New York just became a slightly happier place for some of the people at the hard end of the art world with museum pay deals signed and city grants doubled.

It was announced today that staff at the Whitney have signed a deal providing pay increases of at least 14.75% over four years - halting threatened strike action that could have hit its major Roy Lichtenstein show set to open this week.

That comes after staff at the Guggenheim Museum, the Jewish Museum, the American Folk Art Museum and the Brooklyn Museum all settled contracts removing the threat of strike action.

There was also good news for individual artists when Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced they can now receive up to $10,000 in city-funded grants - double the previous amount which had been in place for almost 20 years.

The mayor joined the city's arts commissioner Diya Vij to make the announcement in an Instagram video showing him painting at an easel.

The value of the works being sold by Jeff Koons at Christie's in New York including a $40 million Picasso and a Manet, according to the New York Times.

Hollywood star Jeff Bridges and his photographer wife Susan were so impressed by the Santa Barbara gallery that hosted their recent shows they bought it.

The couple are taking over the Tamsen Gallery in the Californian city, renaming it Bridges, and putting their daughter Jessie in charge.

The original owners said they would stay on to "spearhead" the new business which opens in December as a "dynamic cultural getaway featuring rotating, experiential programming".

A photography show by the actor opened there this year and ran until May, while last year it hosted an exhibition of photographs his wife took behind the scenes of his 1980 epic western Heaven's Gate.

The film, directed by Michael Cimino, was a huge flop on release and branded one of Hollywood's greatest failures when it lost millions at the box office but is now regarded as a cult classic.

It is back to the scene of the crime at the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Their show opening this month, Crime Scene Ephesus. Cleopatra and Rome, reopens the case of the Egyptian Queen's murdered sister Arsinoe.

It uses more than 100 ancient artifacts, including some on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre in Paris and Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, to create "a window into the political intrigues and cultural codes of international relations in the ancient world".

The exhibition runs froms October 20 to March 29.

1 - Aseel Al-Yaqoub has won this year's $100,000 Ithra Art Prize. The Kuwaiti artist was recognised for her new work Flora Incognita, which used 3D-printed sculptures to recreate desert plants, at a ceremony at the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

2 - Norah Yahya has been appointed chief diversity and government affairs officer at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked at the museum for five years and in that time has helped secure more than $80 million in capital funding for infrastructure projects.

3 - Ancient cockroach eggs, found inside a Roman bakery oven, are among the exhibits in the first show being held in the vaults of the new London Museum next year. They are among artifacts from the Bloomberg Collection that will be brought to life in an exhibition made with design agency Lightroom which worked on the city's 2012 Olympic opening ceremony.