Palestine’s Ministry of Culture said this week that Ghaben died after appeals from his family to Israeli authorities that would have allowed Ghaben to leave the Gaza Strip to seek medical aid.

In a statement, the Palestinian Ministry of Culture said that Ghaben was suffering from chronic chest and lung illness, and had been unable to find help in Gaza’s healthcare system, which has collapsed amid repeated Israeli airstrikes in the region.

In a video uploaded to Facebook on February 19 by a relative of Ghaben, the ailing artist makes a desperate appeal for aid, saying, “I am suffocating. I want to breathe, I want to breathe.” He repeats those words until he is overcome by violent coughing.

Gaza’s health ministry reported on Thursday that the number of Palestinians killed since October 7 has exceeded 30,000. Among the dead are artist Heba Zagout and scholar and poet Refaat Alareer. ARTnews has contacted the IDF for comment on the death of Ghaben.

Ghaben was one of Palestine’s most prominent painters, having gained renown in the 1970s and ’80s for his exuberantly colored paintings that memorialized Palestinian resistance. He was also a fierce advocate for arts education in Palestine and was a founding member of the Association of Fine Artists and Artists in Gaza and established the Fathi Ghaben Center of Arts.

“Palestine was always present in all its details in Ghaben’s works,” Palestinian Minister of Culture Atef Abu Seif said. “He immortalized the life of the Palestinian village that the Nakba wanted to erase, remembering the village of Harbia, in which he was born.” 

“Ghaben’s departure constitutes a loss to Palestinian art,” a statement from the culture ministry noted.

He was born in 1947, one year before Israel forcibly expelled 750,000 Palestinians from the land they called home. That event is communally called the Nakba; its name translates to the Catastrophe. Ghaben’s family resettled in the Jabaliya camp in Gaza, where he lived for most of his life. Having left school at age 15, he supported his family by selling newspapers, all while teaching himself to paint with the supplies that he managed—often with great difficulty—to find.

He transitioned to painting full-time, transmuting the suffering of his neighbors and nation into symbolic, defiant portraits. In some, swelling crowds flood the street while horses, painted as large as the sky, rear and fight against their shackles.

“My paintings are not filled with smiles; they are not loud, flashy or without a deep thought. I draw the national Palestinian issues and the reality of the Palestinian struggle,” the artist once said.

He taught art at the Al Naser Islamic school for 13 years and expressed with frustration with how the struggle to meet basic needs impeded artistic ambitions in Palestine. “I cannot afford paint and tools, so I cannot fully engage in my art, and the children need food on the table daily—it’s a big dilemma,” he said.

Ghaben also served as an adviser in the Ministry of Culture, during which time he gifted the building multiple beloved murals. In 2015, the Palestinian government awarded him the Order of Culture, Science, and Arts on the Creativity Level, and later, he received the Medal of Sword of Canaan from Yasser Arafat and the Annual Media Freedom Awards Appreciation Award from the Palestinian Press House. His international accolades included the Order of Hiroshima and the Order of the World Federation of Societies of Tokyo.

Speaking to ARTnews, prominent Palestinian painter Samia Halaby recounted her decades-long friendship with Ghaben: “His best work and professionalism depended on the revolutionary optimism of the Intifada,” she said. “His best work had a combination of symbolist attitudes and Cubist form. Like all the artists of the First Intifada, Fathi was proud to have a cause and was loyal to it.”

Halaby continued: “My last visit with him was in a tent in Gaza, probably during the 2000s. I could see from the test that a sniper tower was nearby as he told me of the continuous sniping and the absence of any defense against it living in a tent. In that tent, he received me with traditional Arabic hospitality offering gracious welcome, coffee, his cigarette smoking, and conversation.”

Ghaben was arrested by Israeli authorities on several occasions, sometimes because of his art, which was deemed to be “inciting violence.” These events were described in the catalogue for a joint exhibition of Israeli and Palestinian artists held in 1984 in Tel Aviv titled “Israeli and Palestinian Artists Against Occupation.” That show was closed abruptly by the Israeli Military, and multiple paintings were confiscated.

