A version of this article originally appeared in The Back Room, our lively recap funneling only the week’s must-know art industry intel into a nimble read you’ll actually enjoy. Artnet News Pro members get exclusive access—subscribe now to receive the newsletter in your inbox every Friday.
Optimism abounded after the Labour Party swept the U.K.’s July election, but there’s been nothing but pessimism (or maybe just realism) out of 10 Downing Street ever since.
Many in the culture sector have been willing the onset of another “Cool Britannia” movement under the new government—a reference to the cultural phenomenon of the late 1990s under a previous Labour leader, Tony Blair, which brought the world everything from the Spice Girls and David Beckham to the YBAs. And it almost seemed like history would indeed repeat itself when Oasis announced a reunion tour a few weeks ago, but Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves has been insistent that, unlike the ’90s, there is no money in the country’s coffers. In fact, there’s a £22 billion ($28.8 billion) budgetary black hole that is going to make things worse before they get better.
Such was the backdrop to London’s Art Business Conference on September 10, where speakers ranging from Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti to Chris Bryant, the recently appointed minister of state for the department of culture, media, and sport (DCMS), convened to discuss the state of the U.K. art industry. To sum up the day in just a few words, it would suffice to say: Britain is broke. But is there a way to build its culture sector back up? Here are our five key takeaways from the conference.
1. There’s a Big Tax Problem
One major point of discussion since Labour came to power is how proposed tax hikes may lead to a millionaire drain from the U.K. as they flee to countries with lower tax rates. Although Christie’s canceled its London summer sales this year, Cerutti maintained that any wealth exodus from Britain would not have a “seismic” effect on sales there. Even as Paris’s marketplace has grown, he said that, concerningly, Europe overall has been on the back foot globally, and that within the last decade or so, the number of buyers from the region (including the U.K.) fell 37 percent. Over the same period, the number of buyers in the U.S. and Asia has grown by roughly 30 percent.
Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti at the Art Business Conference, London 2024. Photo: David Owens.
But issues with the country’s policies extended beyond just concerns over a wealth tax. The U.K.’s Temporary Admission scheme—introduced after Brexit to suspend import Value Added Tax (VAT) on goods, including art and antiquities, when they are being re-exported—has been a “bureaucratic nightmare,” according to Martin Wilson, the recently appointed chairman of the British Art Market Federation (BAMF). Why? Because it requires dealers to guarantee VAT before the destination of the artwork is known. He proposed that the government emulate the U.S. with a destination tax.
2. Proportionality Is Key
BAMF’s Wilson also said that “proportionality is key” when it comes to regulation in the U.K. art market, adding that recent anti-money laundering legislation (AML) was like “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut” for many dealers. That sentiment was echoed by Liz Chilcott, a representative of the Society of Fine Art Auctioneers, who said that the big three houses have entire departments devoted to AML regulation and essentially operate as banks themselves. However, most auction businesses are small, regional outfits and “simply don’t have the staff or time” to navigate the laws, nor do the price levels they are selling at generally warrant the same kind of regulation, Chilcott said.
3. Small Galleries Need Big Support
Overregulation in the U.K., as well as macroeconomic factors like inflation and the country’s cost-of-living crisis, have also put smaller galleries under pressure, leading to issues of “asymmetry” in the art world. Rakeb Sile, the co-founder of Addis Fine Art, said that “80 percent of business is done by 10 percent of the galleries,” referencing larger mega galleries, which leaves “90 percent of galleries fighting for 20 percent of the market.” She added that small galleries are the “investment engine” of the art trade, but once an artist’s career starts to take off and the gallery starts to see a return on that investment, they are poached by a larger outfit.
Addis Fine Art founders Mesai Haileleul and Rakeb Sile. Courtesy of Addis Fine Art.
How can smaller galleries be fairly rewarded for what they contribute to the art ecosystem? Sile, whose firm focuses on art from the Horn of Africa, argued that mega-galleries should collaborate with smaller, specialized dealers who are subject-matter experts when they take on an artist who is “ready to go blue chip.”
That was a sentiment echoed by Crispian Riley-Smith, who is a market veteran of 30 years specializing in Old Master drawings. He is now managing director and CEO of Art Advisory Group Ltd, which is a new venture that advises on succession planning. He also noted that when a gallery decides to exit the market—which happens frequently these days, often due to economic pressure—dealers think all their value is in their stock, which they bring to auction or sell somewhere else. But there is “plenty of value in their expertise,” he said, adding that dealers should not be shy about monetizing their knowledge or their client base.
4. Funding Is in Crisis
It’s not just commercial businesses that are suffering under the U.K.’s current tax structures. There are also fewer tax incentives to support nonprofits like museums and public galleries in the U.K., especially compared to the U.S., according to Fatoş Üstek, the author of The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model (2024) and curator of Frieze Sculpture in London. She said that the U.K.’s Gift Aid scheme, which broadly allows individuals to claim back 25p of every £1 (25 percent) they donate to a charity, doesn’t offer as much tax relief as a donation to a 501(c)3-registered nonprofit in the U.S. (According to the Internal Revenue Service, in most cases, the amount of charitable cash contributions U.S. taxpayers can deduct is up to 60 percent of the taxpayer’s adjusted gross income.) The result? The U.K. tallied $10.5 billion in Gift Aid in 2023—or just 1.89 percent of what the U.S. brought in through donations to charities ($557.1 billion).
Charlene Prempeh, Charlotte Appleyard, Jennifer Schipf, and Fatoş Üstek speak on a panel about the future of creativity at the Art Business Conference in London. Photo: David Owens.
Üstek noted that, given the vastly larger population of the U.S. than the U.K., the total amount of charitable giving across the pond would always be higher, but she emphasized that the current Gift Aid system could be improved upon to incentivize public giving, especially as many arts institutions find themselves relying increasingly on private rather than government funding. Speaking of government funding, or the lack thereof, Eliza Easton, the founder of the Erskine Analysis think tank, noted that the U.K. is far behind its European neighbors in terms of cultural spending.
Meanwhile, Charlotte Appleyard, the deputy director of development at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, said that the language around funding in the arts “is often couched in [corporate terms like] ‘KPIs’ and ‘deliverables,'” metrics of success that are predicated on a final product and that do not correspond with what artists and institutions often need: time and basic resources to make work and exhibitions. To help institutions keep the lights on, she advocated for the Labour government to implement a tourist levy—a practice standard across much of Europe in which tourists pay a small daily fee, at least part of which is dedicated to the upkeep of cultural institutions and sites—and to better incentivize private patronage.
5. An Emphasis on Education
A major part of Labour’s plan for culture (as minimal as it is so far) has been to reverse declines in art education, and Chris Bryant, the culture minister, reinforced this by saying that the government is committed to putting “more art in schools from early years” and developing more art-business training programs to improve access to culture.
Students at the Courtauld. Photo: Ed Hands, courtesy of AHLU and the Courtauld.
To that end, the Courtauld Institute of Art used the conference to announce its new master’s program in art and business “to equip students with all the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in today’s art market,” according to the school’s director, Mark Hallett. There will be 24 seats available when it begins in 2025. No details were given about its tuition fees, but current M.A. programs at the school range from around £15,000 ($19,700) per year, for U.K. residents, to nearly £30,000 ($39,400) for international students.
Hallet and Bryant did not address issues of chronic underemployment for graduates with arts degrees, the stagnant wage growth for culture workers in the U.K., or the increasingly small pool of jobs in both arts institutions and commercial galleries, due to funding cuts and economic pressure.
“We decided to focus on what parents think because they know better what’s appropriate for their children than any tech company, any private company, any senator or policymaker or staffer or regulator.” – The New York Times
In early March 2022, when his country seemed in danger of falling to the Russians, it occurred to Leonid Marushchak, a historian by training, to call the director of a museum in eastern Ukraine to check that a collection of 20th-century studio pottery was safe.
He had loved the modernist works by artist Natalya Maksymchenko since he had encountered them almost a decade earlier. There were vessels covered with bold abstract glazes in purple, scarlet and yellow; exuberant figurines of musicians and dancers with swirling skirts; dishes painted with birds in flight. The collection was the radiant highlight of the local history museum in Sloviansk, the ceramicist’s home town.
It was remarkable that they were in this small museum at all. Though she was born in Ukraine in 1914 and studied in Kharkiv, Maksymchenko had lived the rest of her life in Russia. But, after her death in 1978, her family, fulfilling her wishes, oversaw the transfer of about 400 works from her studio in Moscow to the city of her birth. It was a deeply resonant act. When the historic traffic of artworks has so often been from Ukraine to Russia, when artists’ national allegiances have been subsumed by the Soviet Union, when works in international museums by Ukrainians (such as Kyiv-born Kazimir Malevich) have been routinely labelled “Russian”, Maksymchenko’s final gift to her home town and country seemed like a statement of defiance.
Now, as the Russian army inched nearer and nearer to the museum, Marushchak worried that these works in delicate porcelain could be destroyed by a missile in a moment – or, if Sloviansk were occupied, taken by the invaders back to Moscow. Had the ceramics been prioritised for the first round of evacuations, Marushchak asked the museum director on the phone.
“Lyonya, what round?” came the reply. “We still haven’t got the order to evacuate!”
Marushchak phoned his friend Kateryna Chuyeva, who was then Ukraine’s deputy minister for culture. “Katya,” he asked her, “why have you still not given the order for the Sloviansk museum?” She explained that she couldn’t just authorise it herself – the regional authorities needed to request it first. So he called the region’s culture department. They said that to issue an order, they would first need a full list of items to be evacuated.
Marushchak was furious. The situation was urgent; there was no time for that kind of paperwork. “Let’s just say I have sometimes had to take my time and breathe slowly,” said Chuyeva, in the face of her friend’s sometimes volcanic passion. She found a way to break the bureaucratic impasse. Before the official order had even arrived, Maruschak was on his way to Sloviansk.
Marushchak cannot drive. When I asked him why he hasn’t learned, he joked that if he had a licence, he’d have long ago driven to Russia to try to bring back Ukrainian artworks that have, over the centuries, been taken from his country. Without his own means of getting to Sloviansk, Marushchak had his brother-in-law drive him from Kyiv 300 miles east to the city of Dnipro. From there, friends took him a further 50 miles, to the city of Pavlohrad. Then he walked to the last checkpoint in town and hitched a lift for the last 120 miles – this time, on a Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier.
In Sloviansk, artillery boomed alarmingly close; the opposing armies were fighting over a town only 18 miles away. When Marushchak reached the museum, staff were finally packing up the exhibits – though, to his annoyance, the official instructions on what should be prioritised dated from 1970, and stated that what he referred to as “an old bucket of medals” from the second world war should be rescued first. Aside from the Maksymchenko ceramics and the medals, there was also a natural history collection to deal with – AKA, stuffed animals, which, just to add another layer of danger to the enterprise, had probably been preserved with highly toxic arsenic. Into Marushchak’s ark – in reality, a police van that deputy minister for culture Chuyeva had managed to commandeer for him – went a moose, a bison, a fox, a wild boar, a wolf and a small herd of deer. All were spirited on a long journey west to a safer location.
