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The cultural world Mr. Koch inhabited as benefactor and board member did not typically engage in the political discourse that made him a figure of intense debate.

The Mono Awards reveal Australia and New Zealand’s best black and white photographers. Run by Australian Photography and Capture magazines, a panel of nine leading photographers judged the competition, which gave entrants a simple brief: the best single black and white image across one of two categories – People and Places.

Sharron Leppien’s winning People-category image, captured in Madagascar, shows a fleeting moment as a boy plays with a tyre in the shadow of the island’s iconic Baobab trees.

Gaanesh Prasad’s image, Fly High, was the result of more than two hours patiently waiting at the Wings over Illawarra airshow for the perfect moment to unfold

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Malaka Gharib, the author of the coming-of-age graphic memoir “I Was Their American Dream,” shares her tips.

A guide to the concerts, art exhibitions and movies to check out on your days off.

Billionaire right-wing arts philanthropist David H. Koch, who leveraged his business empire to wield enormous influence on American politics, and has been credited with bankrolling libertarian causes

Hiding within Cone Hole Reach, 2019, a hand mirror trimmed with Barbie hot pink reflects nothing. The mirror is encased in the sculpture’s conical, concrete-gray base, whose tiny windows allow us an

The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (ICA LA) is attempting to become the first fully solar-powered art museum in the United States. Founded in 1984 as the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the

The Brooklyn Museum opens its doors to the 97-year-old French designer, still defined by his groovy late ’60s fashions.

Readers respond to Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s piece about selfie culture in art galleries

I was pleased to read Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s criticism of selfie culture – every aspect of life has been gatecrashed by the mobile phone (Art, aura and the search for a perfect selfie, 22 August). However, as John Berger pointed out in Ways of Seeing (indebted to Walter Benjamin), the withering of the aura of a work of art is to be celebrated, because aura shrouds the work of art in a veil of false religiosity.

Many modern artworks, such as those in film and photography (media that Benjamin advocated), are no longer necessarily unique one-offs. The fact that film is reproducible and distributed en masse does not adversely affect our viewing. I saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood this week knowing that other copies of the film were being watched in cinemas internationally. In other words, the artwork – if you would agree that film can be an artwork – does not require the quality of one-offness to be valued. If a thing is appreciated simply for its uniqueness, which is more or less attributable to many things, not just artworks, there are other factors being overlooked. The gallery provides a space for the viewer to interact with the work on both a physical and mental – conceptual – level. Considerations of cultural contexts and history play a part. Anyone looking at their phone in a gallery shouldn’t have bothered leaving the house; they brought the house with them. My gallery-going advice: switch off the phone, dump the aura and get lost.
Stuart Cumberland
London

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On Monday, Beijing–born, Hong Kong–based artist and curator Sanmu Chan was detained by mainland Chinese police as he was going through immigration control at Lo Wu railway station in Hong Kong, reports

Weavers, sculptors and visionary eccentrics at the International Folk Art Market have liberated traditional definitions of craft. Social media is challenging ideas about who can make art.

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson was named the winner of this year’s Ars Fennica Prize. Presented by the Henna and Pertti Niemistö Art Foundation, which was established in 1990 to promote visual art

The Guardian’s picture editors select photo highlights from around the world

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The godfather of modern art is at the Whitworth, pioneering feminist film-maker Lis Rhodes is in Nottingham and Portsmouth explores little-known Tudor history – all in your weekly dispatch

Cézanne at the Whitworth
This exhibition celebrates a gift from the late gallerist Karsten Schubert of works by the unrivalled godfather of modern art.
• Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 24 August until 1 March.

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Rochelle Steiner has been hired as chief curator and director of curatorial affairs and programs at California’s Palm Springs Art Museum. She comes to the institution from the Vancouver Art Gallery,

The pop artist and activist created the iconic poster that still resonates after 30 years

Political activism pulsed through Keith Haring’s bright, brief career. He made posters and marched for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid. Meanwhile, alongside the signature dogs and babies, themes of religious oppression versus sexual freedom frequently animated this East Village prodigy’s singular cartoons. And it was the Aids crisis that sharpened his work’s focus in his final years.

