A sweeping fraud scheme targeting ticket sales at the Louvre was uncovered earlier this week, leaving the scandal-plagued museum facing losses estimated at more than €10 million. The Palace of Versailles was also implicated in the scheme, which involved the sale of counterfeit tickets and the overbooking of guided tours, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed on Thursday.

French authorities shared that nine people have been arrested, including two museum employees, several tour guides, and one individual suspected of organizing the scheme. The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that more than €957,000 in cash—plus €67,000 in foreign currency—was seized, in addition to €486,000 in separate bank accounts. According to Le Parisien, three vehicles and multiple safe deposit boxes were also confiscated.

The Louvre told the publication that it is “facing a resurgence and diversification of ticket fraud”, prompting the museum to “put in place a structured plan to combat fraud”, notably through “preventive and curative actions (…) and monitoring of their results”.

The institution added that the ongoing police operation “was carried out following a report from the Louvre Museum as part of its anti-fraud policy and the ongoing interactions between the museum’s teams and the police regarding fraudulent practices.” 

The investigation reportedly began in December 2024 after the Louvre alerted police to “the frequent presence of a couple of Chinese guides at the museum, who were bringing in groups of Chinese tourists by defrauding the ticket office, the guides reusing the same tickets several times for different people. Other guides were subsequently suspected of the same practices.

After 30 years at the Guardian, chief art critic Adrian Searle is stepping down from the role he has held since 1996.

The Guardian announced today that Searle will leave his full-time role at the end of March. His final article, a look back at the past three decades and what he has learned, will appear on April 1. He will continue to contribute occasional pieces.

Searle joined the Guardian after transitioning from a career as a painter. Over the next three decades, he became one of the most influential voices in British art criticism, writing about contemporary art with authority, clarity and wit.

He played a pivotal role during the rise of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, offering early support for figures such as Steve McQueen, Gillian Wearing, and Chris Ofili. His criticism ranged across painting, sculpture, performance, video, and installation, and he built a reputation for championing artists at the outset of their careers, including Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Isaac Julien, and Philippe Parreno.

Beyond writing, Searle served on the Turner Prize jury in 2004. The Guardian’s announcement also said that he organized major exhibitions at institutions including the Hayward Gallery, the Serpentine Galleries, and the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

The exhibition was intended to be a homecoming for artist Victor “Marka27” Quiñonez who grew up in the Dallas–Fort Worth metro area. The excitement built when he got the first batch of images showing his traveling solo exhibition being installed at the University of North Texas’s CVAD Gallery. Quiñonez was looking forward to receiving images of the work being fully installed and was working on managing the RSVPs for an opening reception to take place this month.

Then, silence.

Quiñonez continued to follow up with the university gallery’s director Stefanie Dlugosz-Acton. The exhibition was scheduled to open on February 3, but Quiñonez is unclear if that actually happened. It wasn’t until he began receiving DMs from UNT students, asking if it was closed or there was additional work being done on it. The blinds had been drawn over the floor-to-ceiling glass windows of CVAD Gallery, and the doors locked, the students said, providing him with photo and video documentation. When he checked the gallery’s website and social media profiles, he noticed that any mention of his exhibition had been removed.

“That’s when I realized something was very wrong,” Quiñonez told ARTnews in a phone interview on Thursday night.

On Wednesday evening, he received an email from Dlugosz-Acton, reviewed by ARTnews, stating, “I am writing to let you know that the university has terminated the art loan agreement with Boston University Art Galleries for ‘Ni de Aquí, Ni de Alla.’ The university is making arrangements to return the exhibit to Boston University. Any activities associated with the exhibition are no longer necessary. However, please let us know if you have incurred travel expenses related to the exhibition for reimbursement.”

When Agnes Gund bought Mark Rothko’s 1964 abstraction No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) in 1967, she purchased it directly from the artist in his studio. The painting would go on to hang in her living room for decades. This May, it will be offered on the secondary market for the first time, leading a focused group of works from her collection at Christie’s.

The auction house announced today that it will offer three pieces from the personal holdings of Gund, who died last September, during its marquee May sales in New York: the Rothko, estimated in the region of $80 million; Cy Twombly’s 1961 Untitled, estimated at $40 million to $60 million; and Joseph Cornell’s 1948 Untitled (Medici Princess), estimated at $3 million to $5 million.

The grouping is small but serious. Rothko, Twombly, and Cornell all artists who reshaped postwar art in distinct ways, and these works are ones Gund, a longtime trustee of the Museum of Modern Art and its president from 1991 to 2002, lived with, not just collected. That provenance will almost certainly drive up collector interest and bidding for the work.

The Rothko is the clear headline lot. Painted in 1964, the canvas rises more than seven feet tall. Deep greens and indigo fields are held in place by a sharp red-orange stripe that cuts across the lower third. Gund first saw it during a studio visit, and it remains one of only a handful of Rothko paintings bought directly from the artist that are still in private hands. For years, it anchored her apartment, a daily presence rather than a trophy on loan to history.