Leonid Marushchak with artworks from his private collection, built up over many years. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Since those early days of the war, with the help of a motley group of intrepid friends, Marushchak has achieved something quite extraordinary. He has organised the evacuation of dozens of museums across Ukraine’s frontline – packing, recording, logging and counting each item and sending them to secret, secure locations away from the combat zone. Among the many tens of thousands of artefacts he has rescued are individual drawings and letters in artists’ archives, collections of ancient icons and antique furniture, precious textiles, and even 180 haunting, larger-than-life medieval sculptures known as babas, carved by the Turkic nomads of the steppe. “At times,” said Chuyeva, “he has been doing almost unbelievable things” – putting himself into extreme personal danger for the sake of often humble-seeming regional museum collections on Ukraine’s frontline.
A nation’s understanding of itself is built on intangible things: stories and music, poems and language, habits and traditions. But it is also held in its artworks and artefacts, fragile objects that human hands have made and treasured. Once lost or destroyed, they are gone for ever, along with the stores of knowledge they contain, and potential knowledge that future generations might harvest from them. For Marushchak, his country’s culture, no less than its territory, is at stake in this war: a culture that Vladimir Putin has repeatedly claimed has no distinct existence, except as an adjunct to Russia’s.
On that day in Sloviansk, something became clear to him: there was no point relying on official evacuation efforts. If he wanted to see the job done, he was going to have to do it himself. “He had to do it with his own hands,” his friend, the artist Zhanna Kadyrova told me. “There was no one else.”
Marushchak, 38, is a tall, fair, round-faced man with a clipped beard and a close-shaved head. When he smiles, he radiates an intense sunniness, but in the background one senses a volatile weather system that might abruptly cloud into fury. Moods – impatience, frustration, delight – flit across his face in quick succession. The first time we spoke, in the autumn of 2023, at a cafe in Kyiv, he seemed anxious almost to the point of hostility. He drummed a set of keys nervously against the tabletop, talking so rapidly, and scattering so many conversational tangents, that it was hard to keep up. Yet the more we spoke, during the following spring and summer, the warmer he became. He is a person who, once he has decided to commit to something, becomes unshakeably attached. (When I asked his wife, Marta Bilas, how she would describe him to a stranger, she said “stubborn”.) “He lives his project. He thinks on a different scale from most people,” his friend Arif Bagirov told me.
Bagirov, a reformed “hooligan” (his word), from the now-occupied east of Ukraine, is one of the tight group of helpers who have worked with Marushchak, trusting him with their lives in the most perilous of situations. Others include a team of drivers including Marharita Kravchenko, a self-possessed young woman with razor-sharp cheekbones; Zhanna Kadyrova, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated artists; and Diana Berg, a glamorous, twice-displaced activist and arts manager who fled Russian-occupied Donetsk in 2014 and then the besieged Mariupol in 2022. “We are like partisans, like guerrilla fighters,” said Marushchak.
One day this spring, in his flat in Kyiv, pouring glasses of rosé and radiating bonhomie, Marushchak pulled out some of his own treasures, artworks that he has collected over the years – an early 20th-century oil painting of the apricot groves and slag heaps of the Donbas; red-glazed 1960s studio pottery by Nina Fedorova; a cheery 20th-century folk appliqué textile; a cross-stitch embroidery depicting national poet Taras Shevchenko; a 19th-century icon. Marushchak is one of life’s enthusiasts, deeply knowledgable and passionate about Ukraine’s artistic history – and, after a decade working with museums in eastern Ukraine, he happens to know the museums that have ended up on Ukraine’s frontline like no one else.
Until recently, he has done his evacuation work in secret. This is the first time he has spoken of the work to a journalist. Even Bilas, his wife, hasn’t always known the full story. During the chaos of the first few months of war, the couple were flung from their home in Kyiv to different parts of Ukraine. Unbeknown to Bilas, while she was living with her parents in the far west of the country, Marushchak started making daily 300-mile round trips to the capital. Each morning, with his brother-in-law at the wheel of Bilas’s black Mini Countryman, he would take humanitarian aid into Kyiv – and each afternoon he would take art out. “At that time no one knew whether Kyiv would fall under occupation. And if it did, at some point the Russians would target museum collections and archives,” Marushchak told me.
One of his first big evacuation missions from the capital was the family-owned archive of Viktor Zaretsky and Alla Horska, one of Ukraine’s most important artist couples of the 20th century. It felt especially important to Marushchak to safeguard this work: in the 1960s Horska had defied the Soviet regime to reassert suppressed national symbols – Ukrainian folkloric heroes, for example – in her sinuous, modernist drawings. She was, according to Marushchak, “basically the founder of Ukrainian identity in the 1960s”. (She was murdered in 1970, likely by the KGB for her dissident activities.)
When Bilas finally saw her car again after three months, on her return to Kyiv in May 2022, she noticed a pair of punctures in the s oft lining on the inside of one of the doors. “I asked Leonid and the guys, ‘Who’s been sleeping here in high heels?’ and they said, ‘Oh, so that’s from some horns.’” Unbeknown to her, they been using her car to evacuate a collection of taxidermy.
Part of the reason for secrecy was that Marushchak didn’t want to worry his wife. “For example, I didn’t know he went to Bakhmut about 27 times,” Bilas said. “I’d call and he’d say, ‘I’m busy, the phone is funny, the connection is bad.’” If she asked too many questions, he and his team would just “curl up like hedgehogs”, she said. That was despite the fact that she was raising money to support the evacuations, relying on donors who understood the need to release funds quickly with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss. In any case, she was herself too busy to pay too much attention to the details: aside from her day job in PR, at the start of the invasion she was asked by an old boss, who was by then working for the government, to assemble a team of linguists to translate Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s daily speeches into 14 languages, including English, French, Arabic and Chinese.
There were other reasons for secrecy, too. At one point Bilas came across a notebook in their flat “filled with symbols and weird code”. These were Marushchak’s records of storage locations. “If someone sees this notebook, I don’t want them to understand which collection went where and how is it packed and how’s it marked,” Marushchak said. (For this reason, Marushchak did not allow the stores to be photographed or inspected for this article.)
An antique religious artwork from Marushchak’s personal collection. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
For some of Ukraine’s cultural heritage, it is already too late: like the contents of Mariupol’s Museum of Local History, which succumbed to multiple fires during the aerial bombing of the city; like the 3,000 cultural sites that have been officially reported damaged or destroyed; like the uncountable ancient sites in Ukraine’s archaeology-rich east and south that have been wrecked. In many places, what has not been destroyed is vulnerable to theft and looting. In November 2022, just before they withdrew from the city, Russian occupiers loaded five truckloads of works from the Kherson Art Museum and drove them to Russian-occupied Crimea.
Artworks have long formed part of the spoils of war, but art is always more than simply a question of beautiful, desirable objects. Culture and politics are interleaved, as Ukraine’s history – so full of violence against culture and cultural figures – shows. The killing, in Stalin’s purges of the early 1930s, of an entire generation of modernist Ukrainian writers known as “the executed renaissance”, looms especially large for today’s cultural figures. In today’s war, occupying forces have seen the very act of writing in Ukrainian or owning Ukrainian books as a threat.
By the time Bilas was examining the strange puncture marks in her Mini’s upholstery, Marushchak was devoting his every waking hour to evacuating artworks and artefacts – taking the work upon himself when official procedures were neglected, unworkable or nonexistent. “He went to places where there was a very high chance of being killed or captured,” said Diana Berg, the activist, who helped the efforts by initially having the donations that Bilas raised flow through her cultural NGO. “He was ready to put his life on the line – for the history of our culture.”
Marushchak has conducted many of his missions with his friend, professional driver Yevhen Sternichuk, at the wheel. They have known each other for years, since Sternichuk was a kid at a summer camp in Crimea in the early 2000s, and Marushchak a camp counsellor. There still seems something of that protective relationship about the pair. After the invasion in 2022, Sternichuk said, Marushchak called him straight away, checking if he needed help, or money. As soon as Sternichuk heard about Marushchak’s art rescue projects, he wanted to help.
By the summer of 2022, thanks to donations, Sternichuk graduated from driving Bilas’s Mini Countryman to a roomy van, a white Mercedes Sprinter. “I drove 60,000km in that van,” said Sternichuk fondly. On one trip, what at first felt like an enormous pothole turned out to be the shock waves from a supersonic bomber, which all but knocked the van over. Another time, a Ukrainian tank almost crushed them by accident. “We had some shenanigans together,” he said.
In April 2022, Marushchak and Sternichuk were regularly in Lysychansk, a city in the Luhansk region with a prewar population of about 95,000. Under relentless shelling, it was being reduced to rubble. Marushchak was keeping a watchful eye on the Lysychansk Local History Museum. Aside from the strong chance that it could be obliterated by a missile, he could see that people had been getting inside, perhaps looting it. In one of the rooms was an art installation by his friend, Mykhailo Alekseenko. It included a fur coat that had belonged to the artist’s grandmother, and a dining table set with elaborate glassware, “as if people had just left the table”, Alekseenko told me when we met in Kyiv. The artwork began haunting Marushchak whenever he saw it through the museum windows. Why hadn’t it been evacuated yet? “I started to terrorise the Lysychansk museum authorities,” he said. When Chuyeva, the deputy minister for culture, rang, “I told her, If they don’t let me have it, I’ll steal it.”
An installation by Mykhailo Alekseenko that features a fur coat that belonged to the artist’s grandmother. Photograph: Natalka Diachenko
The first Alekseenko knew about the rescue mission, he told me, was when he got a text message a couple of months later from Marushchak, as he was checking through the objects in the safe storage area: “Hey, how are you? We’re just refreshing the air around your family treasures – please tell me how many shot glasses there were?” Alexeenko still can’t quite believe what Marushchak did. “Imagine the surrealism. There are battles, shellings, noise, explosions, checkpoints every other step, and Lyonya drives in, saying ‘I need the fur. And I need the crystal.’”
Next, Marushchak set his sights on another museum, on the edge of Lysychansk, in a district that had been particularly heavily shelled. “No one wanted to go there with me, not even the military,” he remembered. But two people did volunteer: his local friend Arif Bagirov, and a friend of Bagirov’s, who goes by the call sign “Zombie”. (Such call signs are a borrowing from military parlance – soldiers are addressed by such nicknames as a security measure.) Bagirov, who has the creased face of a heavy smoker and the wiry physique of a long-distance cyclist, explained that in the 1990s, he and Zombie “were young, jobless men in this industrial city in which all the plants and factories had shut down. I used to do a bit of boxing,” he said, elliptically. “It was easy money and hard drugs.” He’d gone straight 20 years ago, he told me, but Zombie (“a good-looking lad, but dangerous,” he said) still attracted police attention.
For the mission, Bagirov acquired a red pickup truck, which he named Skrypa, or “Squeaker”. Together, the trio made their way to the palace of culture – whose facade has, or rather had, a Soviet mosaic depicting cheery cosmonauts, including Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, now, from her seat in the Russian state duma, a hearty supporter of the invasion of Ukraine.
Upstairs was a small museum devoted to Volodymyr Sosiura, a poet who had worked in a factory in the city as a young man before the first world war. He wrote a poem that all Ukrainians know. “Love your Ukraine, love as you would the sun / The wind, the grasses and the streams together … / Love her in happy hours, when joys are won / And love her in her time of stormy weather,” runs the first verse.
