet fibers.

These days, Collins said, she is experiencing a “strange color moment” in which her work often features clashing hues. She pointed out a new weaving from a series called “Zagreb Mountains,” which showcases jagged, zigzagging lines in a range of colors, from raucous yellow to soothing cerulean. “Left on my own, I can come up with some wacky shit like this,” she said.

Read more of our Pride Month coverage here.

In addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one of the most famous public artworks in the UK: Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 1998 sculpture that towers above the A1 roadway near Gateshead.

The Cor-Ten steel sculpture takes the form of a figure who stands 66 feet tall and spreads its 177-foot-long wings. It’s thought to be seen by millions of people annually and has become a calling card for Gormley, a Turner Prize–winning sculptor due to receive his biggest US survey to date in the fall, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Angel of the North has rusted over since its debut, and its oxidized surface comes to take on a post-apocalyptic feel in 28 Years Later, where it appears in an overgrown field, having been abandoned amid failed attempts to curtail a rage-inducing virus that has run rampant in England.

Gormley’s sculpture rhymes with 28 Years Later’s fascination with spirituality—director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland set the opening set piece partly within a church—but it’s also enlisted by the filmmakers in their critique of conservative British politics. (Such a critique may appear oblique to some, but within the UK, few have missed the point. We won’t spoil the out-of-left-field ending, which makes explicit reference to a certain British celebrity who was posthumously accused of rape.)

On its face, Angel of the North does not seem so scandalous. Gormley said he intended the work as a tribute to the miners who once worked in the area where the sculpture is now sited. “When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site,” he once said, “there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.”

But in a 2019 New York Times interview, Gormley said that the work was actually a rebuttal of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative prime minister whom the artist said had made it seem as though “everything that had come out of the Industrial Revolution” was “over.”

The work was initially controversial, not for responding to Thatcherite politics but for its look, with many local politicians claiming it was an eyesore. Jewish residents of the surrounding area also said the work reminded them of German aircrafts, leading Gormley to be labeled a Nazi by certain outlets.

More recently, however, Angel of the North has found itself at the center of a different hot-button debate: the conversation that preceded the 2016 vote on Brexit. That year, the anti–European Union group Vote Leave projected the words “Vote Leave Take Control” across the angel’s wingspan. That moved Gormley himself to send a letter to Vote Leave in which he said that the stunt implied a “false endorsement” on his part of the group’s cause.

In a statement on his website, Gormley writes that Angel of the North was the product of “a focus for collective hope”—something not notably possible in 28 Years Later, in which quarantine acts as a parallel for post-Brexit isolationism.

Rosalind Fox Solomon, a photographer who crafted piercing images of alienation, racism, and marginalization in the United States and far beyond it, died in New York on Monday at 95. Stephen Bulger Gallery, her representative, confirmed her passing, but did not state a cause of death.

Across a career that spanned nearly six decades, Fox Solomon focused on an array of individuals who faced the scorn of mainstream society, from Black Americans in the South to people with AIDS in New York to Palestinians in the West Bank. Her stark black-and-white images, shot using a Hasselblad camera, empathetically captured the psychologies of these people and the realities of their communities.

But whereas some documentary photographers of her generation sought a close connection with their subjects, Fox Solomon kept her distance from hers. Her method of working, she said, was meant to understand how her subjects felt and how they were perceived by others simultaneously.

“The depth is in the pictures, not what I say about them,” Fox Solomon once told New York Magazine. “They represent many strands of emotion and connect to realities—sociological, historic, and political—and I’m interested in the inner as well as the outer.”

Sometimes, this approach left her work opaque in ways that could be troubling, both intentionally and not. Liberty Theater, a Mack photobook that features pictures taken in the South, features one 1975 image taken in Chattanooga, Tennessee, portraying a Black man with a bloodied eye. “The lack of an explanation is maddening,” wrote Doreen St. Félix in the New Yorker. “Who did this? Who is he, and did he survive? Can anyone?”

But some critics found an unusual amount of empathy in Fox Solomon’s work. When her shots of Palestinians appeared in a 2016 Brooklyn Museum show about the West Bank, Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, “Ms. Solomon’s magnetic portraits cut across all ethnic and racial lines.”

Fox Solomon brought her camera far and wide, journeying from Havana to Istanbul and many places in between, but some of the works taken closest to home—in New York, the city where she had been based since 1979—speak best to her practice more broadly.

During the run-up to the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in 2019, for example, Fox Solomon spent time photographing conservators, collection specialist, IT team members, and others employed by the institution with positions that are not so public-facing. She said in an interview published by MoMA that she wanted to spotlight those who often went “unseen.”

