2025 was a rough year any way you slice it: an unstable economy, ravaging climate disasters, the return of President Trump to the Oval Office—and all the chaos that entails—and a viciously divided political climate sporadically punctuated by previously unthinkable violence. Narrow the focus to the art world and none of those pressures disappear. In fact, perhaps more than ever, the art world seemed intertwined with all of them. The Los Angeles fires were most destructive in neighborhoods where both collectors and artists live; the Trump administration made one of its signature policy planks bringing US museums and arts institutions to heel; advancements in AI technologies swept through creative industries first; and even the particular flavor of market volatility brought on by widespread tariffs seemed tailor-made to upend a globalized art market. All in all, an exhausting year. But—if you’ll permit me—a bit of hope? For every gallery that shut down or closed a location, another seemed to open. And, as art dealers reminded me all year, when the world gets dark, artists rise to the challenge, leading the way forward. With 2026 slated for a Venice Biennale curated by Koyo Kouoh, as something like a final gift before her passing, perhaps there is a light at the end of this tunnel. —Harrison Jacobs So large most can be seen in their entirety only from the air, the mysterious geoglyphs known as the Nazca lines were created around 2,000 years ago by the Nazca people of Peru. In the century since the giant drawings became a focus of research by modern archeologists, nearly 900 figurative and geometric Nazca glyphs have been identified; most have been discovered through modern technologies such as aerial photography, satellite imagery, and, beginning in 2019, artificial intelligence. While much recent focus on AI has been on its dangers, it has proved a game changer in the field of archeology. In 2025, an international team of researchers led by Japan’s Yamagata University and IBM announced that since 2022 over 500 new glyphs had been detected using AI trained to search aerial photos. —Anne Doran For nearly a year, Europe’s art market had braced for the impact of Directive 2022/542, a new European Union rule designed to simplify the bloc’s spaghetti-tangle of a VAT system. The directive, which went into effect on January 1, allows member states to apply reduced VAT rates on art sales, provided they remain above 5 percent, while scrapping older, more convoluted systems. Implementation, however, has been uneven. France and Germany wasted no time in adopting reduced rates of 5.5 and 7 percent, respectively. Other nations, including Holland, plan to raise VAT on art, while Italy took its time in finalizing its approach (the Italian government finally bowed to pressure in July, cutting VAT on art sales to just 5 percent, the lowest in the EU).Lower VAT rates stand to reshape Europe’s art landscape. Dealers have said that even small differences can influence where collectors choose to buy. As dealer Thaddaeus Ropac told ARTnews, Germany’s former 19 percent VAT had long hindered its market, and the slashed rate, now at 7 percent, should shift activity across borders. France’s new, streamlined 5.5 percent VAT replaced its more complex “margin system.” Belgium reduced its VAT to 6 percent for almost all art transactions after dealers pushed back against a proposed 21 percent tax. Supporters of lower VAT argue that art is a cultural good and that its economic spillover outweighs tax losses. Early signs suggest France’s simplified system is already reinforcing Paris’s appeal to international galleries, while dealers at Italy’s Artissima this fall said the new rate boosted sales. —George Nelson As in past years, Nazi-looted artworks periodically made headlines in 2025, though only one gripped the attention of the public, largely because the story around it felt stranger than fiction. During the doldrums of summer, a Dutch journalist revealed that he discovered an “unreturned” painting by Giuseppe Ghislandi—its attribution is disputed—in a real estate listing for a home in Mar del Plata, Argentina. That home, it turned out, was owned by Patricia and Alicia Kadgien, the daughters of a former Nazi who died in Argentina, and the painting was once held by Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer who fled the Netherlands during the rise of the Nazis. Following the report on the painting, the work quickly disappeared before Patricia ultimately gave it over to a local court. As Nazi-looted artworks go, the painting is neither the most valuable nor the most expensive, but the scandal surrounding it is a reminder that pieces plundered during World War II still remain at large—sometimes in the most unexpected of places. —Alex Greenberger If last year marked an inflection point in the proliferation of artificial-intelligence tools, with the launch of several sophisticated text-to-video generators, 2025 was the year they blasted into the mainstream. That shift began in March, when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced that the