Arts news

• In Repatriation Ceremony in New York, 43 Antiquities Are Returned to Turkey

  23-12-2025 20:31 via artnews.com
  Reflecting growing pressure by New York prosecutors on museums and private collectors, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and an American collector have returned dozens of looted antiquities to Turkey. As reported by the New York Times, a repatriation ceremony was held in New York on December 8.The repatriations are connected to a years-long investigation into antiquities trafficking networks by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office’s Antiquities Tra
  
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• China Launches Probe Into Alleged Art-Theft Scheme at Nanjing Museum Involving a Former Director

  23-12-2025 20:28 via artnews.com
  Chinese officials have opened multiple investigations into allegations that staff at the state-run Nanjing Museum secretly removed cultural treasures from the collection and sold them on the open market—claims that have gone viral on social media and drawn comparisons to the recent Louvre heist.According to the South China Morning Post, the scandal surfaced after a 16th-century Ming dynasty painting, Spring in Jiangnan by Qiu Ying, appeared in a Beijing auction catalog this year
  
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• Paris’s Galerie 1900-2000 Has Closed Its New York Branch: ‘Business Was Quite Slow’

  23-12-2025 19:02 via artnews.com
  In a multi-year market slowdown, numerous galleries large and small have either gone out of business or retrenched. Galerie 1900-2000, founded in Paris, opened a New York branch on Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side in February 2023 as a joint venture with Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, but the Manhattan outpost is going dark. Its last exhibition closed in September.“We decided to close the gallery mainly because the business was quite slow even though we made some fan
  
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• Jessica Silverman Adds Rebecca Manson, Rubin Acquisitions, and More: Industry Moves for December 23, 2025

  23-12-2025 18:57 via artnews.com
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.Happy Tuesday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week.Industry Moves
  Jessica Silverman Adds Rebecca Manson to Roster: The New York–based sculptor, known for her large intensely tactile ceramics, will debut at the gallery with a solo exhibition in Janua
  
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• Rome Introduces Entry Fee to See Famous Trevi Fountain

  23-12-2025 18:19 via artnews.com
  Rome has unveiled its latest tactic to curb over-tourism: a €2 ($2.35) entrance fee for close-up access to the Trevi Fountain.The measure will take effect on February 1 and be enforced daily from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Rome Mayor Roberto Gualtieri announced on Friday. The iconic fountain will remain visible from a distance free of charge, but visitors seeking a closer view will be required to purchase a ticket. The Italian capital previously implemented restrictions around the 18th-century Baroq
  
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• Louvre Installs Bars on Notorious Window at Center of Art Heist

  23-12-2025 17:32 via artnews.com
  While the Louvre was closed on Tuesday, the museum continued beefing up its security, this time by installing bars on the window through which thieves entered the institution in October and stole bejeweled objects, most of which still have not yet been recovered.The window faces into a space in the Galerie d’Apollon. The thieves reached the window from the outside using a ladder, then applied power tools to slice through the glass and come into the gallery.After being denounced by politici
  
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• Stop Making Sense: 2025 Was the Year No One Could Figure Out the Art Market 

  23-12-2025 16:30 via artnews.com
  Time has become a strange and elastic thing in the post-Covid era. Since President Donald Trump reentered office on January 20, his administration has “flooded the zone” with executive orders, outlandish statements, and social media posts both aggressive and digressive. The cumulative result is a year in which each week has seemed to last, for some for an eternity.So, looking back on 2025, it is exceptionally challenging to boil down what happened in the art market. There were so man
  
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• MoMA Adds CryptoPunks and Chromie Squiggles to Its Collection, Becoming Latest Major Museum to Acquire Onchain Art

  23-12-2025 16:11 via artnews.com
  The Museum of Modern Art in New York has added eight CryptoPunks and eight Chromie Squiggles to its permanent collection. The acquisition, which comes via donations from multiple collectors, is the latest acquisition by a major museum of on-chain art and one of the medium’s most significant institutional endorsements to date.CryptoPunks are a collection of 10,000 unique, algorithmically generated 24×24 pixel characters on the Ethereum blockchain. They were launched by Larva Labs in 2
  
