On a recent visit to the Notre-Dame de Paris, the 12th-century cathedral was bustling with a steady flow of visitors who had come inside the Gothic monument from a wintery afternoon. It seemed more packed than it had been before its closure in 2019, after the collapse of its iconic spire and roof in a horrific blaze. But the line to get in moved quickly, and once under its vaulted ceiling, the sheer size of the structure left room to linger. I had gone to see the stained-glass windows designed by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century, adorning six of the south-side chapels along the nave—before they are replaced.

Viollet-le-Duc’s windows, geometric and floral-patterned stained-glass grisailles, or light gray-scale panes accented with colorful sections, were installed as part of his major restoration of Notre-Dame between 1844 and 1864. Meanwhile, earlier that week, I had gone to the Grand Palais, equally bustling, to see life-size models of the proposed substitutes, a figurative retelling of the Pentecost, by contemporary artist Claire Tabouret. 

These two sets of windows are at the center of a so-called “stained-glass quarrel,” as the French media regularly calls it, or the more poetic “windows of discord,” as Le Monde put it. In late 2023, following the 2019 blaze that nearly engulfed all of Notre-Dame, French president Emmanuel Macron, in agreement with Laurent Ulrich, the Archbishop of Paris, announced a project to commission a new set of stained-glass windows by a living artist for six of the seven stained-glass windows in the chapels along the southern side of the nave, as a “contemporary gesture” to breathe new life into the centuries-old structure.

From eight finalists, Tabouret’s six painted designs, which will be translated into stained glass with master artisans at the Atelier Simon-Marq, were ultimately selected in late 2024, for the commission of a lifetime—but the trouble had already been brewing well before then.

At the crux of the controversy is the fact that Tabouret’s new windows would push out Viollet-le-Duc’s undamaged ones. Advocates for the project argue that since the windows date to the 19th century, instead of the Middle Ages, they are fair game to be replaced in a monument that has historically integrated new artistic elements to its walls over the centuries. The goal is to add “meaning” and “beauty,” through the story of the Pentecost, while maintaining “coherence” in this part of Notre-Dame with a nearby figurative window depicting the Tree of Jesse, according to Philippe Jost, who has led the Notre Dame restoration since the fire. (The Tree of Jesse window is the only figurative stained-glass one on the same, ground-floor side of the nave as Viollet-le-Duc’s geometric ones.) Another dismissal of the 19th-century windows has to do with them being grisailles and therefore not as colorful as one might expect of a stained-glass window. Tabouret’s design, by contrast, is a riot of explosive color.   

The Kennedy Center began laying off staff on Thursday, according to a report in the Washington Post. The cuts, which employees say affected multiple departments, are tied to President Donald Trump’s plan to shut down the Washington, D.C., cultural institution for two years, which was approved by its board earlier this month.

Included in the layoffs were the Kennedy Center’s executive vice president Nick Meade and vice president Rick Loughery, both of whom were installed in their roles by the center’s former president Richard Grenell, a Trump loyalist hired a year ago to overhaul the institution’s “woke” programming. Trump and the rest of the board replaced Grenell, whose tenure was marked by slumping ticket sales and public backlash, earlier this month with Matt Floca.

The cuts follow a year-long saga that began in February 2025, when Trump announced plans to fire existing Kennedy Center board members, including chairman David Rubenstein, and replace them with his allies. That December, the president renamed the venue the Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, sparking protests and a wave of cancelations by prominent performers and performing arts groups, including composer Philip Glass and the Washington National Opera.  

Last month, in a move widely viewed as a face-saving measure amid these cancelations, Trump announced that the Kennedy Center would close for two years for renovations starting July 4. This month, preservation groups sued Trump and the board, along with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, seeking to block the planned renovation.

While more than 100 employees of the center have left or been laid off since Trump’s takeover, this will be the first time that Trump supporters have been included in staff cuts. More layoffs and furloughs are expected.

Guillaume Cerutti, the former CEO of Christie’s auction house, has left his position at the Pinault Collection after just 13 months, the French investigative news outlet Glitz reported earlier this week.

In February 2025, Cerutti became president of the collection owned by French billionaire François Pinault. In addition to the 10,000 works in its holdings, the Pinault Collection also maintains several private museums: the Bourse de Commerce in Paris and the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, which regularly stage exhibitions. The Paris location opened in 2021, while the Venice outposts opened in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Pinault also owns Venice’s Teatrino, a 225-seat auditorium that reopened in 2013 after a renovation by Tadao Ando, who also worked on the other two Venice spaces.

Neither Cerutti nor the Pinault Collection has commented on his departure, with a spokesperson telling the Art Newspaper there are no plans to appoint a new president or an interim. Pinault still serves as honorary president of the collection and is said to be very active in its management.

Cerutti has had a long career in French public arts, having served as the Centre Pompidou’s managing director and as chief of staff to the minister of culture, and in the auction houses. In the latter, he served as CEO of Sotheby’s France from 2007 to 2011, when he became deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. In 2016, he was hired as Christie’s president for Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and India. A year later, he became CEO, a role he held until January 2025. He was replaced by Bonnie Brennan, the then-regional president of the Americas, though he has continued to serve as board chairman.

