George Lucas' Los Angeles-based Museum of Narrative Art has had its staffing issues - losing its executive director and laying off 22 staff - but judging by its latest coverage the filmmaker and his high-powered wife, Mellody Hobson, have hired first-rate landscapers.

The LA Times devotes a vast swath of space to the design of its garden roof and surrounding 11-acre grounds, reporting much of it will be open free to the public with no need for a museum ticket.

The design, by Los Angeles-based Mia Lehrer, includes a footbridge, a waterfall and hanging gardens with the undulating landscape created by sculpting thousands of foam blocks to recreate the natural world without weighing too heavily on the roof.

The museum building itself may look like a spaceship from one of the Star Wars filmmaker's box office hits, but he said he wanted its "backyard" to "provide a respite in a hectic world".

The long-planned museum is set to open next year with work by Carrie Mae Weems, Diego Rivera and Norman Rockwell among the collection.

Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lucas already share a birthday and now they will share a show.

The pair, who first met on their joint birthday, October 23, 25 years ago, will feature in the show spanning the Sadie Coles HQ and Frankie Rossi Art Projects on London's Bury Street.

The artists have previously collaborated with Lucas dedicating - and naming - a sculpture after Hambling who has painted her friend's portrait several times.

The joint project will run from November 20 to January next year.

Another VIP day at Art Basel and more sales reports coming in with one un-named buyer shelling out a reported seven figures for a Jeff Koons lobster sculpture from Gagosian.

Other sales include a Michael Armitage painting at White Cube which went for $3.2 million and a bronze by Louise Nevelson sold for $850,000 by Pace Gallery, which has a $30 million Pablo Picasso “on reserve”.

But while sales were steady, the general consensus seems to be this year's fair was what The Art Newspaper described as a "buyer's market" with many deals done as much as 30% below the asking price while the absence of some major US collectors did not pass unnoticed.

The price paid at Julien's Auction for filmmaker David Lynch's monumental steel easel on wheels from his outdoor art studio in his Hollywood home.

It is more than 50 years since New York's Museum of Modern Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art last joined forces to organize a major Marcel Duchamp show and now they have teamed up to do it again.

The new exhibition will feature more than 300 works by the French artist who made history in 1917 when his “readymade” urinal turned Fountain was rejected by a show in New York.

Organizers describe the forthcoming show as an "opportunity to view the full breadth of his creative output" and his career of "continuous reinvention and deliberate inconsistency".

It will open in New York on April 16, 2026, before moving to Philadelphia later that year before traveling to Paris where it will be in the Grand Palais in 2027.

The critics agree - the hottest show this summer in London has just opened at the National Portrait Gallery.

The Jenny Saville exhibition, The Anatomy of Painting, has been lavished with praise and five-star reviews.

It gathers together 45 works made over the last 40 years from monumental oil paintings to smaller charcoal drawings and is described by Waldemar Januszczak in the Times of London as a "must-see event", with particular praise reserved for the "significant and inspired" works that first made her name in the 1990s.

Writing in the Telegraph, Cal Revely-Calder puts his cards on the table with his opening line: "I believe that Jenny Saville is a genius."

The Guardian's Jonathan Jones also praised the "gargantuan early canvases", but directed his readers towards her "exquisite drawings to get the measure of her" which he says are "beautiful" and "true".

Japanese-American artist Carrie Yamaoka has won the $57,000 Maria Lassnig Prize.

The prize, which also includes a 2026 exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany is a biennial award for mid-career artists.

Yamaoka, a founding member of queer art collective fierce pussy, has shown her work in London's V&A museum and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Previous winners include Lubaina Himid and Cathy Wilkes.