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• Digital Art’s Narcissism Problem, Sotheby’s to Host Second Saudi Auction, Smithsonian Returns 3 Statues to Cambodia: Morning Links for December 23, 2026

  23-12-2025 15:14 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The HeadlinesDIGITAL NARCISSISM. The Art Newspaper opines that this year’s edition of Art Basel Miami Beach exposed a problem in contemporary digital art: its entrenched culture of narcissism. Nowhere was this apparently clearer than in Zero 10, the fair’s new digital art initiative, which operated outside the usual safeguards of the art
  
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• In Memoriam 2025: Notable Artists, Dealers, Curators, and Collectors Who Died This Year

  23-12-2025 15:00 via artnews.com
  Each December, we remember the art-world figures we have lost in the past year. This year, our list includes the famous and the not-so-famous, insiders and outsiders, those who had long careers and those whose lives were cut tragically short. Below, a look back at some of the most notable artists, dealers, curators, art writers, and collectors who died in 2025.Read more of our “2025: Year in Review” coverage here.
  
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• Sotheby’s to Host Its Second Auction in Saudi Arabia in January and This Time Without Luxury Goods for Sale

  23-12-2025 12:02 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s has announced it will hold its second auction in Saudi Arabia on January 31. The house hosted the kingdom’s first international auction this past February, selling a mix of art, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia in the hyper-gentrified town of Diriyah, the original home of the Saudi royal family that is located a stone’s throw from the capital, Riyadh. Next year’s sale—titled “Origins II”—will be in the same location but only feature a
  
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• Sotheby’s to Host Its Second Auction in Saudi Arabia in January and This Time Only Art will Be Sold, No Luxury

  23-12-2025 12:02 via artnews.com
  Sotheby’s has announced it will hold its second auction in Saudi Arabia on January 31, 2026. The house hosted the kingdom’s first international auction in February, selling a mix of art, luxury goods, and sports memorabilia in the hyper-gentrified town of Diriyah, the original home of the Saudi royal family. It is located a stone’s throw from the capital, Riyadh. Next year’s sale—titled “Origins II”—will be in the same place and only feature art, t
  
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• The Best Digital Art of 2025, According to Curators, Artists, and Critics

  23-12-2025 12:00 via artnews.com
  Editor’s note: This story is an edition of Link Rot, a bi-weekly column by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei that explores the intersections of art, technology, and the internet.It’s the end of the year. You know what that means: a list. For this end-of-year edition of LinkRot, I asked artists, curators, gallerists, critics, and technologists to pick the best works of digital art they saw in 2025.The works chosen, like digital art itself, span a wide range of approaches and topics
  
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• Visionary Artist Tom Lloyd Deserves to Be Canonized. His Studio Museum Show Is Proof.

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  “We cannot be free until our art is free,” reads a flyer from the 1960s issued by the Arts Workers Coalition, an activist group whose protests helped reshape the New York art world. Remember that remark when you visit the Studio Museum in Harlem’s divine survey for Tom Lloyd, a member of the Coalition who spoke on similar terms with his art.Set inside a church-like space with a high ceiling, the Studio Museum’s one-room show is mainly devoted to Lloyd’s light sculpt
  
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• The Unhinged Degas Murder Mystery I Didn’t Know I Needed

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  The Artist has manic energy; everyone in this new TV series is yelling all the time. Even Edgar Degas. Even Thomas Edison. Even the robber baron and his wife and their live-in ballerina.This is art history at its most unhinged. But asking friends, “Have you seen The Artist on The Network?” has produced mostly furrowed-brow responses: this great TV show seems little-known at the moment, and the question is made enigmatic by its generic-sounding proper nouns. The final episodes air Dec
  
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• Our Most-Read Stories of 2025

  23-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Let’s face it: with writing, as with everything else, popularity doesn’t always align with one’s proudest work—particularly when algorithms get involved. Usually, it’s the most salacious, scandalous, or sexy that takess off online. But 2025 was a welcome exception. This year, our most-read stories suggest a strong interest in art history, in serious criticism—and to my surprise, in animal welfare—among our readers. I like to think that implies that art c
  
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