Observer

Critic Dawn Chan’s project proposes both serious and absurdist alternatives to the constant jet-setting that’s become an art-world norm. Courtesy of Dawn Chan Editor’s note: This article was originally published in September 2025.

Strong opening-day sales suggested a buyer base deeper than many outsiders expected. Photograph by Casey Kelbaugh / CKA Following its Texas debut in 2025, Untitled Art returned to Houston, opening its second edition to VIPs on Oct. 1 at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

Olafur Eliasson‘s The Weather Project (2003) at Tate Modern. Photo wonderferret (licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license) For a long time, culture was viewed at best as an economic driver, and more narrowly as a generator of tourism. Successful culture-led development strategies around the world have since shown that its impact can be far more structural.

As inflation remains persistent and long-term yields rise, higher rates are changing who can invest, which projects get funded and how we understand money itself. Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images Mortgage rates have crossed an uncomfortable threshold again. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 7.28 percent this week, its highest level since November 2023, according to Freddie Mac. It was the sixth consecutive weekly increase, and the largest one-week jump in nearly four years.

Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images When Paramount Skydance completes its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery next week, the combined company will be called Skydance. CEO David Ellison announced the name on social media this morning, Oct. 2, and presented it as a way to keep the two legacy studios at the center of the company. “We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one,” he wrote.

Andy Jassy. Photo by Andrej Sokolow/picture alliance via Getty Images Andy Jassy has a lot riding on Alexa. On Amazon’s Q2 earnings call this summer, the CEO told investors that “everywhere Alexa goes, it drives momentum for the business,” and he had numbers to back it up. More than 350 million customers have used Alexa in the past 12 months, and in Q2, active users nearly doubled while interactions rose more than fivefold year-over-year.

A luxury watch might make a better sustainability case than most things in fashion. It’s small and usually produced in relatively modest numbers. A good one can spend decades on one wrist before being passed on to another, perhaps across generations.

Xander Soren, with a bottle of his winery’s new chardonnay. Shimane Michimasa I’m running late to meet Xander Soren for a wine tasting at Maison Healdsburg, but my tardiness turns out to be perfectly fine. While he waited, Soren struck up a conversation with a couple at the bar, poured them samples of his namesake label’s new chardonnay, and was happily conversing over tasting notes when I walked in.

Artists like Tom Friedman transform trash, corrosion and entropy into new forms of sustainability. Courtesy Lehmann Maupin Most of us try to be good individually and to do our best to make the world a little better even as we know it’ll never be enough. But when our individual efforts become part of collective action, good things can happen.

Larry Gagosian and Leo Castelli in 1999. Photo by Rose Hartman/Getty Images Twelve years ago, I opened a gallery on West Broadway. Everyone told me I’d fail. The space was too big. The neighborhood was too expensive. I had no experience. Passion and a dream, they said, can’t sustain a business. Turns out, they were right about the risks. They were wrong about the rest. Joseph Campbell said: follow your bliss, and doors will open where there were only walls. I took him at his word.