Bagirov knew the place. “Lots of busts of the poet. Larger busts, smaller busts. Personal belongings,” he told me. “A regular Soviet memorial museum.” Despite its modesty, Marushchak remembered how artists he had brought there loved it. “The director would run to meet us – literally – and would be glad to see each new friend of ours that we brought along,” he recalled.
Arif Bagirov, part of the evacuation crew. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
As they drew up outside for this one last visit, so did a multiple rocket launcher system. It wasn’t that the Ukrainian MRLS was a danger to them: the problem was that if it fired at the Russians, the Russians would fire back.
It fired. “How long have we got?” asked Marushchak.
“Three to five minutes, maybe. Max 10,” said Bagirov.
Marushchak and Zombie dashed upstairs, where a museum employee was there to meet them. Waiting outside with the engine running, Bagirov took the opportunity to tuck into the burger that he had asked Marushchak to bring, as there was no fast food any more in Lysychansk. Inside the museum, Marushchak and the others rushed to assemble archive crates, take photos, open glass cases, pack objects. The prize artefact was Sosiura’s natty emerald-green trilby hat. They got the job done in 10 minutes and were out of there as the Russians started to return fire. Bagirov had just enough time to finish the burger.
From the summit of Mount Kremenets in eastern Ukraine, you can look down on the town of Izium, now a wreck of twisted metal and smashed buildings, and the endless forest and steppe beyond. Until recently, nine ancient sculptures stared out over this same view. They are larger and sturdier than living humans, with mighty hips and breasts. Age has blurred their facial features into inscrutability. Beside them, you feel a little smaller, a little more what you really are, which is to say a flimsy, short-lived creature of bone and muscle and soft tissue. Carved about 1,000 years ago by Turkic nomads of the steppe, the solemn figures have something of the presence of Easter Island moai.
Old they may be, but the babas, as sculptures of this type are known, are not indestructible. The area around Mount Kremenets was occupied at the start of the war, and retaken after a rapid Ukrainian counteroffensive in the autumn of 2022. A few days afterwards, as soon as he heard the army was planning to inspect and de-mine Mount Kremenets, Marushchak got on the road to check out the damage, not just to the babas, but to museums and other monuments in the area. Finding that one of the sculptures had indeed been damaged by artillery, he moved its broken parts to the Izium museum, and put a cover over its base to protect it. Later, he would organise the evacuation of the whole group, along with many others elsewhere in eastern and southern Ukraine.
Medieval sculptures known as babas stand on Mount Kremenets overlooking Izium in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. One was damaged during Russia’s occupation of the area in 2022. Marushchak has since arranged the removal and safe storage of these and many similar sculptures across eastern and southern Ukraine. Photograph: Ed Ram/The Guardian
While in Izium, Marushchak learned that a group of soldiers had found a stash of icons – paintings of Christ or other religious subjects, and objects of veneration in eastern Orthodoxy. They had apparently been looted from different churches by the invaders, then gathered together and stored, likely with the intention of transporting them to Russia. Impulsively, Marushchak asked the soldiers to lead him to the place. He and his driver, this time a friend called Ivan Yatsenko, followed the soldiers to a village via a tortuous route that, without a GPS signal, the pair tried to memorise. The soldiers led them to a building beside a kindergarten: inside were stacks of artworks.
“Where are we?” asked Marushchak. The soldiers had no idea of the name of the village: what they did say was that they had found the icons after breaking through enemy lines, just that morning. Meaning: they were now in what was still, officially, Russian-held territory. No one was in a mood to linger. They stacked the paintings – some from as early as the 17th century, assessed Marushchak – into the van around a bronze, bespectacled memorial to Sergey Prokofiev that Marushchak and Yatsenko had rescued from the village where the composer was born in the Donetsk region, the previous day.
By now it was 11pm. Marushchak assumed the soldiers would escort them back to Izium, or at least a recognisable road – but they shrugged. They had to be on their way, they said. They were due back at their positions. Marushchak and Yatsenko were now on their own, on the wrong side of the frontline, with a van full of icons and a broken memorial to Prokofiev. They were illegally out after curfew, they had no documents to show that they weren’t looters, and they had no idea how they were going to get through the numerous checkpoints between them and the city of Kharkiv, more than 100km away. Worse, they had only a shaky notion of how to find their way back. Each placed their hope in the other’s ability to navigate their way back through the tangle of unmade roads.
To their relief, the many checkpoints they passed were unmanned – until, that is, they reached the outskirts of Kharkiv in the small hours. Marushchak, hands shaking, asked the soldiers manning the post to call the police (“the first time I’ve ever called the police on myself”). In the end, he said, the story of the vanload of treasures was so disorienting that the officer who turned up just let the matter go. The one thing that attracted his attention was an improperly secured gas cylinder. He said he’d have to write them up for that.
Fear is a curious emotion. At times, it arrives without warning or logic, unstoppable and blinding. At others, when its presence might be a useful warning against foolhardiness, it flees altogether. For some, it may become a familiar companion, less and less regarded as time goes on. “Of course I get scared,” Marushchak told me. “Only stupid people don’t get scared.” But he gets less frightened than he used to. On one occasion, describing what it feels like when a shell falls near you, he spoke in almost dreamlike terms: “You almost don’t hear anything, and hardly understand anything. And then you raise your head and you see that the leaves have fallen down from the trees. It is summer, the trees are bare, and you are covered in a blanket of green leaves as you lie there on the ground.”
When I asked Marushchak’s friend Arif Bagirov whether he had felt it worth the risk to his life to evacuate the Volodymyr Sosiura museum, he said, “I told myself, ‘Listen Arif, these are your last days. You might as well live them brightly. Make your death beautiful.’” And if he’d died for Sosiura’s hat? “That would have been the most beautiful death of all.”
Marta Bilas, wife of Leonid Marushchak, in Kyiv. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Long after most of the inhabitants had departed, Bagirov chose to stay in his home town of Sievierodonetsk, which is just across the river from Lysychansk, even closer to what was then the frontline. Mostly, he was delivering aid to vulnerable people who had been unable to leave, riding the deserted shell-cratered streets on his beloved red bicycle (call sign: Mammoth). He and a group of students managed to evacuate a group of recently excavated ancient clay pots, decorated with incised geometric patterns, from the university. They date from between 2600 and 2000BC. Thanks to Bagirov, they survive yet.
When the Ukrainian military told him that it was time for him to leave, Bagirov gave them Squeaker, the pickup. Then he got on Mammoth and pedalled across the bridge and up the hill to Lysychansk. From there, “I looked back down and saw there was smoke coming out of Sievierodonetsk,” he said. “I thought, ‘Great, I’ve made it out.’ Then I looked in front of me and saw smoke there, too.” With no mobile signal, he hadn’t realised that the battle had already spread to the road to Bakhmut – his route to supposed safety. Somehow, he made the 40-mile ride unscathed. A few weeks, later, Sievierodonetsk fell to the Russians, soon followed by Lysychansk. Bagirov lives in Kyiv now, in the flat of a friend who is fighting on the frontline. He misses his old life.
But no one in Ukraine has their “old life”. Everyone lives closer to death than they once did; some people, terrifyingly close. “You acknowledge to yourself you might die. But it’s too early for me – I have cats at home that need looking after,” said Marharita Kravchenko, a professional driver who goes by the call sign Raketa (Rocket), who has worked with Marushchak on some of his most perilous missions. When I asked her why she had felt able to take such risks, she said, “It’s my land and my history. They come, they kill, they loot, but our future generations need to know who and what we are: that’s my motivation.”
She may have felt it was too early for her to die, but the relentless battle for Bakhmut told a different story. By December 2022, when she was regularly driving Marushchak in the region, the population had sunk from 72,000 to 12,000, most of whom were living in basements as the city above was, by degrees, razed to the ground. Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin was throwing soldiers, many of them convicts, into what became known as the “Bakhmut meat grinder”.
From this hellscape, Marushchak was determined to retrieve an important artefact: a unique carved lion, a sculpture of the same era as the medieval babas, from the Bakhmut Local History Museum. The plan was that Kravchenko would drive Marushchak to the outskirts of the city to rendezvous with the military, while she went on to a town about 18 miles west to wait for him.
Nothing went to plan. Kravchenko ended up driving Marushchak right into Bakhmut. Her father, a mortar operator in the Ukrainian army, happened to be stationed there; in Marushchak’s bleakly humorous account of the trip, he was more afraid of getting beaten up by Kravchenko’s dad for exposing his daughter to such danger than of death from the intense Russian shelling. At a bomb shelter they met a museum employee who gave Marushchak a map showing where the building’s main door key was hidden. As they arrived at the museum, people scattered – looters were trying to get in. Consulting the hand-drawn map, Marushchak scrabbled through the icy ground beneath a fir tree until he unearthed a pretty porcelain sugar bowl, which now sits on a shelf in his Kyiv apartment. The key inside it, though, was too rusted to work, and the lock seemed like it had been tampered with, anyway. They did find another door unlocked, leading to an empty basement room in which they found only a handgun – almost certainly left there by looters. As they filed a report on the weapon at the police station, a deafening boom sent them running to the basement, and the van’s roof was battered with shrapnel.
The lion’s rescue would eventually take place early the following year. Marushchak had sent Kravenchko away for a break. He went in alone, with the military. “There was already a Russian group in the city, fighting street by street with Ukrainian soldiers,” he recalled. The chances of getting to the museum again under such circumstances seemed minimal. They had, his military escort estimated, 15 minutes before the next wave of Russians reached them.
Driver Marharita Kravchenko, who helped Marushchak evacuate art from some of Ukraine’s most dangerous hotspots. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
They got the precious lion, but barely escaped with their lives. On the journey out of Bakhmut, a shell exploded right next to the vehicle. Somehow, none of them was harmed. When I asked Marushchak about the risks that he had taken for this, and so many other artefacts, he gesticulated airily towards central Kyiv around us. “It’s a war, you can die anywhere,” he said. “We could die right now, at this cafe.” Which was true, strictly speaking. But Kyiv in late spring, with its largely reliable air defence, its bars and its parks and restaurants, was a world way from the ruins of Bakhmut.
Marta Bilas, Marushchak’s wife – his calm, measured foil – told me that there was a point a few months ago when she realised she hadn’t seen the Mercedes Sprinter for a while. “I was like, ‘Where’s the van?’ And he said, ‘It’s in Nikopol.’ And at some point, I said, ‘Look, there is nothing there right now and most of the city is evacuated.’”
It was then that Marushchak finally told Bilas the truth about the Sprinter – and about everything else that she hadn’t known about the danger and the frequency of his missions. Or nearly everything. She still isn’t sure whether she knows every twist in the tale. A friend of hers once compared the situation to being friends with a couple when you know one is of them is sleeping with someone else. The dilemma, said the friend, is whether to say anything to the one being cheated on. Bilas rolled her eyes as she told me this. The analogy of her husband cheating on her with the cultural heritage of Ukraine was not necessarily one that she wished to dwell on.
