An NSFW picture of Lorde has gone viral, stirring debate on social media about why the singer chose to bare it all for a special-edition release of her new album Virgin.

The photograph, which appears in the vinyl edition of that LP, shows Lorde donning a pair of see-through pants, without any underwear beneath them. Composed so that there is little to see beyond her waist, the picture echoes the album’s cover, an X-ray of the singer’s pelvis by artist Heji Shin.

Artist Talia Chetrit appears to be credited as the photographer of the picture in the liner notes for the vinyl, which were posted to Reddit by fans earlier this week. Chetrit previously photographed Lorde for the cover of one of the album’s singles, “What Was That,” featuring the singer’s face dripping with a translucent substance that may be water, sweat, or something else entirely.

Many of Chetrit’s photographs feature herself and others in various states of undress, often as a comment on how erotic desire and power play a role in how we see. “Power dynamics, agency, sexuality, and the psychology behind imagery have always been an important part of my work,” she told Flash Art in 2018. She has worked on commission for fashion magazines and shown her art in galleries.

Similar pants to the ones worn by Lorde here have also appeared in at least two other pictures by Chetrit, both of them self-portraits. In both, the artist artist poses before a mirror, spreading her legs and holding her camera to her face.

Of Plastic Nude (2016), Amanda Maddox wrote in Aperture last year, “While Chetrit’s see-through garment leaves virtually nothing to the imagination, it’s not exactly titillating by default. Perhaps this image is an evocation of the striptease, which, as Roland Barthes characterized it, ‘is based on a contradiction: Woman is desexualized at the very moment when she is stripped naked.’ Then again, is Chetrit nude? As she leans back against a piano, her plastic-wrapped torso and legs all but open to be viewed, I can’t help but be reminded of the beguiling woman dressed deceptively in a flesh-colored body stocking that E. J. Bellocq photographed a century earlier. In each case, the viewer must look closely to determine if the nudity is an illusion.”

Seen in that light, the new photograph of Lorde speaks to Virgin’s broader concerns with how much one is meant to reveal of their inner self, specifically when it comes to gender. “Some days I’m a woman, some days I’m a man,” Lorde sings on the opening track, “Hammer.” And of the album more broadly, she has said that, during its making, “I was beginning to understand that my gender was more expansive than I had thought.”

Throughout the run-up to the album, Lorde has subverted gender conventions. In the video for “Man of the Year,” she tapes her breasts and writhes around on a pile of soil that references Walter De Maria’s New York Earth Room (1977), an iconic work of the Land art movement. That movement has always been aligned with a certain brand of masculinity, even though women such as Agnes Denes and Nancy Holt are also associated with it.

“Today, land art appears as an almost perfect distillation of the art world’s history of male privilege, with its conviction that man is entitled to space to roam, to make his mark; women, however, never enjoyed that privilege,” wrote Megan O’Grady in 2018. Lorde’s mimicry of the De Maria piece seems to upend that notion, as does the closer of Virgin, a song called “David,” whose name may be an allusion to the Michelangelo sculpture, arguably the most famous male nude in art history.

The Virgin vinyl photograph also points up a contradiction: though Lorde has left little of her torso to the imagination, we still can’t see aspects of her gender identity. That much is also obvious based on the Shin photograph on the album’s cover, one of many X-ray photographs she’s taken. As Shin told ARTnews in 2019, “Even if you can see through me, you can understand even less of what’s going on.”

Most social media users haven’t engaged with the artful ideas broached by Chetrit and Shin’s photography for Lorde. Some have questioned why the vinyl’s picture did not gain the controversy that followed a recent Sabrina Carpenter album cover featuring that pop star kneeling before a man who can be seen grabbing her hair. (Carpenter later released new cover art that she jokingly said had been “approved by God.”)

One X post with 86,000 likes appears to mock the photograph as “groundbreaking” while labeling the Carpenter cover “anti-feminist.” Its poster, whose X page notes that they run a parody account, then wrote in a follow-up tweet, “today when us woman are still fighting for our rights, its bizarre that influential people do weird stuff like this for engagement. both covers are very odd.”

