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The Anderson Ranch Arts Center, a five-acre complex of studios and artist housing in Snowmass, Colorado, that offers workshops and residencies, is often called a maker’s paradise. You understand that moniker upon arrival: Once you get over the 8,000-foot elevation, you feel energized, breathe in the crisp air, behold your bucolic surroundings—mountains dotted with the watching eyes of aspens—and want to revel in making something, even something as banal as your morning coffee. When I was at the Ranch in mid-July for its 60th-anniversary celebrations, for which ARTnews was a media sponsor, that crisp air had a threatening edge, that crisp air had a threatening edge: It was so dry it seemed like you could start a fire simply by thinking about one. Dry enough that the arrow on the daily fire danger rating board outside the Snowmass Wildcat fire station had swung all the way into red (“extreme”). Dry enough that the Ranch’s artists needed special permission to fir...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles has decided it’s not worth writing a single one. Nearly two decades in the making and costing more than $1 billion, the long-awaited Lucas Museum is finally ready to make its debut, with founding member previews starting next week and its public opening on September 22. The two scrapped plans in different cities (first Chicago, then San Francisco) and the eight years spent building it in LA have certainly added to the hype surrounding the country’s newest museum. In a promotional video for the museum, cofounder George Lucas says he has always had a problem with the mainstream art world’s rigid delineations between what is and isn’t art. It’s a noble cause, and one that many would now agree with. The past decade has seen profound changes in the art world, with scholars, curators, and critics working to rewrite an art historical canon that has, since the formalization o...

Christie’s and Bonhams have both quietly raised the fees they charge buyers. The charges, which auction houses like to call “buyer’s premiums,” are added on top of a lot’s hammer price and are a key source of revenue for the houses.    At Christie’s, effective September 1, the house is charging 28% of the hammer price of each lot up to and including £1.5 million or $2 million; 22% of the hammer price from £1.5 million or $2 million up to and including £6 million or $8 million; and 15% of the hammer price above that threshold. The changes affect all departments except wine and were instituted “following an internal business review,” according to a press statement sent to ARTnews .  The change brings Christie’s to parity with Sotheby’s, which hiked its fees in February.  Christie’s changed its fees as recently as September 2025, when the house began charging 27% on amounts up to £1 million ($1.5 million); 22% from £1 mil...

During Paris Art Week, on October 22 and 23, Christie’s will present a sale dedicated to French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel, who was instrumental in the careers of Impressionist artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The sale will feature 62 pieces of work that have remained in his family trust, among them, paintings from Monet , Renoir, Pissarro, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Boudin, and Alfred Sisley. It is estimated to bring in €30 million to €43 million ($35 million to $50 million), with the works expected to go on display at Christie’s Paris from October 16 through 22. On October 22, the collection will hit the auction block and the following day some works will be offered at Christie’s Modern Art sale. Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (1890-1894) In 1924, Monet said that without “Durand, we would all have starved,...

Tom Morrison was a leading player and then fabled administrator in Wellington and New Zealand throughout his entire adult life. Morrison was a pre-World War Two All Black out of South Canterbury and was then named on of the Rugby Almanack’s Five Players of the Year for 1945 whilst representing Wellington where he lived out...

A Wassily Kandinsky painting left behind by a Dutch family fleeing the Nazi occupation and later on view for decades in a German museum will come to the auction block at Christie’s London on October 14, during Frieze week. Estimated in excess of $30 million, Das bunte Leben ( The Colorful Life , 1907) was restituted to the heirs of Hedwig Lewenstein-Weyermann in 2023 after a six-year legal battle.  Measuring just over four feet high and five feet wide, it was Kandinsky’s largest canvas up until that point. In it, he aimed to sum up the richness of life, as other artists had done, for example Henri Matisse with his painting Bonheur de vivre (1905–06) or André Derain with La Danse (1906). Exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris the year it was created, the painting shows a pastoral landscape densely populated by pilgrims, peasants, saints, nobles, and mothers and children, many inspired by Russian legend, folklore, and religious traditions.  “Kan...