What happened to the Sprinter was this. Marushchak, along with a driver called Dima Kapshuk, were in Beryslav, a town in Kherson region, close to Russian positions just across the Dnipro river. Kapshuk was packing a box into the van when he heard something – by the weird, gnawing sound of it, an Iranian-made kamikaze drone. He ran back inside the museum as it hit the van. Another drone hit something else, somewhere; a third, they could hear, was intercepted. Now came an even more terrifying sound: a Russian plane overhead. “It could have been about to drop a glide bomb,” said Marushchak. “And that would have taken out the whole museum, with us in it.”
Marushchak with the van they used to use, showing the damage it sustained in a drone strike in the Kherson region. Photograph: Julia Kochetova/The Guardian
Kapshuk ran outside. The back of the van was cratered, its body pitted with shrapnel holes, its windscreen broken, the shattered glass hanging concave in its frame. Somehow, though, the engine started. They got in, and Kapshuk drove the wounded vehicle to the relative safety of Mikolaiv, 85 miles away. In spring 2024, I went to see it in a yard on the outskirts of Kyiv, where Marushchak and Marharita Kravchenko reverently removed its tarpaulin covering and showed me its battered bulk. Lover of museums that he is, Marushchak would like to donate the Sprinter to the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart.
The work goes on. It is harder, now, said Bilas: it takes her five days to raise the money she once raised in five hours. It is tougher psychologically, too. “I used to always be joking, ‘Oh, you guys moved so many collections. You will have so much work after the war to move it all back.’” That was when the war seemed like it might not last long. Now, she told me, that joke has worn thin. In places like Bakhmut, Sievierodonetsk and Lysychansk, there is nowhere left for the collections to return to. They are under occupation, with no immediate prospect of returning to Ukrainian hands. The cities that sustained the museums are rubble, their communities scattered or killed.
Marushchak’s friends are anxious about the toll his work is taking on him. “He saw so much pain and destruction, so many attempts to destroy everything Ukrainian,” said his friend Diana Berg. “He doesn’t know how to rest. He works 24/7,” said the artist Zhanna Kadyrova. “Even the most resilient person has his limits.”
And yet the importance of the often humble-seeming regional museums that Marushchak had helped safeguard is incalculable, Chuyeva told me, especially in the light of the losses that Ukraine has suffered to its culture over the centuries. “The problem is that we have so many gaps, we have so many lost objects and documents and traditions, that we just cannot go in this way any more,” she said. “We have to stop it, we have to protect what we do have.”
When Marushchak and I spoke for the last time for this article, it was on Zoom. He was mid-mission. Sternichuk was at the wheel of a van, and they had pulled off the highway into an Okko, the chain of service stations that has sustained many on Ukraine’s long roads during this war. Marushchak told me about going to the Kupiansk Local History Museum in Kharkiv region the day after it was destroyed by a missile attack that killed its director and another employee. He and others dug through the rubble and the wet clay of the soil, looking for the museum’s inventory books. “I will remember the smell of the wet clay for the rest of my life,” he said.
The pair were continuing to cover prodigious distances. The previous day they had driven from Kyiv to Kherson, via Nikopol. Today, they were between Kherson and Kharkiv. There was work to be done as the Russians tried to push their lines forward towards Ukraine’s second city. The whole trip added up to 708 miles. The following week, Marushchak sent me some photos and video from the Kherson region. A baba recumbent in the steppe, huge-hipped, hands clasped in front of its body, metres away from a shell-hole, was being gently lifted from the grassland, and taken to a place of safety.
Safeya Binzagr, a pioneering artist who eternalized folk heritage in her native Saudi Arabia, died on September 12 at 86. The news was first reported by the Abu Dhabi–based publication The National.
Binzagr’s trailblazing career revolved the idiosyncrasies of indigenous Saudi culture, which was increasingly imperiled by modernization in the mid-19th century. Aware of the limitations of oral histories—at the time, record-keeping was not common practice in the Arabian Gulf—Binzagr documented traditional architecture and domestic rituals over several years. Once settled, she translated these studies into intricate fabric collages, expressive sketches, and boldly colored paintings.
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Born in Al Balad in Jeddah in 1940, Binzagr grew up alongside the newly united kingdom. Oil money poured into immense urban projects, but arts infrastructure—the sort that sustains generations—was nonexistent. Options for an artist to succeed professionally were limited, and even more so for a female artist. That would change, in part, because of Binzagr.
She left Saudi to study in Cairo and, later, London, finally returning home in the late ’60s. As a teacher, she supported the creation of a context for regional art to be studied. And in 1968, along with her friend Mounirah Mosly, she exhibited at the Dar Al Tarbiya girls’ school, becoming one of two female artists to ever hold an art exhibition in Saudi Arabia.
“I thought, I will do the exhibition; they will receive it or they will object. If they do, I will try again,” Binzagr told Vogue Arabia, adding, “If you have the will, you will. Hard work always pays off and pushes you to be in the beginning of the line.”
In 1995, she opened the Darat Safeya Binzagr, the first and only cultural center in Saudi Arabia at the time. The classes for students and private courses for women, as well as a monthly women-only art salon.
Binzagr continued to exhibit widely in the region and Europe, becoming one of the first Saudi artists with an international audience. Her work, while hardly sidelined in the record of Arabian Gulf art, has in recent years gained new critical attention due to its inclusion in several high-profile exhibitions. Her portrait of a woman in yellow dress was a standout of the 2022 exhibition “Khaleej Modern: Pioneers and Collectives in the Arabian Peninsula” at the NYU Abu Dhabi Art Gallery.
Curated by Aisha Stoby with assistance from Tala Nassar, the show sought to make the first visual narrative of this region—a task that involved undoing Western misconceptions of the people who live there. Binzagr and her subject, vibrantly adorned and radiating selfhood, went a great deal to that end.
Binzagr also figured in the second edition of Saudi Arabia’s Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, which wrapped in May. Her art was on display in the section “Modern Legacies and Geopolitics,” a showcase of the previous generation of South Asian and Gulf artists, where it was among the best works on show.
She was represented by Turathuna (Our Tradition), 1997–99, a series of 39 photogravures. Each small white panel contained a watercolor painting of a woman wearing traditional Saudi garb.
Binzagr was honored in 2017 by King Salman bin Abdulaziz with First Class honors for her efforts to preserve Saudi art and culture.
After discovering a painting by British artist Tomo Campbell online a few years ago, I’ve found myself returning to his work time and again. So when an email from Cob Gallery announced Campbell’s participation in The Armory Show in New York City last week, showcasing a new piece entitled Promise (2024), I was immediately intrigued. This large-scale oil painting has a way of making me wish it hung on my wall, with its blend of abstraction and fleeting hints of recognizable forms, layered in vivid pastel tones. Campbell’s signature style shines through in the painting’s dynamic movement and depth, inviting endless interpretation of its ambiguity. With its delicate balance between chaos and control, Promise (2024) reveals something new every time you look at it.
As a longtime fan of Alexander Girard’s work, I’m excited about the release of Alexander Girard: Let the Sun In by Todd Oldham and Kiera Coffee (out October 15). This beautifully illustrated monograph celebrates Girard’s extraordinary contributions to mid-century design in a way that feels as vibrant and eclectic as his creations. Featuring over 800 images – many of them never before published – the book dives deep into Girard’s work across various disciplines, from his iconic Herman Miller textiles to his complete rebranding of Braniff International Airways with over a thousand unique assets. It also explores his innovative interior designs, such as the lively atmosphere of La Fonda del Sol restaurant in New York and the distinctive sunken conversation pit of the Miller House. Organized by discipline, Let the Sun In captures Girard’s love for color, pattern, and form, and is a must-own for anyone who admires his fearless approach to design. Todd Oldham’s extensive research and collaboration with Girard Studio bring to life the bold, playful spirit that made Girard a standout figure in American modernism.
If you’ve ever been on the hunt for new towels, you know how sad that journey can be with only boring, basic options that half the people love and have the people loathe. One brand I’ve heard nothing but great things about is Kontex. Made in Japan using traditional weaving techniques, these organic cotton towels have a unique waffle texture that promises to be both soft and absorbent. The understated nature of their design – a blend of simplicity and sophistication – makes them effortlessly stylish, while their high-quality cotton ensures they’re built to last. They’re the kind of everyday luxury that just feels right and worth the splurge.
Advent calendar themes continue to expand year after year, especially after the growing trend of unboxing them on TikTok. While candy, jams, wine, and beauty products have been the most popular, I love seeing one that’s off the beaten path, like this one. After selling out in record time last year, Papier has brought back their iconic advent calendar that’s perfect for any stationery devotee you may know. The calendar is packed with 24 individually wrapped gifts, each a bespoke product that’s exclusive to this set. Valued at $250 but available for $175, it’s filled with a mix of mini bestsellers and delightful new surprises, like pens, notebooks, stickers, paper clips, bookmarks, notecards, and washi tape, all designed in London.
As a notebook hoarder who uses them for just about everything, I swing between plain designs and maximalist ones to keep it interesting. I’ve used my fair share of notebooks from Field Notes, as they’re compact and fit easily in a pocket or bag, and was drawn to one of their releases this year – The “Flora” Edition. The three colorful designs come from Chicago artist and designer Emmy Star Brown as a pack of three in the 3-1/2″ x 5-1/2″ size, perfect for list making and reminders on the go.
Caroline Williamson is Editor-in-Chief of Design Milk. She has a BFA in photography from SCAD and can usually be found searching for vintage wares, doing New York Times crossword puzzles in pen, or reworking playlists on Spotify.
✓Showcase your talent and win big in Artists Network prestigious art competitions! Discover competitions in a variety of media and enter for your chance to win cash prizes, publication in leading art magazines, global exposure, and rewards for your hard work. Plus, gain valuable feedback from renowned jurors. Let your passion shine through - enter an art competition today!
Consider these insights on the importance of establishing a daily art practice—and the benefits it can yield over time.
By Eve Miller
“The study of art is a lifetime matter. The best any artist can do is to accumulate all the knowledge possible of art and its principles, study nature often and then practice continually.”
Edgar Payne (American, 1883–1947)
This article is excerpted from the Fall 2024 issue of Pastel Journal. Read the rest of the article—and other inspiring artist features and columns—in the print or digital edition.
My first introduction to art-making took place in my 60s, after having retired from teaching French and Spanish for 35 years. Fortunately, art found me at a time when I had the luxury to take classes and workshops from talented contemporary artists.
Among the Reeds (pastel on paper, 9×12)
To accelerate my artistic development, I embarked on a daily painting practice to push creative possibilities and improve my skills and techniques. I’ve now been practicing every day for more than five years. Over time, I noticed that the work I submitted to exhibitions was accepted more frequently than the paintings submitted before having begun my practice, which has been a delightfully unexpected outcome.
10 Tips to Make it Happen
My advice for aspiring artists is to commit to a daily painting practice—and to reap the benefits that build over time. If you’re interested in establishing your own practice, consider the following.
1
Set aside a dedicated time. It’s important to carve out time to create, even if it’s just 5 minutes a day. This isn’t the time to try to complete a painting. It’s a time to explore—to doodle, sketch, make thumbnails, create a color study or test pastels. You’ll be surprised by what you can learn in a short amount of time. I usually spend 30 minutes daily, setting a timer as a reminder to stop and assess my work before I move on with the rest of my day.
