The Headlines
WHITNEY ‘VICTIM’ SPEAKS OUT. Sara Nadal-Melsió’s role as associate director of the Whitney’s Independent Study Program (ISP) was terminated in June. She received the news right after the museum’s director, Scott Rothkopf, sent an email announcing his “suspension” of the 50-year-old ISP to a select number of its alumni. “I lost my job at the Whitney, but the art community lost a lot more,” Nadal-Melsió writes in Hyperallgergic. Her axing came two weeks after she released a public statement in protest of the Whitney’s cancellation of the performance No Aesthetic Outside My Freedom: Mourning, Militancy, and Performance, “an expression of transnational solidarity with the Palestinian people that was part of the ISP curatorial show a grammar of attention.” She adds that both her dismissal and the ISP’s “pause” were “the culmination of months of the museum’s combined disregard and scrutiny of the program.” Nadal-Melsió explains, “These actions were yet another blunt refusal to engage in dialogue, and further evidence of a consistent lack of clarity, to the point of obfuscation, regarding the future of the ISP, including the circumstances surrounding former ISP Director Gregg Bordowitz’s ‘demotion’ on February 2. If this sounds messy and confusing, you are not alone. It is by design.” Talking about her experience is “painful in personal and utterly impersonal ways,” she says, “I can’t help but recognize that it follows a well-worn institutional playbook… Being witness to and victim of the Whitney’s actions taught me in a new way about decimated workers’ rights and increased precarity; about a pervasive corporate culture of Non-Disclosure Agreements(NDAs) that keep most of us in the dark about how often power protects itself through concealment; about recalcitrant misogyny and scapegoating; about the systemic racisms that continue to find cover in tokenism.”
Related Articles
BONE COLLECTOR. “Dinosaurs are dominating this summer’s headlines,” Artnet News writes. “The Hollywood blockbuster Jurassic World Rebirth is powering through the global box office with $718.4 million earned worldwide as of Sunday, while July’s sale of a juvenile Ceratosaurus fossil at Sotheby’s New York has also been in the news.” A 154–59 million-year-old megafauna fossil recently sold for $30.5 million—five times its $6 million estimate—highlighting the booming market for dinosaur remains. Though it didn’t beat the $44.6 million record set by the Stegosaurus “Apex,” interest in prehistoric fossils is rising sharply, drawing in collectors but also sparking ethical debates around ownership, scientific access, and provenance. Buyers now range from private collectors and celebrities to museums and governments. Abu Dhabi, for example, purchased the T. rex “Stan” for $31.8 million in 2020 and will display it at its upcoming Natural History Museum. Hollywood stars like Leonardo DiCaprio, Nicolas Cage, and Russell Crowe have also entered the fossil scene, fueling a global fascination. “We all grew up with dinosaurs,” said art advisor Nicolai Frahm, who helped broker several major fossil sales. Ken Griffin, owner of Apex, echoed the sentiment, citing a lifelong passion and a desire to inspire future scientists. Collectors today are often professionals in their 30s and 40s, especially in tech and science fields. Prices vary widely—from fragments to full skeletons costing tens of millions. Skull fossils and meat-eaters remain especially sought-after, with demand growing for verified, well-preserved specimens. The allure of dinosaurs—ancient yet timeless—remains stronger than ever.
The Digest
The next edition of Manifesta will take place in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2028. As Europe’s nomadic biennial, the festival moves to a different host city every two years, with the aim of “engaging with local cultural, urban and environmental contexts while working collaboratively with citizens and communities to reimagine how we live, work and envision our shared future in Europe.” [ArtReview]
Twelve art collectors have revealed their “biggest rookie mistakes” so that aspiring collectors can avoid the same pitfalls. [Cultured]
The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina has accused Israel of “genocide” and said profits from its sale of a publication about a historic Haggadah, a foundational Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder, will be donated to help Palestinian causes. [The Times of Israel]
The UK government is giving people the chance to peruse the art collection of Labour prime minister Kier Starmer during special tours of No.10 Downing Street. Anyone can enter a public ballot for the visits slated for September 13, as part of the popular Open House festival. [The Art Newspaper]
The Kicker
THE ART OF RADIOHEAD. Radiohead’s frontman Thom Yorke has made a comeback as a visual artist, and he told The Art Newspaper that it’s “absolutely terrifying.” Yorke and his long-time collaborator Stanley Donwood are opening their first institutional show this week at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. The exhibition, titled “This is What You Get,” charts 30 years of Radiohead record covers, starting with The Bends, plus previously unpublished sketchbooks and recent paintings made by the duo. Yorke said his unease around claiming to be an artist was “perhaps a response to the climate of the UK music industry at the time.” Citing an unspoken strict “notion that ‘a musician could not possibly be an artist and vice versa’—something he now admits is ‘total nonsense,’ particularly given how intertwined Radiohead’s sonic and visual art forms are. As Donwood puts it: ‘Both of [the art forms] evolve at the same time and neither of them are fixed, it’s like chasing smoke.’” Donwood told the paper last year, “It feels like just last year we were standing in [the music store] HMV in Oxford [where the pair are from] thinking about how we were going to do a record sleeve and now we’re doing a museum show in pretty much the same spot.” It has been an “unorthodox route into the art establishment,” TAN writes, “but one that has worked for them, Donwood thinks: ‘It’s like the title of the Ashmolean show says—this is what you get when you have two ex-art students making record sleeves for 30 years. And just letting them get on with it.’”
