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The upcoming presentation of the Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot-long embroidered cloth depicting the Norman invasion of 1066, figures to be the blockbuster exhibition of the year for the British Museum. The institution is pricing tickets like it is. On Thursday, the museum said that tickets to see the tapestry, which goes on view September 10 through July 11, 2027, will cost £33 for a standard adult ticket, or about $45. That’s the high end, for “peak” times. During off-peak times, i.e. non-holiday, non summer weekdays until 5:10 p.m., an adult ticket will cost £27. Tickets for Students and disabled visitors are a flat £25. All tickets get you a 40-minute visit with the tapestry. The first two weeks of the exhibition and the last two weeks of the exhibition will be treated as “peak” tickets no matter the timing. If that wasn’t all confusing enough, the British Museum said it is also offering “super off-peak...

The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust released a statement on Saturday slamming the recent decision by New York’s Danziger Gallery to offer an AI-generated artwork referencing the famed photographer’s work at the 2026 edition of the AIPAD Photography Show in April. The artwork, which still appears on Danziger’s website, does not contain a title but is headlined A.I. GENERATED, From the prompt: Make a realistic color version of Ansel Adams’ iconic “Moonrise Over Hernandez”. It is listed as printed by master printer Esteban Mauchi. Danziger offered the piece in its booth at the fair—which ran from April 22 to April 26—alongside work by Seydou Keïta, Hoda Afshar, and Matthew Porter, among others. In the statement, the trust said it “did not authorize, endorse, consent to, or acquiesce” to the work being exhibited or offered for sale and claimed that the piece “exploited Ansel’s name, reputation, and his most iconi...

Daniel Sikkema, the estranged husband of murdered New York art dealer Brent Sikkema, was found guilty Friday in a Manhattan federal court, according to the  Wall Street Journal . Daniel Sikkema faced charges tied to a murder-for-hire plot that prosecutors said led to the dealer’s killing at his vacation home in Rio de Janeiro in 2024.  The case has gripped the art world since Brent Sikkema, the founder of the Chelsea gallery then known as Sikkema Jenkins & Co.,  was found stabbed to death  in Brazil at age 75. Prosecutors argued that Daniel Sikkema orchestrated the killing from New York amid a bitter divorce and custody dispute involving the couple’s son. Federal prosecutors accused Daniel Sikkema of hiring Alejandro Triana Prevez, a Cuban former security officer living in Brazil, to carry out the murder. According to court filings and testimony presented during the trial, Prevez entered Brent Sikkema’s Rio townhouse in the early hours of Jan...

As demand accelerates for autonomous undersea systems that can move quickly from concept to deployment, Canadian marine technology firm Cellula Robotics and Metron, Inc . are formalizing a long-term partnership aimed at delivering next-generation capability to the United States defense market. Announced on May 19 in Houston, the 10-year agreement brings together Cellula’s commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) long-endurance autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) platforms with Metron’s adaptive mission autonomy and decades of operational experience in undersea warfare and maritime domain missions. The agreement builds on several years of collaboration between the two companies, including support work tied to the Defense Innovation Unit’s CAMP project. Together, the firms are positioning the partnership as a pathway to faster fielding, scalable deployment, and long-term operational support for US defense customers seeking reliable autonomous underwater capability. At the core of th...

By Kevin McCarthy  It’s the penultimate round but really, it may as well be the final round of Super Rugby Pacific for the Hurricanes, if they execute this weekend. There are as always the odd booby traps to make things tasty, however. The Crusaders host the Chiefs at their new home. Should they win, then...

A sacred Buddhist hall on the top of Mount Misen in Japan was destroyed by fire—but an “eternal flame” said to have been burning for more than a millennium was rescued and moved to another site, where it continues to glow. As reported in the New York Times , Reikado Hall, in the south of Japan, “was reduced to a charred skeleton after a fire tore through the building, engulfing its wooden prayer rooms.” No one was injured, fortunately, and the flame that had been burning for some 1,200 years was salvaged and transferred to a less traumatized location. In a statement, the Daisho-in temple, which oversaw the damaged hall, said, “We have received many messages of sympathy. Thank you for your concern.” Reikado Hall had been rebuilt after a previous fire in 2005, after an accident following cleanup from a typhoon. The cause of the latest fire in under investigation. The Times noted that Japanese temples and shrines, often constructed with materia...

Harald Metzkes, the so-called “Cézannist of Prenzlauer Berg” who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany’s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. “Metzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,” wrote Monopol , which asserted that he created his own “world theater” in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, “He wasn’t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.” Metzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that “combined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic...

