The Art Newspaper Weekly

2019: the Year in Review by The Art Newspaper Podcasts

We take an in-depth look at Maurizio Cattelan, the creator of the banana-and-duct-tape work which caused a sensation at Art Basel in Miami Beach last week, with the critic and broadcaster Ben Lewis. And we talk to three UK comedians—Rob Auton, Jenny Eclair and Annie McGrath—about their contributions to the exhibition Art is the Best Medicine at Fiumano Clase in London, featuring works by a wealth of the UK's top comedy talent. The works are on sale and will raise money for the charity Mental Health UK.

The art world has been up in arms this week as Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Helen Cammock, Oscar Murillo and Tai Shani were all announced as the winner of the Turner Prize. We talk to Louisa Buck about the decision and how it might change the award in the future. Plus, we talk to the Miami-born artist Teresita Fernández about her homecoming show at Pérez Art Museum Miami.

We talk to Lesley Fitton, the co-curator of the British Museum's blockbuster show on the myth and reality of Troy. And we talk to Jess Worth of Culture Unstained about ongoing protests relating to fossil-fuel companies' sponsorship of arts organisations.

As a huge exhibition of Dora Maar's work opens at Tate Modern, we take a tour of the show with the curator, Emma Lewis. Finally, Maar is escaping the shadow of her lover between 1936 and 1945, Pablo Picasso. We also talk to Jann Haworth, the US-born artist who was a key figure in the 1960s pop art scene in Swinging London and was, with Peter Blake and Michael Cooper, the creator of the cover for The Beatles' Sgt Pepper album—though she is often ignored when that seminal image is discussed. Haworth has a retrospective show at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, UK.

As he opens a new show at London's White Cube gallery, we talk to the German artist about the themes of the exhibition in the context of his art over several decades. And we explore the results of the New York auctions with Scott Reyburn of the New York Times: why is the market treading water?

This week, we review Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh, which has just opened at the Saatchi Gallery in London. The show includes 150 objects from Tutankhamun’s tomb, 100 more than the British Museum’s show in 1972, which attracted almost 1.7m visitors. Sixty of the objects in the new show have never left Egypt before. We also look at Marcel Duchamp: the Barbara and Aaron Levine Collection, a new show at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, and at the homecoming of perhaps the greatest collection of Duchamp's work, which is at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, following a three-venue tour of museums in Asia and the South Pacific.

To mark Bonfire Night in the UK, this bonus episode of The Art Newspaper takes a look at the history of pyrotechnics in art and wider visual culture. We talk to Simon Werrett, the author of the book Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History, and he talks about the variety of uses of fireworks over the centuries and the differing ways that artists have depicted them. You can see some of the art discussed in the podcast by visiting theartnewspaper.com/podcast.

We talk to the artist Dread Scott about his extraordinarily ambitious two-day performance in Louisiana where he and 500 Louisianans in 19th-century dress will reenact a slave rebellion from 1811. And we visit an exhibition of the women connected to the Pre-Raphaelites at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

As the exhibition of the year opens at the Louvre, we talk to Ben Lewis about the latest developments in the Salvator Mundi saga. Vincent Delieuvin, the co-curator, tells us about the 13 years he has been working on the show and explains its key themes and ideas. And we explore the Mona Lisa in virtual reality with Dominique de Font-Réaulx, Director of the Interpretation and Cultural Programming Department at the Louvre.

After a $450m expansion overseen by the architects Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens its doors on 21 October with 47,000 sq ft of additional gallery space and a more expansive story to tell about the history of modern art. Nancy Kenney, our senior editor in New York met this week with Sarah Suzuki, the drawings and prints curator who’s in charge of the reopening, and Rajendra Roy, the museum’s chief curator of film, to talk about these major changes in the museum. Then, three editors from The Art Newspaper's New York office—Helen Stoilas, Margaret Carrigan and Nancy Kenney—and our Insider correspondent, Linda Yablonsky, sat down to compare notes. MoMA reopens on 21 October. And you can read a wealth of reporting on the building and the displays on our website theartnewpsaper.com, on our app for iOS which you can find in the App Store, and in the November print edition of The Art Newspaper, which is out at the end of the month.

We talk to Agnes Denes, best known for her extraordinary Wheatfield, a two-acre field of wheat that she planted, tended and harvested in 1982 on landfill in Lower Manhattan, as the Shed opens a retrospective of her work. And we visit two new shows in the Netherlands: Rembrandt-Velázquez at the Rijksmuseum and Pieter De Hooch in Delft at the Museum Prinsenhof.

In this bumper edition of the podcast we interview three of the world's leading artists, all of whom have shows timed to coincide with the Frieze art fairs: Ai Weiwei at Lisson Gallery, Mark Bradford at Hauser & Wirth and Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery. We also get all the latest news of sales and trends at the Frieze fairs from Melanie Gerlis, as another Brexit deadline approaches. And Hettie Judah tells us about her new book, Art London, billed as "a guide to places, artists and events" across the city.

As art schools start their new term in the UK, this week’s episode is an education special. We talk to the artist Patrick Brill, or Bob and Roberta Smith, about his campaign for art’s place at the centre of the curriculum, often expressed directly in his art. We look at the National Art and Design Saturday Club, an initiative offering a free Saturday learning programme, founded by the designers Frances and John Sorrell. We talk to two professors at Goldsmiths College about the pressures and realities of art schools today. In the US, we talk to the co-author of a study on the benefits of art education in schools.

We discuss the dilemmas facing museums as the focus intensifies on ethical sponsorship and governance in the UK and US. And we hear about the latest edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which addresses, among other things, the erasure of the history of indigenous settlements in Chicago and its region.