In response to that post, one user, apparently referencing Madonna’s 1992 Sex book, wrote, “No need for all the discourse. 90’s Madonna would kill you all.”

Other users have also poked fun at the Virgin picture. “when you open your Virgin vinyl and see lordussy,” reads one tweet accompanied with an iCarly clip in which the actress Miranda Cosgrove enters a room and is met with a blinding flash of light.

The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) will lay off approximately 30 unionized staff members, according to the Art Newspaper.

A spokesperson described the staff reductions in a statement as “the difficult but necessary process of reducing its operating budget to ensure long-term sustainability.”

Warren Williams, the president of CUPE 15—the local branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees which represents workers from a number of organizations and institutions in Vancouver, including the museum—said he was “deeply saddened by the employer’s recent decision” in a memo to VAG staff published on June 23. Williams also wrote: “Although the union has not yet completed its comprehensive evaluation, we have made the difficult decision to permit the employer to present voluntary severance package offers to individual employees.”

Williams told the Art Newspaper approximately 20 percent of VAG’s 150 unionized staff members represented by CUPE 15 will be laid off, and he was unsure of how many non-union staff would also be laid off due to the overall reductions in staff.

The news follows the recent departure of director and chief executive Anthony Kiendl in March, and the cancellation of plans for a new C$600 million ($420 million) building designed by Herzog & de Meuron last December after the budget rose from C$400 million to C$600 million. The cost for the cancelled project was C$60 million, according to the Art Newspaper.

In January, VAG announced the gallery would seek a simpler, less expensive new home through an invitation to 14 Canadian architectural firms to apply to design the new gallery.

The Art Newspaper reported that the mass layoffs “have raised doubts about the timeline for the new building project, which is already a decade and a half in the planning” and occurred after the city of Vancouver, one of the gallery’s funders, also announced budget cuts and hiring freezes across multiple sectors.

Williams added that CUPE 15 will continues to negotiate for “better severance packages—as our collective agreement allows for our members. Those who want to move on from the gallery need a financial incentive to do so as well as protection of benefits for a certain amount of time and career counselling.”

“Considering the financial status of the gallery and the new site being put on hold—they are in a bit of a pickle,” Williams noted.

The mystery provocateurs behind last week’s eight-foot-tall golden monument of President Donald Trump crushing Lady Liberty have returned to Washington, D.C.’s National Mall with another contribution to the genre of unauthorized presidential fan art—this time, video.

On Thursday morning, a life-sized, gold-painted television set appeared near Third Street NW, pointed squarely at the Capitol, the Washington Post reported. Its screen played a silent, 15-second loop of Donald Trump performing his now-infamous slow-motion dance moves—arms stiff, hips ambivalent, a slow-grinding shimmy—set against backdrops ranging from campaign rallies to a party with Jeffrey Epstein. The latter, for those who have forgotten, was the late financier and convicted sex offender who died while awaiting trial in 2019.

Above the TV sat a spray-painted gold eagle, wings spread in what might generously be described as majesty. Gold ivy trailed down the sides like a rejected Versace ad. At the base, a plaque read: In the United States of America you have the freedom to display your so-called ‘art,’ no matter how ugly it is. — The Trump White House, June 2025

The quote was pulled from a White House statement last week responding to the previous installation, Dictator Approved—a golden thumbs-up smashing the Statue of Liberty’s crown, accompanied by fawning quotes from Trump’s strongman fan club: Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro, and Kim Jong Un.

According to its National Park Service permit, the purpose of the video work is to “demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery.” Translation: trolling with a permit. The piece is allowed to remain on the Mall through Sunday at 8 p.m., barring executive orders to the contrary.

The White House, still nursing its bruised aesthetic sensibilities from last week, was again unamused.

“Wow, these liberal activists masquerading as ‘artists,’ are dumber than I thought!” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, in a statement presumably meant to be read aloud in all caps. “I’ve tricked them into taking down their ugly sculpture and replacing it with a beautiful video of the president’s legendary dance moves that will bring joy and inspiration to all tourists traversing our National Mall.”

She concluded: “Maybe they will put this on their next sculpture.”