The Twombly, made in Rome in 1961, comes from a pivotal period when his looping lines and bursts of pigment felt newly urgent. Works of similar scale and ambition now sit in major museum collections. The Cornell, by contrast, is intimate. Created around 1948, the box construction layers Renaissance imagery with found materials to create one of the artist’s dreamlike stage sets. Together, the three works offer a snapshot of Gund’s range as a collector, from monumental abstraction to quiet, meticulous assemblage.

Since George Washington, it has been customary for presidents to have an official portrait—usually an oil painting—unveiled shortly after they leave office. That was to be the case for President Donald Trump, who sat for a portrait by artist Ronald Sherr just after leaving office in 2021. There is just one complication: Trump now wants a new one.

Sherr’s portrait was ready to be accepted by the National Portrait Gallery, which maintains the nation’s presidential portraits, in 2022. But by then Trump had already announced his bid for the presidency in 2024. The gallery does not typically hang a presidential portrait until the president has permanently left office, according to the New York Times.

Now, the White House says Trump would like a portrait that reflects the full scope of his time in office. “President Trump was appreciative of the portrait created for his 45th term and looks forward to seeing the completion of a portrait that will encapsulate both his 45th and 47th presidential terms,” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement.

The Sherr portrait, completed before the artist’s death in 2022, reportedly depicts Trump at a rally, with the White House in the background. Sherr’s widow, Lois, said the work “captured Trump’s movement, energy, and feeling of absolute resolve.”

Trump was not the first president Sherr painted. The artist also created portraits of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, as well as former Secretary of Defense Colin Powell, former House Speakers John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi, and a forthcoming portrait of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018.

The former treasurer of the Hearthstone Historic House Museum in Appleton, Wisconsin—touted as “the only building still standing from the dawn of electricity” on its website—admitted to stealing $70,000 from the institution.

According to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday, Steven Jahnke confessed to embezzlement and now faces one count of theft in a business setting. As reported by the local radio station WTAQ, “board members became suspicious of transactions apparently not related to museum operations, including cruises, vacation travel and vehicle repair. Additionally, some accounts deposited through the community foundation were depleted, despite having a restricted status.”

Other suspicious charges included property taxes for Jahncke’s residence and Amazon purchases sent to the former treasurer’s home.

According to the criminal complaint, Jahncke claimed he sometimes “confused his personal cards with the museum’s card” and stated: “I did embezzle funds to pay for my own expenses.”

On the National Register of Historic Places, the Hearthstone Historic House Museum states a claim to being “the first house anywhere in the world to be incandescently illuminated by a water powered Western Edison Electric Light Company dynamo power station and an Edison Electric System.” Among its features are “original Edison electroliers, original light switches, and some of the world’s only examples of original Edison wiring in situ.”

On Thursday, Carolina Herrera creative director Wes Gordon presented the brand’s fall 2026 ready-to-wear collection during New York Fashion Week. The show was held at an event space on Little W. 12th Street in the Meatpacking District, and mixed in with the typical parade of willowy fashion models were several art world figures, who, while certainly fashionable themselves, are not necessarily known for walking the runway.  

Among them were photographer Ming Smith, painter Amy Sherald, artist and actress (and occasional model) Anh Duong, art dealer Hannah Troaore, performance artist Eliza Douglas, and sculptor Rachel Feinstein (along with her teenage daughter, Flora).

“I’m celebrating the kind of women who are often overlooked through history,” Gordon said at a preview in his studio, which Women’s Wear Daily attended. He also name-checked Peggy Guggenheim, who was on his mood board.

Leopard print features prominently in Gordon’s collection (as seen in the knee-length jacket modeled by Smith), as do florals (for example, Feinstein’s white dress printed with red calla lilies, or the lily brooches worn by Traore and Sherald). WWD described the collection as exhibiting “a restrained glamour with pieces that were a bit Hitchcock ’60s hourglass, a bit ’80s with rounded puff shoulders and couture coded with sculpted jackets, knits, tulip-shape skirts and diaphanous printed dresses that floated off the body.”

Below are some of Carolina Herrera’s fall 2026 runways looks, modeled by an intergenerational cast of contemporary art figures.

The National Gallery in London will institute cuts to staff and programming in the face of a deficit that would, in the absence of “decisive remedial action,” grow by 2027 to £8.2 million ($11.2 million), says the institution in an emailed statement.

The museum says that “in the present global landscape and with the cost-of-living crisis, like many other institutions, we face increasing competition for people’s time and share of wallet.”

“We have been working hard for a long time trying to mitigate the financial pressures we are facing in our day-to-day, business as usual,” says the statement from a spokersperson. “However, due to many widely reported circumstances which are beyond our control, such as rises in operational costs and commercial pressures, we have now reached a point where we must make difficult and painful decisions.”

The museum has instituted a “voluntary exit scheme” for all staff as well as ceasing “several of [its] activities,” whose costs can no longer be justified. It did not identify which activities. If the voluntary departures do not have a sufficient savings, layoffs are possible, according to a report in the Art Newspaper, which notes that the museum currently faces a deficit of about £2 million ($2.7 million).

The news comes just two months after the museum announced a $1 billion fundraising campaign for its new “Project Domani,” to collect art of the 20th and 21st centuries and build a new wing to house those acquisitions. At that time, about half the goal had been reached. Those funds are restricted to the purpose for which they were raised, notes the museum in its statement.