Françoise Nyssen is the new French culture minister

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Emmanuel Macron appoints publisher Françoise Nyssen as culture minister | The French president Emmanuel Macron unveiled his first cabinet yesterday. His culture minister will be the Belgian-born publisher Françoise Nyssen, chief executive of Éditions Actes Sud, the Arles-based house founded by her father, Hubert Nyssen (French language article). Nyssen, who has never held public office before, replaces Audrey Azoulay who served as culture minister from 2016–17.

Matt Hancock rubbishes Labour’s manifesto pledges for the arts | Matt Hancock, the UK culture minister since June 2016, has criticised plans for arts spending in the Labour Party’s manifesto. ‘If you don’t know how you will pay for your manifesto commitments, then it isn’t worth the paper that it is written on,’ he told the Art Newspaper in reaction to the opposition’s pledge for a £1bn ‘Cultural Capital Fund’.

David Hurn archive donated to National Museum of Wales | Magnum photographer David Hurn (b. 1934) has donated some 1,500 images taken over the course of his 60-year-long career to the National Museum of Wales, as well as an additional 700 pictures from his private collection. The bequest includes images taken all over the world, but focuses on photographs of Wales and Welsh culture.

Hal Foster to give 2018 A.W. Mellon lectures | Art historian and critic Hal Foster has been announced as the next A.W. Mellon lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Foster will give six lectures in a series called ‘Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Wake of World War II’. It will look at the response of post-war artists to the events and aftermath of the Second World War, including the Holocaust, and to the nuclear age.