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Melbourne’s Finkelstein Gallery opens this month with exhibition featuring 10 women

In the age of viral feminist hashtags and global movements against gender discrimination, it’s perhaps surprising that it has taken until now for Australia to open its first contemporary art gallery focusing exclusively on female artists.

Finkelstein Gallery, which opens in Melbourne on 29 August, might be the first, but its founder hopes it won’t be the last. The gallery is the brainchild of the art consultant Lisa Fehily, whose 15 years of experience in the field led her to the project.

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Enthusiasts bring hundreds of steam traction engines to a showground near Blandford Forum to showcase Britain’s rich industrial and agricultural history. The annual show takes place over the bank holiday weekend from 22 to 26 August

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Within the dreamy grotto of Joan Jonas’s exhibition “Moving Off the Land II,” one appropriately feels swallowed up by a gigantic fish. Towers of skeleton-like metal scaffolding mask the inner walls of

Incomplete copy of Holbein work is gallery’s first painting of Tudor king’s third spouse

The National Portrait Gallery, in London, has fixed a glaring hole in its Tudors collection with the acquisition of a portrait of Jane Seymour, the third wife of Henry VIII, who managed to avoid divorce or beheading but not an early death.

“It really is filling quite a gap,” said the curator Charlotte Bolland, as the portrait went on public display for the first time on Thursday. “Previously, the only portrait we had of Jane Seymour was a mid-17th century engraving. We had no painted representation of her, so this is very exciting, she is an incredibly important sitter.”

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An energetic search for the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece is being made in all directions, but it has so far been fruitless

Related: Mona Lisa's theft set the blueprint for art crime

One of the most precious treasures of the Louvre, Reuter’s Paris correspondent says, has disappeared. The discovery was made at midday yesterday, and the picture gallery was immediately closed, while the Minister of Fine Arts was advised by telegraph. The picture is the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci of Mona Lisa, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, a citizen of Florence. According to Vasari, Leonardo de Vinci devoted four years to the portrait. It is styled “La Joconde,” and was purchased about the year 1500 by Francis I.

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“Figures of Speech” in Chicago tries to capture the essence of a prodigious fashion designer. It’s an endeavor with radical juxtapositions, clever products and some missed opportunities.

An epically scaled exhibition flaunts the art form’s pioneers as well as its provocateurs.

Ceramic sculptures; warped photographs; floral still lifes; treasures in a trash collection; and swoops of acrylic indigo.

The season may be winding down, but things are heating up for comics fans, with unusual plot lines and new kinds of heroes.

The move comes less than a year after she was named chairwoman of the auction house.

Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.

“Why try to hide the reality of our history?” she said of the objectionable images that confronted San Francisco students every day.

Robert Sain, the director of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California, is defending the institution’s plan to deaccession hundreds of works from its collection and reinvest the funds

Chinese artist and activist will relocate to Cambridge after four years living in Berlin

The Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei is swapping his adopted home of Berlin for Britain, saying German society has become intolerant of refugees and that he feels like a man without a home.

The artist is to move to Cambridge with his partner and 10-year-old son, but will keep a studio in the German capital.

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Queer critique is, among other things, the best type of bad behavior. In mocking or destabilizing cultural orthodoxy, queer critiques temper, and sometimes obliterate, the conventional. Surveying artists

In the Azores, it is common to experience what feels like all four seasons in a single day. For “Weather Station,” Manuela Marques and Sandra Rocha inhabit the roles of artist, meteorologist, and

Udo Kittelmann, the longtime director of Berlin’s Nationalgalerie, an umbrella organization which comprises five top institutions—the Alter and Neue Nationalgaleries, the Berggruen Museum, the

Ilse Fusková is a Porteña photographer whose by turns irreverent and quiet art, for those same qualities, has been left to collect dust at the bottom of a chest. “La libertad de pasear sola” (The Freedom

There are chickens, a garden and a whole new line of products.

