Trump turns on museums and libraries, the art market’s 12% fall, Evie Hone and Mainie Jellett—podcast

Left: Trump at a rally in 2024. Right: Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery
Trump: Photo: Gage Skidmore. Smithsonian: Photo: Zack Frank (Adobe Stock)
From breaking news and insider insights to exhibitions and events around the world, the team at The Art Newspaper picks apart the art world’s big stories with the help of special guests. An award-winning podcast hosted by Ben Luke.
In two-and-a-half months since the inauguration of President Donald Trump, a series of executive orders and other initiatives have attempted systematically to eliminate and defund some of the federal agencies responsible for the distribution of federal money to museums, libraries and other organisations.
The Art Newspaper’s editor-in-chief in the Americas, Ben Sutton, joins Ben Luke to discuss what is being seen as an authoritarian and ideologically driven attempt to control cultural activities in taxpayer-funded institutions, restrict free speech and—to use the administration’s own term—“rewrite history”. We also discuss the effect of the economic chaos caused by President Trump’s seesawing on trade tariffs in the past week.
Visitors at Art Basel, Basel in 2024
Courtesy of Art Basel
That same topic is discussed by Clare McAndrew of Arts Economics, the writer of the Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report 2025. The report’s key finding is that global art sales declined by 12% in 2024 and McAndrew discusses this stark statistic and other aspects of the survey.
Mainie Jellett, Decoration (1923) Photo: National Gallery of Ireland
And this episode’s Works of the Week are by Mainie Jellett and Evie Hone, the two artists in an exhibition subtitled The Art of Friendship at the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Jellett and Hone were key figures in Irish Modernism, and we talk to one of the curators of the exhibition, Brendan Rooney, about Jellett’s painting, Decoration (1923) and Hone’s stained-glass image of a chalice (1948-52), a study for her most famous piece, the East Window of Eton College Chapel in Berkshire, UK.
Plus, Art Basel: are the buyers back? And Mary Beard on images of power
We find out how the London fair went this year, speak to Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad about their new book and to Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev about her new show at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris
Plus, art censorship online and Brenda L. Croft's photos of fellow First Nations Australian women

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