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Your This Week's Dose of Art Inspiration
Quick and inspiring, handpicked treats for you! 🙂
Welcome to your weekly quick drop of the boldest art, freshest ideas, and creative fuel worth saving. In just 5 minutes.
TOP 3 ART STORIES THIS WEEK
1. Jim Jarmusch Just Snatched Venice’s Top Prize 🎥
The Venice Film Festival ended with a curveball: Jim Jarmusch grabbed the Golden Lion for Father Mother Sister Brother.
The film jumps between three families in the U.S., Ireland, and France. Secrets, tension, and messy love lives, all stitched together with Jarmusch’s signature calm, dry humor.
This isn’t his first rodeo. He’s the guy behind cult favorites like Stranger Than Paradise, Down by Law, and Paterson, plus episodic gems like Mystery Train, Night on Earth, and Coffee and Cigarettes.
Jarmusch kept it cool at the ceremony - black sunglasses on, reminding everyone:
"Art does not have to address politics directly to be political. It can engender empathy and a connection between us, which is really the first step for solving things and problems that we have."
Check out all the winners here.
2. Banksy Hits London’s High Court (and gets removed)🎨
Banksy just pulled off his latest stunt: a mural on the Royal Courts of Justice in London. The piece shows a judge in wig and robes slamming a protester with a giant gavel. On the ground: a protester holding a blood-marked sign.
Banksy confirmed the piece with his usual Instagram post: a photo + the caption “Royal Courts of Justice. London.” Within hours, security wrapped it in black plastic, put up barriers, and stationed guards with cameras.
Why so fast? The court is a 143-year-old protected building, and altering it (even with world-famous street art) breaks the rules. Officials say the mural will be removed “with care.” Activists quickly tied the work to the UK’s ban on Palestine Action, a protest group.
While some of Banksy’s most common themes include commentary on the surveillance state, consumerism and animal cruelty, this latest work is a rare direct political statement.
3. Christie’s Cancels the Digital Art Dept
Christie’s just shut down its digital art department. A spokesperson says it’s not the end of digital, just a “reformat.” From now on, digital works will get folded into Christie’s 20th- and 21st-century art sales.
This comes only four years after Christie’s made history with Beeple’s Everydays: The First 5000 Days (sold for a jaw-dropping $69.3M) - the sale that lit the NFT boom.
Fast forward to 2025: the NFT hype is toast. By 2022, Christie’s NFT sales had dropped 96%, and by 2024, reports said 95% of NFTs were “dead.” Sotheby’s cut its own digital staff last year too.
Christie’s shutting its digital art department is a reminder that shiny trends (like NFTs) can skyrocket and crash, but the art that keeps meaning, connection, and demand survives long after the buzz dies down.
Celebrating Today: Maestro Arvo Pärt Turns 90!
Today one of the world’s most performed living composer, Arvo Pärt, turns 90. Despite the awards, the packed concert halls, and the global fame, Pärt is known for his humility. Here are a few thoughtful quotes from him:
“I write music by discovering myself, looking for myself. I don’t write for others, but it reverberates with them. I suppose secretly we all love one another. Anonymously. It is very beautiful.”
Arvo Pärt is composing for higher stakes. He wants to touch something that he would call the “common denominator”:
“Figuratively speaking, one could say that as a scientist, Schönberg was constantly engaged in examining the shell of a walnut. What interests me more is the “formula” of the nut’s kernel—the part that carries within itself the secret of life.
I would like to reach that single point from which everything originates. At times I also call it the “common denominator” for that endlessly vast multitude of fractions, rational numbers, and all kinds of formulas. Behind everything there must be the One.
That is why it is so difficult to formulate this also in art. There are not many kindred spirits.
I know that when you approach this common denominator, touch it, or grasp it, it opens the way to many things. You suddenly become a relative of the whole world. From simplicity and perfection chaos may arise, and from chaos again perfection and simplicity—reborn once more. It has been said that before rising up, one must die.”
How could anyone reach his level? Perhaps this gives us a clue:
(In the beginning of my career) “I wrote thousands and thousands of pages to think in musical language. (..) Every day, 10 or 20 pages or more. This was my work, every day. No way out.”
“Now (I knew) in this place must be born something of mine — from everything that I have learned in old music, in religion, in life, and how much I was able to see my own sins and imperfections, and to repent it. To say, ‘Yes.’
And if you do, then it is like when you are on a computer, and you write a text and then you press something and it is empty. But it is a good thing. Begin from zero, from nothing.
It’s like if there is a fresh snow and nobody has walked, and you take the first steps on this snow. And this is the beginning of new life.”
“There is a good rule in spiritual life, which we all forget continually, that you must see more of your own sins than other people’s.”
(So many inspiring interviews are available through his website.) Watch below how Arvo Pärt was greeted today, on his birthday, in Estonia 🙂😀 So playful and fun!
p.s. - continuing from here:
From another composer, American John Cage, a legendary speech “Lecture on Nothing”. If you haven’t yet read it, do it. It’s from 1950. Still inspiring!
Artist Interview: Megan Rooney 🎨
This Megan Rooney interview is pure inspiration. Her massive abstract paintings carry a force that feels alive, and her way of thinking about art stands in sharp contrast to Arvo Pärt’s formulaic approach. I love her ability to reflect on what she does.
For us contemporary artists, there are moments in her words that feel like recognition —thoughts we’ve half-known but never voiced. Rooney says them, and in doing so, organizes something in our minds as well. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. 😍
Step Out of the Autumn Rush? Step Into Bali’s Art🌴
Next week, Art & Bali 2025 opens in Nuanu Creative City.
The theme is Bridging Dichotomies. Tradition and technology. Handmade and digital. Chaos and harmony. At its center is the Balinese philosophy of Tri Hita Karana: the balance between people, nature, and the divine.
👉 Dates: September 12–14, 2025. LINK.
Farewell 👋
Gustavo Torner (1925–2025)
A true “total artist.” Painting, sculpture, photography, stained glass, graphic design — he touched every medium with the same pursuit of beauty. With Fernando Zóbel, he co-founded the Spanish Abstract Art Museum in Cuenca. His words remain: “Man cannot live without beauty.” Browse his works @Reina Sofia Museum.
Giorgio Armani (1934–2025)
The king of Italian fashion. He made elegance simple, quiet, and global—stretching from the runway to hotels and beyond. Relentless until the very end, Armani worked almost to his last day.
A thought to carry
Focus on what endures: clarity, beauty, honest work. Today, try to make one small thing around you more beautiful — a space, a sentence, or a brushstroke.
That’s it for this time! Thank you so much for reading. See you again in a week! 🙂
or just:
🙃 😍