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Right for America, a super PAC financed by a handful of billionaires that supports Donald Trump, recently released an ad that promotes Trump’s various tax proposals and celebrates American workers, particularly those who put in overtime. It’s full of photos and videos supposedly showing overtime workers—the “hardest working citizens in our country”—including a welder, a truck driver, and a hospital worker. Yet many of these shots are stock footage or photos of workers in foreign countries, and the ad is misleading overall, leaving out Trump’s past opposition to compensating employees who work overtime.

The 30-second spot, which is being aired in swing states, hails Trump’s vow to end taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime pay. Not surprisingly, it avoids fundamental facts about these proposals. Budget experts have pointed out that eliminating taxes on Social Security would lead to Social Security and Medicare becoming insolvent earlier than what’s now forecast and increase the national deficit by $1.1 trillion over 10 years. Suspending the tax on overtime would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade. Ending taxes on tips is not likely to help most workers who depend on tips—many are low-income earners who don’t pay much in taxes—and could cause an assortment of problems.

There are two ridiculous aspects to the ad: The depiction of Trump as a champion of overtime workers and its incorporation of images of non-American workers. When Trump was president, his administration cut back a rule proposed by the Obama administration to compel businesses to provide overtime compensation to about 4.1 million workers. The Trump Labor Department rule covered only 1.3 million, screwing nearly 3 million American workers. The business community had fought fiercely against the Obama proposal, and Trump came to its rescue. As ABC News put it in a headline, “New overtime rules a ‘win for corporate executives,’ economists say.”

And as a businessman, Trump has been no champion of overtime workers. At a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, last month, Trump discussed his experience as a businessman with overtime. “I know a lot about overtime,” he said. “I hated to give overtime.” He recalled that he would employ new workers to replace those who were supposed to work overtime. “I shouldn’t say this,” he added, “but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay. I hated it.”

On Wednesday morning, the first VIPs queuing up outside the Grand Palais for Art Basel Paris were bathed in sunshine. Inside the historic, glass-covered exhibition hall it was like a greenhouse – hot and sweaty – as the mercury flirted with 80 degrees Fahrenheit. By Thursday afternoon, though, the 124-year-old building was taking on water as heavy rain battered Paris. Several galleries moved fast to prevent the leaks from damaging their paintings.

Art Basel said in a statement that it had called in extra art handlers to help the affected exhibitors protect their inventories. “Due to heavy rainfall on the afternoon of Thursday 17 October, several water leaks were reported on the show floor under the nave of the Grand Palais,” a fair spokesperson said. “The Grand Palais’s historic glass roof is prone to minimal leaks in situations of extreme rain. We remain in constant contact with the GrandPalaisRmn, the organisation responsible for the venue, who are determining possible actions. Since the morning of Friday 18 October, roofers are inspecting the Grand Palais’s roof structure to address the situation.”

Lisson, which has spaces in London, New York, Beijing, Shanghai, and LA, was one of the galleries that got wet. “Our booth was affected by rainwater leaking from the ceiling of the Grand Palais and we needed to re-hang some works,” a Lisson spokesperson told The Art Newspaper. The gallery’s display includes works by Olga de Amaral – titled Viento Oro and Nudo 23 (plata 5) (both 2014) – which sold on Wednesday for $800,000 and $400,000 respectively.

No serious damage has been reported to any artworks at Art Basel Paris. The galleries showing on the fair’s top level, which are generally focused on emerging artists, dodged the leaks.

The Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), the company that runs the Grand Palais, said in a statement: “On the morning of Friday 18 October, rope access technicians were dispatched to the glass roof to identify and repair the anomalies.”

From 2020 to 2024, the huge building was closed while it underwent a $500 million upgrade, which is why Art Basel Paris was forced to wait until its third edition to use the venue.

The Art Basel spokesperson added that “the current severe weather conditions in Paris have led to water ingress in several historic buildings across the city.”

With Art Basel Paris having firmly cemented its place in the French art calendar, museums have smartly begun saving their best exhibitions for the mid-October opening slots. That means there’s much to see around town, and for those here for only a few days, it can feel impossible to hit up all of these shows. It doesn’t help, either, that some of the more high-profile shows contain hundreds of works each.

This is a different situation than what happens when other Art Basel fairs take place. In Basel and Hong Kong, there are fewer museums. In Miami Beach, the exhibitions are typically vanity projects, so they aren’t worth regarding. But in Paris, the exhibitions are much richer.

