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The central attraction at the Venice Biennale is its main exhibition, a curated show meant to pinpoint a dominant theme in art as it stands right now. But all around it are pavilions staged by countries, with each nation selecting one or more artists to mount their own show or installation. These national pavilions have contributed to the common conception of the Biennale as the art world’s Olympics: a place where stars are born and nations flex their might. The national pavilions tend to remain in flux until the very end. In 2024, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza upended several nations’ plans to exhibit at the Biennale. In 2026, those conflicts have once again roiled this area of the Biennale, with Australia canceling and then reinstating its selected artist and the status of Israel and Russia’s participations still unclear. Uncertainty within a given country can also affect their planned participation, as was the case with the government shutdown delaying the announcement of the US Pa...

The official trailer for The Moment , the new A24 movie starring Charli XCX during a satirical version of her Brat era, dropped earlier this month, renewing interest in the musician’s cinematic breakout in 100 Nights Of Hero , a farcical fairy tale released at the latest Venice International Film Festival. In that film, the star plays a striking instrument that may have caught the eye of fans of sound art: a sculptural harp by the artist Amanda Camenisch.  The London-based photographer, filmmaker, and performer is perhaps best known for her sonic sculptures—hand-forged, alien-looking music-makers that facilitate what she calls “participatory rituals.”  The piece played by Charli XCX is titled Elemental Harp: Fire , or the “Fire Harp,” and was commissioned by the London Brent Biennial in 2022. The harp is one of a family of five instruments in dialogue with the elemental forces—earth, water, air, fire, and ether (the last is a colorless, highly flammable liquid once ...

The long-lost mission of Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo, one of the earliest outposts of Europe’s colonial frontier in Texas, has been rediscovered. An archaeology team from Texas Tech University, in collaboration with Texas Historical Commission archaeologists, found the site in Jackson County, Texas, on a private ranch near the Presidio la Bahía and Fort St. Louis. The mission was established in the 1680s by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, a French explorer and trader instrumental in the French colonization of North America and, by more incidental means, the United States’s claim to Texas. Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo was among the most highly successful efforts to convert the native Karankawa tribe. However, the venture ultimately was his undoing: He was killed during an expedition to locate the mouth of the Mississippi, while the Karankawa destroyed the colony, leaving its members dead, scattered, or abducted. Spain occupied the site during its missionary campai...

Tristram Hunt, the director of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, has been knighted by King Charles, landing a spot on the UK’s 2026 New Year Honors list. That means Hunt can now officially go by “Sir.” The former MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central and ex–shadow education secretary was recognized for his “services to museums,” according to the UK government’s announcement. Hunt has led the V&A since 2017, where he’s overseen a run of ambitious exhibitions and helped push the museum’s international profile, most notably through the launch of V&A East. The government also highlighted Hunt’s academic background. Before moving into museum leadership, he was a historian and senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, specializing in Victorian urban history and political thought. Under his leadership, the V&A has expanded its reach and attracted new audiences, strengthening its role in the UK’s cultural landscape. Hunt isn’t the only British arts figure to be recognize...

Australian online casinos have never been under a brighter spotlight. How they handle payments, bonuses, and player care is getting picked apart by a sharper-eyed public. In 2024, PayID’s popularity keeps rising, players have come to expect instant payments and no-nonsense policy language. This appetite for transparency isn’t just a passing trend; it reflects a...

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered the remains of a 4,500-year-old valley temple belonging to a sprawling solar complex built by Pharaoh Nyuserra, ruler of the 5th Dynasty. Announced earlier this month by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, the find offers a rare glimpse into the architecture and ritual life of a period defined by the ascendency of the cult of the sun god Ra. Archaeologists from the University of Turin collaborated with the University of Naples L’Orientale on the excavation of the temple complex at Abu Ghurab, a site located southwest of Cairo, near the Nile. Ancient Egyptian sun temples were typically divided into two connected sections: an upper temple, positioned on higher ground and used for core ritual activities, and a valley temple, located closer to the river. The two were linked by a causeway that guided visitors from the water’s edge up to the sacred precinct. While the upper temple at Abu Ghurab had been excavated several years ago, t...