Rosalind Fox was born on April 2, 1930, in Highland Park, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. Her father’s success in the tobacco and candy businesses provided her family with a comfortable lifestyle, though her parents’ marriage grew strained when her father had an affair and her mother tried to kill herself.

She graduated from Goucher College’s undergraduate political science program in 1951, but she felt “kinda lost” after school, as she told New York, and so went on to take an array of jobs in different fields, working for a period as a regional director of the Experiment in International Living. In 1953, she married real estate developer Joel Solomon and relocated to Chattanooga; the two would have two children, Linda and Joel, and divorce in 1984.

Fox Solomon recalled that Solomon wanted her not to work, but she was determined to find something to do during their marriage. She found resonance in taking up activist causes, campaigning for women’s rights and becoming involved in the civil rights movement.

By the ’70s, Fox Solomon had begun photographing dolls that she chanced upon in the South. But her photography career did not take off until she met Lisette Model, an accomplished photographer whom Fox Solomon met while trying to get her pictures printed by Modernage, a processing lab in New York. Model took Fox Solomon under her wing, offering the budding photographer rigorous lessons that involved disquisitions by Model on her own career and the work of others.

Fox Solomon started out showing her work in group shows in Chattanooga, then gained the attention of American temples that wanted to exhibit her pictures taken in Israel. (Reflecting on those photographs in the 2021 New York profile, she called the Israel pictures “tourist memories.”) A 1979 Guggenheim Fellowship followed, and during the ’80s, institutions such as MoMA and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., staged solo shows of her work.

In 1987, Fox Solomon came across a New York Times article about the AIDS crisis that triggered her to photograph people who lived with the disease, even though she did not personally know anyone battling it. The pictures she produced sought to “reveal a special character, a relationship, an environment, aspects of the human struggle to survive,” as she put it. They showed people in hospital beds and apartments, as well as the individuals who helped care for them.

While Fox Solomon is now well-known for pictures of others such as these, she has more recently gained praise for her self-portraits. One of the more recent ones features her leaning over a grave that bears her surname, a harbinger of things to come. Fox Solomon can be seen closing her eyes, thinking thoughts that remain unknowable to her viewers.

“I feel a kind of detachment from my body, which is strange, but certainly something I didn’t feel earlier on,” she told the New Yorker last year. “At ninety-four, I don’t feel self-protective. Before long, I will be dust.”

Two weeks after the New Yorker revealed that a “dissident-right art hos” US Pavilion was being floated for the 2026 Venice Biennale, Vanity Fair has now reported further details of the proposal, which hinges on the loan of a Titian painting from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

The proposal is the brainchild of Curtis Yarvin, a computer engineer-turned-thinker beloved among the political far right who has called for an American monarchy. Per Vanity Fair, Yarvin is teaming up with Tarik Sadouma, a Dutch Egyptian artist, to conceive the pavilion.

The pavilion would be centered around Titian’s Rape of Europa (1559–62), which portrays the assault of Europa by the god Jupiter, who is here portrayed in disguise as a bull. The Rape of Europa has rarely been loaned.

“If we can’t get it on loan, there are a number of other things we could do,” Yarvin told Vanity Fair’s Nate Freeman. “We could, for example, hire someone to forge it and then burn the forgery. Or AI could be used in some manner, something creative would be done. But ideally, the real thing would be there.” Accompanying the Titian would be other works by artists addressing similar subject matter, which would mean the pavilion would essentially be “rape-themed,” as Yarvin put it before noting that “there’s obviously room for feminist voices here.”

A final decision on the US Pavilion won’t be made until later on in the summer. Though the application process initially ran behind schedule, leading to fears that the beginning of Trump’s second term would influence the pavilion, it is now possible for institutions to submit proposals for the show. Applications close on July 30.

Typically, the pavilion goes to an artist who is already a known quantity in the US: Jeffrey Gibson did last year’s pavilion, and Simone Leigh did the one in 2022, the same year that she took the Golden Lion’s Venice Biennale for her participation in the main exhibition.

But Yarvin told Vanity Fair that he wanted to do something different. Of the people charged with selecting the winning proposal for the pavilion, he said, “They could do the normal thing, or they could do a retarded thing, and basically take a fine art thing and put it in the hands of the American middle brow. We’re hoping to pull off our spectacular heist of the Venice pavilion, but we are, of course, up against the entire Death Star.”

High-ranking politicians in Australia are pushing back against UNESCO’s concerns that ancient rock art in Western Australia is being endangered by the proposed expansion of a nearby gas project, something UNESCO sought to combat by putting these millennia-old works on its World Heritage list.