2
Be consistent. I’m a morning painter, so my daily morning practice serves as a great warm-up. Observe the time of day you have the most energy and the fewest distractions, and commit to a standing date.
3
Find a trigger. It can be intimidating to sit down and “be creative.” I’ve found that inspirational quotes, art books and other artists’ works help to ignite my daily practice. They ground me and give me something to focus on while working.
4
Remind yourself why you’re painting. I usually focus on a creative intention for the day, which I write on an index card and place on the easel. I find it’s also important to remember why I paint. Know your why(s).
5
Find a happy place. The more you like the space in which you’re working—and the materials on hand that you’re using—the more you’ll enjoy and appreciate your sacred creative time.
6
Go outside. It’s important to observe nature’s random beauty for inspiration. When I go for a walk, I focus on enjoying the moment, but I also try to memorize what catches my eye. I’ve learned that my “memory paintings” have a more spontaneous feel than those scenes I captured and referenced with my smartphone.
7
Prep and show up at the easel most days. I’ve learned that it’s much easier if I set up my easel and materials the night before, so I’m all set and ready to go the next morning.
8
Be accountable. It takes time, motivation and inspiration to paint. I post my daily practice outcomes on social media, not for the likes but because it makes me accountable. I love my solitude but I find interaction necessary for follow-through.
9
Let go of judgment. Even if things don’t turn out the way you think they should, it’s a much more joyful experience when you’re open to the process. Remember that you’re not defined by negative opinions—yours or others’—and move forward.
10
Find inspiration that speaks to you. It can be difficult to commit to a daily practice, but if you’re inspired by your subject, process, materials, etc., you’ll be more likely to continue. That’s where the beauty lies.
Dawn (pastel on paper, 12×9)
Serenity in the Marsh (pastel on paper, 12×12)
Morning Magic (pastel on paper, 14×11)
About the Artist
Eve Miller, of Beaufort, S.C., is an instructor and award-winning pastelist. She’s a Signature Member of the Pastel Society of America and a Master Circle Member of the International Association of Pastel Societies, as well as a member of several other art societies and organizations. Follow her daily painting practice on Instagram.
World Monuments Fund (WMF) has found that the most widespread threats to heritage sites include climate change and rapid urbanisation. A study of more than 200 heritage sites around the world also found that factors like war, insufficient funding, irresponsible tourism and “lapse in oversight” topped the list. This is according to research for WMF’s upcoming World Monuments Watch, a biennial list of sites in danger of deterioration or destruction.
“Since its inception in 1996, the World Monuments Watch has been a crucial tool for WMF to understand the evolving needs of heritage sites and the communities that rely on them,” Bénédicte de Montlaur, chief executive of World Monuments Fund, said in a statement. “Our data-driven approach has deepened our insights, enabling us to craft more effective strategies and take meaningful action where needed most.”
In terms of regional menaces, WMF found that climate change appears to be the largest factor in Sub-Saharan Africa, while urbanisation and development is most threatening to historical sites in Asia. Lack of funding appears to be the biggest problem in Europe and North America, while sites in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer most from overtourism. In the Middle East and North Africa, war and lack of local resources are the top concerns.
The 2025 World Monuments Watch list will be released in January 2025, culled from 211 publicly nominated sites in 69 countries.
As the Catalan capital, Barcelona’s tourism has sparked a crisis for those who live there. Local residents are battling crowds, pollution, and carelessness when it comes to the region’s culture. Despite the municipal government taking measures including banning the construction of new hotels and raising tourist tax, over the summer, tensions culminated in thousands of protestors not only denouncing the city’s over-tourism, but even shooting tourists with water guns out of sheer frustration.
The urgency of this atmosphere underpins the 15th edition of Manifesta, which opened to the public on September 9 (running until November 24, 2024). With an artistic team spread across 12 cities on the periphery of the Spanish city, this edition is intentionally decentralized, focusing on local communities as a methodology for sidestepping the ever-increasing tourism and gentrification of Barcelona itself.
Overseen by Portuguese curator Filipa Oliveira, who is the collective’s creative mediator, this edition takes place around the metropolitan region with a clear ambition: to encourage long-lasting change in the area. Large-scale art events are notorious for paying lip service to such endeavors while often avoiding any meaningful responsibility for enduring transformation. Manifesta 15 seeks to redress this imbalance.
Shakespeare’s famous adage, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” could easily apply to Manifesta, which also goes by the European Nomadic Biennale, and has been ever on the move since 1994. (The last edition was in Prishtina, Kosovo, and the next will head to the German region of Ruhr.) Launched to respond to the new social, cultural, and political reality after the Cold War, thirty years on, the project now doubles down, aiming to make socio-ecological improvement its fundamental principle.
A tall order, no doubt. Yet this edition’s will to turn our gaze to the peripheries is, thankfully, non-exhaustive; this show is not about asking everyone to go everywhere. Rather, by embedding itself within atomized local social and ecological infrastructures, the project activates art as a mediating factor to enable both critical engagement and, hopefully, sustained change.
Cue the “clusters:” With three exceptional, if dense, archival presentations mounted at Manifesta 15’s headquarters in Barcelona’s Eixample district—which respectively explore radical pedagogy in 20th Century Catalonia, Barcelona’s democratic and cultural evolution, and Black life in the metropolitan region—the other exhibitions form clusters in spaces as diverse as churches, disused factories, a former panopticon prison, a grain warehouse, and even a bomb shelter. As a whole, this sees 92 artists within three thematic categories: “Cure and Care,” which looks at the healing power of culture; “Balancing Conflicts,” which seeks to protect local natural resources from existential threat; and “Imagining Futures,” which focuses on the Besòs River region, home to one million residents, which has been defined by its disorderly urban growth.
The concept of care has become a buzzword in contemporary art circles, with methods of repair often proposed through exhibition making, and usually in ways that are fundamentally different from Western approaches.
At this cluster’s main venue, a 9th-century Benedictine Abbey, an interior courtyard is the definition of peacefulness with its Corinthian columns, trompe l’oeil frescos, and a fountain with bright orange fish. Encountering Simone Fattal’s bronze sculpture Adam and Eve (2021) is an exultant, tongue-in-cheek dig at the iconography of the Christian church, and presumably, when presented in this context, the history of its own questionable approach to care.
These Biblical figures are abstracted into a glorious amalgam of textured flesh, breasts, legs, and torsos weighted with human authority. Upstairs, Dana Awartani’s medicinally-dyed and hand-embroidered silk installation (Let me Mend Your Broken Bones, 2024) sees darned windows of red, yellow, and orange silk perfectly patching the negative space of the arches, while Wu Tsang’s video Girl Talk (2015), which explores how identity structures can be dismantled, has the exultant singing voice of theorist and poet Fred Moten ringing out through the halls.
The standout work here is Diana Policarpo’s three-channel video Liquid Transfers (2022–24), a speculative-fiction film about ergot, a fungi growing on wheat that caused hallucinations in humans and shaped social behavior alongside the rise of capitalism. Used by healers, midwives, and experimental military programs alike to “reveal the invisible crimes of our psyche,” it poetically taps into not only the cult of hallucinogenic healing but also into the violent undercurrents of political abuse in the name of care and progress.
At the Museo de Ciencias Naturales (Museum of Natural Sciences), it’s easy to wonder whether aesthetic rigor is sometimes sacrificed for methodology. The glass and textile sculptures of Hugo Canoilas, Sculptured in darkness (2020–24)—bulbous, rock-like forms that merge with the vegetation in the museum’s garden—appear less like the “radical inclusion” of non-human life species in a “post-capitalist world” they’re presented as, and more like incidental leftovers. Similarly, the textile and ceramic works by Tanja Smeets, The Life in Between (2024), which appear as fungi-like growths across a great swathe of two additional venues, a Romanesque church and the textile factory Vapor Buxeda Vell, seem parenthetical and, dare I say, needlessly repetitive and rather decorative.
Infinitely more pertinent as an urgent methodology of cure and care are Lara Schnitger’s colorful patchwork banners, which are draped from the factory’s chimneys: Women’s work is Never Done (2024). As the former “Manchester of Catalonia,” this region was known as the world’s second largest textile industry, which created Catalonia’s wealth. Collaborating with a local women’s sewing association, Xarxa de Dones Cosidores, the installation symbolizes female resilience, building upon the stories of these women and focusing on unrecognized acts of female labor.
While some of the venues in this section leave you wondering if you could have just glanced at installation shots online, rather than schlepping for hours to see somewhat mediocre one-work installations, it’s all worth it once you reach Casa Gomis, a private Modernist villa designed by Antoni Bonet i Castellana between 1949 and 1963.
As a former refuge for Catalan’s cultural figures during Franco’s dictatorship, it still functions today as a private home. The villa is bathed in the thick scent of pine, which blends with the heat and rain. It sits in the Llobregat Delta Nature Reserve, bordering Barcelona-El Prat Airport, which is lobbying for an expansion that would destroy both the reserve and the property. This time capsule of Modernist architecture, design, and furniture is one in a million: truly breathtaking, and fighting for survival if indeed the airport is given permission to increase its size.
Encouraging you to sit beneath a leafy, shaded canopy in the garden, works such as Parliament of Trees (2022–24) by Elmo Vermijs, a layered installation of locally sourced or borrowed timbre, acknowledges trees as being the silent witnesses of climate change, poignantly questioning the fundamental rights of more-than-human entities in our society, which are often voiceless in their struggle for existence.
Inside the villa, another standout moment here is by Catalan artist Magda Bolumar Chertó, whose site-specific painting Xarpellera for La Ricarda (1966) lyrically arranges dots, shapes, and lines like a musical score of joyfully bright primary colors. It was the backdrop for many music performances that took place at the villa against a milieu of political mire. It’s easy to imagine the avant-garde gatherings that flourished here as a means of escaping Franco’s tyranny, even if only momentarily.
Imagining Futures
The absolute standout exhibition at Manifesta 15 is presented at the Tres Xemeneies (Three Chimneys), an utterly colossal thermal power station of concrete and iron built in the 1970s, which generated electricity for the metropolitan region before it was closed in 2011. While the building provided work for the local community, and was therefore termed the “Sagrada Família of the workers,” it too was a source of pollution, environmental damage, and a health hazard: its final closure resulted from its detrimental impact on the climate, causing acid rain.
At the center of the power station is a powerful archival presentation, Memory of the Smoke, which explores the dual sense of belonging and sustenance brought to the people by Tres Xemeneies, alongside its threatening presence. Photographs, letters, maps, and posters trace the development of the building, from the first demonstrations against the “damned soot” to the residents who fought against Francoism, to the fight for improved labor rights and women’s rights. Manifesta 15 worked together with residents of the Sant Adrià area to create this presentation, which is bursting at the seams with memories, as well as to contemplate the role of this past in paving the way for the region’s future urban transformation.
Another ode to the local residents finds form in the dreamlike outdoor sculpture Urchins (2024), which was initiated by CHOI+SHINE Architects, and was made in La Mina by 120 people living nearby. They wove white threads into lace-like patterns to form two giant spherical structures that appear like immense shells or sea urchins resting near the shoreline. Proximate is Mike Nelson’s Un Intruso (uninvited, into chaos) (2024), a new commission for which the artist built a shack from salvaged materials, with a window that perfectly frames the vast three chimneys slicing into the sky.
