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Monday morning edition – updates expected: The 2026 club rugby Premier, Premier 2 and Women’s finals are upon us. It’s the defending champions Hutt Old Boys Marust against the first round winners and multiple past champions Petone in this coming weekend’s Jubilee Cup final, while Paremata-Plimmerton and Wellington meet in the Hardham VC Memorial Cup...

Flash flooding in New York City this weekend has presented a new test for the New Museum, which experienced a significant water leak on Saturday in a gallery housing work by WangShui. Video footage shared with ARTnews and confirmed by the museum as accurate shows water pooling on the gallery floor as staff members move quickly to place buckets beneath active leaks, as well as water streaming down the didactic for “New Humans: Memories of the Future”. The incident comes months after the opening of the museum’s $82 million expansion, which faced scrutiny after its debut over reported faulty construction and facilities , including unfinished details and concerns raised by contractors and observers about the building’s final stages. The museum closed early on Saturday and will remain closed Sunday due to the flash flood warning, according to a statement posted on Instagram. A spokesperson for the New Museum told ARTnews via email statement: “As s...

Two former managers of a prominent Shanghai auction house have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for orchestrating an extensive fraud scheme that led one collector to spend about RMB 500 million ($74 million) on counterfeit or grossly overpriced artifacts. Hong Kong media reported on Wednesday that the collector, from Shandong province, purchased more than 40 items from Shanghai Jiahe Auction Co., Ltd., only to discover that authentication documents revealed many were forgeries or had been assigned artificially inflated valuations. The two former managers were convicted in four cases and sentenced to 14 years and six months and 12 years in prison, respectively. According to the court judgment, the pair arranged for employees and associates to drive up bidding prices at auction, inducing the collector, identified under the pseudonym Li Pin, to purchase the items at inflated prices. The profits were then divided between the consignors according to a p...

The office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin L. Bragg, Jr., announced the repatriation of three antiquities valued at $160,000 to Mexico, including one seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The return of the objects is a result of multiple investigations into illegal trafficking networks, including one that led to the conviction of Eugene Alexander last summer. According to a press release announcing the news, “This marks this Office’s sixth repatriation to the People of Mexico totaling 52 antiquities valued at more than $13 million.” The object seized from the Met is a Standing Male Figure dating back to ca. 100-400 that had been sold by the New York-based Merrin Gallery and donated to the museum. An Xochipala Bowl from ca. 1200–900 B.C.E. had appeared at Merrin Gallery before it was seized in December. An Aztec Obsidian Micro-Blade Core dating to ca. 1000–1500 was seized from Alexander this past October. “The Government of Mexico exte...

The third episode of 2026’s breakout show on Apple TV,  Widow’s Bay , ends with the creature of the week—the perpetually sopping Sea Hag—astride her prey: cynical mayor Tom Loftis, played by Matthew Rhys. He’d been warned. Her preferred method of murder is asphyxiation (she sits on your face). Pinned beneath her rotting legs in his recliner chair, Loftis narrowly escapes by yanking its lever, catapulting the hag over his head. The spell breaks; dread collapses with a laugh.   Widow’s Bay was nominated for 19 Emmys last week, an unusual honor for a series committed to bodily indignity. Yet its success feels less like an anomaly than a symptom of the present, in which perpetual crisis has robbed the future of coherence. Cyclically, art history show...

Superblue, the experiential art venture cofounded in 2020 by Pace CEO Marc Glimcher and former Pace London president Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, has landed in India for the first time, with a sprawling nine-work exhibition of immersive installations at Mumbai’s Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC). Titled “Second Nature,” the show opened at NMACC’s four-story Art House on July 3 and runs through January 10, 2027. Curated by Dent-Brocklehurst, the company’s cofounder and CEO, alongside head of curatorial Margot Mottaz, the show features large-scale installations by teamLab, A.A.Murakami, Simon Heijdens and Es Devlin, among others. The installations probe the increasingly porous boundaries between humans, technology, and the natural world, tackling digital identity, real-time data, and the passage of time. While Superblue built its reputation on permanent, ticketed venues of its own, like those in Miami and London, “Se...