The rock art is located in Murujuga, where there are thought to be 1 million petroglyphs, some dating back as many as 47,000 years. The official website for Western Australia’s parks notes that the site is home to one of the “most diverse collections of rock art in the world.”

Many have said all this rock art faces the threat of pollution from the Karratha Gas Plant, a part of the North West Shelf Project, which has been in operation since the 1980s. The Karratha Gas Plant is operated by Woodside Energy.

Woodside is seeking to expand its plant, but the extension efforts have been contentious, with scrutiny paid to the emissions that would result from it. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Woodside has said it will achieve net zero operations by 2050 and claimed that the project will aid in Australia’s transition away from coal energy.

The Australian government has reported that the Murujuga rock art is in “good condition overall” and that there were no signs that “acid rain or deposition is contributing to damage of the rock art.”

But in May, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), a body that advises UNESCO, said in a report that the Murujuga rock art is “vulnerable due to industrial emissions, considered the majorly adversely affecting factor for the petroglyphs.” ICOMOS recommended that UNESCO send the World Heritage listing back to the Australian government, so that the government could “prevent any further industrial development adjacent to, and within, the Murujuga Cultural Landscape.”

Now, the debate has only deepened. This week, the Guardian reported that Murray Watt, the environmental minister of Australia, is personally seeking to get UNESCO to reject some of ICOMOS’s claims. According to the Guardian, Watt said the ICOMOS report contained “factual inaccuracies.” “Our view was that the decision was overly influenced by that kind of political activity rather than the scientific evidence, and rather than the wishes of the traditional owners,” Watt told the Guardian.

Per the Guardian report, a document issued by Western Australia claims that there is evidence that the Murujuga area was impacted by pollution during the 1970s and 1980s, but that the pollution declined in 2014.

The debate over the rock art does not appear to be settled. ABC reported this week that, next month in Paris, members of the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation and other Australian delegates will make the case for why the rock art deserves to enter UNESCO’s World Heritage list.

The US will get its first Marcel Duchamp retrospective in more than half a century next year, in what is already poised to be one of 2026’s most high-profile museum exhibitions.

With a checklist numbering nearly 300 objects, the exhibition is being organized by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and will be curated by MoMA’s Ann Temkin and Michelle Kuo and the Philadelphia Museum’s Matthew Affron. It will debut in New York on April 16, 2026, before opening in the fall in Philadelphia.

After that, the mega-retrospective will travel to Paris, in a presentation co-produced by the Centre Pompidou and the Grand Palais in 2027. Because the Centre Pompidou is closed for renovations, the exhibition will appear at the Grand Palais.

One goal of the show is to suggest that although we talk often about Duchamp, there’s still more to learn about him. “Duchamp remains mysterious,” Kuo wrote in an email. “The totality of his oeuvre still isn’t well known. What is talked about most often is only the tip of the iceberg, and his diverse body of work leaves much to be investigated. Duchamp changed the very definition of the artist. And he changed the very definition of art from something that issues forth meaning to something whose meaning depends on how it is received.”

It’s the first time any American institution has endeavored to survey every aspect of Duchamp’s practice since 1973, the year that both MoMA and the Philadelphia Museum debuted another retrospective for the artist. And though Duchamp is widely acknowledged as one of the most influential figures for artists working today, retrospectives for him are exceedingly rare. When the MMK Frankfurt did its own Duchamp retrospective in 2022, it was billed as the first show of its kind in two decades.

But this exhibition is particularly unusual in that it will appear in both the US and France, the two nations where Duchamp was a citizen. “It was important for him, this going back and forth,” said Affron, the Philadelphia Museum curator. “It was part of who he was and how he chose to have his career unspool. So any complete retrospective of Duchamp is going to have to tell the story of his transatlantic life.”

Duchamp hailed from France, where, during the early years of the 20th century, he began painting works that appeared to represent figures formed from cascades of mechanical parts, like an industrial take of Cubism. His famed painting Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 (1913) scandalized audiences in France, but it made its greatest mark in the US, where, at the 1913 Armory Show in New York, it helped kickstart American modernism. The painting is currently owned by the Philadelphia Museum but will make its way to MoMA in 2026, the first time since 1973 that the work has visited that New York institution.

The artist then went on to become one of the key figures of the Dada art movement, conceptualizing what he called readymades, or everyday objects that he lured into galleries with few changes and deemed artworks in their own right. These works are prized for the pesky sense of humor Duchamp infused in all of his art, which made heavy use of wordplay and visual puns.