The inclusion of two films are notably well curated: Emilija Škarnulytė’s Arrow of Time 2 (2022–24), which centers on the threat of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant in Lithuania when it was under Soviet rule, and Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year (1928), a recently restored propaganda film. It marked the eleventh anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution, celebrating the Soviet Union’s dictatorial empire and engineering might with the construction of the Dnipro Hydropower Station in Ukraine. Both speak to the disastrous proposition that utopia is achievable through industry.
It is really the sculptural installations that make this presentation sing, from the acid yellow pigment and hanging pale-pink cocoons of Carlos Bunga’s The Irruption of the Unpredictable (2024), which calls out to the power of renewal, to Diana Scherer’s Yield (2024), a gigantic tapestry made of roots, soil, seeds, and grass that is draped all the way from one factory floor to another, and that references the spines and bones which fascinated Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí.
On the top floor of the Tres Xemeneies, Asad Raza’s Prehension (2024) saw the artist removing three of the factory’s windowpanes to conjure the poetic possibilities of the wind, which blows through the space, activating long drapes of white fabric that rhythmically dance in with air: truly mesmerizing. And perhaps the pièce de résistance is Claire Fontaine’s LED installation When women strike the world stops (2020), which conjures the importance of women to this factory’s history; while only making up 1 percent of the workforce, nonetheless women fought in the shadow of the building for personal rights, environmental safety, and improved living conditions.
Charging art with having the power to activate enduring change—not only to visualize or represent alternative ways of being in the world, but to actively protect and repair–makes Manifesta 15 political by definition. It is a valiant effort, and one that deserves our support while the potential of its long-term influence plays out.
English Wikipedia contains almost seven million articles. That is an astonishing fact. And a revealing one, too. Please keep it in the back of your mind as you read on.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m now co-writing a book with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. The book is about trust and its heart will be the story of Wikipedia – how immense numbers of volunteers created the largest encyclopedia in history and how that encyclopedia became a globally trusted source of information. In fact, I wrote most of this article sitting in a hotel room in Katowice, Poland, while attending this year’s “Wikimania,” the annual global conference of “Wikipedians,” the volunteers who edit Wikipedia.
I am not a Wikipedian. I’m an observer. And what I observe is that hardcore Wikipedians – the sort of people who spend their precious summer holidays attending a conference of Wikipedians -- are some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Which really isn’t a surprise. After all, these are people who spend enormous amounts of spare time researching, editing, discussing, organizing, working on IT, resolving disputes, and doing the many other tasks required to build and run Wikipedia. And they do it all for free. They don’t even get so much as a byline. Or a “thanks” from the billions of people – yes, billions – who benefit from their labours. Their motivations? It’s mostly curiosity, generosity, and community. These are people who absolutely love finding and sharing knowledge. In a word, these people are nerds. I adore them.
But if you spend time perusing very online American right-wing commentators, that may not be the image you have of the people behind Wikipedia.
Instead, you probably picture weedy youngsters with blue hair, nose rings, and a snarl. Each carries a well-thumbed copy of Das Kapital in a backpack, along with Antifa leaflets and sticks of dynamite. That’s because, while most of the planet sees Wikipedia as a generally reliable source for basic facts on everything from Ansel Adams to ZZ Top, it is increasingly conventional wisdom in much of the American right that, while Wikipedia was once the crown jewel of the Internet, it has been taken over by leftist cadres hell-bent on pushing a neo-Marxist agenda. Wikipedia is now “Wokepedia,” a leftist propaganda platform.
The case against Wikipedia has been percolating for years but several iterations of it have appeared recently. This is the latest version, published a couple of weeks ago. It follows on this critique published last month on Substack. (Note: Please see the PS as the end of the essay.) And this analysis, published by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative American think tank. Conservatives have been using the portmaneau “Wokepedia” for some years now but it was Elon Musk tweeting that accusation to his immense right-wing following that really popularized it. And given that Musk thinks “wokeness” is a “mind virus,” and nothing less than a threat to civilization, calling Wikipedia “Wokepedia” is something more than the gentle punning criticism it may appear.
Maybe all that was inevitable.
For a frightening number of Americans, everything is political, and everything that is political can be divided into “for us” and “against us.” This is true on the right and the left, but I do think the process is at least somewhat asymmetrical, with the right — or at least the very online Musk-worshipping right — going further in the belief that anything not avowedly for us is against us. Do I exaggerate? Consider that, last year, a wide swathe of the American right convinced itself that a pop star (Taylor Swift) dating a football player (Travis Kelce) was all part of an elaborate conspiracy to rig the Super Bowl and maximize the publicity impact when Swift endorsed Joe Biden. Yes, adults of sound mind actually said that. In public. And not only Alex Jones fans. Promoters of this theory included Vivek Ramaswamy, then a Republican presidential contender, now a favourite of Elon Musk, J.D. Vance, and Donald Trump.
Given this background, given Wikipedia’s immense readership, and given the demonstrable trust most people feel for Wikipedia as a source of basic facts, it’s remarkable Wikipedia was not dragged into this hyperpoliticized madness years ago.
Or maybe I’ve got this all wrong.
Maybe Wikipedia really is controlled by leftists hell-bent on promoting a neo-Marxist agenda — leftists who are brilliant at pretending to be apolitical nerds when strangers attend their conventions.
How should we judge? Well, rational people judge claims based on evidence. You are doubtless a rational person. So let’s have a look at the evidence.
As far as I can make out, there are several types of evidence offered by those who claim “Wikipedia is Wokepedia.”
The first involves anecdotes about Wikipedia editors behaving badly. You can find a story or two like that in the articles linked above.
I could get deep into the weeds of those anecdotes and try to test the he-said-she-said veracity of the accusations in each, but I don’t think that’s actually necessary. Instead, I’ll be charitable: I will simply assume that everything in those stories is a full, fair, and accurate description of the events described.
Now, what should we make of that evidence? Does it add up to a damning indictment of Wikipedia?
No. Not remotely.
English Wikipedia is immense. It has — remember! — almost seven million articles! That is a number so huge it can be hard to really grasp what it means. So try this: Picture a complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf at your local library. Now picture ninety sets of those books filling shelf after shelf, aisle after aisle. That’s how big English Wikipedia is.
If one editor among the vast throng of editors that created and maintains Wikipedia behaved badly … so what?
Or two editors. Three editors. Four editors. It makes little difference. As scientists say, always a little wearily, the plural of “anecdote” is not “data.”
Condemning Wikipedia as a whole for the bad behaviour of this or that editor is almost as dumb as insisting that the crimes of Bernie Madoff and Jeffrey Epstein prove the United States is a horrid place full of criminals.
The most that this sort of evidence can prove is that Wikipedia is imperfect. But no sane person has ever claimed that Wikipedia is flawless. Wikipedia certainly contains errors and nonsense. I’m pretty sure that if I had asked people at that Wikipedia conference if Wikipedia is perfect, the answer would invariably be a loud guffaw. No one knows Wikipedia’s flaws and failings better than the people who spend their free time finding, arguing about, and correcting those flaws and failings. And I’m confident not one of them expects to ever run out of work.
It is axiomatic, I believe, that every human is biased and every human institution imperfect, and I doubt I’d find any serious Wikipedian who disagreed. (Which is curious because human perfectibility – here comes New Soviet Man! -- was a belief of Communists.)
So I think we can dispense with “editors behaving badly” stories and move on to the second sort of evidence brought by Wikipedia’s accusers.
It is institutional evidence. That most recent story exemplifies it.
The article’s headline is a little strange and requires some translation. It reads: How the Regime Captured Wikipedia. What “regime”?
“Regime” is New Right jargon for the supposed cultural elites who control universities and governments and major corporations and Hollywood and the World Economic Forum and The New York Times and so on down the list of institutional elites. In New Right-world, this disparate group isn’t disparate at all. All these seemingly different parts are manifestations of a leftist cultural elite that is highly coordinated and uses its power to promote its worldview and agenda. J.D. Vance is a big fan of this thinking. You can read more about the New Right and the long historical tradition it draws on in the house organ of The Regime. (That’s The New York Times, of course. Curiously, hardcore progressives often loudly despise the Times. That fact would complicate the New Right’s take on the Times if the New Right deigned to notice it.)
The thesis of the article is summed up in its subhed: “Inside the cultural revolution at Wikipedia, which pivoted from a decentralized database of all the world’s knowledge to a top-down social activism and advocacy machine.”
To understand what is being claimed, you need some basic facts: “Wikipedia” is the website you know and read. It is entirely written and edited by volunteers. The “Wikimedia Foundation” is a non-profit foundation created to support Wikipedia (and related projects). It has a substantial budget, endowment, and paid employees, and it provides services like lawyers and core IT support without which Wikipedia could not function. What the Wikimedia Foundation does not do is write and edit articles on Wikipedia. I can’t stress that enough. Wikipedia’s content – the stuff people like you and me care about – is written and controlled by Wikipedia volunteers. It was that way from day one. It still is.
The bulk of that article attacking Wikipedia is devoted to the Wikimedia Foundation’s fundraising, plans, projects, and spending. I’m told by people who should know that its account contains serious mistakes. But you know what? That’s irrelevant for present purposes. Because -- let me say it again -- the Wikimedia Foundation does not write and edit articles. Wikipedia’s volunteers do. Period.
Now, to be fair, in that article, the author alleges there was an instance where someone with a foot in both camps helped get the Foundation to interfere in the operation of Wikipedia, arguably improperly. I have not investigated that incident so I have no opinion about what did or did not happen, or its propriety. But again, let’s generously assume that what is alleged happened exactly as described. What does that evidence amount to? Yes! It’s another anecdote.
Maybe you think it’s an appalling anecdote that reflects badly on those involved. That’s fine. Let’s go with that. It’s appalling. But remember that fact right at the start of this article? Yeah. Wikipedia is so vast that one appalling incident of misbehaviour is not dissimilar to one person pissing in the ocean. Or, if you think that metaphor understates the seriousness of the anecdote, let me try another: It is one sewage pipe emptying into the ocean. That’s bad. But it does not change the ocean.
Maybe you cringe at scatalogical metaphors. Fine, try this: The tens of thousands of editors who made and make Wikipedia are volunteers. They are independent. They do not take orders from the Wikimedia Foundation. So even if we assume the Wikimedia Foundation really is the incorrigible den of Trotskyite perfidy portrayed in the article, how exactly does that turn Wikipedia into a “top-down advocacy machine”? The argument makes no sense on its face.
Your honour, I move to dismiss the case.
No, hang on. Got carried away. We’re not done yet.
There is one final sort of evidence used to indict Wikipedia.
This evidence is decidedly not anecdotal. And it does not rely on a misleading conflation of the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikipedia. Instead, it uses real techniques of social science. That study by the Manhattan Institute is arguably the best of its kind, and it is more than worthy of serious consideration. So let’s give it that.
“To study political bias in Wikipedia content,” the study reports, “we analyze the sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) with which a set of target terms (N=1,628) with political connotations (e.g., names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. congress members, U.S. Supreme Court justices, or prime ministers of Western countries) are used in Wikipedia articles.”