company’s flagship platform, ChatGPT, could now produce images natively. Users no longer needed a specialized platform—they could simply use the one they were already hooked on. The power of the new capabilities was immediately apparent when a Seattle software engineer kicked off a viral trend of transforming images into the style of Studio Ghibli films like Howl’s Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, and Spirited Away. While there had been AI-generated images that swept the internet before—most notably the 2023 deepfake of Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket—the Ghibli craze was different. It marked a truly native AI meme that captured the zeitgeist, made all the more uncanny given Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki’s very clear and well-documented disdain for the technology. Still, the craze demonstrated the unique power of an AI-driven trend: regular users transformed themselves into Ghibli characters, quickly followed by the White House and the Israel Defense Forces leveraging the technology to circulate Ghibli-fied propaganda. The whole episode made one thing clear: we are entering a new, stranger, and darker digital culture than the one we just left. —Harrison Jacobs After her photographs were seized at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas in January, photographer Sally Mann found herself at the center of controversy. The removed images, dating to the 1990s, include nude depictions of her underage children. Though they do not depict sexual activities, some critics characterized the images as “child porn,” even drawing comparisons to “pedophilia” and “child rape.” The controversy was spurred by a 2024 open letter from the Danbury Institute, a conservative Christian advocacy group, and then backed by some local government officials, which ultimately resulted in their removal from the museum’s group exhibition “Diaries of Home.” They were eventually returned to Mann’s gallery Gagosian, following a thorough investigation, and all charges were dropped. Mann is no stranger to this kind of criticism of her work; however, this marked the first time that her photographs were censored in a museum—setting a larger precedent among US museums about what artwork can and will be shown. —Francesca Aton It’s not every day that a museum will close for seemingly no reason at all. But that’s exactly what apparently happened this year when the Flemish government decided it would gut Antwerp’s M HKA, Belgium’s oldest contemporary art museum. The government did not cite financial troubles as the cause for the closure, though it had recently denied the institution’s plans to build a new €130 million building. Instead, the decision came as part of a restructuring of Flemish cultural institutions that would create three “clusters” of museums and more evenly spread out the region’s cultural offerings. As part of the change, which is expected to take two years and be completed by 2028, M HKA’s collection of some 8,000 objects, many of which trace the importance of Antwerp in the development of 20th-century art, will be transferred to S.M.A.K. in Ghent, with the M HKA’s building essentially being transformed into a Kunsthalle-style organization. Two museum groups as well as artists like Luc Tuymans spoke out against the decision and called for the government to reverse it. —Maximilíano Durón The cultural shift brewing in Central Asia broke the surface this year, carried by new museums and a high-profile biennial that caught the art world’s eye. In September, Uzbekistan drew scores of journalists and arts professionals to Bukhara, an ancient city designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site that has newly been refashioned as the setting for a contemporary art exhibition.The biennial brought together more than 70 Uzbek artists and artisans, joined by international figures including Antony Gormley, Wael Shawky, Tavares Strachan, and Dana Awartani. That same month, neighboring Kazakhstan inaugurated new two arts and culture venues to comparable fanfare: the Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture, a non-collecting institution making good on its mission to decolonize art history, and the Almaty Museum of Arts (AMA), a private museum from collector Nurlan Smagulov. Eurasia’s ascendant arts profile shows no hint of cresting: Tashkent’s Centre for Contemporary Arts, designed by Paris-based Studio KO, will open in March under the leadership of curator Sara Raza. —Tessa Solomon This year, the Gulf Cooperation Council redrew its cultural map yet again, with a slate of new institutions inaugurated or announced. The long-anticipated Natural History Museum in Abu Dhabi opened in November, with the Foster + Partners–designed Zayed National Museum to follow this month. The latter museum will house 3,000 pieces, with 1,500 items on view at any time, including one of the world’s oldest natural pearls. Elsewhere in the United Arab Emirates, Dubai unveiled plans for its first art museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art. Called the Dubai Museum of