There are eat-your-vegetables art historical surveys and exhibitions for rising and mid-career international talents alike. There are even off-kilter experimental shows that make you think. Below, a look at a few of some of Paris’s most buzzy exhibitions.

This week, soon after his 100th birthday, former President Jimmy Carter was able to vote in his home state of Georgia—in part thanks to protections under the Voting Rights Act. As his grandson Jason Carter explained in a CNN interview with Jake Tapper, voting assistance protections in Georgia allow family members to help cast absentee ballots (the vote can still be discarded if a signature or mark on the ballot does not match what is on file, per Georgia law).

“He sat down and told everybody what he wanted to do, and was excited about it,” Jason Carter told Tapper. “My aunt dropped his ballot [at] an absentee drop box, just like thousands and thousands of other Georgians.”

Jimmy Carter just voted. His grandson explains how. pic.twitter.com/Ax1Ulvt9RR

Even if Carter doesn’t consider himself disabled, many aging people benefit from disability rights laws and protections. Section 208 of the Voting Rights Act guarantees that “any voter who requires assistance to vote by reason of blindness, disability, or inability to read or write may be given assistance by a person of the voter’s choice.”

The art world is still flush from Paris fever, with international galleries vying for a foothold in the City of Light, particularly since Brexit in 2016 and the arrival of Art Basel Paris three years ago. Now added to this week’s fete are several new satellite fairs and expanded, hybrid selling exhibitions.

From Thursday to Sunday, the US-based New Art Dealer’s Alliance is partnering with local artist-run organization The Community for “Salon by NADA and The Community.” The hybrid, must-see selling exhibition OFFSCREEN has expanded, welcoming Marian Goodman gallery for the first time with a special Chantal Ackerman project, and the Place des Vosges in the Maris is hosting an informal grouping of eight pop-up galleries, including Chris Sharp Gallery, and Corbet vs. Dempsey, to name a few. Not to be forgotten, the mainstay Paris Internationale fair is celebrating a decade since its founding.

With so many events over such a densely-packed week, comes the inevitable question of whether the Paris pie is big enough to go around. Yet from what ARTnews has been hearing, for now, the answer is a resounding, yes.

“I absolutely think there’s room for all of it,” Lowell Pettit, a New York-based art advisor at the Association of Professional Art Advisors told ARTnews. “If the economics are there, from the point of view of our responsibility to our clients, it’s required reading” to attend just about every satellite event. “It’s fascinating the number of different options and experiences … It just means more voices, more artists and more venues in which to experience art.”

Galleries too, are eager. Silvia Ammon, director of Paris Internationale, told ARTnews she has never received so many requests to join the fair—400 applications for 75 spots. This, despite smaller and midsized galleries struggling amid ever rising operating costs and a down market. “It’s been a really difficult year for the whole art market, and young galleries in particular, but I had no withdrawals. I feel a very strong desire to be in Paris and for this week in October,” she said.

Editor’s Note: This conversation between Cindy Sherman and Miranda July was originally realized for #37 Miranda July: New Society, part of the Quaderni series published by Fondazione Prada. That publication was published to coincide with the exhibition “Miranda July: New Society,” currently on view at Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan until October 28. With permission, ARTnews is republishing that piece in its entirety here.

Cindy Sherman: Tell me about the new videos. What is behind them?

Miranda July: Well, I was writing this book, All Fours (2024), and I would occasionally get up and dance in my office, partly because it got uncomfortable sitting in a chair for four years and partly because there is dance in the book. I would sometimes post the dances on Instagram, which eventually created this dancer persona that I was not totally comfortable with, honestly. Meanwhile, my marriage and family were changing. I created an acronym for the word ‘family’: ‘Falling Apart Meanwhile I Love You.’ And then, at the start of 2023, Apple released an iPhone update that included a cutout tool, where you press on a person in a picture, and the tool cuts an outline out around their body so you can drag or drop them somewhere else.

Sherman: Oh, yes. I saw that.

July: I remember thinking, “Why now? Why have we been given this tool now? Did this come out of the pandemic, people not being able to physically be with each other? And what else can be done with it?” I formed this research group to explore bringing people into a space with me, using this tool. I put out a casting call on Instagram, and hundreds of people sent their pictures.

Vincent van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) has been picked up by the Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands.

According to the Art Newspaper, the museum bought the 1885 painting from London-based art dealer and collector Daniel Katz, who has been revealed as the buyer for the work when it appeared at Christie’s auction last year. The Noordbrabants Museum reportedly paid €8.6 million ($9.34 million) for the portrait of the peasant woman, making it among the most expensive van Gogh pictures ever bought by an institution. 