As for who’s behind all this? Still a mystery. The materials and gallows humor are consistent with guerrilla works that popped up last fall in D.C., Portland, and Philadelphia: a bronze tiki torch, a replica of Nancy Pelosi’s desk topped with fake poop—part performance art, part lowbrow indictment of the January 6 insurrection.

Permit records list a “Mary Harris” as the applicant, though no contact details were provided. For those into clues: Mary Harris Jones was the real name of labor leader “Mother” Jones. Either the artist is playing a long game or moonlighting as a U.S. history teacher.

The art market isn’t broken, exactly, but in the eyes of art market veterans Ed Dolman, Alex Dolman, Brett Gorvy, Philip Hoffman, and Patti Wong, it doesn’t function the way it used to. The group aims to change that with a new collaborative consultancy, New Perspectives Art Partners (NPAP), announced Thursday.

The consultancy won’t operate like a normal firm: each partner is keeping their day job, and they’ll only assemble when there’s a high-level, specialized problem that needs solving. Think of it like the Avengers, but for the art world.

“We’re not just another advisory,” Gorvy told ARTnews over the phone earlier this week. “This is more like a McKinsey model—a team that comes together to dissect a problem and solve it.”

NPAP isn’t looking to simply broker sales. Instead, it will advise collectors, fiduciaries, and family offices on how to manage, grow, or disperse significant collections with global context and institutional muscle. A major selling point is the group’s deep experience across different segments of the market—from auction houses and top galleries to institutions and high-end advisory—and a geographical footprint that spans Hong Kong to Doha.

Gorvy and Dolman both acknowledged that the current art market is at an inflection point. “We’re not starting this in a boom,” Gorvy said. “We’re starting this in a market that’s becoming complex.”

Dolman pointed to the proliferation of third-party guarantees, declining resale premiums, and regional fragmentation as evidence of a “paradigm shift” in the auction market, with the biggest houses becoming “victims of their own success.”

“What used to be a straightforward business has gotten massively complicated,” Dolman said. “That auction model, once full of surprise and upside, now feels rigid—designed more to manage risk than to serve buyers.”

Gorvy suggested that the market’s fragmentation and increasing complexity have created an opening.

“The tried-and-tested platforms are all showing signs of failure—or at least exhaustion,” Gorvy said. “But that chaos creates opportunity. If you can help clients navigate it, you can add real value.”

NPAP, the partners say, draws strength not just from its flexible structure but from the chemistry behind it. Dolman and Hoffman have known each other since the early 1990s. Gorvy worked closely with Dolman in the early 2000s. And although Patti Wong was a longtime competitor—she led Sotheby’s Asia while Gorvy served as Christie’s chairman and international head of postwar and contemporary art—Gorvy always admired her from afar.

“I was jealous of her power in the marketplace,” he said.

Both Gorvy and Dolman stressed that discretion is baked into the consultancy’s model. There’s no brand-building exercise, no junior staff scrambling for consignment quotas.

“Relevancy is what we keep coming back to,” Gorvy said. “What’s relevant to collectors right now? What’s relevant to institutions? To fiduciaries?”

The chief executive of English Heritage, the British conservation charity, has stepped down from his role having only joined at the beginning of 2024.

English Heritage said in a statement that Nick Merriman resigned for personal reasons linked to family health. Geoff Parkin will now step into the role on an interim basis.

Merriman’s reign was not without tension; he oversaw a restructuring of the charity and proposed cutting its workforce of 2,535 employees by 7 percent (189 jobs). The charity said it would aim to avoid redundancies while maintaining a team of more than 75 curators, historians, and conservators. He also planned to slash opening hours across its 400 sites by 10 percent as part of the overhaul. It was agreed that 21 sites would close over winter, including castles and abbeys.

The organization had reportedly begun to consult with staff and its unions on the proposals as part of a formal consultation period which was not concluded before Merriman’s departure.

The Guardian reported that some staff were “angered by cost cutting under [Merriman’s] watch.”

Gerard Lemos,  the chair of English Heritage’s trustees, said in an official statement to staff: “I am sorry to say that Nick has requested to step down from his role as chief executive for personal reasons relating to family health. The Board has agreed to his request, which will take place with immediate effect. The Board would like to thank Nick for everything he has done.”