During one such imprisonment, one of Ghaben’s sons, Hossam, succumbed to intestinal cancer after failing to receive medical treatment. Hossam died at the age of 18.

Recalling the realities of life in Gaza, Ghaben once said: “Being a sensitive artist soul, I believe the colors appropriate for our life in Jabalia and the individual perception of them are the warm, dark and earthly colors – with a grasp of hope, maybe half of that dark brown, dark blue, but with orange, yellow and a mixture of white and yellow, these light colors reflect glimpses of hope in this hell on earth.”

Collectors snapped up paintings, photographs, custom-designed clothes, fine jewelry, and other items. Other highlights from the several-day sale, which began on February 22, included Banksy’s Thrower Triptych (2017), which sold on opening night for nearly $2 million; an untitled Keith Haring from 1982 that fetched $756,000; and a pair of silver leather platform boots adorned on either side with John’s initials in a vivacious red, which realized $94,500—about 19 times its low estimate of $5,000.

Bonnie Brennan, president of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement:  “It was a great honor for Christie’s to have been entrusted with the auction of the contents of Elton John’s Atlanta home. The collection was assembled over 30 years in an American city that meant so much to Elton John and his family.”

John’s photography collection represented over 350 of the lots—about one third of the whole collection—and included works by seminal fashion photographers Richard Avedon, Steven Meisel, and Irving Penn. One Avedon silver print, depicting a serpent coiling around a naked Nastassja Kinski, went for $201,600.

“Beyond including artistic and personal treasures the sale cemented the cultural legacy of one of the world’s most iconic figures,” Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs, said in a statement. 

This is the first single from her seventh full-length album, All Burn Screaming, which arrives in April and will be accompanied by visuals from Da Corte. The two have worked together before—most memorably on her “New York” music video—and for this album, they mined art history for inspiration. In an interview with NME, St. Vincent (born Annie Clark) recounted how she and Da Corte stopped, transfixed, at Francisco Goya’s “Black Paintings” at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. 

“You see Saturn eating his sons, the witch’s mask. We walked into this claustrophobic room and saw the paintings that Goya made at the end of his life,” she said. “He didn’t necessarily want them seen, but these were paintings that he had in his house. This is what he had surrounded himself with.”

Clark added: “Alex and I looked at each other and it was electric.”

The “Black Paintings” are a group of 14 works made between 1819 and 1823, and as the title suggests, they are dramatically lit and fiercely emotive, oscillating between horror, grief, and humiliation. Saturn Devouring His Son, which Goya worked on between 1820–1823, is among his best-known paintings, and one of the best-recognized paintings in Western art history. In it, the Titan feasts on the body in a mad attempt to prevent his own prophetic demise at his children’s hands. 

The other painting Clark references is Witches’ Sabbath (The Great He-Goat, completed between 1821 and 1823, when Goya was 75 years old and suffering from degenerative mental and physical conditions. (He died in 1828.) Applied in oil on the plaster walls of his home, it depicts a coven cowering before the goat-headed devil. The scene radiates confusion and dread. 

And it makes you curious to what else Da Corte has planned for the album. The conceptual artist is known for vibrantly hued films, sculptures and installations that reimagine pop culture, design, and art history. In January, he relased a 90-second video created for Tierra Whack’s song “Shower Song”, and the aesthetic is exuberant and theatrical, with references that swing from the original Pierrot, to fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli and Donna Summer—a sharp departure from the austerity of “Broken Man”.

“For me, the record is black, white and all the colors in the fire, because it’s about life and death. Life and death is pretty binary – you’re alive or you’re dead,” said Clark.

