Your weekly art news fix – served fresh, punchy, and with just the right amount of spice. Expect the unexpected, because the art world never sits still. From controversy to pure inspiration, we’ve got it all covered.
TOP 3 ART STORIES OF THE WEEK:
1. Venice Biennale 2025: It’s Weird, Brilliant, and Full of Dirt
The Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 just opened, and it’s one big brainy playground.
📍 Theme? “Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.”
🎯 What it means: Architects from around the world (750+ of them!) are showing how buildings can work with nature and AI, not fight them.
🏆 Big Winners
🇧🇭 Bahrain won Best National Pavilion with Heatwave, a setup showing how old-school cooling methods (like wind towers) can beat the heat without AC.
Canal Café by Diller Scofidio + Renfro took Best Participation: they literally made coffee from filtered Venice canal water. A bold mix of art, science, and protest.
Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler grabbed Silver for a huge map showing how tech and power have shaped the world for 500+ years.
The Dirt Is the Star
Yep, soil.
Mexico used floating gardens.
Australia built with earth walls.
Kosovo added scent to the mix, so you could literally smell the dirt.
Even Turkey made buildings out of soil.
🤖 When AI Gets… Meh
This year, some text labels at the main exhibit were written by artificial intelligence.
Critics hated it.
Why not just ask the artists to write their own blurbs? One person joked: “Do you tell people your Word doc was written with Word?”
🛠️ Construction Is the Exhibit
France, Denmark, and Switzerland turned their own renovation work into the show itself. It’s scaffolding with a message: Reuse is cool. Don’t waste.
🐘 Weird, Wild & Unexpected
Bricks made from elephant poop? Totally real.
Crickets as food? One piece says: time to rethink what’s on our plates.
Sound everywhere: Uruguay had dripping ceilings, Ireland built a wooden listening hut, and Luxembourg went full blackout audio mode.
💥 Things That Didn’t Land
Austria showed a split-screen of housing in Vienna vs. squatting in Rome. Critics called it misleading and political.
Italy, Portugal & others went all in on open calls to include more people—but ended up with too many projects and no clear story.
Venice Is Upgrading
🦁 Querini Stampalia now has 4 huge lion sculptures by Davide Rivalta.
🧠 Fondazione Prada is showing… diagrams. Sounds boring, but it slaps.
💸 Over €169 million in renovation funds are revamping Biennale venues for the future.
It’s messy. It’s ambitious. It’s full of soil, AI, sound, lions, and lagoon coffee.
The Biennale 2025 is doing the most, and you should absolutely walk through it.
🗓️ Open until November 23, 2025
👉 See all the Golden Lion winners here
2. Jaume Plensa Joins Spain’s Top Art Academy 🕊️
Big news from Madrid: Jaume Plensa, the world-famous Spanish sculptor, has just joined the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, basically the Hall of Fame for artists in Spain. He received Medal #37, a big honor. His acceptance speech? Titled “From I to We.”
💬 What He Said (and Why It Matters)
Plensa’s message: In a world full of war, poverty, and confusion, he said artists need to commit fully (with heart and courage) to creating beauty and hope.
“We must fill the darkness with light. Bring beauty to everyday life,” he told the crowd.
🎨 The Art Behind the Artist
You might know Plensa from his giant head sculptures in cities like Chicago, Madrid, and Seoul. But he’s also worked with music, poetry, light, shadows, and even tears (literally: he made fountains shaped like crying faces in Senegal). He sees his own art like a collage of memories, doubts, poems, and dreams.
📚 Inspired by Poets, Not Just Stone
Plensa says he’s learned more from Shakespeare and Baudelaire than from bricks and blueprints. Poetry, he says, built the music of his art.
🔁 Full Circle
The medal he now holds once belonged to sculptor Julio López Hernández, known for showing deep humanity in his work. Now, Plensa steps into his shoes, bringing 40+ years of public art, opera sets, giant statues, and quiet drawings with him.