Art (DUMA), it will be designed by Pritzker Prize–winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando and built along Dubai Creek, an inlet of the Persian Gulf. The project is being developed by the Al-Futtaim Group conglomerate, with the support of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the current ruler of Dubai who also serves as vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. No opening date has been confirmed. Qatar, which is preparing to debut the Lusail Museum and Art Mill Museum, caught global notice with plans for the first museum dedicated to the pioneering Indian modernist Maqbool Fida Husain. Operated under the aegis of the Qatar Foundation, the new institution, officially called Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum, will present a newly formed permanent collection encompassing the full sweep of Husain’s oeuvre, from paintings and tapestries to photographs, films, installations, and poetry. —Tessa Solomon It’s not every day—or every year—that a museum opening is as highly anticipated on an international scale as Cairo’s long-awaited Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). While a dozen of the museum’s galleries opened to the public last fall, the grand opening on November 1 presented the totality of GEM’s 968,000 square feet of space, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects, for the first time. The museum, located a stone’s throw from the Giza Plateau, houses some 50,000 artifacts from throughout the course of ancient Egyptian history. The most popular attraction is sure to be the two sprawling exhibition halls housing all 5,600 burial objects—among them shrines, coffins, thrones, chariots, and his golden mask—from King Tutankhamun’s tomb. —Leigh Anne Miller After four years of anticipation dating back to an initial announcement in January 2021, the Centre Pompidou closed its doors definitively for five years of renovation work to be conducted while Paris—and all the eyes on that beloved City of Light—wonder how to reconcile the cessation of activity at one of the world’s most-important museums. Action won’t be ceasing entirely: the institution’s “Constellation” program, initiated earlier this year, will continue to disperse holdings from the collection, and the Pompidou has satellite sights in Spain, Belgium, China, and elsewhere in France, as well as plans for more in South Korea, Brazil, and New Jersey. But still, five years is a long time to wait for the iconic HQ to reopen. —Andy Battaglia After a messy and very public period of finger-pointing and contentious back-and-forth, the Whitney Museum in New York suspended its storied Independent Study Program (ISP) after controversy surrounded a performance allegedly canceled over content related to the ongoing crisis in Gaza. The museum said it nixed the performance after learning that, during an earlier presentation of the work, an artist involved had asked audience members who believed in America or Israel “in any incarnation” to leave. Detractors said they suspected something more nefarious. Either way, ISP associate director Sara Nadal-Melsió was let go after condemning the cancellation, and the standing of the program, founded in 1968, was put up for question after the Whitney issued a letter calling for “greater reflection” regarding ISP as well as a “need to further consider the nature of the relationship between the program and the museum of which it is a part.” —Andy Battaglia The art market is primarily a vibes-based economy and, well, the vibes this year were pretty bad, due in no small part to President Donald Trump’s signature economic policy: tariffs. Since re-entering office in January, Trump repeatedly announced, delayed, negotiated, and then announced again tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China, and a host of other countries. Those countries inevitably announced retaliatory tariffs and, suddenly, a very fragile US economy was thrown into an ever-expanding trade war. While the larger economy has somehow survived shock after shock, and the stock market has ridden the roller coaster in lockstep, it’s still not clear—10 months later—what actual impact the Trump tariffs have had on the movement and pricing of goods. Still, dealers, art fair directors, art shippers, and artists have been scrambling with little clarity to adjust their operations and take on additional overhead to avoid running afoul of the new regulations. Painting, sculpture, and fine art seem to be exempt from tariffs under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but art supplies, antiques, and decorative arts are not. Shipping materials, furniture, and other supplies used to put on major trade events like art fairs are also subject to tariffs, and therefore rising costs. But the greatest cost to the art market may be an increasingly isolated US, with many Canadian collectors halting US art purchases on principle, and American collectors, exposed to a shaky economy, becoming gun-shy on spending money. —Harrison Jacobs When the art market gets bad, the lawsuits start. And, boy, were