Arts news

• Woeful Security At The Louvre (Including Its Passwords)

  07-11-2025 19:44
  
  Since the heist, information has resurfaced showing that gaps in security appear to have been known for years – including a 2014 warning that alleged one of the museum’s key passwords was simply “LOUVRE.” – CNN
  
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• Protests Arise as New York’s New School Threatens Severe Cuts to Staffing and Programs

  11-12-2025 22:55 via artnews.com
  As part of a radical “restructuring” to address a $48 million deficit, New York’s New School for Social Research is offering voluntary severance programs to a large group of faculty and staff. A December 3 email laying out the terms of the offer, which ARTnews has reviewed, went to 169 members of faculty and staff, including some forty percent of full-time faculty. The letter named a December 15 deadline to decide on whether to accept the offer.According to the American Associa
  
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• Christie’s to Sell Billionaire Bill Koch’s $50 M. Collection of American West Artworks

  11-12-2025 20:53 via artnews.com
  Christie’s announced Thursday that it will stage a single-owner sale of works owned by billionaire Bill Koch over two sessions on January 20 and January 21.The “Visions of the West” sale will feature dozerns of works owned by Koch, with a heavy emphasis on American artists who depicted the American West and the frontier. Frederic Remington, Charles Marion Russell, and Albert Bierstadt are among the artists whose works are to be sold from the collection.Koch, 85, is the lesser k
  
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• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Repatriates 2,500-Year-Old Treasures to Turkey

  11-12-2025 20:30 via artnews.com
  The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA) in Richmond has returned 41 terracotta relief fragments valued around $400,000 to Turkey after an investigation led by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. The works, acquired by the VMFA in the 1970s, were found to have been illegally taken from a Phrygian temple dating back to the 6th century B.C.E.The museum purchased 34 of the reliefs from Summa Galleries in Beverly Hills, California, in 1978, and the
  
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• Rijksmuseum and Municipality of Eindhoven Will Partner on a New Museum

  11-12-2025 20:22 via artnews.com
  The Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, announced today that it will partner with the municipality of Eindhoven to build a satellite branch in Eindhoven. The branch will show works from the Rijksmuseum’s collection.With a collection of over one million objects, the Rijksmuseum is famous for its holdings of Dutch art from 1200 to now, including works by Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, Judith Leyster, Frans Hals, Rachel Ruysch, Vincent van Gogh, Karel Appe
  
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• Ceal Floyer, Artist Whose Sculptures Bend the Mind and Confuse the Eye, Dies at 57

  11-12-2025 19:23 via artnews.com
  Ceal Floyer, an artist whose spare sculptures charmed and confused in equal measure, died on Thursday at 57. Esther Schipper, the Berlin-based gallery that represented her alongside Lisson and 303, said that she died after a long battle with illness.Floyer received international attention for sleek artworks that consider how meaning is constructed. Working within a long tradition of conceptual art that extends back to the 1960s, Floyer often made sculptures using familiar objects such as ladders
  
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• Post-Fair Expands for Its Second Edition With Broader International Reach

  11-12-2025 18:18 via artnews.com
  Post-Fair will return to Santa Monica from February 26–28 for its second edition, bringing 30 galleries—and 31 total exhibitors including the project space Untitled Love—back to the Art Deco former post office that helped define the fair’s early identity.Founded by Los Angeles dealer Chris Sharp, the fair debuted last year as a deliberately low-cost counterpoint to Los Angeles’s increasingly expensive fair landscape. Its inaugural edition offered single-artist prese
  
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• Paris’s Modern Art Museum Is the Proud New Owner of 61 Henri Matisse Works

  11-12-2025 18:15 via artnews.com
  When the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris mounted the exhibition “Matisse and Marguerite: Through Her Father’s Eyes,” the world took note, with feature articles in the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal recounting the life of his eldest daughter, conceived in an affair with one of his models, Caroline Jaoblau. When the show closed over the summer, Barbara Dauphin Duthuit, the wife of Henri Matisse’s grandson, opted to give the museum the 61 works she had l
  
