The expensive art market continues to struggle - Marketplace.org

at florida southern college, the restored 1950s-era building reopens with its original circular seating and new digital projection system. kat barandy October 23, 2026 5 min prefer designboom on googlea dome full of stars returns to florida southern collegeTwo rings of curved red seating surround a central projector beneath the domed ceiling of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s only built planetarium, which has reopened at Florida Southern College in Lakeland. After more than two decades without regular star shows, the 1950s building has been restored by a team led by Jeff Baker of MCWB Architects. Its original seating has been returned to Wright’s circular arrangement, and a new digital projection system brings the night sky back overhead. The Miller Planetarium welcomed the public again on September 26th, 2026. The planetarium occupies the southern end of the Polk Science Building, part of the college‘s collection of thirteen Wright-designed structures. Built between 1954 and 1958, its pale concrete walls are patterned with geometric textile blocks, while a white dome rises above the surrounding low-slung buildings.

On protest, business as usual, and the surreal experience of attending an art fair while smelling burning plastic. A visitor looks at an Anish Kapoor painting at Art Basel Paris 2026. (all photos Naima Morelli/Hyperallergic)

When the Milwaukee Brewers face the Tampa Bay Rays in game one of the 122nd World Series tonight, they will be playing for more than just the right to hoist the sterling silver Commissioner’s Trophy after four wins. A rival museum’s Monet is also on the line. The teams’ local art museums—the Milwaukee Art Museum, four miles east of where the Brewers play at American Family Field, and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, just over a mile west of the Rays’ Tropicana Field—have entered into a friendly wager, wherein the winning city’s museums earns the right to borrow a Monet painting from the loser’s collection.

A Virginia man allegedly beheaded one of six statues at the Iwo Jima monument near the Quantico Marine base, causing what police estimated was hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. According to the incident report, Prince William County police arrived at the site Wednesday night to find 27-year-old Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano “actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer.” The attack cost one of the monument’s Marines his head and left a second figure’s helmet and face “chipped and gouged.” The stone bayonet from the rifle carved over the back of a third statue was also missing.

In the legal system, art created by refugees and incarcerated people can serve both as a form of therapy and as evidence of mass atrocities. A woman weeps in the foreground of a painting by Rohingya artist Enayet Khan, set against scenes of violence committed by Myanmar’s military during the Rohingya genocide. (image courtesy Enayet Khan)

As an artist who lived through the Reagan-era Culture Wars, I recommend Isaac Butler’s “The Perfect Moment” for the stories that parallel our current fight to defend creative expression. A self-portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe projected onto the facade of the Corcoran Gallery of Art during a protest on 30, 1989 (photo Carol Guzy/the Washington Post via Getty Images, all images courtesy Bloomsbury)