there lawsuits in 2025. The year kicked off with cryptocurrency mogul Justin Sun’s lawsuit against billionaire collector David Geffen for the return of an Alberto Giacometti sculpture, Le Nez, claiming it had been sold out from under Sun by a rogue art adviser in an elaborate scheme of forged signatures and fictitious lawyers. Later in the year, the auction house Phillips sued David Mimran, the son of French businessman Jean Claude Mimran, over his failure to pay $14.5 million for a Jackson Pollock painting. Those were just appetizers. The main course arrived in July, when high-powered art advisers—and former business partners—Barbara Guggenheim and Abigail Asher sued each other over alleged financial mismanagement and questionable business practices. Then this fall, the founders of Sperone Westwater sued each other as they prepared to close the gallery. Artists weren’t immune to suits either. In May, it was revealed that Pace was embroiled in a messy lawsuit with the estate of a wealthy collector over the authenticity of a work attributed to Louise Nevelson, whose estate it has long represented. Racquel Chevremont filed a lawsuit accusing her former romantic partner, the artist Mickalene Thomas, of emotional and physical abuse. Jack Shainman Gallery was accused by one of its artists of withholding artworks, and an organization possibly owned by a collector sued David Kordansky Gallery and the Sam Gilliam Foundation for allegedly “disavowing” a Gilliam drape painting. That’s hardly all, but it gives a pretty good picture of 2025’s remarkably litigious environment. —Harrison Jacobs There were two standout results for female artists at auction this year: a Marlene Dumas painting set the record price for a living woman artist at auction, while a work by Frida Kahlo broke the auction record for any female artist. Christie’s New York netted $13.6 million (all quoted prices include fees) for Dumas’s Miss January (1997) in May during its 21st-century evening sale. The painting, portraying a woman with a sickly white face and naked from the waist down, was consigned by Miami collectors Don and Mera Rubell. Though the work carried a third-party guarantee ahead of its sale and didn’t meet its high estimate of $18 million, it was still as a major milestone for a work by a living artist, besting Jenny Saville’s Propped (1992), which sold for $12.4 million in 2018. (Dumas’s previous auction record was $6.3 million, set in 2008 for The Visitor, from 1995.) It’s worth noting, however, that Miss January wasn’t among the top five priciest works sold during the New York May sales. They were all by men: Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Alberto Giacometti, Rene Magritte, and Piet Mondrian. The $47.6 million paid for the latter artist’s Composition with Large Red Plane, Bluish Gray, Yellow, Black, and Blue (1921) makes the Dumas result look like a drop in the bucket, highlighting the gaping void in demand between male and female artists. Still, Dumas capped off a fine year by becoming the first living female artist to join the Louvre’s permanent collection in November.As for Kahlo, her 1940 self-portrait El sueño (La cama) sold for $54.7 million in November as part of Sotheby’s sale of Surrealist art in New York, beating the previous record for a female artist at auction of $44.4 million, when Georgia O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed/White Flower No.1 (1936) sold in 2014. The painting’s pre-sale estimate of $40 million to $60 million suggested it was set to break the Mexican artist’s auction record of $34.9 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2021 for her Diego y yo (1949). That work set a record at the time for a Latin American artwork, which El sueño (La cama) also broke. In both sets of the New York sales this year, other female artists also saw their auction records fall. In May, Simone Leigh’s Sentinel (2020) sold at Christie’s for $5.7 million, breaking her previous $3 million record, while at Phillips Grace Hartigan’s The Fourth (1959) sold for $1.6 million. In November, Sotheby’s sold Ceciliy Brown’s High Society (1997–98) for $9.8 million after a 10-minute bidding war, while Christie’s also notched new records for Firelei Báez ($1.1 million), Joan Brown ($596,900), and Olga de Amaral ($3.1 million); the latter’s record had most recently been reset in May. —George Nelson When it comes to national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, nothing should ever be considered set in stone until the exhibitions themselves go on view: artists are sometimes replaced, and controversies and conflicts periodically lead to cancelations. But even with all that in mind, no Venice-related turnabout in recent memory is quite so embarrassing as the one that afflicted Australia’s 2026 pavilion, which was initially given to artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino. Not long after the pair was appointed, Creative Australia, the nonprofit organization charged with commissioning the pavilion, dropped them amid concerns that Sabsabi had glorified a Hezbollah leader in a past