Your 2026 Art Book Reading List
Plus, a sexual history of the internet as told by sex workers and cyberfeminists.
If the internet began as a dream of a decentralized network, why would a history of it stick to the center? Mindy Seu takes this idea to heart in A Sexual History of the Internet. A synthesis of artist book, historical study, and performance piece, the project looks to cyberfeminists, sex workers, and others who have shaped online culture from the margins.
In her feature on this 700-page book, Eileen Isagon Skyers posits the potential for the archive to be a form of activism, writing that “the project asks us to imagine what a consensual internet might look like.” While Seu lays bare the systems of power that have turned the utopian fantasy of the internet into a dystopian reality, her strategies hint at the potential for a shared, democratic, and maybe even hopeful experience that still exists at the shadowy edges of internet culture.
Check out Skyers’s feature, plus a list of forthcoming books we're excited to read in 2026.
—Natalie Haddad, reviews editor
Features
The Internet According to Sex Workers and Cyberfeminists
“The Internet developed from a military-industrial complex so it’s no wonder that it has a fraught relationship with sexuality,” writes author Mindy Seu. | Eileen Isagon Skyers
Giving and Receiving: Memoirs of an Immigrant Curator and Philanthropist
Marica Vilcek shares her story in a new memoir, from her early life and escape from Czechoslovakia to her 30-year career at The Met, and the decision to create the Vilcek Foundation to champion immigrants in the arts.
Guide
15 Art Books We're Excited to Read in 2026
Books about Marcel Duchamp, Frida Kahlo, Alma Thomas, and more, plus critical studies of lipstick and complaining, are on our radar. Personally, I can't wait to dive into Sara Ahmed's No! The Art of Activism and Complaining. It just might become my guidebook for 2026.
Other Books I'm Reading This Week
Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (1990) by Norman Bryson is arguably the definitive book on the art of still lifes, and one that always inspires me in my own art analyses. [Bookshop.org]
No Man's Land: Combat & Identity in World War I (1979) by Eric J. Leed may be more dogeared than any other book I own. One of the backbones of my dissertation, it's a fascinating psychological study of the first modern war. [Bookshop.org]
From the Archive
Photographs That Depict Alzheimer's With Dignity
“I think I knew deep down, one day, everything’s going to be so different. Every time I would go home, I would take a ton of pictures,” says photographer Alicia Vera. | Monica Uszerowicz