Katz bought the work at Christie’s 20th/21st century evening sale in London back in February of last year. At the time, the work had an estimate of £1 million–£2 million ($1.3 million–$2.6 million). Prior to the sale the picture had been in the same family collection for 120 years. 

The Noordbrabants was among the bidders that evening, but had to drop out when things got serious, leaving Katz with the final prize for 4.8 million and change (around $6.3 million). 

Katz, who is also a dealer, bought the work for his private collection. A few months later, he acquired the original frame which had been replaced for the evening sale. That summer the Noordbrabants director Jacqueline Grandjean and its curator, Helewise Berger, approached Katz asking if he would consider parting with his freshly bought van Gogh. He passed, but agreed to a loan. The picture went on view at the Noordbrabants in January. 

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, closed and then reopened an exhibition that unpacked the concept of the cowboy, critiquing it through the lens of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.

That exhibition, formally titled “Cowboy,” aspired to “disrupt the homogenous ideal of the cowboy as a White, cisgender American male,” per its release. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, which first mounted it last September, the exhibition features a range of Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and queer artists.

Among those artists are Ana Segovia, a current participant in the Venice Biennale whose work in this show queers the charro archetype; Deana Lawson, a photographer who is here presenting images of Black cowboys; and Mel Chin, who is showing a saddle formed of barbed wire as a statement on “the Catholic colonization of Texas,” per a description on his website.

Many of these works stand in stark opposition to what is housed in the museum’s permanent collection, which is rich in 19th-century paintings of the American West by artists such as Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. These artists frequently portrayed cowboys as white males who triumph over the nature and Native American people of the region.

According to the Fort Worth Report, which first reported the news, “Cowboy” opened as planned at the Amon Carter Museum on September 28 and had closed by October 11. It is now open again, with one addition: a label that warns of “mature content.” Viewers are now invited to preview works in the show before entering by accessing them via a QR code.

In his 1967 article “Notes for Guerrilla Warfare,” the art critic Germano Celant (1940–2020) coined the term “Arte Povera,” describing the movement as full of revolutionary potential. Championing artists like Giovanni Anselmo, Jannis Kounellis, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, he showed how their work rejected the capitalist system of production and consumption. By embracing unconventional ephemeral forms and materials—cardboard, wood, newspaper, and cubes of earth—these artists broke free from the confines of the art market, along the way critiquing the consumerism that had taken hold of postwar Italy.

In contrast, the exhibition “Arte Povera” at the Bourse de Commerce | Pinault Collection in Paris, assembling more than 250 works, one-third of them drawn from the collection of François-Henri Pinault—France’s third-richest man—argues, in both the exhibition literature in a tour for the press, that the Italian post-minimal movement was concerned with energy flows and with the connection between humanity and nature, that it focused on material and experiential practices for their own sake. To be sure, these are key aspects of Arte Povera. Still, this exhibition omits much of the political and social context that defined the movement and postwar Italy more broadly.

Arte Povera responded directly to Italy’s postwar economic boom, aided by the US Marshall Plan. During that time, northern cities like Turin and Milan industrialized rapidly, leading to mass migration from the south. By the late 1960s, Cold War tensions were escalating, and the Italian Communist Party was gaining significant political influence, earning 12.6 million votes in the 1976 general election. During these “Years of Lead” (late 1960s–late ’80s), terrorist paramilitary groups—some covertly supported by the NATO project Gladio—battled police, bombed train stations, and even murdered the Christian Democrat President Aldo Moro.

Meanwhile, the United States’ economic and cultural postwar dominance grew. In 1964 Robert Rauschenberg won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion, the world’s most prestigious art award, granted on Italy’s home turf. Arte Povera was in this context a grassroots reaction to art imported, along with Marshall Plan aid and the American way of life, and actively promoted by the CIA. None of this is mentioned in the Parisian show. Arte Povera artists sought not only to create an art of primordial energies, they were also critiquing the crude gestures of Abstract Expressionism, the slick consumerism of Pop, and the stodgy rigidity of Minimalism and Socialist Realism.

This double character of Arte Povera—artistic innovation intertwined with political critique—is visible in the artworks, even if the curators underplay it. In the vestibule, Marisa Merz’s untitled fountain from 1997 spews water from a wax violin placed at the center of a lead basin. To the Pinault Collection’s credit, Marisa occupies space equal to her male counterparts here, after long being overshadowed in the history of Arte Povera by her husband, Mario.