When actress and humanitarian Angelina Jolie took over a Manhattan studio building in 2023 with a plan to offer clothes shopping, Turkish coffee, and Syrian mini pies, and workshops for under-represented tailors and artisans from around the world, part of the cachet was that 57 Great Jones Street, now called Atelier Jolie, had once been occupied by Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But now it turns out the brand name for the operation was also previously taken, by artists and artisans who are very much alive—and not happy about the actress’s use of the name.  The pre-existing Atelier Jolie, in Easton, Pennsylvania, was established in 2021 by Omnaia Jolie Abdou, an artist, curator, and entrepreneur, according to the U.S. Sun , which reports that the Pennsylvania Jolie is asking that the actress and humanitarian’s trademark application, filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, be denied.  The trademark, according to Jolie Abdou’s filing opposing the new ...

After five months sailing alongside NATO allies across two of the Alliance’s most strategically vital maritime theatres, His Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) St. John’s has returned home to Halifax, Nova Scotia—closing a deployment that underscored Canada’s enduring commitment to collective defence, maritime readiness, and alliance solidarity. Departing Halifax in July, the Royal Canadian Navy frigate sailed east to the Mediterranean Sea, where it joined Standing NATO Maritime Group Two (SNMG2) under Operation REASSURANCE. Operating alongside allied warships, St. John’s conducted a demanding schedule of multinational exercises and patrols designed to strengthen interoperability, enhance situational awareness, and reinforce NATO’s deterrence posture in a complex and evolving security environment. Throughout the Mediterranean phase of the deployment, the ship’s company worked shoulder to shoulder with allied navies, demonstrating the professionalism and adaptability that have become ha...

Ukraine has requested the extradition from Poland of an archaeologist who was detained in Warsaw earlier this month on suspicion of conducting illegal excavations in Russian-occupied Crimea, according to the Polish media. The Warsaw District Prosecutor’s Office received the extradition request from Kyiv authorities for Oleksandr Butyagin, following his apprehension in Poland on December 4. Butyagin, 52, is an employee of the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, where he leads the archaeology division specializing in the Northern Black Sea region, which encompasses Crimea. Polish authorities arrested Butyagin in Warsaw while on a lecture tour across Europe, with a planned final destination in Belgrade. A Polish court placed him in custody until January 13 while the extradition process unfolds. In November, the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office charged Butyagin with illegal excavations of the ancient city of Myrmekion in the Kerch district of Crimea from 2014 to 2019 without...

Chinese officials have opened multiple investigations into allegations that staff at the state-run Nanjing Museum secretly removed cultural treasures from the collection and sold them on the open market—claims that have gone viral on social media and drawn comparisons to the recent Louvre heist. According to the South China Morning Post , the scandal surfaced after a 16th-century Ming dynasty painting,  Spring in Jiangnan  by Qiu Ying, appeared in a Beijing auction catalog this year with an estimate of 88 million yuan ($12.5 million). The work was part of a 137-piece donation made in 1959 by the family of renowned collector Pang Laichen but was discovered missing during a 2023 court-ordered inventory check. The museum later said the painting, along with four other donated works, had been deemed forgeries in the 1960s, formally deaccessioned in 1997, and sold to a provincial relics store in 2001 for 6,800 yuan—though how it resurfaced at auction remains unclear. Pang’s descen...

New York City Mayoral-Elect Zohran Mamdani has signed an open letter in support of roughly 1,000 workers of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York who filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board in November to approve a bargaining unit. The vote is scheduled to take place on January 13 and 15, 2026, and if it passes, the Met would become the largest unionized museum in the country. The letter was released on December 18 by the United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents the Met workers. It was signed by an assembly of current and incoming New York City and State officials, including Comptroller Elect Mark Levine and Manhattan Borough President Elect Brad Hoylman-Sigal. “The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gem of our state, and one of the greatest art museums of the world, relies upon its dedicated staff who preserve and present its collection, welcome thousands of visitors daily, and disseminate knowledge about art beyond the walls of the Museum,” reads the letter....

