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A Virginia man allegedly beheaded one of six statues at the Iwo Jima monument near the Quantico Marine base, causing what police estimated was hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. According to the incident report, Prince William County police arrived at the site Wednesday night to find 27-year-old Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano “actively damaging the statue with a sledgehammer.” The attack cost one of the monument’s Marines his head and left a second figure’s helmet and face “chipped and gouged.” The stone bayonet from the rifle carved over the back of a third statue was also missing. Maldonado Soriano, 27, of Stafford, was arrested and faces two felony charges, injury to a monument and destruction of property and a misdemeanor charge of trespass with intent to damage property. A representative for the attorney assigned to Maldonado Soriano’s case declined to comment at the time of writing. He is being held without bond pending a court appearance....

Russian-born abstraction pioneer Wassily Kandinsky’s painting Betonte Ecken (1922–23) will come to the auction block at Christie’s New York on November 17, carrying a $60 million to $80 million estimate. The anonymous seller acquired the work at Sotheby’s New York in 1986. The painting is guaranteed to sell at a record-setting level, the house told ARTnews . Kandinsky’s auction record currently stands at $44.8 million , paid for the artist’s 1910 painting Murnau mit Kirche II ( Murnau with Church II ) at Sotheby’s London in 2023. Just last month, Christie’s London notched the third-highest price for the artist with his 1907 canvas Das bunte Leben ( La vie mélangée ), which sold for $41.5 million against a $30 million estimate. That work had recently been restituted to the heirs of a Jewish Dutch collector family whose art was lost during the Nazi era. The artist’s top 14 works at auction all exceed the $20 mill...

For two centuries, Westminster Abbey has harbored a mystery: Whose skeleton was discovered within a Roman sarcophagus unearthed beneath its foundations? Two Anglo-Saxon abbots are in the running, according to a new archaeology study. The limestone sarcophagus was discovered in 1820 and officially excavated in 1869 from what is now a grassy strip along the north side of the abbey’s nave. In the Middle Ages, it was the yard of the Great Sacristy, built during the reign of Henry III. How, then, did a fourth-century Roman sarcophagus end up beneath the yard? Deepening the mystery, no Roman artifacts were found in successive investigations of the site, even though the sarcophagus bears a Latin inscription to one Valerius Amandinus. “That was not its original place of burial,” Warwick Rodwell, a consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, told the Guardian . In the Journal of the British Archaeological Association , he argues that the sarco...

In piano parlance, an étude is a technically tricky piece of music typically practiced to push a musician beyond their limits. Following that logic, the name of Florentina Holzinger’s final Venice Biennale performance, CLOSING É TUDE , suggests that after seven months of her propriety-imploding, waste-wonderland SEAWORLD VENICE , there are feats of endurance still ahead. Part performance, part installation, SEAWORLD VENICE opened at the Austrian Pavilion in May with the piercing peal of a colossal bell salvaged from the Venice Lagoon. In line with her body-first philosophy, a nude Holzinger served as its human clapper. The bell, sans artist, continues to mark the passage of time, ringing every hour over the pavilion and its guests, a grotesque altar to the ongoing Venetian apocalypse. Human refuse (freshly sourced) and lagoon waste, the sort that occasionally washes in with the high tide, form the material of her installation. Visitors were encouraged to use p...

Top galleries are placing plenty of works for prices above $1 million at Art Basel Paris 2026. Dealer Emmanuel Di Donna told ARTnews at the Avant-Première preview on Tuesday afternoon (aka the VVIP opening) that the experience is like “drinking from a fire hose.” That was followed by the VIP preview on Wednesday. This all came off without a hitch amid heightened security as protests roiled Paris after demonstrations by high school students against crumbling educational infrastructure and absent teachers in a local suburb literally caught fire, with thousands taking to the streets, with some resulting property damage. The priciest work on display, on offer from Pace DiDonna Schrader, is a rare 1917 painting of a reclining nude woman by Amedeo Modigliani, Nu étendu (Lolotte) , valued in excess of $100 million. As of Wednesday evening local time, there was no word on whether the piece had found a buyer, but its presence testified to dealers’ faith that top ...

It has been widely reported that the Kennedy Center is at the center of a power struggle between the Trump administration and preservationists, as the president wants to rename it in his own honor and insists that the decaying building must close for renovations. He has threatened that it will be razed if he does not get his way. Now, CNN reports that donors who have given artwork to the institution are trying to reclaim their gifts, fearing for their safety amid a renovation and in the wake of layoffs. They are not convinced that the leadership, largely appointed by Trump, values the artworks as part of the institution’s holdings. According to an internal document reviewed by CNN, officials have been working since at least late last year on a plan that proposed the “disposal” of artworks, whether by “return to country of origin, transfer or exchange with another institution, public sale, or destruction.” “I want ...