Power, Protest, and the Algorithm. The Art World’s Uneasy Season

Late 2025 feels like a strange, shimmering moment for art. Museums are tied up in lawsuits. Auction houses are breaking records. Artists are wrestling with machines that can write and dream. Everywhere you look, power and imagination are negotiating their uneasy relationship.

Museums in Trouble

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has turned into a drama about power and damage control. Daniel H. Weiss, the calm former Met chief, has been brought in to steady the institution. But even as he takes the seat, lawsuits fly. The museum accuses its ex-director Sasha Suda of theft. Suda claims she was wrongfully fired and mistreated. A place built to preserve art now finds itself fighting for its own integrity.

In Cairo, things are just as fraught. The Grand Egyptian Museum, a symbol of national pride, stands accused of favoring foreign visitors while locals struggle to afford tickets. What should have been a civic treasure now feels like a mirror reflecting inequality.

Across the Mediterranean, the plan for Trump Tower in Belgrade is sparking outrage. Architects say it violates heritage laws by threatening to erase a modernist landmark from the Yugoslav era. Once again, culture and commerce come face to face, and money is winning the argument.

The Market Keeps Rising

While institutions burn with controversy, the market glitters brighter than ever. Christie’s and Sotheby’s together have made more than a billion dollars this autumn selling modern art. Christie’s pulled headlines with a newly found Michelangelo drawing for the Sistine Chapel ceiling, as if the Renaissance had returned for one last encore. Sotheby’s brought in 304 million, topped by a sixty-two million Van Gogh and a record-breaking Frida Kahlo.

The auctions glow with triumph, but the cracks are visible. A collector is suing Sotheby’s, claiming a Modigliani painting was misrepresented. The money flows, but trust is brittle. The art world’s faith in authenticity is thinning under the weight of its own wealth.

Voices of Protest

Amid all the profit, artists keep finding ways to resist. In Washington, dancers took their protest to the Kennedy Center, demanding culture not be silenced by politics. In Norway, curators opened an exhibition on queer sexuality in Islamic art quietly radical, deeply necessary. And in San Francisco, KAWS filled SFMOMA with bright, shiny nostalgia. Critics pointed out that the show could have asked how toys, commerce, and art blur together. Instead, it seemed content to lead visitors toward the gift shop.

The Code that Writes Poetry

At MoMA, the tone is completely different. Poet and technologist Sasha Stiles has created A Living Poem, an installation that uses GPT‑4 and code to generate verses endlessly. It doesn’t paint or sculpt. It writes and rewrites itself, exploring what creativity means when language itself can think. MoMA’s embrace of this project marks a turning point. The avant-garde’s wish to dissolve authorship has finally met a tool that knows no author.

Restoring the Lost Voices

Beyond the headlines, museums continue a quieter revolution. MoMA’s retrospectives of Ruth Asawa and Helen Frankenthaler restore women whose genius had been sidelined by history. Wifredo Lam’s dreamlike work returns the Caribbean to modern art’s story, where it always belonged. And Tate Britain’s show on Lee Miller proves that rediscovery can still feel electric. These exhibitions do more than correct the canon; they rewrite it.

A Restless Balance

Art in 2025 is caught between success and exhaustion. Markets soar, but morals fray. Institutions talk about transparency while fighting lawsuits. Artists create new worlds while fearing the machines that help them do it. Protest and privilege now share the same museum floor.

Maybe this is not collapse, but adjustment. The art world is learning, awkwardly, to live in a time when money and code speak louder than curators. The beauty remains, but it no longer feels innocent.

Between the swing of an auctioneer’s hammer and the quiet hum of a generative poem, art still shows us who we are and sometimes, who we’re becoming.