Affron said the 2026 retrospective’s “beating heart” will be a section devoted to Duchamp’s “Boîte-en-Valises,” portable pieces that contained mini versions of his readymades. “It’s really a new way of replicating your own work,” Affron explained. The exhibition will present these boxes alongside archival materials that remained in Duchamp’s studio, affording a rare view into the artist’s process for making these works.

The forthcoming retrospective’s lengthy checklist includes nearly all of Duchamp’s most famous works: Fountain, his 1917 readymade formed from a urinal tipped on its side; L.H.O.O.Q., his 1919 piece involving a postcard of the Mona Lisa with a mustache and goatee drawn onto her face; Anemic Cinema, a 1926 film that counts as a landmark within experimental cinema. But two key works by Duchamp—The Large Glass (1915–23) and his final work, Étant donnés (1946–66)—will not leave the Philadelphia Museum, which owns them, and therefore will not be seen in New York or Paris.

In 1973, when the New York Times covered the opening of the last Duchamp retrospective, James R. Mellow remarked that “the cult of Duchamp will always be a cult of true and ardent believers.” Affron said that cult does not appear to be going away because, each decade, it simply becomes fascinated with a new part of Duchamp’s oeuvre.

“In the ’50s, I think it was an aspect of Duchamp that was involved in assemblage art and collage and those sorts of things,” Affron said. “In the ’60s, some aspects of the conceptual Duchamp came to the fore. In the ’80s, Duchamp’s plays with notions of gender and the way gender intersects with the creative personality became very important.”

What will interest in the Duchamp cult in 2026? Affron was loath to speculate, saying only, “Every generation gets the Duchamp that it wants.”

“Duchamp’s revolutions are everywhere with us today,” Temkin, the MoMA curator, wrote in an email. “Whenever anyone asks ‘Why is this art?’—they are asking this in Duchamp’s wake. Duchamp’s work touches upon the importance of chance, questions of skill and deskilling, the art market, the role of the human and the machine, and the definition of originality and authorship. Duchamp—along with the turmoil of the 20th century—is still with us.”

The University of California, Irvine, said it is discussing the possibility of a deal with the Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa that would see the institutions merge.

“UC Irvine and the Orange County Museum of Art are exploring a transformative agreement that will open a new chapter for OCMA and establish a new model for public arts engagement, scholarship and access” read a statement from UC Irvine last week. “A nonbinding, exploratory letter of intent has been signed, and the two organizations continue to develop a definitive agreement, pending approval of the University of California Board of Regents.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, that board will vote on the merger in the fall.

The announcement came less than two months after Heidi Zuckerman revealed plans to depart the OCMA as director and CEO. Later this week, the OCMA is opening its California Biennial, featuring a dozen artists based in the state, from Laura Owens to Joey Terrill.

Typically, an institution’s merger with a larger entity is preceded by financial strife, but no reports have emerged to suggest that the OCMA is having money issues. Yet in 2022, when the museum opened in a new building, critics seemed to question how the $94 million used to fund the new building had been spent. Christopher Knight wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the building did not appear to be finished upon its opening. In the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright labeled the new building “disastrous.”

The museum has said its reopening was a success, drawing more than 10,000 visitors during its first day alone, per the Times. The museum today offers free admission following a $2.5 million donation from Lugano Diamonds in 2021.

The Baloise Art Prize, a $36,800 award given out to two artists participating in the Statements sector of Art Basel annually, has this year gone to Rhea Dillon and Joyce Joumaa.

Dillon’s work was brought to the fair by London’s Soft Opening gallery, whose booth showcased her “Leaning Figures” sculptures made from materials such as soap and molasses. As Nicole Kaack wrote in the recent “New Talent” issue of Art in America, Dillon produces “visceral portraits of postcolonial Black experiences from everyday objects, symbols, and language.”

Joumaa, a participant in last year’s Venice Biennale, is showing at Art Basel with Montreal’s Eli Kerr Gallery, whose booth is devoted to an installation by her called Periodic Sights. The piece features photographs of sights seen in Tripoli and Beirut—Joumaa splits her time between that latter city and Amsterdam—and are intended as a comment on energy crises afflicting countries such as Lebanon.

The Baloise Art Prize tends to recognize artists on the cusp of a big break, with past winners including Tino Sehgal, Simon Denny, Tourmaline, and Haegue Yang. It recognizes artists participating in the fair’s Statements section, where galleries turn over their booths to single-artist presentations.

This year’s jury included Karola Kraus, director of mumok in Vienna; Bettina Steinbrügge, director of MUDAM in Luxmebourg; Susanne Pfeffer, director of the MMK Frankfurt; Susanne Titz, director of the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach; and Uli Sigg, a well-known collector.