In a statement the charity sent out in January, it said “high inflation has increased the cost of conservation work at our sites, but significant and ongoing expenditure is still required if the condition of the sites in our care is not to deteriorate.” The sites managed by English Heritage include Stone Henge, Hadrian’s Wall, and Dover Castle.

The charity became self-financed two years ago and said it no longer receives regular funding from the UK government’s Department of Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) to preserve the National Heritage Collection of state-owned historic monuments and sites.

Its annual 2023–24 review showed that the charity is operating at a loss, with its income totaling £141.4 million ($191 million), against £155.5 million ($213 million) in expenditure.

“Like many organisations, we are operating in a challenging environment and the aim of these proposals is to ensure that English Heritage is financially resilient and can fulfil our charitable purposes,” English Heritage said in a statement.

A new EU law aimed at preventing the sale of looted antiquities is set to go into effect Saturday. While Regulation 2019/880 has a partial exemption for temporary exhibitions, the law may still hamper loans from private collectors, according to a new report from the Art Newspaper.

The new law, first introduced six years ago, stipulates that any party which imports cultural goods from outside the EU will have “heightened due diligence requirements.” Cultural goods refer to fine arts, antiquities, decorative arts, and collectible items.

An advisory note published by the insurance company Lockton said the law is “intended to tackle the illicit trade of goods from countries affected by armed conflict, and where those goods may have been traded by terrorist or other criminal organisations.”

The three categories of cultural goods are 1) ones that have been unlawfully exported from third countries, 2) products from archaeological excavations more than 250 years old, regardless of their value and 3) various types of goods greater than 200 years old with a value above €18,000.

Goods from the second category will require an import license prior to their entry into the EU, and importers need to supply evidence the items were not illegally exported. Goods from the third category require an importer statement with a signed declaration they were also not illegally exported as well as a standardized description of the items.

Implementation of the new law will depend on the actions of individual EU member states, but non-compliance with Regulation 2019/880 could result in seizures and other legal consequences for art dealers, collectors, and other art professionals.

“Where importers lack the required documentation for such items, the entire shipment may be compounded,” Will Ferrer, Lockton’s head of fine art, wrote. “Alternatively, where importers submit false evidence in the course of an import license application, or make a reckless or knowingly fraudulent declaration, there may be criminal consequences. With a greater risk of confiscation, private collectors may also show more caution when deciding where, and to which institutions, to loan their works. This may hinder the efforts of certain institutions to secure works for loan.”

Regulation 2019/880 does have an exemption for “the purpose of education, science, conservation, restoration, exhibition, digitisation, performing arts, research conducted by academic institutions or cooperation between museums or similar institutions.” But the Art Newspaper noted that implementing regulation 2021/1079 limits the exemption to temporary loans from museums outside the EU—meaning private non-EU lenders do not benefit from it.

The new law was designed in response to looting of cultural heritage and archaeological sites in Syria and Iraq. Regulation 2019/880 also mandates digital records to enhance transparency and traceability through a International Cultural Goods (ICG) database. Museums only benefit from the law’s exemptions by registering for the ICG database.

Several art professionals told the Art Newspaper they did not question the aim of the law, but it would add a level of administrative difficulty, especially for works with incomplete documentation or complex histories of ownership.

Eike Schmidt, the director of the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, said there is “a complete lack of administrative infrastructure” for the proper implementation of Regulation 2019/880. “Just consider the thousands of administrative officials, archaeologists, art historians, and restorers who would need to be hired to cope with the avalanche of requests,” he told the Art Newspaper.

“For many museums, requirements for import licenses and provenance proof may hinder international loans and exhibitions,” Tone Hansen, the director of the Munch Museum in Oslo told the Art Newspaper.

Ferrer also wrote that the new EU legislation will likely to increase the need for private collectors to do provenance research before selling goods from their collections.

“Collectors may find themselves in a difficult position of conducting the appropriate provenance research on a given item, with the knowledge that such research could reveal gaps or inconsistencies in provenance that complicate their efforts to sell.”

