Exhibitions, Research, Criticism, Commentary

A chronology of 3,585 references across art, science, technology, and culture
● 27/11/2025
OUT NOW:
Rita Ouédraogo
How We Made Noise
Buro Stedelijk founding curator Rita Ouédraogo presents contributions from Tina M. Campt, Wayne Modest, Christina Sharpe, and others reflect on efforts to reimagine Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum from within.
Onomatopee
● 21/10/2025

In anticipation of the 2027 opening of its new facilities, the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) Pittsburgh teamed up with KADIST and EPOCH to offer a virtual tour of what’s to come. “The Generative Museum” is a detailed rendition of the forthcoming building, featuring a promptable exhibition that draws on ICA and KADIST’s vast collections. Another highlight: four AI works by Morehshin Allahyari, Holly Herndon & Mat Dryhurst, Joe Namy, and Ahmet Öğüt.

ICA Pittsburgh
● 01/10/2025
“Fifteen years ago, museums were busy digitizing their holdings so they could be accessible online. Now, MoMA is opening its data up for use as raw material, not to index artworks, so that audiences can see how they’re unique, but to render them as training sets, ready for endless reorganization.”
– Critic Brian Droitcour, on museums becoming data centres that grind their collections into digital slurry. “MoMA has opted in so hard to AI that it’s another way of opting out—gliding over what’s happening now on the smooth, opaque surface of the tech demo.”
Cultured
● 29/09/2025

UNESCO launches the Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects, a VR-enabled platform that aims to reconnect communities with their looted heritage. The initiative, unveiled at MONDIACULT 2025 in Barcelona, reconstitutes over 250 stolen artifacts selected by 46 member states in 3D, offering educational narratives and testimonies from affected communities. “Unlike traditional museums, the Virtual Museum is designed to gradually empty itself with the goal of returning and not accumulating,” UNESCO writes.

Unesco
● 27/08/2025
“The only viable response to attacks against museums is to double down on our ability to hold contradictory ideas in tension, support difference, and foster dialogue and debate.”
– Princeton University Art Museum Director James Stewart, arguing that museums must “make productive noise” rather than retreat into silence amid growing political pressure from the Trump administration. Writing as the Smithsonian faces scrutiny and museum directors come under fire, Steward advocates for embracing discomfort as a tool for discovery and democratic engagement. [quote edited]
Artnet
● 19/08/2025

Amsterdam’s LI-MA announces a new cataloguing system that accounts for the complexity of media artworks that confounds traditional museum databases. The Four Level Artwork (FLA) model breaks works down to the artist’s core idea, different iterations of the concept, how the work is technically realized, and the files or objects in a collection. Bas van Koolwijk’s TST (2000) demonstrates FLA: one conceptual work becomes two artistic versions, each with two display formats, and specific tapes in LI-MA’s vault.

LI-MA
L
● 18/08/2025
OUT NOW:
Gareth Harris
Towards the Ethical Art Museum
Arts journalist Harris examines why museums have become flashpoints for society’s conversations about ethics, from dubious funding sources to contested collections and exclusionary practices.
Lund Humphries
● 05/08/2025
“The booming commercial market for fossils means that institutions and museums seeking these prehistoric bones for scientific and education purposes are being priced out by the ultra wealthy.”
– Culture journalist Vivienne Chow, on the impact of hedge fund managers and sovereign wealth outbidding cash-strapped museums for dinosaur fossils. The result: vital scientific specimens disappear into private collections and are lost to research and public education.
Artnet
● 30/07/2025
“In a world galloping towards the accommodation of questionable regimes such as those seen in Saudi Arabia, Russia, and China, individuals and institutions are weighing up their priorities and possibly recalibrating their values.”
– Towards the Ethical Art Museum (2025) author Gareth Harris, on the geopolitical pressures facing western institutions. Observing that museums often “mask these challenging arrangements in educational and research terms,” Harris argues that partnerships with authoritarian states are increasingly providing “extra funding streams.”
The Art Newspaper
● 24/07/2025

In a conversation with Ben Davis, institutional critique pioneer Andrea Fraser dissects how the contemporary art world actually works. Elaborating on her 2024 e-flux essay “The Field of Contemporary Art,” she explains how art has splintered into five overlapping subfields—market, exhibition, academic, community-based, and activist—each with competing economies and “radically different and often conflicting perspectives on what art is and does.”