Curated with Sonia Dhami, president of the Art & Tolerance organization and a trustee of the Sikh Foundation, the exhibition, titled “I Will Meet You Yet Again: Contemporary Sikh Art,” brings together 40 works. Ranging from sculpture to photography, from painting to photographic essays, the works center Sikhism, a socio-religious group with an origin in India’s Panjab region and a diaspora that today numbers around 25 million. 

A new exhibition of Sikh art that Puliady co-organized offers what the previous have lacked: an opportunity to exceed one’s understanding of both South Asian art history.

No two works approach Sikhism from an identical historical moment or perspective; they represent the constellation of experience that forms collective memory. To bring them together, Dhami and Puliady worked with scholars, artists, and local religious practitioners for over two years.

“We wanted personal stories, not another anthropological exhibition,” Puliady said. “This was an opportunity to make room for women, ideas on climate change, political activism. We could expand past the boundaries of conventional pairings of sacred and historical narratives.”

The show is organized into themes that have shaped modern Sikh identity, starting with the 1947 Partition, during which India was violently divided to form a second nation, Pakistan, following its liberation from British colonial rule. In the process, millions of Sikhs were displaced from their ancestral lands. 

But rather than lingering on the tragedies wrought upon the Sikh community, as is common among Western narratives about Partition, Dhami and Puliady explore topics of gender, artistic production, architecture, climate change. Themes in the show, for example, include “Sikh Heritage as Artistic Inspiration” and “Sikh History in the U.S.A.” Additionally, underpinning the exhibition are three concepts—sangarsh, (struggle), basera (home), and birha (longing)—that speak to more ineffable elements of Sikh identity.

The show celebrates Sikh women, whose achievements have been woefully understudied in institutional settings. Among the standouts are two seven-foot-tall tapestries by the Singh Twins, British artists of dual Indian and English ancestry. The tapestries depict Sophia Duleep Singh, an Indian princess and high-profile suffragette in early 20th century England, and the Hungarian Indian avant-garde painter Amrita Sher-Gil. Both women—radical thinkers in their respective ways—stand amid a dense weaving of traditional Panjab symbols and allusions to the legacies of colonization.

A solemn section of the show focuses on 1984, the year the Indian government initiated a pogrom against its Sikh population. During the genocidal campaign, sacred sites and Sikh-owned business were destroyed across the country and civil rights were curtailed, and within days, some 3,000 Sikhs were murdered in in New Delhi alone.

Artist Arpana Caur has contributed Wounds of 1984 (2020), a surreal expression of the injustice inflicted upon Sikhs after the assassination of the Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, the event which triggered the pogrom. Whether ghost or physical, the figures in the painting have been transmuted by anguish, elongated, wide-eyed, and withered. But they are also the only varied bursts of color within a black night flickering with firelight. 

Elsewhere is an excerpt from 1984 notebook (2013) by Gauri Gill, one of few first-person chronicles of the anti-Sikh pogrom. Working for Tehelka magazine in 2005 and Outlook magazine in 2009, Gill conducted interviews with survivors in Trilokpuri, Tilak Vihar, and Garhi, and took their photographs. Later, she asked artist friends with a connection to Delhi to write a small paragraph to accompany the images. The entirety of the project is available for reading online, and is very worth it.

There is a severe lyricism to the pairings. On page 8 of the online edition, there is an image in which a woman named Nirpreet Kaur does not look at the camera. The caption reads that when she was 16, she joined a protest movement, and married a militant. Later, he was murdered, and her family was arrested. Beside Kaur’s stark black and white portrait are these words by the artist Monica Narula: “The insolubility of the photographic surface gives life its stupendous force to keep in contention the very will to breathe itself.”

It’s an important idea in this show, which toils over the ruthless transference of the past into the future. Kaur sought justice repeatedly in court but, like countless others, never found it. In the whole of South Asian art history, Sikh artists were pushed to the margins. Recognition—taking a photograph, weaving a tapestry, curating such an exhibition—is an expression of resistance.

