LAST SEPTEMBER, when Artnet published a sweeping account of the dramatic ascent of Amoako Boafo, whose fingerpainted portraits of Black people had apparently cast a spell over the market, it read like the script of a Hollywood blockbuster. Replete with eye-popping prices, secret deals, greedy collectors and curators, and a ballsy move by Boafo himself to seize control of his own work, the profile laid bare the inner workings of a rapacious art market. It also sharply framed the increasing international hunger for contemporary African portraiture and the surge of pressure it creates for the

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, the Tanjong Pagar Distripark, an unassuming warehouse turned gallery hub whose tenants included Galerie Steph, Ikkan Art International, and Valentine Willie Fine Art, was touted as the “edgy” gathering spot for the Singapore art scene. Not long after, in late 2012, Gillman Barracks, another visual arts cluster home to local and international galleries and the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, was inaugurated with much fanfare. After the confetti fell, both art precincts publicly dealt with their fair share of tribulations: a revolving door of occupants, criticisms of unnecessary

WELL, THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY! In the deluge of recent stock market coverage—hard to ignore even for the most financially illiterate digital soldiers—this new arc of the obnoxious reality show we call the US of A has fast developed along antique narrative lines such as the “Jacobite day traders versus the powdered wig hedgefunders.” Elon Musk busted into the fray mid-last week like some crypto Kool-Aid Man to incite the razing and pillaging of the hermetic fortress of finance and his loathed enemies, the short sellers, who were betting on a video game retailer to fail much as they had bet against

ERIK MET ME for dinner in Stockholm, where I had a few hours to kill before my night train north. We sat alone in the large and self-consciously old-fashioned restaurant in the central station while a second wave of Covid-19 ravaged the Swedish capital. Unlike in Germany, establishments—and, crucially for my visit, exhibitions—remain open here. Throughout the pandemic, the state has declined to enforce the use of masks and social distancing, appealing instead to people’s sense of civic responsibility to control the virus, though the government is now reconsidering this strategy. “It sounded

BACK IN JULY, after the pandemic in China eased due to draconian border control and contact tracing measures, the Chinese Super League was able to resume matches. People had been joking about how torturous it would be for the rest of the world to have only Chinese soccer games to watch—a running gag here on the mediocrity of the sport in this country. Earlier this month, Shanghai Art Week’s two main offerings, ART021 and West Bund Art & Design, seemed to be the only art fairs opening offline in the world. Unlike football games, they were not televised to the rest of the world.

From November 9 to

“THE DANCE FLOOR is so much smaller than I remember.” This is the main feedback you’ll hear from visitors to the recently opened Boros x Berghain exhibition that fills Berlin’s old power plant–cum–legendary nightclub until it’s safe for techno-heads and leather-gays to return to their natural habitat. It used to take hours to get from one end to the other, or so it seemed. Now a small, wonderful Andro Wekua painting lends the space an almost domestic atmosphere. One of Anna Uddenberg’s mannequin sculptures humps the counter in the upstairs Panorama Bar; Sandra Mujinga’s tall hooded figures lurk

AFTER FOUR HOURS OF HUFFING MY OWN BREATH under a mask on the bus from Vilnius, stepping out in Latvia’s capital for the second Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art (Riboca) felt like entering a pre-Covid wonderland: Masks were not seen anywhere, bars were full, and foreign languages spilled out into the streets. The surrealism intensified the next morning, when guests from around the world(!), their brains buzzing from the mimosas on offer, were greeted by Riboca’s founder, director, and, finally, the curator Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel under Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-painted plywood poem

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, dear reader, but I really have not been getting out much. I hunkered down the second week in March, resurfaced briefly for some protests, and then resumed the shadowy, unproductive, vaguely counterfactual Covid-era life—a weird, slow-dripping speedball of paranoia and complacence topped off with knifing hangovers of despair. It’s gotten a little old. Therefore, when asked by the editors to report back from Thursday’s L.E.S. Summer Night—an evening of gently extended hours among some thirty-odd Lower East Side pandemic-parched galleries waiting open-mouthed for a quenching

FOR THREE WEEKS, a six-block radius in Seattle was one of the freest spaces in America. The Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) was never planned—rather, it sprang up spontaneously after the police, who had violently suppressed the Black Lives Matter movement at their door for weeks, were ordered to abandon their own precinct. Protesters decided to pitch tents and set up an encampment and, after some deliberation, came up with a list of demands, including defunding the Seattle Police Department by 50 percent. As this no-cop zone flourished into a lively village, local artists including Kreau,

A VIDEO PROJECTION on the facade of the US Department of Justice building played to an audience of one for its debut last week in Washington, DC.

Moments after the light beam touched the limestone, an agent from the US Department of Homeland Security arrived, demanding to know who the projectionists were with. They weren’t “with” anybody, one of the four of them said. The agent made a call on a radio. He put his face in their faces. He shouted. Military jeeps swept down Pennsylvania Avenue, but they glided past the tense nighttime scene.

The standoff lasted only minutes. The projection squad

BEFORE ANYONE GOT STARVED ENOUGH to sneak out for a fuck or a socially distanced porch hang, we took drives. On a recent Saturday, I visited the Westside edition of “Drive-By-Art,” an outdoor exhibition billed as “public art in this moment of social distancing” and organized by Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, Michael Slenske, and Anuradha Vikram. On the way, I passed through Silver Lake and Echo Park, where a number of Artemisa Clark’s replicas of posters from New York in 1987—when Carl Andre was on trial for second-degree murder of his wife, Ana Mendieta—remained stapled to telephone poles

MY FAVORITE WORK OF ART so far this year was made by anonymous Chinese netizens: They took the transcript of a 404’d interview with the nation’s earliest Covid-19 whistleblower and reuploaded it on WeChat in various “useless” codes, including HEX, emoji, oracle bone script, and one of J. R. R. Tolkien’s invented languages, Sindarin. Their ideal audience, one imagines, was the censors themselves.

At the Timezone 8 Café in the 798 Art District on May 22, the first day of Gallery Weekend Beijing, I briefly sat in on a meal with curator Zhang Hanlu, artist Wang Tuo, and critic Yang Beichen, who were