How does a selective competition fit with the contemporary art world’s aspirations toward greater inclusivity?

Naomi Polonsky
Naomi Polonsky is a London-based curator, art critic, and translator. She studied at the University of Oxford and the Courtauld Institute of Art and has experience working at the Hermitage Museum and Tate Modern. She has written for the Times Literary Supplement and The Calvert Journal. Follow her on Twitter @NaomiPolonsky
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Born in Shiraz, Sokhanvari fled Iran as a child a year before the Revolution and has devoted her artistic practice to the country she left behind.
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Artists gathered for the launch of the new David Graeber Institute, which will oversee the scholar’s archive of unpublished texts and pursue projects around climate change, debt, labor, and war.
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In an action at the museum this weekend, participants made impassioned speeches calling for the return of the sculptures and sang “Happy Birthday” to the Acropolis Museum.
Hundreds Storm British Museum to Protest Fossil Fuel Sponsorship
The daylong demonstration culminated in a mass action and occupation of the museum after hours.
The Forgotten Story of Modern Art’s Great Jewish Collectors
Charles Dellheim’s study tells the tale of a small group of Jewish art dealers and collectors who played a key role in the changing art world of the 19th and 20th centuries.
The Restless Spirit of Lubaina Himid
Lubaina Himid’s Tate exhibition is a conversation, a rhetorical question, an experiment. Like opera, from which it draws its inspiration, it aims to be “a total work of art.”
Jean Dubuffet’s Highs and (Controversial) Lows
Curiously, Dubuffet’s anti-hierarchical approach to art did not translate to similar views on society.
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During the two-day protests, activists explained that they “won’t stand by and let the Science Museum green-wash Shell’s reputation.”
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In Packer’s canvases, swathes of abstraction express aspects of human experience that lie beyond representation.