This is called “sentiment analysis.” It’s a legitimate technique that can be quite useful. It allows researchers to judge the emotional range of language used in a discussion of a subject. The emotional scales — which words are said to contain positive or negative sentiment — are not determined by the researchers in any particular instance but have previously been developed and validated by other research. So this study is not something cooked up to come to a pre-determined conclusion.
So what did the researcher, David Rozado, find when he looked at the sentiments in Wikipedia’s articles? Presented visually, his results are quite striking.
With a quick eyeball of those graphs (and there are several more like them) it seems that articles about left-leaning politicians contain more positive language, while articles about right-leaning politicians have more negative sentiment.
Sounds bad, doesn’t it?
Following is the author’s own summary. (David Rozado is the only author. I have no idea why he uses “we.”)
We find a mild to moderate tendency in Wikipedia articles to associate public figures ideologically aligned right-of-center with more negative sentiment than public figures ideologically aligned left-of-center.
These prevailing associations are apparent for names of recent U.S. presidents, U.S. Supreme Court justices, U.S. senators, U.S. House of Representatives congressmembers, U.S. state governors, Western countries’ prime ministers, and prominent U.S.-based journalists and media organizations.
This trend is common but not ubiquitous. We find no evidence of it in the sentiment with which names of U.K. MPs and U.S.-based think tanks are used in Wikipedia articles.
We also find prevailing associations of negative emotions (e.g., anger and disgust) with right-leaning public figures; and positive emotions (e.g., joy) with left-leaning public figures.
These trends constitute suggestive evidence of political bias embedded in Wikipedia articles.
I’ve seen a lot of people citing this study. And in particular, I’ve seen those charts being waved about on social media like a bloody shirt.
The Regime has been exposed! Wikipedia is Wokepedia!
The first thing to note about that buzz is the discrepancy between what people in the Musk-o-sphere are saying and what the author says. The former are strident and sweepingly dismissive about Wikipedia. But that’s not the language of the researcher himself. Remember, he only claims to have found a “mild to moderate tendency.” And note also that, as the author found — and the Musk-o-sphere ignores — there was no skew found in the articles about UK politics or US-based think tanks. If The Regime is using Wikipedia to promote the left and vilify the right, it’s doing a shit job.
But that’s a minor comment about the discourse surrounding the study. Now let’s look directly at the results: Has this study demonstrated there is a “mild to moderate” bias in favour of the left, and against the right, in many of Wikipedia’s political articles?
I don’t think so. In fact, I think this study is irredeemably flawed — because it rests on a methodological assumption that, I will argue, is simply wrong.
To spot it, take a look at the result for the Wikipedia articles about Ronald Reagan on the chart above.
They tilt strongly positive. In fact, writing about Reagan on Wikipedia has the fourth-highest positive sentiment of all the modern presidents.
Does that mean Wikipedia editors are biased in favour of Ronald Reagan? By the logic of this study, the answer has to be "yes." After all, that’s the same logic the author uses to conclude that, overall, Wikipedia is biased positively for Democrats and negatively for Republicans.
Hence, if this study is providing real, meaningful insight, we must conclude that Wikipedia is biased against Republicans but for Ronald Reagan.
Does that make even a scrap of sense? Ronald Reagan wasn’t just any old Republican president. He was, and is, the patron saint of the modern Republican Party.
Isn’t that odd? And by “odd,” I mean “absurd.”
It makes no damned sense.
So what's really going on? I believe the problem lies in the fact that the author has confused “sentiment” and “stance.”
I’ll use Reagan to explain the difference.
Ronald Reagan's whole political persona was sunny optimism. He was the “morning in America” guy, the “shining city on a hill” man. As a result, almost any article about Reagan would use a lot of words and phrases like "sunny optimism" -- words and phrases with strongly positive sentiment. That would be true of even the most neutral articles. Indeed, someone who absolutely despised Reagan, but wrote a basic factual outline of his life and political career, would have no choice but to use lots of words and phrases like "sunny optimism" because that language and attitude is how Reagan won elections and because that’s how people routinely talked about Reagan. But that language would not reflect the author's stance on Reagan — that is to say, his strongly negative view of Reagan. It would simply reflect the factual reality of Reagan’s life and career.
“Sentiment” is the emotional valence of the words in an article, whether positive, negative, or neutral. “Stance” is the view of the author about the subject of the article. They are not the same. In fact, they are fundamentally different.
If I were to write an article about the fall of the Confederacy and Sherman’s “March to the Sea,” when a Union Army swept through Georgia, looting and burning as it went, that article would be stuffed with negative sentiment. It would have to be. After all, Sherman’s march involved war, killing, death, burning, and destruction. That’s all saturated with negative sentiment.
Now imagine you run my article through a sentiment analysis. Huge negativity! Conclusion? By the logic of this study, it’s obvious: “The author of the article is biased against the Union and General Sherman.”
But I’m not! I hate the Confederacy! I completely and passionately support Sherman and what he did because I think that, as brutal as it was, it was just and necessary to hasten the defeat of the South, the end of the war, and the end of slavery. These views constitute my “stance” on the matter. But by drawing conclusions based on a sentiment analysis — that is, by treating sentiment as synonymous with stance — a researcher could “objectively prove” that I am biased in favour of the Confederacy. Pretty silly, no?
Here’s another way to think about it: Imagine the most scrupulously neutral article about the political career of Donald Trump. It just states facts. No opinion whatsoever. It is perfectly, purely neutral. But if you run it through a sentiment analysis, it would come out strongly negative. Why?
In part because Donald Trump was impeached twice, charged with many crimes, convicted of some, and stands accused of inciting an insurrection. And that’s only a partial list of what he’s been accused of. There’s also fraud, sexual assault, rape. And more. Whatever you think of the substance of the accusations, they have been made. So if you are writing a scrupulously neutral, factual article about Donald Trump, you would have to list them. And guess what? All those words have negative sentiment attached. Run that through a sentiment analysis and the conclusion, by this study’s logic, is that you are biased against Donald Trump. Even though your article is absolutely neutral.
Let’s take this a step further. Imagine you are a writer who is passionately pro-Trump. You want to support Trump by writing a sympathetic biography of his political career. Of course you think all the accusations levelled at Trump are illegitimate. So you write about them, explaining why you think they are illegitimate. And guess what? If you run your article through a sentiment analysis it will come out strongly negative — because it is stuffed with words like “fraud” and “riot” and “insurrection” and “rape.” By the logic of this study, your writing would biased against Donald Trump — even though you passionately support him!
Then there’s Trump’s political persona, which is the polar opposite of Ronald Reagan’s. Where Reagan loved to talk about the sunlit future, Trump always goes on about decline and despair. Trump talks so relentlessly about crime and disease and corruption and war and rigged elections, that one of his routine references in stump speeches is Hannibal Lecter. Seriously, Hannibal Lecter, also known as “Hannibal the Cannibal.” I’m pretty sure “cannibal” codes negative in sentiment analysis. Any attempt to describe Trump and his political career would reflect all of that. There’s no way around it. If you ran Donald Trump’s own presidential inaugural address — the one famously containing the phrase “American carnage” — through a sentiment analysis, it would generate off-the-charts negative sentiment. If you then wrote a scrupulously neutral description of that address, it, too, would score high on negative sentiment — but that would not prove the author is biased against Trump.
OK, that’s enough. Maybe too much. I’m sure you get the point: Sentiment is not stance. This study conflates the two, so it proves nothing.
By the way, if you think this is just Dan Gardner ginning up a methodological criticism to knock down a study whose conclusions he doesn’t like, think again: Here is an academic study published two years ago making exactly my argument. Its title is “Sentiment Is Not Stance.”
In closing, let’s recap the evidence that Wikipedia has become “Wokepedia.”
First, some anecdotes that do not — cannot — prove much.
Second, criticism about a different organization that says little or nothing about Wikipedia.
Third, a text-based data analysis which, although well-intentioned, is fundamentally misguided and misleading and fails to support its supposed conclusions.
And that’s it.
Your honour, I move to dismiss the case.
Particularly in the United States, these are hyper-politicized times. (See Taylor Swift, above.) This atmosphere leads people to zero in on political matters, often to the exclusion of all else. That’s unfortunate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is what it causes us to overlook.
When Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia, he said it would become “the sum of all human knowledge.” It’s not. But that’s a push goal. And while Wikipedia does not contain everything, it is, in fact, the biggest encyclopedia in human history. By a huge margin. Did I mention English Wikipedia alone contains almost seven million articles?
That is a towering achievement. It is something to celebrate. And be inspired by. Look what people can accomplish when they freely come together and create!
But instead of celebrating Wikipedia, lots of people are bitching and moaning about “Wokepedia” — because they think a very small subset of those seven million articles are politically biased.
Even if they were — and please do show me better evidence than you have so far — would that be reason to denigrate and sweepingly dismiss the entirety of one of humanity’s greatest constructions? I don’t think so.
Reality is so much bigger than politics. And so is Wikipedia.
PS (added August 27): A reader brought to my attention that my first reference to this essay by Tracing Woodgrains could be read to mean I am including the author and his essay among those making the case that Wikipedia has become “Wokepedia.” On reflection, I think that’s right. I regret that. So let me clarify.
In my reading, that essay only examines the behaviour of one editor. While I think its conclusion is hyperbolic — “the site lives under the shadow of Gerard’s deadly gaze…” — the essay is clearly of a different species than the crude attacks on “Wokepedia.” In fact, one could argue it’s very much in the spirit of Wikipedia, as it identifies what it argues is a problem and urges correction. Agree or not with its conclusions, that sort of searching criticism is core to how Wikipedia became as good as it is.
So why did I include it in that list? Because when it was published on Substack, a veritable parade of Substackers — including quite a few big names who really should know better — lined up not only to applaud the author and condemn the criticized editor, but to wave that essay like a bloody shirt and make outlandish statements dismissing Wikipedia as nothing more than leftist propaganda.
I don’t know the author but I suspect, and hope, that was not his intention.
In sum: I included that essay because it has been widely cited by the “Wikipedia is Wokepedia!” crowd as proving their charge. (It does not and cannot.) I did not include it to suggest that was the author’s argument or intention.
If you spent the long weekend in a chilly theater for an Alien: Romulus matinee, there is a good chance you witnessed a few superfans munching popcorn pulled from a matte-black Xenomorph head. The novelty popcorn bucket is available at Cinemark and AMC theaters, and it retails for a hefty $28.99. (A latch at the top of the skull can be flipped backwards, allowing patrons to fill the interior with the snack of their choosing.)
It’s an unwieldy canister, an object that favors aesthetics over utilitarianism, and yet, the bucket has been a huge hit, and is already commanding a premium on eBay. That’s great news for Zinc Group, an international advertising firm that has carved out an unlikely niche: designing maximalist, and often grotesque, popcorn receptacles for some of the world’s most dedicated fandoms.
