Many international festivals have been seeing a slow return to their former glory this past year after reduced operations due to the COVID-19 pandemic—although there are still reports of new surges—and this was evident at Art Basel Hong Kong 2024. After multiple years of a pared-down version of the event, it was back in full force this past week to showcase Pacific Asian artists and the global art community.

Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 hosted two hundred and forty-two exhibitors, compared to the one hundred and seventy-seven from last year—although they reported being down over 10,000 visitors from last year’s total of 86,000. Still, the festival made a strong showing of talent from across the Pacific Asian region and its diaspora, from curated works of the early 20th century and beyond to galleries for established and emerging artists to immersive installations.

Some of the works in the central spotlight of this year’s exhibition included: Atsushi Kaga’s Ukiyo-e  (2022-23), an installation evoking a traditional Kabuki-style theatre of the Edo period with a panel painting of the artist’s bunny alter ego sat amidst homages to his late mother; El Anatsui’s A Desire To Get Away (2024), a massive tapestry of bottle caps and metal wire, resembling a fish’s scaly skin from repurposed waste; and the wealth of film works curated by Li Zhenhua.

While Art Basel Hong Kong 2024 may have seen a dip in numbers from the prior year, it is certainly no reflection on the art on offer. An all-encompassing presentation of the modern-historic and current works within its borders and beyond, it is positive to see growth in presentation in the wake of the recent artistic climate. Fingers crossed for an even stronger turn out in the years to come.

In the modern art paradigm, consent and plagiarism are more hotly debated topics than ever. From the purposefully slippery cesspool that is AI art generation to reopened debates on the likes of Warhol, we are seeing the topic batted around more each passing year. But maybe the most unexpected addition to the debate comes from a grade school teacher in Quebec, thanks to their side hustle of Creepy Portraits.

A $1.5 million lawsuit is being levelled at Mario Perron and the Lester B. Pearson School Board following the reveal that Perron had been repurposing his students’ work to sell as merchandise on his website. After assigning his students the task of creating portraits inspired by the signature style of Basquiat—an assignment he perhaps insensitively called “Creepy Portrait”—Perron took their portraits and began printing them to order various merchandise that was selling for up to nearly $40 a pop.

Parents were living when they found out about the matter, and students also seemingly felt despondent about having their works being used without permission, especially with their first names attached. They filed their lawsuit in the Quebec Superior Court, and it calls for not only the monetary damages but also an apology from Perron and a report of Creepy Portraits’ sales.

There is a good chance the lawsuit has strong footing, especially given Perron having actively sold the works of the students for Creepy Portraits. This coupled with the contemporary examples being set regarding similar cases of artist plagiarism may put the school and Perron in hot water. But kudos to each student for making some truly haunting portrait work.

When most people think of theatre productions with legendary longevity, their mind goes to Broadway. After all, the North American mecca of musicals and beyond has been home to the likes of Wicked, The Lion King, and The Phantom of the Opera, each holding decades under their belts. But even these feats pale in comparison to the well-lived and loved gem of London’s West End, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.

The Mousetrap has just recently celebrated its fiftieth year at its home in St Martin’s Theatre. This alone is a grand achievement, but truly, the show has been running in the West End for seventy years, having switched over from its original home of Ambassadors Theatre after running there from 1952 to 1974. The only interruptions in its run have been two days while it moved theatres and a year and two months during the pandemic. St Martin’s is denoted by its proud neon sign for The Mousetrap and has a wooden sign within clocking how many performances have shown—now upwards of 29,500.

Agatha Christie’s piece started out as a radio play entitled Three Blind Mice, before spinning into a short story—one that Christie demanded not be published in the UK so long as the show ran—and was inspired by the real-life death of a young boy in foster care. The Mousetrap is a whodunit murder mystery of several guests snowed in at a lodge as a woman’s murder is investigated. A standard piece of mystery work with a requisite twist ending, the sheer continuity of the show has become the true reason tourists flock to it.

While there is often dismay as to the future of theatre at large, and while there are certainly many theatrical artifacts that could do with supplanting to breathe new life into the medium, The Mousetrap is a pleasant and present reminder of an era gone by. There is little to wish it except another fifty years at home in the West End.

