The UK government is considering introducing admission fees for international visitors to national museums. Responding to recommendations from a recent review, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) said that entry fees for tourists could ‘provide significant benefits’, ensuring ‘art and culture is accessible, representative and shared across the country’. The proposal to charge international visitors was made in December in a review of Arts Council England by Baroness Margaret Hodge, but is conditional on the UK first adopting a universal digital ID scheme. Responses have been mixed. Tristram Hunt, director of the V&A, says that the museum is not ‘institutionally attracted’ to charges, preferring instead that museums get a share of an upcoming tax on hotel stays. The department will work with the museum sector to ‘explore options’ and provide an update before the end of the year.
A Russian drone strike on the Ukrainian city of Lviv has damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery in the old quarter, the BBC reports. Dating from the late Middle Ages, Lviv’s historic centre was listed by UNESCO in 1998; in 2023 it was added to the organisation’s World Heritage in Danger list. In a statement issued a day after the strike, UNESCO said it was ‘deeply alarmed’ by the strikes, adding that ‘all parties must safeguard heritage and refrain from any acts harming cultural property’. After the attacks, the Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs, Andrii Sybiha, shared a post on X that included a photograph of the monastery surrounded by flames. It addressed the organisers of the Venice Biennale, denouncing their decision to allow Russia to participate in the event. ‘Don’t look away @la_Biennale,’ he wrote. ‘This is the barbarism you wish to normalize.’
Pat Steir, the New York-based painter and printmaker best known for her Waterfall paintings, has died at the age of 87. Born in New Jersey, Steir studied at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. After a decade working in publishing, she became a teacher herself, working at the Parsons School of Design in New York and later the California Institute of the Arts. In 1976, she founded Printed Matter, an influential publisher of artists’ books, with her then-partner Sol LeWitt and others, and co-founded the feminist publication Heresies. Though she achieved acclaim in the ’80s for her Wave paintings, made by flicking a paint-loaded brush at a canvas, it was her Waterfall works, for which she poured paint from above in a ‘solitary performance’, as she told Apollo in 2019, that earned her exhibitions at museums including the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Steir’s works are held in the permanent collections of museums including the Met and the Louvre.
Gabrielle Goliath, the artist dropped as South Africa’s representative at the upcoming Venice Biennale, will exhibit the work she planned to show at an independent venue in Venice, the Art Newspaper reports. Elegy (2015–ongoing), a performance piece about gender-based violence in South Africa, was cancelled in January by the country’s culture minister after Goliath refused to remove a new section about violence against women in Gaza. Her attempts to overturn the decision in court have been unsuccessful and the South African pavilion will remain empty this year. Elegy will now be shown at the Chiesa di Sant’Antonin, Castello. In a post shared on Instagram, Goliath said that the ‘exhibition is – for me and many others – a radical intervention of hope and community-care, surfacing in the wake of the shocking cancellation of the South African Pavilion’.
Guillaume Cerutti is stepping down as president of the Pinault Collection after only 13 months in the role. His departure was first reported by French publication Glitz, and later confirmed to the Art Newspaper by a spokesperson for the Pinault Collection on 26 March. Formerly the chief executive of Christie’s – which is owned by François Pinault, the French billionaire whose collection forms the basis of museums in Paris and Venice – Cerutti took up the role in February 2025. The reason for his ‘dismissal’, reports Glitz, are unknown. Pinault, who is now 89, is said to be taking over as acting president.
