It is summer and what journalists call the silly season - when the news is full of frivolous stories while everyone takes a vacation - is upon us and its geographical heart this year is undoubtedly in Chicago.

In the city's Millennium Park to be precise where a group of protestors has taken to staking out Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture insisting a man is trapped inside the landmark known to locals as The Bean.

The Man in Bean campaign has gone viral with tens of thousands of followers on social media prompting Chicago alderman Brendan Reilly to release a statement saying he was "happy to confirm that a man has not been trapped inside Cloud Gate (aka ‘the Bean’) for the past 21 years".

Alderman Reilly said the campaign had led to his office being inundated with messages calling for the man to be freed and proving to be "a distraction for my office from the real work we do".

It comes as Kapoor today launched a slightly less frivolous campaign teaming up with environmental campaigners from Greenpeace who hung his work BUTCHERED on a Shell platform in the North Sea.

It took seven climbers, who scaled the platform off the English coast, to secure the 12 meter by 8 meter canvas on the structure then pump 1,000 liters of blood-red liquid into the fabric, creating a vast crimson stain described by a spokesman for the stunt as a "visualization of the wound inflicted on both humanity and the Earth by the fossil fuel industry".

Plans have been announced to start restoration work on Michelangelo's Last Judgment fresco in the Sistine Chapel in Vatican City.

The work, which will be done next year, is expected to last three months. The fresco covers the whole altar wall of the chapel which gets around 6 million visitors a year.

Paolo Violini, the head of the Vatican Museums’ Painting and Wooden Materials Restoration Laboratory, said the work should be finished before Holy Week when hundreds of thousands of tourists and pilgrims descend on the city.

It will happen alongside a five-year project to restore Raphael’s Loggia - a fresco covered corridor in the papal palace.

The amount of money Guillaume Cerutti, the former Christie's chairman and incoming president of the Pinault Collection, asked the European Union to provide for a fund for acquisitions bought and shared by museums working together across the continent.

Whether a peace deal emerges from tomorrow's summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin is impossible to predict. What we can say with certainty is it will come too late for artist David Chichkan who was killed on Sunday serving in the Ukrainian army.

He came from a family of artists including his great-grandfather, Leonid Chichkan, whose paintings were among the works looted from the Kherson Art Museum’s collection by Russian troops.

Chichkan is among 221 Ukrainian writers, artists and other cultural figures killed since the start of the invasion, according to the monitoring service They Were Killed by Russia.

Other deaths include that of artist Margarita Polovinko, killed in April while serving as a combat medic, and photographer and cultural historian Ihor Klymovych who was killed serving on the frontline in July.

Miami's landmark Freedom Tower, once dubbed the Ellis Island of the South, is to reopen as a museum telling the story of the Cuban refugees who flocked to Florida for decades.

The 14-story building, once home to the Miami Daily News, was from 1962 to 1974 the first port of call for around 400,000 Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro where they were welcomed with English lessons and access to medical care and the start of their journey to US citizenship.

Its $65 million renovation has been led by Miami Dade College and include plans for exhibits explaining the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion the CIA organized against Castro and Operation Peter Pan which saw 14,000 children sent to the US by their parents.

It will also examine the stories of exiles and refugees from other countries including Venezuela, Haiti and Nicaragua when it opens next month. In 2007, the building memorably hosted a sound installation, Forty-Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller which later went to the Met Cloisters in New York.

1 - Claudia Gould, who ran New York's Jewish Museum for 12 years, has been appointed Executive Director of the Shaker Museum. The museum, dedicated to the history of the US religious sect, is in the process of building a $30 million new home in upstate New York for its collection.

2 - Cathy Della Lucia and Sara Rahbar are among the 15 emerging artists to get a 2025 Joan Mitchell Fellowship. Each of them gets a $60,000 grant over five-years as well as the opportunity to attend workshops on topics from financial literacy to legacy planning.

3 - The organizers of a show of rice paddy art in a Japanese village say they expect 300,000 visitors to come to see the outdoor exhibition. Locals plant different colored varieties of rice plant to create the large scale works which this year feature images from classic Hollywood films including Gone with the Wind and Roman Holiday.