He also noted that for art dealers and institutions, seizure is excluded from insurance coverage as standard, and when an artwork loses value due to uncertain provenance, it’s unlikely the owner would be compensated by insurers.

“As a result, policyholders will not be covered in the event that any works are seized upon entry into the EU. However, insurers may be able to grant exceptions on a case-by-case basis. For example, insurers may be more inclined to provide cover to borrowing institutions for a single loan for exhibitions in their home country, where that country has a clearly defined set of rules around seizure.”

Marcia Resnick, a photographer known for documenting Manhattan’s downtown art scene during the late 1970s and early 1980s, died at age 74. Her cause of death was lung cancer, according to her sister Janice Hahn, her sole surviving relative.

Resnick started out making conceptual photography and later moving toward portraiture. The shift came as she became increasingly entwined with a faction of ascendant artists and musicians who frequented New York nightclubs like Mudd Club and CBGB. That included a subset people associated with the era’s punk movement.

Born in Brooklyn in 1950 to a mother and father working in publishing and art, Resnick spent her undergraduate years at New York University and Cooper Union, later pursing photography at California Institute of the Arts. She would go on to teach at both her New York alma maters.

Some of her most famous subjects were male musicians, some widely known in the mainstream and others more niche. She shot Mick Jagger and Klaus Nomi; the latter passed away in 1983, making him one of the first notable figures of the downtown scene to die of AIDS-related complications.

Resnick was briefly married to Wayne Kramer, a guitarist for the Detroit-based punk band MC5.

Artists Joseph Beuys and Jean-Michel Basquiat appeared in Resnick’s photographs, as did Ed Koch and comedian John Belushi, who posed for her in 1982 during a spontaneous visit to her Canal Street studio. Her picture of him is thought to be the last photograph of him before his death of an overdose.

In interviews, Resnick said she wanted to reconsider gender norms using her photography. Her pictures of famous men defied convention, often catching her subjects in intimate moments that went against the buttoned-up aesthetic associated with male celebrities. Pictures such as these can be found her series “Punks, Poets & Provocateurs: New York City Bad Boys, 1977–1982.”

Some of Resnick’s photographs were published by the SoHo Weekly News, where she was a columnist. But though her work received a good deal of public attention, privately she struggled: Resnick battled an addiction to alcohol, and then eventually to heroin, for over two decades.

She is today considered one of the foremost documentarians of the ’80s punk scene. In 2022, a retrospective of her photography opened at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine before traveling to two other institutions.

The Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, Scotland, will be closed for the rest of the week after a pro-Palestine protest held in the institution’s courtyard on Tuesday afternoon.

Art Workers for Palestine Scotland organized a sit-in at CCA that was intended to last the entire week, calling for the CCA to support the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel amid Israel’s ongoing war in Palestine, according to the Art Newspaper. (CCA’s board had not backed the campaign earlier this month.)

Law enforcement was called to assist museum security staff in clearing the sit-in. According to the Glasgow Times, “three police buses, four vans, and a patrol car [were] deployed to the scene.”

In a statement, Art Workers for Palestine Scotland said, “During a family-friendly reading and Arabic writing lesson outside the premises, CCA called the police who violently escalated: kettling members of the public, brutally arresting an elderly woman, and unforgivably putting their hands on us. Earlier, CCA’s internal security assaulted and tackled an art worker to the floor for entering the public space of the courtyard.”

The CCA’s board posted its own statement on Tuesday, saying that the institution was “closed to the public due to security and safety concerns, following a rapidly evolving situation involving an intended occupation of our courtyard space. Law enforcement was called in response to a forced entry, and the building was secured. We regret the disruption caused by today’s events and the impact on all those involved inside and outside of the building.”

On Wednesday, CCA said it would be closed for the rest of the week, adding, “This is not a decision we take lightly, but we recognise the need to pause. The temporary closure will allow us to prioritise the safety and wellbeing of our staff and partners, and to create space for reflection. We understand the strength of feeling being expressed by our community, and we remain committed to engaging with this moment thoughtfully.”

The Rijksmuseum’s latest acquisition—a nearly 200-year-old condom made from sheep intestine—has prompted outrage from a conservative Christian group in the Netherlands, which has called its display “a grotesque insult to God, the Catholic Church and the entire Dutch nation,” according to the Art Newspaper.