For the third time this year, Banksy has created a new work of street art. The new piece has been confirmed in the anonymous British artist’s customary fashion, with an Instagram post.  The artwork shows two children lying on their backs and looking toward the heavens, with one pointing a finger skyward. It was spotted Monday outside the Tottenham Court Road Tube station in London, near the landmark Brutalist Centre Point skyscraper.  As Christmas approaches, the work could be read as two children hopefully looking for signs of Santa Claus in the sky, which would be an uncommonly sweet statement from the often sardonic artist.  But its location points to a more critical dimension, owing to the symbolism of Centre Point. The 34-storey tower was built in 1966 as office space by real estate tycoon Harry Hyams. It remained vacant for many years even amid a housing crisis as the developer awaited a single corporate tenant to lease it, thus becoming a symbol of the housing ...

When the Government of Canada announced a major new contract to deliver a fleet of Canadian-built Global 6500 aircraft for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF), it signalled far more than a procurement milestone. It marked a defining moment in the country’s push to rebuild its military capabilities, reinvigorate its aerospace sector, and reshape how Canada buys the capabilities it needs to operate at home and abroad. Unveiled in Mississauga on December 12, 2025, by Secretary of State (Defence Procurement) Stephen Fuhr, Minister Rechie Valdez, and Parliamentary Secretary Karim Bardeesy, the decision awards Bombardier the contract to provide six Global 6500 aircraft under the Airlift Capability Project – Multi-role Flight Service . As one of the first procurements shepherded through the new Defence Investment Agency (DIA), the initiative embodies Canada’s evolving philosophy: strategic speed, economic impact, and a strong emphasis on Canadian-made solutions. A New Era of Airlift Capa...

In a region where shifting ice, mounting maritime traffic, and accelerating climate change are rewriting the map of the North Atlantic and Arctic every year, collaboration is no longer optional—it is essential. On December 16, 2025, that spirit of shared responsibility took a major step forward as the Canadian Coast Guard and the Icelandic Coast Guard signed a letter of intent that deepens operational partnership across some of the world’s most challenging waters. The agreement, finalized in Reykjavik, Iceland, formalizes a growing relationship built on years of coordination through the North Atlantic Coast Guard Forum, the Arctic Coast Guard Forum, and the Arctic Council’s Emergency Prevention, Preparedness and Response Working Group. For two nations whose coast guards often operate at the frontline of extreme northern conditions, this new commitment creates a structured pathway for more integrated, agile cooperation. “This agreement with the Icelandic Coast Guard demonstrates our c...

Club Rugby wishes everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year. This is probably our last article of the year, so after this we will see you on the other side! A few bits and pieces as the year winds down and the summer season kicks in. +++++ In the last tournament of the...

Robert Mnuchin, the Wall Street pioneer who became one of New York’s most respected art dealers and a fixture at blue-chip auctions, died on Friday at his home in Bridgewater, Connecticut. He was 92. His death, first reported by the New York Times ,  was confirmed by his stepdaughter, Lisa Hedley Wick.  Mnuchin was unusual in having two long and highly successful careers. At Goldman Sachs, he was a central figure in the rise of block trading in the 1960s and ’70s, helping build the firm’s institutional equities business under managing partner Gustave Levy. By 1978, the Wall Street Journal  described him as “the acknowledged dean of block traders,” rivaled only by Salomon Brothers’ Michael Bloomberg. His skill on the trading floor—an encyclopedic recall of buyers and sellers, an instinct for pressure and timing—made him a legend inside the firm. He became a partner in 1967, co-headed trading and arbitrage by 1976, and joined the firm’s powerful management committee in 19...

The British Museum is sending some of its prized art and artifacts on long-term loan to countries that the British Empire previously colonized. While those nations have long called for the repatriation of objects they consider stolen, the institution may be hoping to blunt some of those criticisms by sending valuable historical items—though not always those that come from the recipients of the loans.  A Mumbai museum, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), is now host to a loan of some 80 artifacts, including an ancient wooden model of an Egyptian riverboat and devotional Sumerian statues from 2200 BCE, as well as a Roman mosaic from London and a marble bust of Roman emperor Augustus, the Telegraph reports, noting that it is the largest ever loan of ancient material to India and the first deal of its kind between the British Museum and a non-Western museum. “You don’t have to embarrass your own country to do something positive with another country,” British Mus...