“Most institutional spaces stop at the Partition or 1984,” said Dhami. “I think the reaction from the community has been so positive because this is more a collection of stories, monumentalized or memorialized through artworks. It’s the building of a home.” 

Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee known for vibrantly colored abstract works that celebrate queer and Native identities, will be the sixth artist to transform the Met’s facade with new sculptures. His works—four figurative sculptures that he refers to as ancestral spirit figures—will take over the niches from South Korean sculptor Lee Bul; they will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.

The prestigious Met commission follows another momentous career milestone for Gibson: he was chosen this past July to represent the United States at the 2024 Venice Biennale, becoming the first Indigenous artist in the 90-year history of the American Pavilion to do it alone.

Meanwhile, Jennie C. Jones will be the last artist commissioned to create sculptures for the museum’s rooftop garden before the outdoor space closes for renovations related to the construction of the Tang Wing, a $500 million, five-story-high gallery expansion. Jones, who was born in Cincinnati and works in Hudson, New York, uses sculpture, painting, and sound to probe the legacies of modernism and Black avant-garde music. In her minimalist sound installations, hearing supplements seeing.

For the Met rooftop, she will create her first multi-work outdoor installation; it will be on view from April 15, 2025, through October 19, 2025. She succeeds Kosovo-born artist Petrit Halilaj.

Max Hollein, director of the Met, said in a statement, “Though stylistically different, both Jones and Gibson see the potential for beauty and form to carry the potency of individual and cultural histories. We’re honored to have them join this important commission series and look forward to unveiling their works in 2025.”

The news comes amid a moment of uncertainty for the unprecedented cultural project. In January, Amr al-Madani, the former chief executive officer of the RCU, was arrested on charges of “abuse of authority and money laundering“ while in his role prior to leading AlUla. The 41-year-old al-Madani allegedly used his position to gain more than $50 million (46.2 million euros) from contracts with King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, a scientific research agency, for the company he co-owned. He formally left the company in 2017 to join AlUla.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, the former French foreign minister who took leadership of Afalula last July,  ordered an internal audit of Afalula “around the same time that Saudi Arabia was monitoring” al-Madani, per Le Monde’s investigation. The audit was ordered at the end of 2023

“This is an internal Saudi affair prior to the project, with no impact on our action,” a spokesperson for Afalula said, adding that there will be a penalty of “late payment.”

According to a separate Le Monde report Monday, Afalula’s budget doubled to about $65 million in 2023, as part of the intergovernmental agreement signed in April 2018 between France and Saudi Arabia. Per the 10-year, €30 million ($32.4 million) per year deal, France will consult on a slew of cultural and luxury projects planned for AlUla’s historic ruins and desert canyons. 

The Saudi government has already launched initiatives with the Louvre, Riyadh’s Misk Art Institute, the German Archaeological Institute, and Desert X, the California-based outdoor biennial. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s plan for “Vision 2030” is to open more than 200 cultural attractions in the northwest desert by 2030, tens of millions of dollars alone being invested in commissioning artworks for the once desolate Wadi AlFann in AlUla.

Meanwhile, a second Le Monde report published Monday revealed that despite the controversy, Saudi Arabia is set to fulfill a 2018 promise to finance the restoration of several French landmarks and museums.

According to the museum, the ideal consultant is versed in handmade memorabilia, such as concert signs and friendship bracelets (which Swift is known for gifting at her shows). The V&A hopes to make its hire before the 34-year-old, 14-Grammy winner starts the European leg of her Eras tour.

Interested parties can submit their credentials through the museum’s website from Friday.

The Swiftie position is one among several pop culture consultancies the museum has recently launched; people passionate about emojis, Crocs shoes, and drag are also wanted. Advisers on Pokemon cards, Lego, and Gorpcore fashion have already been secured.

The unusual position is part of an initiative to deepen its “vast curatorial knowledge” by employing the knowledge of civilian experts in “specific cultural niches,” the museum said.