work and “favored boycotts of Israel,” as one widely read Australian outlet claimed. Expectedly, a bitter outcry ensued over Creative Australia’s decision. Less expectedly, after furor mounted and board members departed the organization, Sabsabi and Dagostino were reinstated as artist and curator for the upcoming pavilion. In spite of repeated allegations of censorship voiced by outsiders amid the ado, the pair said their reappointment provided a “sense of resolution.” —Alex Greenberger Painter Amy Sherald canceled the Washington, D.C., stop of her traveling survey, “American Sublime,” after the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery considered removing a painting from the exhibition. That work, Trans Forming Liberty (2024), depicts Arewà Basit, a Black nonbinary model and performance artist, as the Statue of Liberty. The iteration of “American Sublime” set for the NPG would have marked the first solo presentation of its kind by a Black contemporary artist at the institution. (The nearby Baltimore Museum of Art took over the exhibition’s Mid-Atlantic stop, with the show opening there in November.) Instead, the cancelation marked a palpable shift, directly connected to changing politics, as to what kind of federally-run arts institutions are willing to show. “It became clear during my exchanges with the gallery how quickly curatorial independence collapses when politics enters the room,” Sherald wrote in an op-ed for MSNBC about the cancelation. —Francesca Aton After Frieze’s expansion to Seoul at the beginning of the decade and a growth in art fairs across Asia, there have been rumblings about where in the world a new outcrop of international fairs might emerge. For the past few years, many eyes have looked to the Gulf. That speculation came to fruition twice over this year. First, in May, Art Basel announced that it would launch a fair in Doha, Qatar, in February 2026; though at 87 exhibitors, it will be a fraction of the size of the company’s other fairs in Basel, Miami Beach, Hong Kong, and Paris. Then, in October, Frieze said it would take over the region’s premier homegrown fair, Abu Dhabi Art, and rebrand it as Frieze Abu Dhabi in November 2026. The Gulf has been a major player in the international market for decades, and its governments have equally built up museums—some already open, some opening in the next couple of years—to show off their spoils. But the majority of these high-profile buyers have come from the ruling families of Qatar, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia. Now it’s up to Art Basel and Frieze to prove that the region can sustain two mega-fairs. —Maximilíano Durón As soon as the Museum of Modern Art announced that its longtime director Glenn Lowry would retire in September 2025 after 30 years, art world chatter turned to speculation regarding his replacement. Would it be a youthful, up-and-coming curator or an international candidate? Would MoMA for the first time in its history appoint a woman or a person of color to helm its top job? In fact, MoMA went with an internal candidate, Christophe Cherix, who joined the museum in 2007 and had served as the museum’s chief curator of prints and drawings since 2013. While some found Cherix’s appointment uninspiring, his curatorial bonafides are not in doubt; he has organized many well-regarded shows at MoMA, from the the long-overdue, critically-acclaimed Adrian Piper retrospective in 2018 to the popular Ed Ruscha retrospective in 2023. And just before taking the director’s chair, Cherix, with cocurator Beverly Adams, spent three years on a sweeping Wifredo Lam survey, which resulted in MoMA’s recent acquisition of a major work by the artist. —Leigh Anne Miller While the controversy surrounding the Australian Pavilion (see above) might have produced more international headlines this year, the cobbling together of the American Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale is not to be overlooked. Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has cracked down on arts funding and tried to take control of federally-run cultural institutions (see below), and his policies have induced a chilling effect that has led to the cancelation of one major exhibition (see above). All of this would seemingly impact the US Pavilion, which is historically administered by the State Department and the National Endowment for the Arts who empanel experts to choose the winning artist proposal. But Trump’s overhaul of the federal government this year led the NEA to not participate, citing a lack of staff and a shortened timeline. In May, with the pavilion’s status uncertain, Vanity Fair asked the State Department what exactly was going on as the portal to apply for a $375,000 grant from the State Department to take on the pavilion had not yet been posted. After an internal discussion, the posting was live—with some adjusted language that the chosen artist must “advance international understanding of American values by exposing foreign audiences to innovative and compelling works of art that reflect and promote American values.” While