The Art Angle
● 21/07/2025
“They’re doing a good job—it’s just a slow integration. Digital moves fast, and institutions move slowly. That’s the dissonance we’re experiencing.”
– Offline gallery director Mika Bar-On Nesher, on institutional adaptation to digital and crypto-native art. Institutions aren’t resistant, they’re just operating on different timescales than the technologies they’re accommodating, she argues.
Artnews
● 08/07/2025
“Her show was basically an encyclopedia of emergencies made up of anti-colonial video essays, sonic archaeologies, radical-care manifestos, and queer lichen.”
– Filmmaker Andrew Norman Wilson, sardonically describing a hypothetical biennale in response to the prompt “what is art good for?” His clever parable skewers contemporary art’s tendency to catalogue crises while highlighting the stark disconnect between curatorial rhetoric and the harsh world outside museum walls.
Art in America
● 23/06/2025
“What if the real challenge of AI isn’t how museums adopt technology but how they redefine their purpose in a world where time itself is restructured?”
– High Museum of Art Director Randall Suffolk, arguing that museums should focus less on tech adoption and more on preparing for a world where—if the lofty productivity boom predictions come true—”we get forty percent of our time back to pursue other, non-work activities.”
Artnet
● 17/06/2025

“Online collections are not resourced to continue adding more servers, deploying more sophisticated firewalls, and hiring more operations engineers in perpetuity,” warns the GLAM-E Lab in its new report “Are AI Bots Knocking Cultural Heritage Offline?” The study reveals a growing crisis where AI companies are extracting value from cultural commons with swarms of bots that force museums, libraries, and archives to bear the infrastructure costs—and threaten public access to digitized heritage altogether.

GLAM-E Lab
● 13/06/2025
“It will have to answer new questions for the younger audience interested in art, who maybe only experience it through social media.”
– Artist Ian Cheng, on Canyon, a new NYC venue opening in 2026 that he’s advising. The 3,900-square-metre Lower East Side nonprofit will focus on video, sound, and performance art, aiming to attract younger audiences through extended evening hours and gallery spaces equipped “more like living rooms than a typical white box.”
New York Times
● 05/06/2025
“As a paid exhibition, visitors invested time and money to support the artist and institution without damaging artworks or disrupting operations. Our photos were taken in good faith, reflecting genuine engagement with the exhibition.”
– Chinese museum visitors, after Singapore-based artist Heman Chong allegedly re-shared their UCCA Dune Instagram exhibition selfies derisively claiming they “used my work as a backdrop for their narcissism.” The group filed a complaint citing privacy violations and public humiliation.
The Art Newspaper
● 16/05/2025
“TeamLab currently has 12 exhibitions in Japan, as well as sites in places like Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Macau, Miami, New York, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Installations or museums are planned for Hamburg, Germany; Utrecht, the Netherlands; Kyoto, Japan; and more.”
– Journalist Lisa Lucas, on teamLab’s rapidly expanding global footprint. Notably, her survey of the international studio’s works and venues is published as a travel feature, which may be a first in digital art coverage.
New York Times
● 14/05/2025
“Yayoi Kusama inaugurated a new era of art specifically catering to smartphone engagement. The conceptual artist James Turrell soon had a crossover moment when Drake visited his exhibition and later used it as the inspiration for the ‘Hotline Bling’ music video.”
– T Magazine Features Director M.H. Miller, tracing the lineage of art that goes viral on social media—from Tumblr to TikTok. [quote edited]
T Magazine
● 07/05/2025
OUT NOW:
The Museum Is Not Enough, no. 10–14
The second volume of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s reflections on its curatorial process presents contributors who “rethink the tools used to conceive its programs and build its relationships.”
CCA
To dive deeper into Stream, please or become a .

Daily discoveries at the nexus of art, science, technology, and culture: Get full access by becoming a HOLO Supporter!
  • Perspective: research, long-form analysis, and critical commentary
  • Encounters: in-depth artist profiles and studio visits of pioneers and key innovators
  • Stream: a timeline and news archive with 3,100+ entries and counting
  • Edition: HOLO’s annual collector’s edition that captures the calendar year in print
.
$40 USD