Hungary Axes SANAA-Designed National Gallery, Basel Social Club to Launch Tokyo Event, and More: Morning Links for September 9, 2026

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Good Morning!

• Hungary’s new government has nixed plans to build a SANAA-designed National Gallery in Budapest. 
• Basel Social Club is launching Tokyo Jazz Club in November. 
• Greece rejected a request from Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection to borrow Parthenon marbles because of the British Museum’s participation.

The Headlines

NO PLACE TO CALL HOME. Hungary’s new government has pulled the plug on a $320 million SANAA-designed National Gallery in Budapest, reports The Art Newspaper. The museum project, located in the city’s Városliget City Park development, home to several new cultural institutions, would have hosted the country’s national collection, which is currently housed in a castle whose structure is not “viable long-term.” While the planned 538,200 square-foot museum had experienced delays and some opposition from environmental groups, it was slowly moving forward until June 18, when Hungary’s new government officially abandoned the project. Instead, its remaining building sites will be made into public parkland. For now, the future location of the national collection remains undecided, and the project’s backers are hopeful that the museum design by Japan’s SANAA architects will see the light of day in another location.

TOKYO-BOUND. Basel Social Club is launching a new project in Tokyo reports Artribune. Dubbed Tokyo Jazz Club, the new event featuring a hybrid of visual arts, music, and gastronomy, will debut in November’s Art Week Tokyo. This first edition, held from November 1–8, will be located in Tokyo’s Jimbocho district, and will pay homage to local jazz history. “The city maintains an extraordinary tension between tradition and experimentation, from its long musical history, its rituals, and its exceptional craftsmanship to its ability to embrace the most original and unconventional forms of expression,” said Basel Social Club founder Robbie Fitzpatrick.

The Digest

Greece has rejected a request from Frankfurt’s Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection to borrow Parthenon marbles housed in the Acropolis Museum, because of the British Museum’s participation in the same exhibition, which will piece together key parts of the temple for the first time. [The Art Newspaper]

Peter Simon, founder of boho-chic retailer chains Monsoon and Accessorize, is selling the bulk of his art collection, including works by Francis Bacon and Bridget Riley, because he “want[s] to live with blank walls for a while,” before collecting new and emerging artists. [The Financial Times]

Philippe Parreno’s iconic Iceman in Reality Park (1995–2023) will make its New York debut at Esther Schipper’s first booth at the Independent 20th Century fair later this month. [ARTnews]

Why has the White House Historical Association, a nonprofit whose mission is to preserve the building, stayed so quiet as President Trump continues his remodeling of it? [The Washington Post]

Archaeologists working near Rome’s Colosseum believe they have discovered the largest Roman wall mosaic ever found, and they are still excavating to find where the 1st-century CE masterpiece ends. [Times of London]

The Kicker

RENOIR’S WORST CRITICS. When thieves made off with two paintings yesterday by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but decided to leave two behind in yet another museum heist, were they in fact expressing one of the harshest forms of art criticism imaginable? Critic Eddy Frankel thinks so, albeit all in good-humored fun, for a piece in the Guardian that has quite a few laugh-out-loud—or at least guffaw-out-loud—moments. As far as fans of Renoir’s oeuvre go, Frankel doesn’t count himself among them. “Why would anyone bother stealing a Renoir?” Runs the essay headline, which also lists Renoir’s many haters, including the aptly named “Renoir Sucks at Painting” group, lest anyone have any doubts, which has made it their business to protest the artist’s exhibitions in the past, and even sell “anti-Renoir” t-shirts. Frankel, like many in the art world, has to agree. Why? “Kitsch and chintziness. His work is soft focus and gentle, his figures are plump and joyful, it’s all happy haze and night-time revelry… He is the safest of the group [of Impressionists], the chocolate boxiest, the easiest, the horniest.” He concludes: “In all my years as an art critic, I’ve never managed a piece of criticism as incisive, cutting and direct as a bunch of criminals looking at a painting that they’d already nicked and thinking ‘leave it – it’s not worth it.’”