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Thieves took the 330-pound bronze cover of Dalí’s Livre de l’Apocalypse, inlaid with precious stones and seashells, from a museum in Issoire, France, overnight Sunday, and police can’t say how they moved it unnoticed. Its owner, the restorer Christian Karoutzos, told local radio, “They assassinated France” (The Telegraph).
The Justice Department is citing executive privilege to withhold records from Rep. Joyce Beatty’s suit over the Kennedy Center’s planned two-year closure (Forbes). Beatty, a center board member, says the “one-year review” Trump cited never happened; what the center turned over were four reports from 2021 to 2024, none contemplating a full closure.
Leon Botstein left the Bard College presidency after 51 years, following a WilmerHale review that counted 25 visits to Jeffrey Epstein’s townhouse; he is on sabbatical writing a book on Mahler and still runs the Bard Music Festival and The Orchestra Now (The New York Times). Elaina Richardson, leaving Yaddo, the Saratoga Springs artist retreat, after 26 years, grew its endowment from $8 million to about $40 million (Hyperallergic).
London’s V&A will open a voluntary exit scheme with no savings target or terms published, though its latest accounts show staff costs up 13 percent to £57.5 million (Art in Context). James and Kathryn Murdoch paid more than $300 million for New York magazine and Vox; James says human authorship gets more valuable as AI rises (Vanity Fair).
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