Art Basel Miami Beach names 272 exhibitors and unveils a new floor plan.
Art Basel Miami Beach is slimming down. The fair’s 24th edition, running from December 4–6, will host 272 exhibitors, down from 285 last year. It also drops the Meridians sector for large-scale works and debuts a fully reworked floor plan. The biggest cut is in the flagship Galleries section, which shrinks from 226 to 204 exhibitors. Positions loses four booths, and Nova and Survey lose two each. Director Bridget Finn frames the downsizing as “refinement.” The new layout takes up roughly 12 percent less of the Miami Beach Convention Center. It swaps five plazas for four larger ones, realigned so each connects with more aisles, and the goal is a more symmetrical floor where collectors can move aisle by aisle without losing their way. Finn says dealers’ most common complaint is clients who couldn’t find their booth. The reshuffle also brings back seven galleries, including Pilar Corrias and Mariane Ibrahim.
Cartier opens its watchmaking prize to jewelers.
Cartier is widening the net for its long-running award for young talent. Launched in 1995 as a watchmaking competition, the program now covers jewelry as well, under a new name: the Cartier Talents of Tomorrow Prize. Watchmaking students and apprentices in Switzerland, France, Belgium, and Germany can apply, as well as individuals from Sweden, Denmark, and Finland, who join the list this year. Aspiring jewelers must be enrolled in France, Italy, or Switzerland and have at least two years of jewelry training behind them. This edition draws on the menagerie that has long roamed Cartier’s designs: panthers, tigers, crocodiles. Watchmakers will rethink the house’s 1847 MC automatic movement around the animal theme, while jewelers will design a brooch that captures a creature’s spirit. Eight finalists per category get three months, and up to 80 hours, to develop their ideas, each guided by a mentor from outside the house. Alongside the finished piece, they’ll hand in a logbook tracing the process. The juries include independent watchmaker Kari Voutilainen, Christie’s Europe chairman François Curiel, and Cartier Collection director Pascale Lepeu.
Farshid Moussavi is the latest architect to win the Soane Medal.
London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum has awarded its 2026 Soane Medal, which honors contributions to architectural culture, to Farshid Moussavi. Moussavi launched her London- and Paris-based firm, Farshid Moussavi Architecture, in 2011, after co-founding Foreign Office Architects. Her work ranges from the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland to housing in Montpellier and at La Défense–Nanterre, and most recently the Ismaili Center Houston, completed last year. She earned her MArch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1991 and now teaches there as Professor in Practice. Her research focuses on housing, how buildings get made, and the link between design and construction. That focus shaped her 2024 GSD exhibition, “Architecture as an Instruction-Based Art,” which explored how construction coordination drawings turn ideas into buildings. She has also written four books, most recently Architecture and Micropolitics (2022).
After 18 years, Ann Temkin hands over MoMA’s painting and sculpture department.
Curator Ann Temkin, who has led painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art since 2008, will leave the post in January. Temkin will stay on as strategic adviser to director Christophe Cherix and is expected to oversee programming for the museum’s centennial in 2029. Her ties to MoMA go back to 1984, when she joined as a curatorial assistant. After more than a decade at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, she returned in 2003 and was promoted to chief curator five years later, the first woman to run the department. Her tenure is defined by breaking down walls between disciplines: she hung painting and sculpture alongside photography, film, and design, and gave greater visibility to artists from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Temkin also organized solo exhibitions of Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Gober, and Gabriel Orozco, among others.
Dolly Parton’s Nashville museum debuts with her long-lost wedding dress.
Dolly Parton’s Life of Many Colors Museum opens today on the third floor of the SongTeller Hotel in downtown Nashville. The 20,000-square-foot museum is billed as the largest exhibition of the singer’s life and work, tracing her rise from the Smoky Mountains to Nashville, Hollywood, and global stardom. Its centerpiece is a dress presumed lost for nearly six decades: the simple white A-line Parton wore to marry Carl Dean in 1966. It surfaced in 2024 inside Dean’s old National Guard trunk, which had been sitting in the Dolly Parton Archive. When her niece Rebecca Seaver, the archive’s director and now the museum’s executive director, showed it to her, Parton knew right away where it belonged. It is now displayed in a case modeled on the Ringgold, Georgia chapel where the couple wed.
Attractive Distractions:
Blue Bottle Coffee is releasing a limited-edition jazz album.
A study on the design history of the nightclub.
Matières Fécales transforms Paris Fashion Week into a personal theater.
Formafantasma takes the creative lead on an 800-year-old Florentine apothecary.