Most moviegoers became familiar with Zinc’s work in the run-up to the release of Dune Part Two, where the company unveiled their wonderfully weird sandworm-themed popcorn bucket. To retrieve their mid-movie snack, audiences had to reach into the moist, gaping mouth of the shai-hulud, an orifice that unintentionally resembled a gnarly sadomasochistic sex toy. (The bucket was widely parodied online and elsewhere, to the point of earning its own Saturday Night Live sketch.) But no puritanical backlash followed. In fact, the Dune buckets flew off of shelves, leading to an incursion of mega-brand imitators hoping to snag a fraction of the same viral ubiquity. (Deadpool and Wolverine gratuitously amped up the lewdness in its version, and an eldritch Beetlejuice model—designed by a different company—followed suit.)
Despite the cheesiness of the subject matter, it’s always been clear that a lot of craftsmanship goes into these buckets. That’s why I reached out to Zinc’s Vice President of Business Development Rod Mason, and Global Creative Director Marcus Gonzalez, who are the auteurs behind the novelty popcorn bucket renaissance. We talked about the creative satisfaction they find in the medium of novelty swag, the huge number of factors that must be considered when developing a popcorn receptacle, and yes, how they reacted to the internet’s interpretation of that sandworm mouth. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
When did dreaming up different popcorn bucket sculptures become a real part of your day jobs?
Rod Mason: Back in the early 2000s I was working for a different company and we started doing this with a theater chain in Mexico, where we actually started creating collectible popcorn buckets for the cinemas. I remember having a conversation with one of the major cinema chains in the U.S. about it in 2009 or 2010. I said, “We’re really doing huge business with this in Latin America. Would you guys like to be involved?”
They were like, “No, no, we’re good. We’re fine.” Years later, here we are.
Marcus Gonzalez: I worked for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, and I was responsible for developing their novelty programs. If you go to the parks, I made anything related to food—tiki mugs, popcorn buckets, sippers, globe products, you name it. I joined Zinc almost three years ago, and they had already been working on an R2-D2 combo bucket [snacks and a drink in the same vessel]. It’s, uh, really big. The dome is the sipper and the cylindrical part is the popcorn bucket. It’s pretty amazing.
Mason: When we first started working on the R2-D2 bucket, I was talking to our creative director at that time, and he was like, “What do you think?” I said, well, it’s going to be very expensive, but let’s throw it out there and see what people say. The response we got was so great that we kept doing it.
Since then, we’ve been improving things incrementally. Three or four years ago, there were no lights on the buckets, there was no sound, and they didn’t have any bells or whistles. Now, there is light, there is sound, and in some cases, there is articulation or movement. It’s an evolutionary process.
Gonzalez: We did a few other ones, too, prior to Dune. We had good success, but they didn’t exactly go viral. One was Dungeons and Dragons. We did the 20-sided die as a popcorn bucket, which wasn’t something that Hasbro were even remotely interested in. It wasn’t in the contract. I did a little doodle of it and I said, “I’m thinking about this.” Wizards of the Coast ultimately said, “Well, we weren’t thinking about that, but it’s pretty cool, so let’s figure out how to make it happen.”
Mason: Interestingly enough, even before the SNL sketch came out, my son, who was 26 at the time, said, “Hey, dad, did you do the Dune bucket?” I said, “Yeah, why? It hasn’t been released yet.” He said, “Yeah, check out Twitter.” I guess someone got a hold of it, and it showed up on Reddit first, and then on Twitter, and the rest is history.
It was a little concerning because there was what could be construed as “negative press” for the IP’s home, which is Legendary Pictures, and the client, which was AMC. But both of those companies decided to just embrace it. Then, when the SNL sketch happened, that was the beginning of the craziness.
You must be referring to that fairly puerile meme spawned by the Dune bucket. It sounds like the studio ultimately embraced it, but were there any moments of anxiety when people started commenting on the, let’s say, anatomical parallels in the design?
Mason: The funny thing with Dune Part Two, as you’re probably aware, was the actor strike last year. The movie was supposed to be released in November, but it got moved to March 2024. Still, all of the popcorn buckets were produced last summer. They were delivered and they were just sitting in warehouses all over the world. During the approval processes that you have to go through with the studio, everybody reviewed the bucket and made sure it was all good. I don’t remember anybody having any concerns.
Gonzalez: After the fact, we had a couple of people say, “I had a little chuckle about it,” but that was about it. It just went right through all the checkpoints. We certainly didn’t think that anyone was going to be looking at it inappropriately.
Now there are people combining the Dune bucket with the Xenomorph that we just put out for Alien Romulus. The back of the head conveniently fits inside the mouth of the worm, which it’s like ... what? Who takes a look at those two things and goes, “Hey …”
Mason: When the meme broke, there was some initial anxiety. There were definitely some concerned phone calls. It was like, “Oh my god, how is this going to affect AMC? How is this going to affect Legendary?” Luckily, both those organizations leaned into it and just said, “Okay, you know what? Let’s roll with it.” Really, when it comes down to it, what can you do? When it’s out there on social media, you either embrace it or you try to fight it. I think if you try and fight it, I think you tend to make it worse.
After the Dune bucket blew up—or even after a couple of these other successes—were vendors more intrigued to work with you guys? Have the wheels been greased in this industry at all?
It’s really become part of the zeitgeist. It’s one of these weird things that everybody wants to have fun with. Now, as to whether the trend will continue, who knows? We’ll have to see, because obviously there’s a bar that’s been set. We’ll see where it goes.
I’m desperate to know how the sausage gets made. Do you model the buckets in 3D first? How dirty do your hands get when you’re making them?
Gonzalez: We first try to understand what the clients’ needs are and what the sales team is going to want, but we also have our own ideation sessions. Then we either sketch the ideas out, or Photoshop them, or AI them. Then we present the ideas and talk about it and see what sticks. Is that too weird? Do we think it’s going to cost $50? Is it going to be within the right price ranges? We start broad, and then we whittle it down to hone in on the ideas that we think are going to have more traction. We’re looking for the next new, big, innovative thing.
In the meantime, we also show the ideas to the licensor and have them say, “Yeah, we don’t want you to have Snoopy with a machete” or something. That’s just a hypothetical, but we make sure that we’re not including design elements that may be inappropriate for the characters or IP.
Then we go into tooling. During this phase we’ll get prototype images and figure out the paint applications. The most difficult products are the ones that have a human face, because getting skin tones and the shadows and all that stuff can be challenging. Once the paint is figured out, we make sure it functions the way we originally intended it to. Between the art director and myself, we usually review those things to make sure we’re on track. Also, at the same time they’re working with sales and are also in tune with their clients to make sure that is what they envisioned when we show the product.
These buckets seem to keep getting bigger and more elaborate. Is there something like an arm’s race going on for novelty popcorn buckets?
Mason: Absolutely. Marcus and I share a lot of stuff back and forth that we see on social media, and say “That’s a good idea.” I’m sure our competitors do that, as well. I hate saying this, but way back, a decade ago, we were the company that was really making these products in the cinema business. When we opened the U.S. office here in 2016, the biggest objection was, “Well, these buckets don’t fit in any cup holder.” Then you fast forward three years and you’ve got this giant R2-D2 item being sold.
When there’s innovation, there’s also copying. We’ve always been the innovator. Our competitors have innovated, as well. I don’t want to take anything away or speak badly of them, because they’re obviously very good at what they do. We’ve pushed the envelope over the past eight to 10 years, and as a result of that, I think the people that have benefited the most are the fans.
Everybody’s trying to outdo each other, and we’re all trying to make something that’s really cool. We all want to get social media traffic. But it’s also a destination thing. It’s like when Marcus was working for the Disney theme parks—they were the only place you could get those novelty products. What the cinemas have realized, not just here in the U.S. but all over the world, is that if you are the only company in your country that has that item, you become a destination and they have to come to you to purchase it.
Do you take an artist’s pride in this stuff? I know they’re novelty items, but they’re still impressive. I’m curious to know if you get any creative satisfaction from designing popcorn buckets.
Gonzalez: Seeing the sketches, seeing the 3D renders, it’s cool. You’re like, “This is starting to look pretty awesome.” Holding that final piece and knowing the work that everybody put in to get it done—all the approval processes with the licensors and all that stuff—is pretty amazing. So I definitely have a sense of pride and appreciation for all the work that everybody’s done. When I’m holding the product and it’s even better than I originally expected, I get that goosebumps feeling. The hair on the back of your neck tingles and you go, “We made this cool thing that everyone’s going to go batshit about.”
Mason: I had a three-year-old niece here about two months ago, and my office is just like a toy store—there are samples all over the place. For me personally, this stuff doesn’t excite me. It’s cool, but when you see a little three-year-old or a four-year-old or somebody that is really into this stuff, that’s when I get really excited about it. Sometimes I tend to forget that what we’re really doing is bringing joy to people. It makes them really happy. That’s really cool to me.
Richard Brauer, a nonagenarian art history professor who has opposed a controversial plan by Valparaiso University in Indiana to sell three key paintings from its collection, said he will request his name be stripped from its museum building, which currently honors him.
Brauer’s statement, which was distributed to ARTnews through his attorney on Thursday, comes after a recent court ruling allowing the university to amend the terms of the legal trust that endowed the artworks. The change means the school is legally permitted to move ahead with the art sale.
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One of the works the university plans to sell, Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting Rust Red Hills (1930), was the second work the Brauer acquired for its collection. The university said it was worth about $15 million, making it the most valuable of the three pieces. Frederic Edwin Church’s Mountain Landscape was valued at $2 million, and Childe Hassam’s Silver Vale and the Golden Gate is valued at $3.5 million.
The university initiated plans last year to sell the works to raise funds that would go to completing a dorm renovation project for freshman students. Brauer argued in his statement that the paintings are a cornerstone of a museum that has set Valparaiso apart from other small liberal art school. Sales of the works would raise an estimated $20 million. The museum has argued that it can no longer afford to safeguard such valuable works due to high security costs.
Brauer first began teaching at the university in 1961, later overseeing what was then-termed the Valparaiso University Museum and Collections, housed in its Moellering Library. In his statement, Brauer said that his decision to drop the lawsuit to halt the sale of the paintings is to avoid “serious financial risk” from ongoing legal fees.
“I still hold out hope the President and the Board of Directors will back away from this very dangerous wager,” Brauer said in his statement. Brauer said that if the school ends up selling the paintings, he’ll officially divest from school officials and the museum. “I will be ashamed to have my name associated with this affair,” he said.
This month’s Designer Desktop takes us headfirst into the vibrant world of Annu Kilpeläinen. The Finnish-born, London-based artist and illustrator draws endless inspiration from two polar opposites: floral designs and automobiles, with a special fondness for the SAAB 900. Whether she’s hand painting a Ford Sierra field rally car, collaborating with brands like WeWork, contributing her artist’s vision to various magazines, or showcasing her work in solo shows in the United States and South Korea, Kilpeläinen continually expands her creative expression through animation, painting, and stained glass.
Today’s design, New Sun, is a whirlwind of colors and flowers that were originally painted with acrylic ink on paper. With a shift of the seasons just around the corner, the design captures the essence of change with its bold colors and lively motifs, bringing a burst of warmth and energy to your screen as we welcome September.
Download the wallpapers for free with the links below for all your tech devices today!
As the Senior Contributing Editor, Vy Yang is obsessed with discovering ways to live well + with intention through design. She's probably sharing what she finds over on Instagram stories. You can also find her at vytranyang.com.
