French President Emanuel Macron will visit the Louvre next week after the museum’s director warned in a leaked memo that a major renovation was needed to preserve the famous building and its art collection. President Macron’s visit is planned for Tuesday, when the Louvre is closed to the public, the presidency announced in a statement.

In a memo leaked to French media earlier this week, Laurence des Cars, the first woman to lead the institution, alerted French culture minister Rachida Dati of a “proliferation of damage in museum spaces, some of which are in very poor condition.” Des Cars added that some areas of the museum “are no longer watertight, while others experience significant temperature variations, endangering the preservation of artworks.”

A significant renovation of the museum was needed, she said, acknowledging that the five-year closure of the Centre Pompidou for its own overhaul, as well as the French government’s budget crisis, could be obstacles. The Louvre is state-owned and relies, in part, on the government to cover operating costs, including maintenance.

The most popular museum in the world, the Louvre reported that 8.7 million people visited its galleries in 2024. However, those crowds are causing “physical strain” on the 232-year-old building, des Cars warned, while visitors increasingly lack spaces “to take a break”.

“The food options and restroom facilities are insufficient in volume, falling well below international standards. The signage needs a complete redesign,” the memo reads. Even the museum’s most modern feature—the glass pyramid designed by Chinese American architect I. M. Pei and opened in 1989—was scrutinized for “major shortcomings”. According to Des Cars, the pyramid traps heat like a greenhouse, becoming “inhospitable”, and given its location, is sometimes noisy.

“Understudies,” a survey of work by Zambian-born, Johannesburg-based artist Nolan Oswald Dennis at the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, opens with an overture—or so I thought. I entered through a reading room containing an imposing vertical steel structure, a wall drawing rendered in graphite, and the artist’s studio notes: research drawings that would become their new body of work. The room was an example of what Dennis described in the exhibition text as “quietly sharing secret strategies of liberation through convoluted and non-linear forms.”

I later found out that this room was actually the end of the exhibition: I had seen the show in reverse. This false beginning nevertheless set the tone for me and felt fitting for an exhibition set on challenging and reimagining knowledge and structures that feel fixed, whether astronomy, land sovereignty, geological formations, or cartographic systems.

Dennis relinquishes some authorship (read: power) in the making of some works in “Understudies,” calling on museum workers at the Zeitz MOCAA to cocreate. The work Xenolith (Letsema), 2024, a large column made from lines of packed soil, is installed alongside the exposed hundred-year-old columns of the grain silo where the museum is built. Letsema, a Setswana word, speaks to the practice of voluntarily working together—a communal act typically applied to farming but extended to ways of organizing that took root during liberation struggles in Southern African countries. This collaborative work considers what images can emerge when labor is done collectively, and becomes a way to disorganize space and time—space, by reimagining the very structure of the museum, and time: the time of labor, and of geological deep time.

Space, time, and the mystifying yet ordinary ways they interact are recurring themes for Dennis, whose concurrent show, “overturns,” is on view at the Swiss Institute in New York through April. The most affecting work in “Understudies” is titled Superposition, 2024, after a principle of quantum mechanics: It describes how a physical system can be in more than one state at the same time. This immersive sonic room-size installation, boasting an infrasonic sound system consisting of a sub-bass speaker, LED unit, and sensors, is a techno-poetic reflection on our relationship to land, deep time, and planetary interconnection. The work uses acoustic compositions of seismic data documenting the earth’s vibrations collected by the Wits School of Geosciences in Johannesburg during the 2020 COVID lockdown. These sounds capture data about volcanoes, bombs, and earthquakes, but are played at frequencies beyond the threshold perceptible by the human ear. Superposition explores how we might learn to listen to the earth, attuning ourselves to the vibrations that pass through it; it also points to the limits of what we can know and perceive, and to the limits of data’s authority.