3. A Giant Spider Is Back in London, and It’s a Big Deal🕷️
To celebrate its 25th birthday, London’s Tate Modern just brought back one of its most famous artworks: a 7-meter-tall spider called “Maman” by artist Louise Bourgeois.
First shown in 2000 inside the museum’s Turbine Hall
Now reinstalled outside on Bankside
Made of steel with a sac of 17 marble eggs
What’s it about?
🕸️ A tribute to the artist’s mom: a weaver.
💪 It shows protection + power (but also looks creepy and fragile).
It’s not just a throwback. “Maman” is a reminder that emotions can be art, and art can be massive.
MUSEUM NIGHT IN EUROPE 👓
This Saturday, Museums Across Europe Open Their Doors for a Magical Night
On Saturday, May 18, over 3,000 museums across Europe will stay open late and offer free access for the Nuit Européenne des Musées (European Night of Museums).
Launched in 2005 by the French Ministry of Culture, the event now spans dozens of countries, turning cultural spaces into nighttime hubs of art, music, performance, and workshops.
From major institutions like the Louvre, Tate, and Uffizi, to small local museums and galleries, visitors can expect unique programming: candlelit tours, live art, film screenings, and concerts, all for free.
Whether you’re in Paris, Berlin, Madrid, or Ljubljana, this is Europe’s most poetic museum night of the year.
ARTISTS, UNFILTERED
Some people are still deep in the David Lynch rabbit hole, replaying his talks like gospel, not ready to come up for air. And honestly? Fair. Though Lynch passed away earlier this year, his thoughts on creativity keep surfacing: stranger, sharper, and more useful than most. This one’s about how ideas really arrive (hint: not through hustle).
What’s it really like to get a creative idea?
“You are going along, and there is no idea… no idea… no idea… and then BOOM. It’s like you could say a big movie screen in your head, in your brain. This idea comes on the screen and you see it, you hear it, you FEEL it. You KNOW it. All at once.”
“A desire for an idea is like a bait on a hook. If you’re desiring ideas and you’re meditating regularly – they’re gonna swim in. (…) They may not be ideas that you’ll fall in love with, but you’re gonna start catching them. And then one day you’re gonna get an idea that you love.”
“It might just be a little fish, a little part of a whole story – that you maybe see a character, you know THAT character, you say: that’s an important character. That’s an important fish I got. You write it down.
And then when you’ve got that one, it’s now more bait on the hook, and so you lower it in the water and a school of fish will come that know that fish you love, and connect with it. And bring in more and more fish, and a story, a thing will evolve, or a painting …”
Beautiful, beautiful talk. 🫠
NEWEST CREATIVITY HACK
📢 New study just dropped (literally 2 days ago!): Want better ideas, faster? Move around. Seriously. Researchers studied Nobel Prize winners (yeah, the science legends) and found this:
If they moved to a new place every 2 years, they started their prizewinning work 2 years earlier.
If they worked in more than one place (like a university and a lab), they started 2.6 years earlier on average.
“You’re more likely to come up with that great new idea if you move around, meet new people, have new experiences.”
— Bruce Weinberg, co-author
🪄 Same desk = same thoughts.
Switch it up, new city, new studio, even a new café, and your brain might light up. This works for artists, writers, creators, anyone. A change of scene = a change of mind.
MUSIC FOR YOUR STUDIO (nostalgic vibes with a new fun fact you now cannot un-know!)
🥚 Did you know? Paul McCartney wrote the melody for Yesterday with the placeholder lyrics: “Scrambled eggs, oh my baby how I love your legs”, and kept them for a whole year before the real words came to him on a road trip in Portugal. 😃
Well, that was that for this time.
Hope you liked it or that found something to take away. Please, let me know below and see you again next week! 😊 😍
Source: FB You.are.another.me
Source: FB You.are.another.me
