This week: is art censorship on the rise? The Art Newspaper’s chief contributing editor, Gareth Harris, joins Ben Luke to discuss his new book, Censored Art Today. We look at the different ways in which freedom of expression is being curbed across the globe and at the debates around contested history and cancel culture.
Diane Arbus's Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C., 1965
© Estate of Diane Arbus
This episode’s Work of the Week is Diane Arbus’s Puerto Rican woman with a beauty mark, N.Y.C., 1965, one of the 90 images that feature in Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, which opens at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Canada, on 15 September. Sophie Hackett, the exhibition’s curator, discusses Arbus’s remarkable eye and technical brilliance.
Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, northern Spain
Photo: Naotake Murayama
As the Guggenheim Bilbao celebrates its 25th anniversary, Thomas Krens, the director and chief artistic officer of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation from 1988 to 2008, reflects on the genesis and development of a museum that had a dramatic impact on contemporary art and museums’ role in the cultural regeneration of cities across the world.
• Gareth Harris, Censored Art Today, Lund Humphries, 104pp, £19.99 or $34.99, out now in the UK, published in December in the US
• Diane Arbus: Photographs, 1956-1971, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 15 September-29 January 2023
• Sections/Intersections: 25 Years of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection, Guggenheim Bilbao, 19 October-22 January 2023