Indeed, the show often speaks corporeally as much as it does cognitively. Throughout the show, Fred Moten and Wu Tsang’s concept of gravitational feel rang loud in my mind. I kept thinking—nay, sensing—a kind of gravitational pull toward space and time, my body feeling its own mass, aware of its weight and the weight of time. Though maps, machines, data, and drawings fill the museum, they are arranged in installations that choreograph bodies. For instance, Izintaba (Hottentots-Holland), 2024, is a 12-minute immersive film featuring digital simulations of mountains, hills, and other elevations. Viewing the film, one is enveloped by it; the rocks seem to float toward you.

Sotheby’s revealed its 2024 earnings in a press call Thursday, with CEO Charles Stewart announcing $6 billion of consolidated sales against what he called “a clearly challenging market backdrop.” The figure was the highest in the industry for last year (in December, Christie’s reported $5.7 billion in sales for 2024), but still marked a 23 percent decline from 2023.

Sotheby’s had an especially difficult year. The house laid off dozens of employees in London and New York, and also did an embarrassing U-turn on its buyers’ fees less than a year after overhauling them. And that’s not even getting into the macro-economic environment wrought by multiple geopolitical conflicts, the US presidential election, and high interest rates. Still, Stewart told reporters Thursday that he remained optimistic.

“2025 is set to be a very exciting year for us,” he said, adding that the company has roughly $800 million of sales earmarked for the first few months of 2025, which would make it the most successful quarter in the house’s 281-year history. No pressure, then.

Thursday’s presser was about 2024, though, and Sotheby’s auction sales dropped by 28 percent last year to $4.6 billion. Fine art sales took the biggest hit, taking home just $3.8 billion, almost a third less than 2023. Stewart bemoaned the “discretionary sellers [who] stayed on the sidelines” and the “relative lack of large estates” that stemmed supply at the “high end of the secondary fine art and luxury markets.”

“I certainly can’t recall a year when there were such strong counter indicators in the market,” he said. “Whether it was high interest rates that were expected to come down, strong equity markets that seemed to defy gravity, election uncertainty in many countries—especially in the US and Europe—cyclical softness in China and other parts of Asia, and of course ongoing conflict in Ukraine and the Middle East. All of those factors contributed to a sense of overall uncertainty.”

During the call, Lisa Dennison, chairman of Sotheby’s North and South America, chipped in, saying “A+ material [still] generates A+ results,” pointing to David Hockney’s L’Arbois, Sainte-Maxime (1968), which sold at Sotheby’s London in October for over $17 million as an example. “While the volume of lots dropped across all houses, demand for masterpieces remains strong,” she said. “Indeed, when we offer the rarest and best in class objects with exceptional provenance, we see record prices and competitive bidding.”

Sotheby’s luxury sales meanwhile only shrank 4 percent to $2.2 billion, a hopeful sign as the house prepares to host the first international auction in Saudi Arabia next month. The Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, has a fast-growing luxury goods market and Stewart has said he is determined to turn the house into a globally recognized luxury brand beyond the art world. The sale in the historic town of Diriyah on the outskirts of Riyadh will coincide with Sotheby’s opening an office in Al Faisaliah Tower in the Saudi capital.

“Looking ahead, the horizon is bright,” Stewart said. “We’re venturing into new markets, unveiling spectacular venues around the globe, and welcoming a new generation of collectors to discover another world of art and luxury at Sotheby’s.”

Records for the auction house in 2024 were in short supply. Sotheby’s did, however, record an 85 percent sell-through rate across all categories—a house record. Luxury sales saw an 86 percent sell-through rate.

Compared to 2023, more people bid on lots worth more than $15 million last year. For lots that sold for over $10 million, Sotheby’s said double the proportion sold above their high estimate against 2023, with more bidders per lot as well.

The major positive in 2024 for the house was the growth of its private sales department, which grew by almost 20 percent to $1.4 billion, the second-highest total in Sotheby’s history.

“It’s a reminder, that in times of market uncertainty, clients often favor the discretion, price control, and flexible timing that private transactions offer,” Dennison said. “Blue-chip artists drove much of this sales momentum, with 20 percent of the total private sales value coming from works priced over $20 million.”

Dennison added that curated private selling exhibitions are an increasingly important element of this business and pointed to October’s show “London to Paris,” staged in both cities. For that show, the house focused on works priced over $2 million and held the exhibition during fair season in those cities, factors that David Rothschild, Sotheby’s Senior Specialist, Private Sales said pushed it to be Sotheby’s most valuable selling exhibition ever.

