❌

Normal view

Sweet nothings, urinal cakes and headless dogs: 10 artworks worth seeing at Frieze

16 October 2026 at 07:02

There’s plenty that stands out at Regent’s Park this year, from antidepressant pens and an ibuprofen-dolling robotic arm to Miriam Cahn’s 26 years’ worth of self-portraiture and a 150m-year-old dinosaur skull – still with embedded tooth

The raised platform in the middle of British artist Ella Fleck’s installation vibrates under your feet to the sound of a male voice. He’s whispering sweet nothings, intoning sexual fantasies. It’s all based on third-party agencies that manage OnlyFans accounts, interacting with users, creating fictional relationships that horny guys spend thousands on. It’s a greasy, gross, uncomfortable exploration of sex work on an industrial scale.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

© Photograph: Courtesy the artist/ Trautwein Herleth

‘Fantastically special’: all 10 Victoria Crosses awarded to Royal Marines go on show for first time

15 October 2026 at 09:00

Exclusive: Portsmouth Historic Dockyard’s new £15m permanent display tells tales of courage from conflicts such as Crimean and both world wars

They tell tales of bravery under fire, may lead to conversations about the UK’s place in the world and could prompt visitors to reflect on what they might have done if faced with the same perilous circumstances.

All 10 Victoria Crosses (VCs) awarded to members of the Royal Marines are going on display together for the first time along with tales of courage during conflicts such as the Crimean and both world wars.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Royal Navy Museums

© Photograph: Royal Navy Museums

© Photograph: Royal Navy Museums

‘What could be discovered? What is new there?’: blockbuster exhibition celebrates Roy Lichtenstein

11 October 2026 at 05:00

The often-criticised pop artist is the focus of a monumental new survey including rarely seen pieces and ambitious new restagings at New York’s Whitney Museum

When the American artist Roy Lichtenstein created his monumental Greene Street Mural in 1983, he took inspiration from the Bayeux tapestry for its serial storytelling technique. But whereas the embroidery depicting the Norman conquest continues to delight after nearly 1,000 years, Lichtenstein’s site-specific mural was destroyed after six weeks, in accordance with his wishes.

More than four decades later, however, the monumental Greene Street Mural is to mesmerise art lovers once more. This week a 96ft (29-metre) recreation of the work will span the entire entryway to Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, the first major New York retrospective of the pop artist’s work in 33 years, at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Jason Lowrie/Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com

© Photograph: Jason Lowrie/Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com

© Photograph: Jason Lowrie/Estate of Roy Lichtenstein. Photograph by Jason Lowrie/BFA.com

‘It’s not about sex but empowerment’: why I picked a ‘naked’ frock as dress of the year

8 October 2026 at 07:34

Sarah Burton’s sporty, daffodil mesh dress made me smile. But the reason I chose it for Fashion Museum Bath is because it tells the story of our times, when bodies are more political than ever

One morning in February this year, I opened my laptop to find an email with an all-caps subject line: TOP SECRET. Being a fashion editor can be exciting but state secrets are not generally my beat, so I was intrigued. Sure enough, it was a thrill: an invitation from the Fashion Museum Bath to choose their Dress of the Year for 2025.

What an honour. Dress of the Year began in 1963, the brainchild of the museum’s founder Doris Langley Moore, as a way of keeping a static collection perpetually current. Each year a fashion expert picks an outfit or outfits that capture the year just gone, and these become part of the permanent collection. There is a Mary Quant dress and a Katharine Hamnett slogan T-shirt, Ossie Clark chiffon and Ralph Lauren pinstripes. There is sublime beauty from the catwalks of Yves Saint Laurent and Chanel and John Galliano, and pieces of cultural history: McQueen’s bumsters, Jennifer Lopez’s internet-breaking green Versace Grammy dress, Dior’s “We Should All Be Feminists” slogan, Naomi Campbell’s pandemic hazmat suit, a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and the dress worn by the Duchess of Sussex for her Oprah interview in 2021. “Dress” is interpreted loosely, in the sense of clothing rather than a frock: the lineup includes men’s suits. The Bath museum is currently mid-revamp, having closed its doors in 2022, with construction soon to start on a new museum set to open in the city’s old post office in 2030. Meanwhile the collection is stored in Wiltshire and can be seen online.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Fashion Museum Bath Photo: Peter J Stone

© Photograph: Fashion Museum Bath Photo: Peter J Stone

© Photograph: Fashion Museum Bath Photo: Peter J Stone

The 90s: Art and Fashion review – this isn’t an exhibition, it’s a magazine spread

6 October 2026 at 05:54

Tate Britain, London
The Young British Art of the 1990s was brash and macabre but also intelligent and emotional. This breathlessly superficial show reduces it to a stylish pose

Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither.

You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role, staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 1990s no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Jake and Dinos Chapman/Jake and Dinos Chapman. All Rights Reserved, DACS Images

© Photograph: Jake and Dinos Chapman/Jake and Dinos Chapman. All Rights Reserved, DACS Images

© Photograph: Jake and Dinos Chapman/Jake and Dinos Chapman. All Rights Reserved, DACS Images

Archaeologists Decode Rules of an Ancient Roman Board Game

20 September 2026 at 15:37
They scanned the pattern of microscopic imperfections on an ancient limestone slab, and used A.I. to figure out how a game might have been played.

© Luk van Goor

Scientists used artificial intelligence to analyze wear patterns on an 8-by-6-inch chunk of limestone dating from the Roman era and found in the Het Romeins Museum in the Netherlands.

A T. Rex Walked Here: Teacher Finds Rare Footprints in North Dakota

15 September 2026 at 17:19
Kent Hups, a high school science teacher in Colorado, discovered a 23-foot trackway of fossilized dinosaur footprints, which offer a glimpse of how the apex predator moved 66 million years ago.

A Nearly 200-Year-Old Museum Known for Its T. Rex Faces Extinction

1 September 2026 at 19:18
The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which is affiliated with Drexel University, cited attendance struggles and higher costs in its decision to close.

© Matt Rourke/Associated Press

The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia opened in 1828 and is known for its Dinosaur Hall.
❌