Museum director Tristram Hunt added in a statement: “These new advisory roles will help us celebrate and discover more about the enormous, and often surprising, creative diversity on offer at the V&A, as well as helping us to learn more about the design stories that are relevant to our audiences today.”

And while the V&A’s Swift specialist is a first for the museum world, it is not unheard of more broadly. The newspaper chain Gannett, for example, recently hired a reporter whose stated beat is Swift and everything that accompanies her.

The Save Stonehenge World Heritage Site campaigners—a group comprising druids, archaeologists, urban planners, and scientists—have cited expert assessments that warned of “permanent and irreversible damage” to the ancient stone circle, which has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1986. 

However, in a 50-page ruling, a High Court judge wrote that UK ministers had “rightly focused on the relevant policies” and the assessments provide “no basis for undermining that conclusion.” Judge David Holgate continued that parts of the campaigners’ claims, which center on the potential environmental impact of the plan, were “unarguable.”

The £1.7 billion proposal was approved earlier this year by Mark Harper, the UK’s transport security head, and is being managed by a UK government agency called National Highways. The scheme would reroute the A303 road, which runs parallel to the ancient stone circle in Wiltshire, and transform it into a divided highway. The existing A303 road would be transformed into a public walkway.

In 2019, UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, announced its opposition to the proposal, saying that the new tunnel will have an “adverse impact” on the ancient stone circle. Repeated requests to the UK State Party to have the plans modified have been rebuked, however, and last year, UNESCO added Stonehenge for the first time to its list of endangered World Heritage sites. 

The layoffs will include salaried and part-time employees, as museum management is seeking to reduce the nearly 70 percent of its operating budget dedicated to wages. 

“The museum was fortunate to receive ERC credits and PPP loans to maintain staffing and programmatic growth during unprecedented times, but the multi-year positive impact of this support will soon expire,” the PMA said in a statement. “As expenses continue to remain high and unpredictable, the real and persisting negative effects of this historic moment have necessitated changes in the PMA’s operations.”

The announcement follows two years of contentious relations between the museum and its employees over wages and job security. Last month, gallery ambassadors and security workers unionized, marking the second second successful union campaign at the museum, following the 70 or so employees who joined United Auto Workers Local 2110, the Technical, Office and Professional Union in 2021. Unionized employees will be not be affected by the layoffs. 

The museum reported that attendance numbers have dropped by 35 percent since the 2020, raising concerns for the sustainability of its programming. 

“We will maintain and care for our aging campus and find ways to unify and leverage our Congress Square location. And we will ensure our programs, events, and exhibitions support our mission of Art for All and values of courage, equity, service, sustainability, and trust,” the museum said.

341 cultural sites—including 26 religious structures, 150 buildings of historical or artistic importance, and 31 museums—across Ukraine have been damaged. Additionally, more than 15,000 pieces of Ukrainian fine art and artifacts have been reported as missing. Reports have surfaced of the systematic plunder of Ukrainian museums by Russian forces, which is a war crime. 

UNESCO has also raised the number Ukraine will need over the next decade to properly rehabilitate its interconnected cultural and tourism sectors from around $6.9 billion to $9 billion. Since the start of the war, the country’s tourism has lost over $19 billion in revenue.

UNESCO has been an active partner in the preservation of Ukraine’s cultural assets. In April 2023, Audrey Azoulay, UNESCO’s director-general pledged more than $10 million to rehabilitation efforts, and added the historic center of the Ukrainian Black Sea port city Odesa to its list of endangered World Heritage sites—a move which should ensure Odesa gets extra international aid along with potential consequences for its destruction.

That same year, an aerial assault on the city resulted in the destruction of part of the Odesa Museum of Modern Art and Odesa Museum of Fine Arts. UNESCO funded repairs to both museums and financed efforts to digitize artworks and provide protective equipment. 

Azoulay has condemned in “the strongest terms” Russia’s attack on Ukrainian cultural heritage.