The staff at the Venice Biennale must dread logging on to e-flux every morning.

The site has become the destination of choice for angry open letters decrying the event for its role in whatever the latest controversy is and today is no different.

More than 90 people including artists and curators signed a petition supporting Asel Kadyrkhanova whose work, Machine, was removed from the Kazakhstan pavilion.

The letter says the removal of the work, which includes copies of arrest warrants issued during Stalinist rule, "caused great reputational damage to the pavilion of Kazakhstan" and recalled "the times of Soviet censorship".

It is unclear who ordered its removal and why but the mounting controversy is another scandal for an event dogged by bad publicity.

The biggest issue has been the presence of Russia and Israel which prompted the resignation of its jury in protest via a letter posted on e-flux.

That was followed by a declaration by dozens of artists that they no longer wanted to be considered for this year's awards - again by a letter on the same site.

The number of votes cast by members of the US House of Representatives against a bill to establish a Smithsonian American Women's History Museum in Washington DC. The bill failed to pass after a number of Democrats withdrew support over recent revisions made by Republican lawmakers.

Treasures from the collection of New Delhi's Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) will go on show at Christie's in London later this year.

The Meeting Ground: Scenes from the KNMA Collection runs at King Street from July 16 to August 21 and includes works by M.F. Husain, Neha Choksi and Zainul Abedin among others.

Collector and philanthropist Kiran Nadar, who founded the museum in 2011, said the works were coming to London "during a pivotal moment of institutional expansion" as construction continues on a multi-million-dollar David Adjaye-designed complex in New Delhi.

It comes a day after Christie's announced another exhibition - this time a selling one - to raise funds for the South London Gallery.

Works by artists including Tracey Emin, Michael Landy, Allison Katz and Joseph Yaeger will feature in the show from June 5 to 25.

Parisians woke up yesterday to find a monumental new artwork in the heart of their city.

The temporary transformation of the Pont-Neuf by JR does not open until next month but its canvas cover was inflated overnight on Wednesday giving them the first real glimpse of what it will be like.

The installation transforms the bridge into a giant cave in a tribute to artistic duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude who famously wrapped the landmark in one of their trademark installations more than 40 years ago.

Work is now underway on the interior ahead of its opening to the public from June 6 to 28 when it will be free to enter 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Masterpieces by Caravaggio, Frans Hals and Peter Paul Rubens that went up in flames at the end of the Second World War have now been made available online 80 years after they were destroyed.

Around 430 paintings were reduced to ashes by two fires that broke out in a bomb shelter in Berlin after being stored there for safekeeping, but staff at the city's Picture Gallery have digitized historical photographs of them and made them publicly accessible.

The pictures were taken over almost 20 years by photographer Gustav Schwarz so they could be reproduced as postcards and his glass negatives survived the war and were returned to the museum after the country's reunification.

Gallery director Dagmar Hirschfelder said the project was about "regaining a piece of cultural identity".

She said: "The images, which once seemed irretrievably lost, are now visible and accessible again for our audience."

1 - Philadelphia Museum of Art director Daniel Weiss turned poacher at the city's zoo to fill out his senior leadership team. He has appointed the zoo's head of fundraising, Neil Batiancila, as the museum's chief advancement officer.

2 - An unauthorized documentary is being made about the life and career of art dealer Larry Gagosian. The film, called Shadow Man: Inside The Secret World of Larry Gagosian, is being made by director Barry Avrich whose 2020 film Made You Look examined the Knoedler Gallery forgery scandal.

3 - Anna Kafetsi, who was the founding director of Greece's National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, has died aged 70. The museum said her 14 years in charge from 2000 were "pivotal to the development of the history of modern and contemporary art, curatorial practice, and cultural institutions in Greece".

4 - K-pop megastars BTS have teamed up with the digital art venue Arte Museum for a series of shows inspired by their new album with exhibitions in Las Vegas, Busan and New York. It comes ahead of a major show opening in October at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art featuring works from the personal collection of band member RM.

5 - Francois Moulin, who paints under the pseudonym Blow, has been acquitted by a court in Guadeloupe of charges of inciting crime after he painted a man brandishing the severed head of French President Emmanuel Macron. His co-defendants, who organized the exhibition in the overseas territory of France in the Caribbean, were also acquitted.

6 - A new auction record was set yesterday when Josef Albers' Homage to the Square: Golden (1958) sold for $3.55 million at Christie's in New York. The sale beat the artist's previous auction record by $524,000, a 17% rise. Read our full report here.

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