We go to galleries to surround ourselves with the delights of the exhibited artists, meandering through peaceful halls to engage in quiet contemplation of works past and present. But it’s easy to forget that there is a bustling team making it such that these serene and beautiful moments can happen. And just like every other workforce, they are feeling the squeeze of unfair wages—and it’s because of this that the Art Gallery of Ontario’s workers have gone on strike.

As of March 26th, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s workers, Local 535 of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, has voted to strike after ten months of negotiations with the AGO. The latest offer was not representative of necessary living wages in the rapidly worsening housing crisis of Toronto, an issue keenly felt coast to coast. After three years of wage freezes and the tumultuous issues in the sector stemming from the pandemic, the union has finally decided enough is enough.

As one of the largest museums in North America, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s workers fairly point out the AGO’s ability to throw money around. From 2020 to 2021 their CEO Stephan Jost took home almost $800 thousand. Recently the gallery has announced plans for a $100 million expansion for modern and contemporary art. While it may have stated a deficit in its last year, the gallery certainly isn’t hurting for money—but the union members certainly are.

Whether the Art Gallery of Ontario’s workers will get to the agreement they desire is to be determined in the face of such a titanic target for bargaining. Hopefully, the AGO will take stock beyond its own growth and do right by those who keep the ship running.

After seven years in the position and thirteen at the institution, Patrick Moore is stepping down as director of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh–but perhaps not for as heated reasons as was first believed. While it was speculated as being driven by controversies surrounding recent decisions by the former director in relation to the museum, the president and CEO of Carnegie Museums, Steven Knapp, responded to ARTnews stating this was not the case.

In a letter to the editor, Knapp explained that Patrick Moore is choosing to step down due to a position offer in Spain, a choice corroborated in Moore’s own statement of choosing to live in the homeland of his husband. “My 13 years at The Warhol have been the most formative of my life,” Moore states, “and I’m so grateful for having been given this opportunity.”

Patrick Moore has been an impactful force for the Warhol Museum for over a decade. It was under his tenure that it expanded its operations beyond the locale of the late pop art icon’s hometown to a global scale. This expansion, however, also contains one of the multiple controversies of Moore’s decisions with the museum, having curated a show in Saudi Arabia. Moore was criticized for choosing to present in an authoritarian and homophobic state, a choice he staunchly defended in an ArtNet piece.

Another incident–one that is still underway–that has been indicative of Moore’s bumpy history at the museum is the Pop District Initiative. The Pop District is a $45 million “creative-economy workforce development project” by the Warhol Museum encompassing six blocks that surround the existent museum. Alongside a massive entertainment structure, it aims to turn the area of Pittsburgh’s eastern North Shore into a multi-purpose arts hub in the coming years. But this move has been deeply criticized within the museum by both employees and higher-ups, with several director-level members retiring since its announcement.

Despite the conflicting nature of Patrick Moore’s time in the position, there is seemingly no ill will between himself and Carnegie Museums, Moore having stated his intention to continue collaborating and supporting the institution from Spain. And while it’s uncertain how the contentious Pop District will progress without him helming it, it’s certain not to be the last we’ll hear of it.

Over the past year, we’ve come to a point in the arts and entertainment industry where the heavy hitters of the modern world are in dire straits. Both the video game and film industries have fallen on bleakly hard times for their workers, for the first time in a while bringing some real kinship with their estranged cousin—the theatre industry. But today, on World Theatre Day 2024, we revel in the fact that while consistently at odds with the industry framework around it, theatre is a nigh-invulnerable medium.

World Theatre Day 2024, as it has every year since 1962, is encapsulated by a message from a renowned theatre practitioner from across the globe. This year’s message is delivered by Jon Fosse of Norway, a playwright and writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023. Second only to Henrik Ibsen for most produced Norwegian playwright, Fosse’s minimalist and lyrical style has spanned a long and active career, from his prose and poetry of the 80s to the biographical fiction of Melancholy and his first forays into theatre in the 90s, all the way up to present day where he is still creating new and impactful works.