that news was concerning on its own, the US Pavilion seemed to be back on track, with the State Department scheduled to announce details for it in October. But then the federal government’s shutdown, which lasted a record 43 days, delayed the announcement yet again. That didn’t stop artist Robert Lazzarini and independent curator John Ravenal from going to the Washington Post in November to say that they had won the pavilion but that negotiations between the State Department and the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, their institutional partner, had ceased and their commission had been rescinded. Later that day, ARTnews reported that the State Department had already moved on, selecting artist Alma Allen and curator Jeffrey Uslip, with the recently formed, Trump-aligned American Arts Conservancy serving as commissioner. That selection was only confirmed by the State Department on November 24, nearly two weeks after the shutdown ended. But what’s most intriguing about the situation is not only that these two artists are white men—the last four selections have all gone to artists of color—but they have relatively small profiles within the US art world. What’s more is that in a break from decades of tradition, the commissioning institution is not an accredited museum or well-regarded public art nonprofit. That would seem, to astute observers, that many of the country’s top artists and museums, who would normally be vying for the honor to represent the United States at the world’s top international art exhibition, decided to sit this one out. Will Allen’s pavilion steal the show in Venice next year? It’s unlikely, but if 2025 is any indication of the state of the world, I guess anything can happen. —Maximilíano Durón The November auctions returned this year with something the market hasn’t felt in a while: conviction. Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Phillips all reported stronger-than-expected bidding, buoyed by high-quality consignments and the headline-grabbing sale of the Leonard Lauder collection, which injected more than $400 million into the season. But the biggest win went to Sotheby’s, which sold Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer (1914–16) for $236.4 million after 20 minutes of bidding, eclipsing the artist’s previous auction record and instantly becoming one of the most valuable portraits of the 20th century—and the second-most expensive artwork ever sold at auction. With the marquee sales now in the rearview mirror, it appears that Sotheby’s CEO Charles Stewart was correct when he noted earlier this year that the question in the market wasn’t demand but supply. And with all three major auction houses finally securing the A+ material that top collectors crave, records fell across categories, including major new benchmarks for women artists and for sculptural works by Glenn Ligon and Richard Prince. The week didn’t just stabilize confidence—it signaled that the top of the market is willing to compete again, provided sellers bring their best. —Daniel Cassady If 2025 had a mood, it was contraction. As tariffs set in, a weaker-than-expected Art Basel in June heralded a steady trickle of gallery closures that grew into a flood. Each closure had its own particular circumstances, but by September Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, Clearing, Tilton Gallery, LA Louver, and others had shuttered. Still more contracted, closing outposts in New York, Los Angeles, or Hong Kong to cut costs or refocus on core markets. The closures underscored a structural shift that has been building for years. Rising rents, tightening margins, and a relentless global fair circuit have made mid-tier brick-and-mortar operations harder to sustain. Dealers talked openly about reallocating resources toward fairs, private sales, and partnerships rather than maintaining multiple physical locations, while others spoke of participating in art fairs more intentionally. The closures were not—in most cases—collapses so much as recalibrations: responses by dealers who were often overextended to collectors who buy internationally, artists who expect global exposure, and an audience whose attention is fragmented across platforms. The result is a market that feels more streamlined, more itinerant, and increasingly shaped by where dealers want to influence the conversation—not by where they happen to pay rent. —Daniel Cassady Nearly 40,000 acres burned across Los Angeles County at the beginning of this year, primarily due to the Palisades and Eaton fires, affecting the neighborhoods of Pacific Palisades, where many collectors live, and Altadena, a community that has been home to generations of Black creativity and, more recently, to artists of various backgrounds. Dozens of blocks were incinerated and thousands more residents lost their homes and their contents, including tens of millions of dollars’ worth of art. Among those impacted were artists Kathryn Andrews, Kelly Akashi, Beatriz Cortez, Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio, Salomón Huerta, and Alec Egan. But the L.A. arts