After six months of financial tumult and legal sparring, Price Tower, the only skyscraper designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, is finally changing hands. The 19-story structure in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, will be sold for $1.4 million following a Washington County Judge Russell Vaclaw’s ruling on January 21, Artnet News reported Friday.

The resolution compels the enforcement of a May 2023 contract between the current owners, Copper Tree and Green Copper Holdings, together known as Copper Entities, and Tulsa-based McFarlin Building Company.

The sale winds up a six month dispute. McFarlin had sought to block other potential buyers, arguing it had already agreed to acquire the property. Meanwhile, Copper Entities were burdened by debts estimated at $2 million. These include a $600,000 loan from a local businessman and $200,000 borrowed from individuals linked to Bartlesville’s tight-knit community and people connected to Cynthia Blanchard, Copper Entities’ president. The court will hold the funds pending creditor claims and other complications.

The building’s fixtures—some sold off in breach of preservation agreements—complicated matters further. Copper Entities began auctioning off furnishings last summer, citing financial pressures. A clause in McFarlin’s contract requires the sale to include all fixtures, including Wright-designed items such as copper relief panels and custom armchairs. The proceeds from any pre-sale transactions, ruled the judge, must either be refunded or deducted from the sale price.

Copper Entities declared bankruptcy two days after the ruling, potentially muddling the payout process. The tower itself, closed since August, has been without utilities during Oklahoma’s icy winter, adding urgency to the proceedings and allegedly putting the building at risk. Despite a January 16 court order and claims by McFarlin that they tried to have the utilities restored, the power has remained off—a detail that underscores the fraught state of the transaction.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, D.C. has stopped its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, following an executive order by President Donald Trump to end these programs on Monday.

“The National Gallery of Art has closed its office of belonging and inclusion and removed related language from our website,” a museum spokesman told the New York Times.

The executive order, signed shortly after inauguration on Monday, went so far as to describe DEI initiatives as “illegal and immoral.”

Four years ago, however, following Trump’s first term in office, the NGA rebranded for $820,000 around such initiatives, including redesigning its logo and signs. The museum put forth a new vision and mission statement in 2021 with a “focus on diversity, equity, access and inclusion throughout our work to diversify the stories we tell, the ways in which we tell them, and our staff.”

The effort highlighted a lack of diversity among NGA leadership and curatorial staff, which until that point had been nearly all white. The shift in ideology gave way to new hires, including the NGA’s first curator of African American art and a new chief curator, as well as diversified exhibitions showcasing more women and artists of color.

A Russian military officer and three Russian-appointed officials from occupied Crimea illegally removed more than 33,000 historical artifacts and artworks from two museums in the Ukrainian city Kherson in the fall of 2022, the Kyiv Independent reported Thursday, calling it the largest museum theft in Europe since World War II.

The looting was carried out while Russian forces were fleeing a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

A journalist working for the Kyiv Independent posed as a Russian television producer and investigator to identify local collaborators who helped Russian troops with the looting. Through the investigation, it was discovered that Russian officer and head of communications of the Russian Black Sea Fleet Dmitry Lipov, who served as the city’s commandant during the city’s occupation, secured the collections during the government-sanctioned removal and personally sealed the trucks transporting the stolen items.

Sergey Patrushev, who was appointed by Russian authorities to lead the museum department of the Crimean Ministry of Culture, moved paintings from the Kherson Art Museum to Crimea.

During the theft, two Russian-appointed directors of the Crimean museums, Tauric Chersonese, and the Museum of Defense of Sevastopol, Elena Morozova and Mikhail Smorodkin respectively, selected objects from the Kherson local history museum’s collection to be taken.

The National Portrait Gallery in London is facing scrutiny for putting on an exhibition centered on the photographic work of a donor whose family contributed £40 million (approx. $50 million) to a recent large-scale renovation that ended in 2023.

