Podcast | What happens when Unesco becomes the enemy?

This week: the latest controversies prompted by the Unesco World Heritage Committee. As we mentioned last week, the 45th session of the committee is taking place in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, and continues until 25 September. The founder of The Art Newspaper, Anna Somers Cocks, joins host Ben Luke to look at the latest sites granted World Heritage status and at the Committee’s decision not to add Venice to the organisation’s endangered list. We ask: is Unesco so mired in politics that it cannot adequately perform its role? Artist Fernando Botero during a 2007 exhibition of his sculptures in Berlin Photo: Rainer Jensen. dpa picture alliance archive / Alamy Stock PhotoThe Colombian artist Fernando Botero died last week, aged 91, and we talk to the gallerist Stéphane Custot, of Waddington Custot galleries in London, about this painter and sculptor who drew ire from many critics but achieved widespread public acclaim. Barkley L. Hendricks’s October’s Gone . . . Goodnight (1973) Credit: Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Cambridge; Richard Norton Memorial FundAnd this episode’s Work of the Week is October’s Gone . . . Goodnight (1973) by Barkley L. Hendricks. As a group of paintings by Hendricks goes on display among the masters at Frick Madison in New York, Aimee Ng, co-curator of the exhibition, tells us about the painting.• Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, Frick Madison, New York, until 7 January 2024.