When Powerhouse Parramatta, the enormous new cultural center opening in the city of Parramatta west of Sydney, Australia, opens later this year, a new commission by the British-Indian sculptor Bharti Kher will welcome visitors as the entrance. Art Asia Pacific reported the news. The sculpture, titled Tree of Life , will be monumental in scale and will be made up of four stacked bronze and clay heads. Tree of Life is part of Kher’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series , which she began making in 2016. Many of these large-scale sculptures re-create or transform fragments of found ritual objects into hybrid creatures. The Powerhouse Parramatta commission is not Kher’s first foray into public art: from fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor , an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure also referencing an “Intermediary” piece, was installed in Central Park, and from 2018-20, The Intermediary Family , based on a collection of small clay objects from South India, was install...

James ‘Big Jim’ Kinvig was a leading player for Onslow throughout the 1950s and early 1960s and he played a number of times for the Wellington representative team. Kinvig was well known as a big goal-kicking forward, whose most usual position was lock but he also played at prop and No. 8 throughout his career....

Every time a tech company promotes an emerging technology like AI or the metaverse, the pitch sounds the same: a promise to “unleash” the imagination, or a new “immersive world.” When Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, its ad showed four people looking at Henri Rousseau’s Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo , as it sprung to life and a portal opened before them. Four years later, when Meta debuted its Ray–Ban Meta smartglasses, the company touted its in-lens display and voice activation with an ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt looking at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian , i.e. the banana, which Hemsworth promptly ate. What does it say about our collective consciousness that the direction of tech innovation seems to always lead to that scene in Mary Poppins , when the nanny and her wards jump onto a chalk drawing and end up in an animated world? That question lay at the center of several works performed at Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) earlier this month...

She is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an upcoming one at the Tate Modern. Netflix is planning an adaptation of her life. Her unibrowed face stares out from tote bags, murals, notebooks, enamel pins, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room posters across the globe. A recent auction of The Dream (The Bed) , 1940, helped send her market value into yet a higher strata. I speak, of course, of Frida Kahlo. Add to the list a new opera. El Último Sueño de Frida y Dieg o, which recently opened at the Met, stages an oneiric reckoning with two famed painters. The premise is deceptively simple: on a November day in 1957, Frida returns from the underworld during Día de los Muertos for a brief reunion with her husband, who is himself not long for the world of the living. Carlos Álvarez as Diego and Isabel Leonard as Frida in a scene from Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Últi...

Rene Matić was named the winner of the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, one of the most prestigious honors in the field. They received the £30,000 ($40,250) prize for their exhibition “AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH,” which closed at CCA Berlin in February. Matić, who is based in London, works across photography, sculpture, sound, poetry, and film to examine social dynamics of race, gender, and intimacy through the lens of national symbols (flags are a recurring motif). Their practice includes an excavation of British subculture, including the “rude boy,” a fashion and ideological formation that emerged in the aftermath of postcolonial resistance movements. Part photography, part sculpture, and part installation, AS OPPOSED TO THE TRUTH positioned itself within the rise of right-wing populism, asking how the personal intersects with—and survives—the political. It extended an earlier exhibition staged at Vitrine Gallery titled “Born ...

A lineout scene in Saturday’s match between Petone and Ories. Petone won 39-10. Photo: Kinetic Images. Photos from the weekend at https://ift.tt/Ios1a4G The Swindale Shield reached its halfway point on Saturday and the race for the first round title is heating up with several teams in the mix and no conclusive favourite at this point....

The Hanwha Ocean shipyard in Geoje, South Korea covers 4.9 million square metres. It employs roughly 31,000 people, operates its own fire departments, hospitals, and daycare centres, and produces approximately 45 to 60 vessels per year. Vanguard visited the Geoje facility and Hanwha Ocean’s Siheung R&D campus in late April as part of an editorial trip hosted by Hanwha, gaining firsthand access to one of the production facilities under consideration for Canada’s submarine fleet renewal. From explosives to ocean giants Hanwha’s origins trace to 1952, the year before the Korean War armistice, when the company was founded as Korea Explosives Co. What followed over the next seven decades is one of the more remarkable industrial stories in modern history. Korea emerged from the war as one of the poorest nations on earth. Within a generation it had become one of the world’s dominant industrial powers, and shipbuilding was central to that transformation...