“Art Is Peace,” states the emphatic title of Fosse’s message. “I know of no better way to bring opposites together. This is the exact reverse approach from that of the violent conflicts we see all too often in the world, which indulge the destructive temptation to annihilate anything foreign, anything unique and different, often by using the most inhuman inventions technology has put at our disposal. There is terrorism in the world. There is war. For people have an animalistic side, too, driven by the instinct to experience the other, the foreign, as a threat to one’s own existence rather than as a fascinating mystery.”

Theatre is one of our earliest art forms. It is one of the most connective forms of storytelling that exists at the core of so many other mediums. It is something primal and ethereal, and in having these qualities, it has the power to transcend danger. While the entirety of the theatre industry could fall, unlike with film or gaming or tech, theatre would still exist. This is the power we can revel in on World Theatre Day 2o24, and in a world wrought with conflict, Jon Fosse states its importance better than anyone.

“War and art are opposites, just as war and peace are opposites—it’s as simple as that.”

Click here to read the entirety of Jon Fosse’s message for World Theatre Day 2024.

Few groups are as easily recognizable as Pussy Riot. Clad in vibrant balaclavas, the Russian punk band and activist group has made a name for itself as an unflinching detractor of their country’s authoritarian state as well as fascism at large globally. With over a decade of feminist artistry and rebellion, it seems more than time for a retrospective on their stalwart work. And that is just what we’ll receive with the upcoming exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia.

Hosted by The Polygon Gallery in Vancouver, Velvet Terrorism is the first of its kind for the art collective. It collects documentation of their activism from 2011 onwards and is set to display a dichotomy of the group’s actions against a backdrop of Russian officials’ reactions. The name for the exhibition itself comes from such a source—a quote from Putin’s spiritual advisor Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov referring to the actions of the feminist collective as “velvet terrorism.”

“Through videos, photographs, testimonies, song lyrics, and reflections,” explains The Polygon’s statement, “the exhibition offers a rich account of Pussy Riot’s non-violent actions, alongside the reactions of the Russian authorities to their provocations. In illustrating an increasingly hostile relationship between the group and the state authorities, the exhibition provides key insights into the evolution of Putin’s Russia over the past ten years, leading up to the military invasion of Ukraine.”

Velvet Terrorism is collected by group member Maria Alyokhina, one of the individuals who was sentenced to two years in a penal colony for their protest against Putin’s reelection. Having described her time in the group and her punishment through her novel Riot Days, she is giving resonant insight into one of the most notable activist and musical groups this century.

Velvet Terrorism opens March 22nd at The Polygon Gallery.

In a continuing trend of non-violent protest, Extinction Rebellion has once again made a very public splash in the arts realm. In the middle of a preview of a new Broadway production of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a group of protestors, including an individual working at the production’s venue, stood up and spoke out about the growing climate disaster that threatens to wash theatres off the map.

An Enemy of the People is currently up at Circle in the Square Theatre starring succession actor Jeremy Strong as its lead. A new adaptation by Amy Herzog directed by Sam Gold, it is the story of a small-town doctor discovering a bacteria afflicting his local community and turning into a pariah in his attempt to help them. Simply put, it is no surprise that such thematic content would be the target of an Extinction demonstration. Before the group was ushered out, one of its pleading members called out “No theatre on a dead planet.”

Extinction Rebellion NYC and other like-minded forces, such as Just Stop Oil and the Extinction movement at large, have a vibrant history over the past several years of making a lot of noise in quiet spaces. From theatres to galleries, individuals have made themselves visible nuisances in order to draw attention to the issues plaguing our world. And while they have seen varying levels of effect and certainly some missed marks, it certainly does keep them present in the public eye.

There’s no doubt that the audience of this preview for Enemy of the People will be thinking about the events that unfolded. And that is largely the point of any demonstration. While it may be naive for the group to proclaim that they are being made as the enemy vs. destructive corporations when any non-political outburst would be met the same, it is necessary for us to take the messages of our art to heart and push for the safety of our planet—if we hope to live to see another show interrupted.