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• UK Police Seek Suspects in “High-Value Burglary” at Bristol Museum

  11-12-2025 18:14 via artnews.com
  More than 600 artifacts have been stolen from the Bristol Museum’s British Empire and Commonwealth collection, in what UK police describe as a “high-value burglary.”On Thursday, authorities released CCTV footage of the suspects as part of a public appeal for leads on the robbery, which occurred in the morning hours of September 25. A police spokesperson said that information on the theft had been withheld until now to accommodate the investigation.The BBC reported that mil
  
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• Vancouver Art Gallery and Modern Art Museum in Paris Receive Major Gift, Rare Illuminated Jewish Prayer Book Heads to Auction, and More: Morning Links for December 11, 2025

  11-12-2025 16:29 via artnews.com
  To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.The Headlines GIVING TIME. A few notable museums have just announced landmark donations to their permanent collections. The Vancouver Art Gallery has received a “transformative” gift of 131 artworks from an anonymous Hong Kong collector, reports the South China Morning Post. The donated, “living” collection, meaning that new works can
  
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• A Searing Petition Protests Serbia’s Venice Biennale Pick, Calls Out the ‘Collapse of Culture’

  11-12-2025 16:11 via artnews.com
  It seems the US is not the only country whose Venice Biennale pick is stirring up discontent in the arts community back home. Prague-based artist Predrag Đaković was tapped to represent Serbia at the 2026 Venice Biennale with a project titled “Across Golgotha to Resurrection.” Serbia’s Ministry of Culture reportedly announced the competition on its website on September 6, with a one-month deadline, but did not announce Đaković’s win. Instead,
  
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• Gagosian to Stage Survey of Jasper Johns’s Crosshatch Paintings in New York

  11-12-2025 14:00 via artnews.com
  Half a century after Jasper Johns first unveiled his crosshatched paintings at Leo Castelli Gallery, the series is returning to center stage. On January 22, 2026, Gagosian, working with Castelli Gallery, will open a landmark survey of these works at its longtime 980 Madison Avenue flagship, where the exhibition will remain on view through March 14. The show marks the 50th anniversary of the crosshatched paintings’ debut in 1976 and nods to another historical hinge: Gagosian inaugurated the
  
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• Using AI and Abstract Paintings, WangShui Is on a Journey to Understand Love

  11-12-2025 11:00 via artnews.com
  Artists who work with technology are typically viewed as nerds sequestered in studios filled with hardware, gadgetry, and complex wiring. But WangShui, an artist who made their name on innovative abstract paintings made with the assistance of AI, positions themself less as a geek than a hermit with a romantic worldview. “To me, being an artist is a spiritual project, and it always has been, no matter what tools I’ve used,” they told me during a visit to their New York studio ea
  
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• Tom Jung’s 1977 ‘Star Wars’ Painting Fetches $3.9 M., Breaking Auction Record for the Franchise

  10-12-2025 23:44 via artnews.com
  At a Heritage Auctions sale of Hollywood memorabilia in Dallas on Wednesday, a Star Wars painting sold for $3.88 million, breaking the record for an object associated with the series.The work, a painting by illustrator Tom Jung, served as the original half-sheet poster for Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope when it was first released in 1977. The work was consigned by the family of the film’s producer Gary Kurtz, who has owned it since it was first produced by Jung.The work first app
  
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• Consultants’ Gulf Gold Rush, South Arts New CEO and More: Industry Moves for December 10, 2025

  10-12-2025 21:31 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 Thursday! Here’s a round-up of who’s moving and shaking in the art trade this week:South Arts Names Doug Shipman as Next President and CEO: Shipman will depart his post as Atlanta’s City Council president to take the helm of the regional arts nonprofit in January, overseeing
  
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• Sotheby’s Nets $133 M. from Abu Dhabi Collectors’ Week as Its Luxury Prospecting Strikes Gold

