There has not been a lot of good news in the museum world recently so thank you to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art or rather the 5.7 million people who visited it recently.

Newly-released figures show attendance to the main site and the Cloisters in the fiscal year ending June 30 up 5% on the previous 12 months.

It also scored its highest single-day visitor numbers since 2017 when 33,700 people came to the public opening day for The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing on May 31.

The wing, home to its collection of art from Africa, the Ancient Americas and Oceania, reopened after a four-year-long $70 million refurbishment. It is named after the explorer and anthropologist son of former New York Governor and US Vice President Nelson Rockefeller who disappeared in 1961 on an expedition in New Guinea.

Other strong performers include the John Singer Sargent show which attracted more than 427,000 visitors and the Harlem Renaissance exhibition which drew in 464,000 people.

New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim both saw a dip in attendance in 2024, according to The Art Newspaper’s annual survey.

Only a third of the art and other treasures placed under a temporary export ban by the UK government in the last financial year was saved for the nation.

An official report covering the period from May 1, 2024, to April 30, 2025, found there were 18 cases where a ban was ordered in an attempt to keep items in the country, but in only six of them was the item bought by institutions or individuals in the UK.

Nine have either already been taken out of the country or are expected to be with three cases still ongoing.

Among the items saved for the nation are the papers of computer pioneer Alan Turing with all six saved items valued at $793,000 compared to $23 million for the nine that left the country.

One of the three cases still being worked on is Barbara Hepworth's Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red which is valued at $5 million.

The number of works bought by Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania after it struck a pre-sale agreement with nearby Albright College which sold off its Freedman Gallery art collection featuring work by the likes of Jasper Johns.

No need to ask what Marina Abramovic is getting for her birthday this year - an exhibition about her 12-year-long partnership with fellow performance artist Ulay opening on their joint birthday, November 30.

The show, at Cukrarna Gallery in Ljubljana, where Ulay lived until his death in 2020, includes video footage of their work as well as archival material including photographs, letters, personal notes, recordings, music lists and books.

Their collaboration began in 1976 with their performance Relation in Space where they ran into each other repeatedly for an hour in an attempt to mix male and female energy to create something new and ended in 1988 with Lovers where they walked the Great Wall of China from opposite ends and met in the middle and then split in acrimony until a late, emotional reconciliation.

The show will run to May 3 next year.

The United States is withdrawing from UNESCO - again.

The State Department said "continued involvement" in the cultural arm of the United Nations, which oversees more than 1,200 World Heritage sites including the Taj Mahal as well as Yosemite National Park, was "not in the national interest".

A department spokesperson said the organization's "globalist, ideological agenda" was "at odds with our America First foreign policy", adding the withdrawal will not take effect until the end of 2026.

The US left UNESCO during President Trump's first term only to rejoin in 2023 under Joe Biden.

Oscar-winning filmmaker Pedro Almodovar is among the collectors to have lent work to a new show of Spanish art from the country's transition to democracy in the 1970s and 1980s.

His untitled 1986 work by Miguel Ángel Campano is among 30 works by 23 artists in Liberated Painting at the Carmen Thyssen Museum in Malaga.

Other artists in the show include Carlos Alcolea, Patricia Gadea and Miquel Barcelo who despite their differences shared - and reflected - the sense of liberation across the country following the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the return of democracy.

The show runs to September 14.

1 - A little bit of history was made by Iranian artist Hanieh Yavari who won the $13,500 Ruth Borchard Self-Portrait Prize - the first time a photographer has won the prize. Her image and 34 other short-listed works are on show at Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum in Bournemouth on England's south coast until Sunday 7 September.

2 - Auction house Phillips is bringing in Priority Bidding to encourage early bidders who will be offered a reduced buyer’s premium if they have placed a written bid at least 48 hours before an auction. It is being introduced for all live auctions in the Fall 2025 season apart from Watches.

3 - The Acropolis Museum in Athens is opening until midnight on Saturday August 9 to celebrate the full moon. The museum, which normally closes at 8pm, had two million visitors last year.