On view in the museum’s print room as part of a small exhibition on 19th-century sex work, it features an erotic illustration of a seated nun, her legs spread apart and her habit hiked up around her waist, and three very enthusiastic clergymen. Beneath the image, the caption reads Voilà mon choix—“This is my choice”—a lascivious parody of the Judgement of Paris myth, in which a mortal must choose the most beautiful goddess. In this version, the nun appears to have made her pick among three conspicuously aroused priests. She’s pointing right at him.

The artifact was likely a brothel souvenir and is believed to be one of only two known examples to have survived. Rijksmuseum co-curator Joyce Zelen told the Art Newspaper that the object was printed directly onto the sheep’s appendix—a method far less forgiving than paper. “Normally, an etching you can print a few thousand times, but paper is easier to print [on] than sheep’s appendix,” she said.

The protest, organized by Stichting Civitas Christiana and its youth wing TFP Student Action Europe, included 11 demonstrators outside the museum last week and a circulation of 5,000 flyers. The group claims the condom was originally created as anti-Catholic propaganda during the French Revolution.

In a separate op-ed, a Dutch right-wing outlet suggested that similar satire involving Mohammed would be “unthinkable” in the museum.

Zelen, however, sees the controversy as misplaced. “Mocking religion is as old as religion itself,” she said. “It’s meant to be funny.”

The Rijksmuseum show explores a period when prostitution was legal in the Netherlands and public health efforts were focused on curbing rampant syphilis. Condoms made from animal byproducts were discreetly sold in barbershops and seafront stalls. The museum’s print room, which houses more than 750,000 works on paper, acquired the object at auction earlier this year. It will remain on view through November.

In addition to a host of ravenous zombies and a fractured Scottish family, 28 Years Later features one of the most famous public artworks in the UK: Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, a 1998 sculpture that towers above the A1 roadway near Gateshead.

The Cor-Ten steel sculpture takes the form of a figure who stands 66 feet tall and spreads its 177-foot-long wings. It’s thought to be seen by millions of people annually and has become a calling card for Gormley, a Turner Prize–winning sculptor due to receive his biggest US survey to date in the fall, at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas.

Angel of the North has rusted over since its debut, and its oxidized surface comes to take on a post-apocalyptic feel in 28 Years Later, where it appears in an overgrown field, having been abandoned amid failed attempts to curtail a rage-inducing virus that has run rampant in England.

Gormley’s sculpture rhymes with 28 Years Later’s fascination with spirituality—director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland set the opening set piece partly within a church—but it’s also enlisted by the filmmakers in their critique of conservative British politics. (Such a critique may appear oblique to some, but within the UK, few have missed the point. We won’t spoil the out-of-left-field ending, which makes explicit reference to a certain British celebrity who was posthumously accused of rape.)

On its face, Angel of the North does not seem so scandalous. Gormley said he intended the work as a tribute to the miners who once worked in the area where the sculpture is now sited. “When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site,” he once said, “there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now, in the light, there is a celebration of this industry.”

But in a 2019 New York Times interview, Gormley said that the work was actually a rebuttal of the policies of Margaret Thatcher, a Conservative prime minister whom the artist said had made it seem as though “everything that had come out of the Industrial Revolution” was “over.”

The work was initially controversial, not for responding to Thatcherite politics but for its look, with many local politicians claiming it was an eyesore. Jewish residents of the surrounding area also said the work reminded them of German aircrafts, leading Gormley to be labeled a Nazi by certain outlets.

More recently, however, Angel of the North has found itself at the center of a different hot-button debate: the conversation that preceded the 2016 vote on Brexit. That year, the anti–European Union group Vote Leave projected the words “Vote Leave Take Control” across the angel’s wingspan. That moved Gormley himself to send a letter to Vote Leave in which he said that the stunt implied a “false endorsement” on his part of the group’s cause.

In a statement on his website, Gormley writes that Angel of the North was the product of “a focus for collective hope”—something not notably possible in 28 Years Later, in which quarantine acts as a parallel for post-Brexit isolationism.