  10-12-2025 21:27 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.Last week, Sotheby’s took over the ritzy St. Regis Island Resort on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, transforming two of its restaurants into showrooms—one touting handbags, diamonds, and watches, the other staging a non-selling display of $500 million worth of art. In the palm-shaded gard
  
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• Louvre Thieves Evaded Police by a ‘Hair’s Breadth,’ Says Investigator

  10-12-2025 20:11 via artnews.com
  The thieves who stole jewelry from the Louvre evaded capture in October “by a hair’s breadth,” a senior official from the administrative inquiry into the museum’s security failings told the French Senate on Wednesday, as reported by Le Figaro.Noël Corbin, director of the General Inspectorate of Cultural Affairs (IGAC), noted that Louvre agents or the police had a chance to prevent their escape. Another rapporteur for the investigation, Pascal
  
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• Lalanne’s ‘Hippopotame Bar’ Sells for $31.4 M., Shattering Design Auction Record

  10-12-2025 20:05 via artnews.com
  François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar sold today for a staggering $31.4 million at Sotheby’s in New York, shattering every precedent in the market for design and setting a new auction record for the artist by a wide margin. Estimated at $7 million–$10 million, the hand-wrought copper bar more than tripled its high estimate after a 26-minute bidding contest among seven bidders.Not only does the result confirm Lalanne’s commercial star power, it also re
  
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• Now’s Your Chance to Snag a $1.12 M. Picasso for Just $115 in a Global Raffle for Alzheimer’s Research

  10-12-2025 19:57 via artnews.com
  You might associate raffles with pretty low stakes: pitch in a few dollars for the Girl Scouts, say, and win a chance for something like a gift card or a spa day. But now aspiring art collectors can donate just €100 (about $115) to a raffle organized by France’s Fondation Recherche Alzheimer and win the chance to take home a Pablo Picasso valued at €1 million ($1.2 million).Entrants can buy one of 120,000 tickets at the site 1picasso100euros; the draw will take place April 14, 20
  
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• Now’s Your Chance to Snag a €1 M. Picasso for Just €100 in a Global Raffle for Alzheimer’s Research

  10-12-2025 19:57 via artnews.com
  You might associate raffles with pretty low stakes: pitch in a few dollars for the Girl Scouts, say, and win a chance for something like a gift card or a spa day. But now aspiring art collectors can donate just €100 (about $115) to a raffle organized by France’s Fondation Recherche Alzheimer and win the chance to take home a Pablo Picasso valued at €1 million ($1.2 million).Entrants can buy one of 120,000 tickets at the site 1picasso100euros; the draw will take place April 14, 20
  
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• Yokohama Triennale Announces Co-Artistic Directors for 2027 Edition

  10-12-2025 19:54 via artnews.com
  Japan’s Yokohama Triennale has announced Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero as co-artistic directors for its 9th edition, set to open at the Yokohama Museum of Art on April 23, 2027. Costinaș, from Romania, is a writer and critic. He is a senior curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, an art center in Berlin; at the end of the year, he will transition from his current role and become a curatorial adviser to the museum. Guerrero, from Bogotá, is a professor in the School of C
  
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• The New Mexico Desert That Inspired Georgia O’Keeffe Is Now a Protected Zone

  10-12-2025 18:50 via artnews.com
  A conservation plan is underway to safeguard the spectacular stretch of New Mexico desert that inspired some of Georgia O’Keeffe’s most enduring artworks. The initial phase establishes a protected area spanning some 26 square kilometers near Abiquiu, in northern New Mexico, encompassing the sandstone bluffs and grasslands familiar to fans of the modernist artist. The land is owned by a charitable arm of the Presbyterian Church, which partnered with the New Mexico Land Conservanc
  
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• San Francisco Asian Art Museum Returns Stolen Ancient Sculptures to Thailand

  10-12-2025 18:45 via artnews.com
  After years of research revealed they had been illegally removed in the 1960s, four ancient bronze sculptures were transferred from San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum to their original home in Thailand as a result of an investigation led by the US Department of Homeland Security.The works, most recently featured in the 2024 exhibition “Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities,” were connected to Douglas Latchford, a dealer indicted for illegally trafficking in S
  
