Smithsonian under fire from Trump, Frieze Seoul, Dara Birnbaum and Quantum

Since we were last on air in June, the US government has announced what it calls a comprehensive internal review of activities at eight of the 21 museums under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution. Meanwhile, one of those museums, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., saw the artist Amy Sherald cancel a long-scheduled exhibition of her work, citing censorship and institutional fear of the US government. Ben Luke talks to Ben Sutton, The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, about Donald Trump and his administration’s growing interference in museums, and whether Sherald’s act of resistance is an outlier or a marker of a wider art world response. The first major art fair of the new season, Frieze Seoul, is happening this week in the South Korean capital, after a period of political turmoil there. Our correspondent in Asia, Lisa Movius, visits the fair and gauges the mood. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79), by Dara Birnbaum. This landmark of video art is part of a new exhibition at San Marco Art Centre, or SMAC, a new space in the Procuratie Vecchie in St Mark’s Square, Venice. The show, called The Quantum Effect, explores the work of several leading contemporary artists in the context of quantum theory. I talk to the exhibition’s curators, Daniel Birnbaum—no relation—and Jacqui Davies, and to Ulf Danielsson, a physicist who has suggested quantum equations to accompany each of the pieces in the show.

Frieze Seoul until 6 September.

The Quantum Effect, SMAC, Venice, Italy, 5 September-23 November.

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