In a move that prompted immediate questions about its legality, the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., voted on Thursday to add President Donald Trump’s name to an institution he has roiled since taking office in January. The move, following a year-long fascination with a center that has not been a top-of-mind priority for other presidents in the way that it has been for Trump, was met with disapproval from members of Kennedy’s family and legal experts who say it goes against a stipulation put in place after Congress renamed the center in the wake of JFK’s assassination in 1963. As reported by CNN, spokeswoman Roma Daravi said, “The Kennedy Center Board of Trustees voted unanimously today to name the institution The Donald J. Trump and The John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” The claim of unanimity was disputed by Democratic Representative Joyce Beatty, an ex-officio member of the board, who said, “I wa...

The National Endowment for the Arts has a new chair: Mary Anne Carter, the same political operative who served in the post during Trump’s first term. The Senate voted this morning to confirm her along party lines, by a 53–43 margin. In keeping with his tendency to appoint agency heads who either lack subject-matter expertise or are openly hostile to the missions they are meant to support, Trump has reappointed a controversial pick with no other professional experience in the arts and a record as a reliable supporter of Republican politicians. Carter also worked in the 1990s for the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank that authored Project 2025, the extremist policy blueprint that has shaped Trump’s second term. Trump nominated Carter as far back as May, as ARTnews reported , noting that her nomination came during a tumultuous moment for the NEA, which the Trump administration was seeking to defund. Senior NEA leaders reportedly left the agency en masse. At the same momen...

Louvre president Laurence des Cars faced an fraught Senate hearing on Wednesday as lawmakers pressed her on years of allegedly neglected security warnings preceding the October theft of $102 million in imperial jewels — an interrogation that has intensified calls for her resignation.  The session followed revelations that multiple audits conducted in 2017 and 2018 flagged structural vulnerabilities in the Apollo Gallery, where intruders broke in on October 19. Des Cars, who assumed leadership in 2021, told senators she had not been informed of those earlier reports until after the theft, according to  Le Monde .  She defended the museum’s response, noting accelerated upgrades to the institution’s long-outdated surveillance system, the installation of 100 new cameras, and a 20 percent increase in the budget for staff security training. A new senior security coordinator will also be appointed imminently, she said.  Lawmakers were unsatisfied. Conservative senators J...

The Oakland Museum of California (OMCA) will stage a major retrospective for Bay Area artist Mildred Howard, opening next June. Titled “Poetics of Memory,” the exhibition will bring together work from across five decades of Howard’s career and will also debut new work by the octogenarian artist, who was awarded a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. The retrospective will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalog, and the museum is working on a national tour for it. Howard’s history with OMCA extends even before the institution’s official founding in 1969, through a merger of an art museum, a history museum, and a natural sciences museum. She remembers visiting the Oakland Museum in her youth when it was still housed in the Camron-Stanford House directly on Lake Merritt. “I’ve had an ongoing relationship with the local museum for many years,” she told ARTnews in a recent phone interview. “I would go there as a child. I’ve taken students there. I’ve been in exhibitions there,” including...

Konstantin Akinsha, a top curator and art historian of Russian and Ukrainian art, said he believes 14 artworks attributed to Russian and Ukrainian modernists in the collection of the Palazzo de Nordis, a museum in the northern Italian town of Cividale del Friuli, are not authentic. In a Substack post published in late September, Akinsha analyzed the De Martiis Collection, a cache of 64 modern and contemporary works donated to the palazzo in 2015 by the late local collector Giancarlo De Martiis. The collection includes works by significant Italian modernist artists, including Mario Sironi, Afro Basaldella, and Giuseppe Santomaso, as well as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Eugène Boudin, and Graham Sutherland. But it is 14 works attributed to several Russian and Ukrainian modernist painters that have drawn Akinsha’s scrutiny. In a recent interview with ARTnews , Akinsha—who has previously covered fakes and forgeries in the Russian art market for this publication—said that the attributio...