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• ‘Nnena Kalu was ready for this – nobody else was’: how her Turner prize victory shook the art world

  10-12-2025 18:22
  As the first learning-disabled artist to win the UK’s most prestigious art award, Kalu has smashed a ‘very stubborn glass ceiling’. Her facilitator reveals why her victory is so seismic – and the secrets of her party playlistThe morning after the Turner prize ceremony, the winner of the UK’s most prestigious art award, Nnena Kalu, is eating toast and drinking a strong cup of tea. Everyone around her is beaming – only a little the worse for wear after dancing t
  
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• Ximena Garrido-Lecca Wins Miami Beach Legacy Purchase as City Highlights Year-Round Cultural Role

  10-12-2025 17:58 via artnews.com
  Now that the art world has finally caught its breath after a sun- and champagne-soaked Miami Art Week, it’s worth remembering that Miami Beach does more than host the annual influx of collectors, artists, and fashion pilgrims. The city is also an active cultural player in its own right—not just during the fairs, but throughout the year.Last week, that role sharpened into view with the announcement of the 2025 Legacy Purchase Program winner, the city’s headline public-art a
  
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• Yves Bouvier Seeks US Discovery to Track 91 Artworks in New Twist to Long-Running Feud

  10-12-2025 17:54 via artnews.com
  After Sotheby’s was cleared of any wrongdoing in the Yves Bouvier affair last year, the art world thought it had finally thumbed through the final chapter. But no story in this business ever truly ends. And like Hollywood’s penchant for remakes and sequels, the saga is gearing up for yet another installment: the Swiss art dealer has now filed a sweeping petition in US federal court to track down 91 artworks he claims are rightfully his.Bouvier’s filing—known as a Section
  
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• Zohran Mamdani’s Favorite Museum in New York Is ‘Our Subway System’

  10-12-2025 17:48 via artnews.com
  New York has one of the richest art museum ecosystems in the world, with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum all located within the same borough—and that’s to say nothing of the Brooklyn Museum, the Queens Museum, the Bronx Museum, and many other institutions that make this city’s art world go round. But according to Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s Mayor-elect, the best museum is none of these. Instead, it’s “our su
  
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• Who Was Auguste Rodin and Why Was His Sculpture So Radical?

  10-12-2025 17:04 via artnews.com
  Aside from Michelangelo, there’s no artist as synonymous with sculpture as Auguste Rodin (1840–1917). He created an art-historical icon—The Thinker—that rivals Leonardo’s Mona Lisa for pop-cultural fame. But more than this, he set sculpture on its path toward modernism, breaking with the mythological themes and neoclassical refinement endorsed by the French Academy and revolutionizing the medium, imbuing it with raw emotional expression.Rodin’s approach was a
  
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• Napoles Marty Wins Frieze LA’s $25,000 Impact Prize

  10-12-2025 16:00 via artnews.com
  Frieze Los Angeles has awarded its 2026 Impact Prize to artist Napoles Marty, whose work will now be featured in the upcoming fair, scheduled to run February 26–March 1.The annual award, now in its fifth year, is given to an emerging artist and a nonprofit and comes with a solo booth at Frieze LA as well as a $25,000 prize for the artist.This year’s iteration of the Impact Prize was awarded in partnership with NXTHVN, the artist residency program in New Haven, Connecticut, that was f
  
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• A tribute to resilience: what we can learn from the splendour of Accra Cultural Week

  10-12-2025 15:46
  Ghana’s capital is a party and entertainment hub but members of the diaspora would do well to experience its spectacular art scene• Don’t get The Long Wave delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereAfter more than 50 editions surfing across the waves of the global Black diaspora with Nesrine, this will be my final dispatch for the Long Wave, as I move on to a new role on the Opinion desk at the Guardian. I am heartbroken to be leaving, but I am so thankful to all of our readers for b
  
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