The exhibition is centered on the photography of Zoë Law, who had donated to the institution through a family foundation in the past. The show, titled “Legends,” features close to a hundred black-and-white portraits of prominent figures in art, fashion, and pop culture, including an image of British musicians Noel Gallagher and Princess Julia, both of which the museum acquired to its permanent collection. Other subjects include British writer Lemn Sissay and designer Ozwald Boateng.

The work, which is presented in the museum’s Studio Gallery and Spotlight Space, will close on March 2.

The photographer cofounded the Law Family Charitable Foundation with her former partner, British hedge fund manager Andrew Law. The organization was listed as a major donor to the museum’s renovation, according to a report published by The Guardian earlier this week.

Law stepped down from the foundation’s board in June 2024 following the couple’s separation.

Los Angeles’s Broad museum is facing two lawsuits, filed within less than a week of each other, that accuse the institution of discrimination and defamation, as well as failing to prevent retaliation against two workers.

The first suit was filed by the museum’s former HR director, Darron Rezell Walker, who claims in a legal filing that he was released from his role after failing to find cause to fire a facilities manager. Walker claims he was pressured by the museum’s former COO, Alysa Gerlach, to fire Rick Mitchell, 65, based on personal animosity, his age, and his race. Walker alleges that he was dismissed by Gerlach after failing to find cause for Mitchell’s termination following an investigation into his department.

The investigation was initiated after Mitchell asked for safety standards to be reviewed for his department, which included 37 people at the time of the internal dispute.

The second lawsuit, filed by Mitchell, accuses Gerlach of orchestrating his termination due to age and racial bias. Mitchell alleges that there was an internal investigation that was conducted by Walker and requested by Gerlach, and that no wrongdoing was discovered.

Mitchell goes on to allege that Gerlach violated the law by fabricating a reason for his firing. The suit claims that Gerlach committed defamation, allegedly by making false claims about Mitchell’s job performance, and that the museum failed to prevent retaliation against him.

All eyes are on the Smithsonian following the announcement that the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. would cancel its diversity, equity and inclusion programs in accordance with an executive order, signed by President Trump’s within hours of taking office, that eliminates all federally funded DEI initiatives. 

According to a memo of the United States Office of Personnel Management that was obtained by CBS and confirmed by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, federal employees in any DEI office were to be put on paid leave “no later than 5:00pm EST on Wednesday” while steps are taken “to close/end all DEIA initiatives, offices and programs.”

But the Smithsonian, which oversees 21 museums, including ones dedicated to American art, portraiture, and African American history and culture, has a unique structure. That means the decision to adhere to Trump’s freshly penned executive order isn’t so clear. 

According to the Congressional Research Service, the Smithsonian Institution is unlike other governmental bodies—it is “organizationally separate and distinct from the legislative, executive, or judicial branches of the national government.” Created by Congress in 1846, the Smithsonian Institution’s roots are in a bequest from James Smithson, an English scientist who died in 1829 and left his estate to the federal government. As a result the Smithsonian is a “trust instrumentality of the United States,” overseen by a Board of Regents with representation from all three branches of government. 

More importantly, only 53 percent of the Smithsonian’s funding comes from federal appropriations, according to the Institution’s 2023 annual report. The rest of the organization’s revenue comes from contributions and grants, business interests, and endowment payout. 

Two Winslow Homer paintings that were recently appraised on Antiques Roadshow have been auctioned by Christie’s during its 19th century American Art and Western Painting sales on January 23.

The watercolor paintings Boy and Girl at a Well (1879) and Boy and Girl on a Swing (1879) were consigned to the auction house and sold after being appraised on the popular PBS program. They were also added to the official catalogue raisonné for the artist after they were reviewed by expert Abigail Booth Gerdts, who wrote the entries for the catalogue.

Boy and Girl at a Well (1879) sold for $113,400, including fees, on an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000. Boy and Girl on a Swing (1879) sold for $75,600, also including fees, above an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000.

“This is such an exciting consignment because the works had never before been published,” Paige Kestenman, Christie’s Vice President and Senior Specialist of American Art, told ARTnews.

“The owners didn’t really even know what they had,” art advisor and dealer Betty Krulik explained to ARTnews.

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