President Donald Trump made his final public appearance before the midterms at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., turning the hour-long speech into an extended meditation on his own building projects. The Associated Press described the appearance as an unusual closing argument for a party seeking to keep control of Congress, with the president's approval rating near career lows.

Trump lingered over the saga of his Reflecting Pool renovation, using visual aids to show the transformation of the landmark. He returned to his familiar praise of Corinthian columns, calling them the most beautiful in the world, and promised voters he would complete his Triumphal Arch and Garden of American Heroes, with sculptures by the greatest artists in the world. Art and architecture, in other words, became the vehicle for his closing pitch.

Elsewhere in the art world, the week's conversation turned to a different question: why is there so little anti-war art at a time of era-defining conflicts? Writing in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Julia Halperin noted recent exceptions, including Miles Greenberg, Nicole Eisenman and Dean Majd, but the overall picture was bleak. Tom Finkelpearl, the former head of New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs, told her that people are afraid, and that galleries feel unable to show such work while museums worry about funding.

The art press itself was also in the spotlight. Former Artforum web editor Travis Jeppesen, who left the magazine last year, published a 13,500-word essay in Tablet revisiting the publication's controversies, including claims of corporate interference in coverage of political art and sharp criticism of former editor-in-chief Tina Rivers Ryan. And in the New York Times, Scott Reyburn drew attention to Lauren Leek's essay arguing that algorithmic discovery is making culture look increasingly alike, with around a fifth of what audiences are served needing to be deliberately left un-optimised to prevent the slide into sameness.