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Tickets to see the Bayeux Tapestry when it goes on view at the British Museum this fall sold out in just over 24 hours this week, reports the Telegraph . The museum said it was the biggest day of ticket sales in its history. Depicting the Norman conquest of England 1066 and made there in the 1070s, the Bayeux Tapestry (technically an embroidery) is an astonishing 230 feet long and, according to the British Museum, features 58 detailed scenes, each rendered in colored wool on flax. On loan from the Bayeux Museum in Normandy, it will be displayed at the British Museum from September 10, 2026, to July 11, 2027, the first time in its nearly 1000-year history the work has been publicly exhibited on British soil. Tickets for period September to December went on sale to the public on Wednesday, July 1, at 10:00am BST; by mid-afternoon, 80,000 people had joined an online queue that at one point had a wait time of up to nine hours long.  By the following day, ...

The discovery of lead during renovation work at Paris’s historic Palais Garnier—opened in 1875 and summoned as inspiration for Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera (and even more famously for Andrew Lloyd Weber’s musical adaptation)—has “throw[n] a tight schedule of venue closures and the projected budget into disarray,” according to a report in Le Figaro . Planned restoration work that was supposed to take two years is now projected for five, with evaluation for the best method to extract the lead to be undertaken this summer. “Depending on the method chosen, the duration of the Palais Garnier stage’s closure will be determined this fall,” Le Figaro reports. “Barring any unpleasant surprises, management can already announce that the work will extend from at least 2027 to 2032, leading the Paris Opera to offer an off-site program during this period.” Alexander Neef, the Paris Opera’s artistic director, told Le Figaro in the spring that h...

An artist has demanded the organizers of Manifesta 16 remove an installation from the exhibition in Essen, Germany, alleging that a piece in the show plagiarizes one of her earlier works.  The piece, titled Elevation and made by the Turkish sculptor Nasan Tur, consists of reclaimed church pews installed on their side inside St. Gertud Church and engraved with anonymous musings submitted by the public. Bochum-based artist Dorothee Bielfeld told the German outlet Waz that the Elevation ’s central visual motif—meter-high upright pews, transformed by their reorientation into oblique towers—closely resembles her 2010 work Aufrichten (Raising Up), created for Ruhr.2010, a cultural campaign in Germany’s Ruhr region. Elevation invites visitors to carve wishes, worries, and hopes into the church pews. Bielfeld’s Aufrichten also employs a participatory conceit: Visitors to Christ-König-Kirche could deposit slips of paper bearing their thoughts into ...

The Brazilian-born, London-based art collector and patron Flavia Nespatti will open a commercial gallery in London this October, reports the Art Newspaper . Located in a mid-century industrial building in the central London neighborhood of Fitzrovia, Antesala will focus on art and artists from Latin America. The gallery will organize selling exhibitions of both primary and secondary market works in collaboration with galleries, artists, estates, collections, publications, and nonprofits, together with talks, screenings, and other public programming. As envisioned by Nespatti, the space will be a hub for exhibiting, discussing, and collecting contemporary art. Antesala will not represent artists, but neither will it be a rental space, Nespatti told the Art Newspaper , though collaborators will be charged a combination of a flat fee and a commission on sales. Rather, she and her team will be “highly involved” in the decisions behind each show. In add...

Bae Young-hwan, a beloved artist who represented his home country of Korea at the 2005 edition of the Venice Biennale, died on June 19 at 57. His Seoul representative, Gallery BB&M, did not state a cause in its announcement of his passing on June 20, which described Bae’s death as “sudden.” He was most widely known for his artworks that appropriated lyrics from Korean pop songs. Remaking those lyrics from pain medications, disinfectant, and cotton used to soothe wounds, Bae critiqued the optimism of these songs, suggesting that the hope offered by those words was only a temporary patch in the quest to fix a perennial sense of sadness afflicting Korean society. Born in 1969, Bae attended Hongik University in Seoul, where he received an eduction in traditional Asian painting styles. He would go on to eschew that education and take up conceptual art, showing it in vaunted Korean art institutions such as Alternative Space Pool, Art Sonje...

Visitors Paremata-Plimmerton beat Wainuiomata 19-12 in a tough fixture at William Jones Park on Saturday in their Smith & Wilson Cup match in the last round of the 2026 Swindale Shield. It was always tight and it came down to who could take their chances. Paremata-Plimmerton did just that, while also coming up with three...