Earlier this week, a 5.5-carat diamond ring sold for over $17 million dollars during Christie’s Magnificent Jewels auction in Zurich. The triangular-cut stone, known as Ocean Dream, thanks to its blue-green color, had an estimate of about $9-12 million. It is set into an 18-karat white gold band and surrounded by pink and white diamonds. Fortune magazine reported that the buyer was an unnamed private client and that the ring took 20 minute to sell. Max Fawcett, Global Head of Christie’s Jewellery, noted in a statement that this is the second time Ocean Dream has been offered at auction. (t sold for nearly $10 million in 2014, also at Christie’s Geneva.) According to the Smithsonian, it is “one of the eight rarest diamonds in the world.” Ocean Dream was one of seven colored stones in the 2003 exhibition “Splendor of Diamonds” at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. The ring comes with a letter issued by the Gemo...

More than 100 Seattle Art Museum employees announced plans this week to unionize, joining the nationwide labor movement that’s swept through art institutions in the last six years.  The union, called the Seattle Art Museum Workers United, will represent workers in over 20 front- and back-end departments. The union told SAM director and CEO Scott Stulen of its formation in a letter, writing: “Our solidarity is a movement to improve working conditions in alignment with SAM’s mission, vision, and core values.”  The letter continues, “The challenges we face as unsustainable wages, subpar health benefits, and siloed, top-down decision-making, are undeniable, systemic, and have persisted across administrations.” The Seattle Art Museum did not respond to an ARTnews request for comment.  Details of the bargaining unit will be finalized over the coming months. Union organizers said they have a supermajority of support among eligible workers, including...

In this episode of Vanguard Radio , host J. Richard Jones sits down with Peter Dawe, Vice President of Defence Strategy at Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), to explore why business readiness—not just technology or equipment—is becoming one of the most critical components of Canada’s defence and economic security landscape. Drawing on more than three decades of experience in the Canadian Armed Forces and his current work supporting Canadian SMEs at BDC, Dawe offers a practical and execution-focused perspective on what it really takes for companies to succeed in defence and national-security supply chains. The conversation examines how operational discipline, governance, financial resilience and long-term sustainability often determine whether businesses can compete credibly in complex defence environments. Jones and Dawe discuss the growing intersection between defence and economic security, the realities facing SMEs entering defence markets, an...

Five days before a trove of 16 masterpieces from the late media magnate S.I. Newhouse is set to hit the block as part of Christie’s New York evening sales, the auction house has released a two-minute video promoting one particular sculpture in the sale. The short film, as Christie’s refers to it, was filmed in early May and features none other than Academy Award–winning actress Nicole Kidman starring alongside Constantin Brancusi’s bronze sculpture  Danaïde  (1913). The sculpture, expected to be one of the top lots this season, carries a pre-sale estimate of $100 million, well above the artist’s $71.2 million record, though below the three most-expensive sculptures ever sold at auction, all by Alberto Giacometti. According to a Christie’s spokesperson, the concept for the video was inspired by a Man Ray film of Lee Miller uncovering Brancusi’s controversial sculpture Madame X . (The film, and a marble version of the sculpture,...

Israel advanced a bill on Tuesday that would expand Israeli civilian authority sweeping authority over antiquities and archaeology in the occupied West Bank, a move that human rights groups warned would lead to the annexation of the Palestinian territory. As first reported by Haaretz , the Likud-backed bill would empower a new government body under the purview of the Israeli heritage minister to purchase and expropriate land. The proposed “Judea and Samaria Heritage Authority”—using the biblical term favored by the Israeli government for the occupied West Bank—“will hold exclusive responsibility for all matters relating to heritage, antiquities and archaeology in the area.” Those responsibilities would reportedly include excavating and overseeing heritage sites and archaeological digs, including those currently managed by the IDF-appointed archaeology staff officer in the West Bank Civil Administration. Tuesday’s vote (23-14) was the first of three v...

Alexis Corbière and Alexandre Portier, the French MPs overseeing the government commission investigating the shocking October 19, 2025, Louvre jewel heist , have accused the museum of deprioritizing security at the museum. The full parliamentary report was released today and also casts doubt on French president Emmanuel Macron’s nearly $1 billion plan to revamp the Louvre, which he announced in January 2025 (nine months before the heist) and referred to as a “new renaissance” for the museum, the world’s most-visited art museum.   Macron’s visit followed the release of a leaked memo written by Laurence de Cars, then the director of the Louvre (she resigned in February of this year), alerting French culture minister Rachida Dati (who also stepped down in February) of a “proliferation of damage in museum spaces, some of which are in very poor condition.”  As noted in Le Figaro , the damning May 13 report is based on over 20 hearings and roundta...