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The Headlines
MACRON PICKS PÉGARD. Catherine Pégard, former president of the Chateau de Versailles and a close ally of French president Emmanuel Macron, will become the new French culture minister, reports Le Monde. Unconfirmed guestimates that she would replace the outgoing Rachida Dati were making the rounds for weeks. Pégard, 71, will have her work cut out. She will need to sort out the Louvre‘s predicament in the wake of the October theft of France’s crown jewels, while attempting to save Macron’s controversial $1 billion plan to overhaul the museum. It’s part of his cultural legacy, a prized tradition among French leaders that still holds sway.
FRIEZE FRENZY. The first day of sales is in for Frieze Los Angeles, which runs through March 1, and ARTnews’ Brian Boucher has all the stats from the VIP Day that saw plenty of schmoozing from New Yorkers swapping the snow for California’s sun. LA dealer Charlie James, standing amid works by Kristopher Raos and Manuel López, summed up the enthusiastic mood with the headline-making quote: “It’s a frenzy.” Meanwhile, Maximilíano Durón was sifting through the fair booths for his pick of Best Booths for ARTnews. He landed on the standout boothat LA’s Parker Gallery, which is showing a series of new paintings by Marley Freeman inspired by Textile Artifacts, an antique textile dealership in LA, founded by her father, Paul. Still on the textile theme is a cheerful display of quilts by Yvonne Wells at Fort Gansevoort. This edition is also trending an uptick in photography, with the likes of Uzi Parnes’ “photo chandeliers” at Gordon Robichaux, and Christina Fernandez’s photographs at Gallery Luisotti depicting LA sweatshops, many of which employed undocumented women. Both made the Best Booth list.
The Digest
Ulysses Jenkins, the muralist, performer, and trailblazer of video art, has died at the age of 79. His death was confirmed by the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, his home town. [ARTnews]
Artist Amy Sherald has been crowned one of TIME magazine’s 2026 Women of the Year, joining 16 other honorees. Last year, Sherald claimed the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. was censoring her planned exhibition because of a painting of a Black transgender woman posing like the Statue of Liberty, so she pulled the show in protest. [TIME magazine]
Giancarlo Politi, founder of the publication Flash Art, has died at the age of 89. [Le Quotidien de l’Art]
With new lounges, an occasional herbal tea service, chess on round coffee tables, a “touching library” of hunks of steel, peacock feathers, and other materials, sculptor Carol Bove has set up her forthcoming retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum as a “buoyantly feel-good affair that prioritizes the human desire to sit or lie down.” “Museums are so off-putting,” Bove said. “I think it goes all the way back to Plato, who believed the body was really inferior to the soul.” [The New York Times]
German culture minister Wolfram Weimer has called a crisis meeting over the Berlinale film festival, which has been torn apart over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and accusations of censorship of pro-Palestinian stances. [dpa]
A statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, London has been defaced with red graffiti paint and the words “Zionist war criminal” and “free Palestine.” [The Daily Telegraph]
Dubai is preparing to reopen the renovated 1787-built Al Fahidi Fort, the oldest surviving structure in Dubai. The fort-turned-museum will boast expanded gallery spaces, archival materials, and digital media displays. [The National]
The Kicker
GIFTS GALORE. We’ve got news of two large museum donations to tide over the weekend: the Vancouver Art Gallery just received over 800 photographs by Stephen Shore from his “Uncommon Places” (1973-81) series, to help shore up the gallery’s collection, reports The Art Newspaper. In fact, the gift from the Chan family means the museum now has one of the most comprehensive groupings of Shore’s photography in the world. The photography gifts keep giving, with the J. Paul Getty Museum scooping up a series of photos by Irving Penn, taken while he was travelling in Cuzco, Peru, also reports TAN.