community quickly responded, staging fundraisers to support those affected; the most notable of these was the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, led by the Getty Trust. Many questioned whether Frieze L.A. should be staged the following month; that art week ended up being a salve for the arts community and resulted in necessary sales for artists. London-based Victoria Miro donated its booth at Frieze to a group presentation in support of artists. A prescient exhibition titled “Fire Kinship: Southern California Native Ecology and Art,” examining the region’s relationship with fire, was delayed but provided a way of thinking about how to be “fire-adaptive,” as the exhibition’s cocurator Daisy Ocampo Diaz told ARTnews. And in April, the California African American Museum mounted “Ode to ’Dena: Black Artistic Legacies of Altadena,” an exhibition looking at Altadena’s past, present, and future as a hub of Black creativity and highlighting several artists who were impacted by the fires. The fires also raised new concerns about art insurance and how best to protect valuable goods.—Maximilíano Durón When Koyo Kouoh was picked in 2024 to curate the Venice Biennale, it was a moment of brightness: one of Africa’s finest curators was set to curate the world’s finest art festival, which has downplayed artists of the Global South until very recently. But this summer, Kouoh’s show was nearly shrouded in darkness when she died of cancer at 57, leaving uncertain the futures of both the 2026 Biennale and the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, the Cape Town institution she directed. In the wake of her passing, both that museum and the Biennale have soldiered on; her Venice show will be seen through posthumously by Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helene Pereira, Rasha Salti, Siddartha Mitter, and Rory Tsapayi, the team of curators she had already chosen. Yet Kouoh’s death marked a profound moment of reflection, anyway, leaving a transcontinental coalition of artists, curators, and dealers to muse on all that she had done to raise the profile of Africa’s rich art scene. Her legacy will be on full display next spring at her Biennale, which is titled “In Minor Keys”—a fittingly subdued name for the final effort by a truly great curator not prone to puffery. —Alex Greenberger On Sunday, October 19, around 9:30 a.m., robbers broke into the Louvre Museum‘s Apollo Gallery using a cherry picker and an angle grinder to steal nine pieces of jewelry worth an estimated $102 million in less than eight minutes. One artifact, a crown once belonging to Empress Eugenie, was dropped outside of the museum during the robbery and, despite sustaining damage, experts believe it can be restored. The eight stolen jewels, however, have yet to be recovered, as four suspects remain in police custody. The Louvre heist both captured global attention and became a symbol of wounded national pride in France for the failure to protect some of the country’s most precious cultural treasures. Though alarms in the Apollo Gallery reportedly functioned properly and went off during the heist, it highlighted the museum’s “very inadequate” and “outdated” security systems. The Louvre now plans to bolster its personnel and cyber security in the coming months and years, but there still remain concerns about how to safeguard cultural heritage, while maintaining a balance of security and access. —Francesca Aton From the day President Trump took office in January, he set about revamping the fabric of America’s arts and culture. He started by slashing federal funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), canceling grants and dismissing a majority of their workforces. By November, one-third of American museums had lost grants or contracts, according to a survey of museum directors conducted by the American Alliance of Museums. The White House didn’t stop there. Soon after the funding cuts, all 18 board members—including the chair—were purged from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.; Trump has since appointed himself board chair. And in May, the president claimed on social media to have fired Kim Sajet, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, though the museum responded that he did not have the authority to do so. After a brief standoff among Smithsonian secretary Lonnie Bunch III, Sajet, and Trump, the director formally resigned on June 13, 2025. These moves were not isolated incidents but part of a longstanding fixation. Trump has been preoccupied with American museums since his first presidency, particularly with how they represent American history in all its complexities and failures. Within days of taking office this term, he released an op-ed calling for a purge of “anti-American ideology” from all 19 Smithsonian museums. His officials have instructed that museum exhibitions be “accurate, patriotic, and enlightening—ensuring they remain places of learning, wonder, and national pride for generations to come,” and he moved to personally review whether those standards were being met. —Tessa Solomon