The recovered and restored crown damaged during the $102 million Louvre heist will become "a new highlight" of the museum when it goes back on show, according to its new director.

Christophe Leribault, who replaced Laurence Des Cars as the institution's president in February, told French newspaper Le Monde the scene of the crime in the Apollo Gallery will reopen in July.

He said the crown, which was damaged after being dropped by the thieves, and several other objects would "remain in a secure location until we have a safe space for them elsewhere in the museum, which will become a new highlight, far from the Mona Lisa".

Leribault also said spending on contemporary art would become "more sporadic in the coming years" as the bills come in for much-needed renovation work on the Paris landmark.

He told the newspaper he wants to reduce the amount of money from ticket sales set aside for acquisitions from the current 20% to 12%.

French police have made a number of arrests around the raid but none of the stolen jewels have been recovered.

The distance between the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale and Zhanna Kadyrova's 8-foot-tall statue of an origami deer that is part of her Security Guarantees show for the Ukrainian pavilion. It was created in 2019 as public art for a park in Pokrovsk but was removed in 2024 as Russian forces advanced on the city.

Amid all the controversy at this year's Venice Biennale, one artist making waves is Austria's Florentina Holzinger.

Her show in the country's pavilion, Seaworld Venice, transforms the building into an "underwater theme park and sewage treatment plant" and has been a hit with the early crowds.

Some visitors have been more involved than others - the courtyard includes a water tank that is home to a performer throughout the Biennale which is regularly topped up by urine from a series of public toilets in an attempt to show how "the idea of beauty in Venice cannot be separated from the waste it produces".

Today also saw the first of what many expect to be a regular feature this year - a protest against the presence of the Russian pavilion.

Around 20 people led by Pussy Riot art collective founder Nadya Tolokonnikova draped themselves in Ukrainian flags and chanted anti-Putin slogans.

Virtual visitors can now see all the National Gallery’s collection displays without a trip to London after it teamed up with Google Arts & Culture.

Among the works on show now are pieces by Johannes Vermeer, Edouard Manet and Claude Monet.

The previous online tour only showed the contents of eight rooms. It was launched during the pandemic when lockdown shut the gallery and attracted more than one million views between November 2020 and January 2021.

Visitors to Vienna's Burgtheater can get up close to a series of early works by Gustav Klimt for the first time in more than a century.

The 10 paintings, showing scenes from theater history, were painted by Klimt and others on the building's ceiling between 1886 and 1888.

Among them is a scene from a 16th-century production of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet at London's Globe Theater with a rare self-portrait showing him among the audience.

The paintings are currently being cleaned up and a limited number of tickets are available allowing visitors to climb the conservators' scaffolding to see them.

The tour of the ceiling has been such a success it is now sold out until the end of the month but more tickets go on sale on Sunday for dates in June.

1 - Tickets go on sale today for the museum at the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago ahead of its opening on June 19. The museum's four floors include a full-size replica of the Oval Office, a display of 440 campaign buttons from the 2008 election and a viewing room looking out over the city's South Side.

2 - The Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation is donating a collage of their unrealized plan to wrap Picasso's sculpture, Bust of Sylvette, to the Art Museum Pablo Picasso in Munster, Germany. The collage is currently on display at the museum which is hosting a show of the couple's projects that never got beyond the drawing board.

3 - Sotheby's is selling a $4.5 million collection of manuscripts, artifacts and books related to American Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. The 156 items from the collection of US businessman Jay T. Snider will go on show in exhibitions in Philadelphia and New York before being sold in January.

4 - Berlin's Pergamon Museum will partly reopen on June 4 next year with its altar centerpiece going on show after being closed since October 2023. The restoration program is still not finished and the museum is not expected to fully reopen for another 10 years.