A new biography explores the secret lives of John Singer Sargent, the queer Gilded Age society painter whose dazzling surfaces concealed a more guarded inner world. A manifesto by the artist collective Metahaven asks about the changing role of art as AI wreaks havoc on our attention span and climate change dampens our capacity to imagine a future. Journalist Hettie Judah guides readers through the opaque creature that is the art world, offering practical advice while puncturing a few of its more stubborn myths.

Meanwhile, Daisy Dixon’s Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art blends history and philosophy to explore a subject as timely as it is timeless, tracing anxieties around obscenity, taste, and public offense back to prehistoric art.

• Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art

  By Daisy Dixon

  Philosopher Daisy Dixon asks what moral and aesthetic sentiments we are expressing when we—or they—refer to an artwork as “depraved.” Taking us across time and genre—from prehistoric Venus figurines to Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP—she weaves, too, between historical examples and philosophical musings. This range-y lookback has a pointed resonance with the here and now—that is, MAGA’s ongoing assault on culture.

• The Photographic World Picture: A New Prehistory of Photography

  By Andrew Moisey

  Depending on who you ask—and what counts as a photograph—2026 marks 200 years since the technology’s invention. But of course, in the runup to the world’s first photo came a lot of exploring. Cornell art historian Andrew Moisey looks all the way back to the Renaissance, arguing that proto-photographic ideas of instantaneity first appeared in painting before showing how photography indelibly altered the canvases of modernists.

• The Hard Question of Art: Cognitive Futures

  By Metahaven

  Challenging times prompt existential questions, and here, Metahaven takes a stab at answering them. Looking to how climate change, AI, and rampant inequality have assaulted our attention spans and reoriented our ability to imagine a future, the artist collective asks what all this means for art—reliant as it is on both attention and imagination.

• Beyond Beauty: A Portrait of John Singer Sargent

  By Devon Cox

  The indelible chronicler of Gilded Age glamor, who made so many portraits of society’s finest, here gets a portrait of his own. Biographer Devon Cox tackles the queer artist’s “guarded inner life,” promising readers a character who is “restless, deceptively daring, and shrouded in secrecy.” He argues, too, that Sargent left clues to the inner lives of the socialites he painted.

• How to Enter the Art World

  By Hettie Judah

  Targeted toward artists, this book, by journalist Hettie Judah, offers pointers toward navigating the art world, demystifying its unspoken rules and debunking its myths. Based on years of conversations with artists and arts professionals, it dispels the notion that an artist’s career is ever linear.

• Still Dangerous!: The Harmony Hammond Reader

  By Harmony Hammond

  Lately, Harmony Hammond figured in the 2024 Whitney Biennial and mounted a survey at SITE Santa Fe. But long before that, she co-founded the storied feminist collective A.I.R. Gallery and wrote tirelessly (for this magazine and others) on the work of women and lesbian artists, fighting their structural exclusion from the art world. A new collection of her writings, edited by Tirza True Latimer with a foreword by Julia Bryan-Wilson, is a portrait of her perseverance.