United States Artists (USA), the national arts funding organization based in Chicago, announced today that Ed Henry has been appointed its new board chair. Henry is currently president and CEO of the

The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York has welcomed four new members to its board of trustees: financier Maximilian Coreth, cofounder of the investment firm Timberlane Partners;

Landing at Heathrow airport from Sydney, a world full of different buildings opened up before my eyes

My mother was born in England, so we would often travel to London from my hometown, Sydney, to visit relatives. From a young age, my relationship with travel has always been intertwined with London.

We would usually visit during the Christmas holidays, in the darkest depths of the English winter. It was an alien experience to step off the plane in shorts and T-shirt from the Australian summer, into grey skies, soon to turn black.

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Markéta Luskačová fell in love with and photographed Whitley Bay in the late 1970s. Her warm and intimate images from 40 years ago capture families young and old enjoying the north-east coast – wind, grey skies and rain notwithstanding

• By the Sea is at the Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, until 5 October. Luskačová’s work is published by RRB Photobooks in September

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‘The light was soft … They were so graceful. They are the last peasants, the last of their kind’

In 2012, I travelled to Transylvania to document what is effectively the last remaining bucolic landscape of Europe. England, for example, has lost most of its hay meadows because of large-scale agriculture, but in Romania this kind of small-scale sustainable way of farming persists. It survived the Ceaușescu regime. It survived the EU. Today, however, it is a vanishing way of life as young people increasingly choose to migrate to western Europe in search of work and faster money.

I spent three weeks in Maramureş in the northern Carpathian mountains, exploring life in six tiny hamlets, each with no more than 500 inhabitants. It was August, the height of the haymaking season. Families worked in the fields from dawn to dusk. These women were from a village called Breb. I saw their haystacks from the road as my translator and I drove past. I shouted “stop!” and ran out of the car towards them. They smiled at me, but we didn’t talk, they just carried on with what they were doing. It was late in the day, and they were getting ready to go home. The women wear trousers to make hay because the wind blows their skirts up. Here, they were putting their headscarves and their traditional skirts back on. Then they gathered their baskets, in which they’d brought their lunch, and walked back to the village. I followed. The light was very soft, and the shadows long.

Cutting hay and stacking it is physically demanding, I tried doing it myself and failed miserably

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From tracing its post-war roots to putting today’s artists to the test, BBC Four’s night at the Bauhaus was illuminating and fun

To mark the centenary of the endlessly influential art school’s foundation by Walter Gropius, BBC Four spent a night in the Bauhaus. It began with a half-hour trot through the life and pioneering artwork of Anni Albers, in A Life in Thread. From her banishment to the weaving workshop (where female students were expected to go instead of metalwork or other departments – progressive institutions always have surprisingly traditional limitations) we witnessed her transformation of the ancient craft into unique art and a lauded career.

Related: Bauhaus: 100 years old but still ubiquitous in our homes today

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Best known for his neo-expressionist paintings of figures incarcerated in color, Misheck Masamvu has recently added text to his armory. In 2016, the twilight of former Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s

Without exiles and émigrés there is no modern culture. A new show in Washington maps a century of art and displacement.

On August 15, MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito published a public apology for the Cambridge, Massachusetts–based organization’s business affiliations with Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier who was

The recipients of the 2019 Ateneo Art Awards, which recognize young artists and critics in the Philippines, were announced on Sunday. The visual art prizes were awarded to Costantino Zicarelli, Keb

THE TASK SEEMED EXCITING ENOUGH: conduct research on a generation of Latin American artists who had moved to Paris after World War II. Back in 2002, when snail mail was still my primary means of

Long associated with European cities, the style has plenty of history in other parts of the world, too. In Brazil, it reached a surprising apotheosis.

The Kai Art Center, a new cultural hub that will present four main exhibitions a year, boast a 100-seat theater, and serve as an education center, will open on the waterfront in Tallinn, the capital of

The Arkansas Arts Center has named Victoria Ramirez its new executive director. Ramirez comes to the institution from the El Paso Museum of Art (EPMA) where she served as director since January 2017.

More than 120 artists, dealers, and curators have signed an open letter protesting the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Foundation’s decision to deaccession the majority of the works in its 1,600-work collection