The move to the Pinault Collection did not mean a change in boss: Pinault has been the owner of Christie’s since 1998. Both entities are owned by his investment holding company Groupe Artémis, which also owns Creative Artists Agency, which the billionaire purchased in 2023 for $7 billion. Pinault made his fortune as the founder of luxury group Kering, which owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, and Bottega Veneta; he is the 81st wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $29.5 billion, per Forbes‘s annual billionaires list.

Antonio Homem, who started working with the storied gallerist Ileana Sonnabend in the 1960s and went on to oversee her collection and maintain her and husband Michael Sonnabend’s legacy as supporters of some of the most important figures of post-war contemporary art, has died at the age of 86. The news was announced by the Sonnabend Collection Mantova, a museum Homem helped open in the north of Italy in 2025.

Born in Portugal in 1939, Homem moved to Switzerland as a teenager and studied engineering before he solidified his interest in the arts upon meeting Ileana Sonnabend, who convinced him to work at her gallery in Paris in 1968.

In an interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Homem recounted, “I must say that Ileana and Michael were very much the real parents for me, in the sense that they did show me what I wanted and what I could be.” Later in the same interview, he said, “I always said that the collection was an autobiography and an auto-portrait of Ileana, for Michael, for me, and that for me is very interesting. In other words, a work is just not something one bought for a certain amount at the moment; it’s a kind of distillation of our lives, of years of our lives. And so I think it becomes much richer.”

Homem helped Sonnabend open her gallery in New York in 1971, in the beginnings of the burgeoning Soho scene. Sonnabend shared a building with fellow dealers Leo Castelli, John Weber, and André Emmerich, and continued as a commanding presence as the gallery moved to Chelsea in 2000. After her death in 2007, at the age of 92, Homem took over as the gallery’s director and, two years later, established the Sonnabend Collection Foundation to maintain a collection that includes works by a long list of luminaries including Jasper Johns, Anselm Kiefer, Jannis Kounellis, Roy Lichtenstein, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Robert Rauschenberg, Mario Schifano, Andy Warhol, and many more.

In the fall of 2025 Homem helped open the Sonnabend Collection Mantova in restored spaces in the Palazzo della Ragione, a medieval palace in the center of the city. Among the highlights of the museum are Jasper Johns’s Figure 8 (1958), Roy Lichtenstein’s Little Aloha (1962), and Robert Rauschenberg’s Kite (1963), as well as an installation of Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests (1964–66).

Countless bands and musical artists have celebrated new album releases on late-night television, but no one has done so with quite the art world flair as BTS, the mega-famous K-pop boy band fronted by art enthusiast and collector RM. (The other six members are Jin, Suga, j-hope, Jimin, V, and Jung Kook.)

Fresh off a four-year hiatus, BTS’s new album Arirang came out on Mar. 20. The band was interviewed on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday night. But instead of performing their new single “SWIM” in Studio 6B, Fallon played a previously recorded video from a secret live performance at the Guggenheim Museum earlier that day.

In the video, Fallon stands in front of a circular stage on the ground floor of “New York’s iconic Guggenheim Museum,” as the host puts it, and introduces the song. All seven BTS members take turns singing while strolling separately down the museum ramp, with Carol Bove’s colorful metal sculptures acting as a backdrop to the performance. They meet up on the stage just in time for the first chorus.

During the interview portion of the The Tonight Show, RM explains that they named the album—their first as a group since taking a hiatus in 2022 due to compulsory service in the Korean military—after the Korean folk song “Arirang.” The album, RM said, includes a lot of emotions: joy, sorrow, longing, sadness, resistance. “We hope our new songs can be universal, like Arirang.”

BTS also performed a second single at the Guggenheim, “2.0.” This one involved more choreography, with the 150 audience members watching from the ramps above rather than from around the stage. (RM hurt his ankle during a recent rehearsal, so performed from a stool.)

As controversy mounts over Russia’s plans to mount its first Venice Biennale pavilion since the nation’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, 37 members of the European Parliament signed a letter that calls for the European Union to cease all funding to the Biennale.

The EU has not publicly stated how much money it gives to the Biennale, which is not just the top art exhibition in Europe but the biggest show of its kind anywhere in the world. But according to the letter, which was obtained by Politico on Friday, the EU has granted around 2 million euros to the Biennale over a three-year period.

“Under no circumstances should Russia, a state subject to extensive European Union sanctions on trade, goods and services, be permitted to participate in an event financed by European taxpayers’ money,” the letter states. “The Russian pavilion must likewise not be used for any activities organised by Russia, whether in physical or digital form.”

Calling the pavilion “unacceptable,” the pavilion goes on to note, “Every day that Russia’s pavilion remains on the programme of the Venice Biennale is a day the European Union’s credibility is weakened. Every euro of EU funding that flows to an institution hosting that pavilion is a contradiction in terms. The Ukrainian people, who are fighting and dying for the values this Union was built upon, deserve better than ambiguity.”

The letter calls for a formal review of the Russian Pavilion’s participants and organizers, with the possibility of seeking sanctions against some individuals as a result. Moreover, the letter’s signatories are asking for “targeted restrictive measures against any individuals or entities involved in the Russian pavilion who can be credibly linked to the Russian government, its propaganda apparatus, or entities supporting the war effort.”