Kehinde Wiley collectors could be about to get an unexpected chance to buy one of his works after the US State Department decided to sell a painting it commissioned more than a decade ago.

The work hung in the American embassy in the Dominican Republic until last week when it was first hidden behind a huge US flag and then taken down after ambassador Leah Campos said it was "turning away from globalist and woke ideologies and instead embracing American patriotism and the beauty of our great country".

It was commissioned in 2013 and paid for with public funds four years before Wiley was chosen to paint former President's Barack Obama's official portrait.

A State Department spokesperson told the New York Times it was still determining if the painting could be legally sold, adding they would "proudly" sell it if "that is feasible".

The newspaper reported a similar but smaller work went for around $845,000 at auction in 2024.

The number of people who visited the Mark Rothko exhibition at Florence's Palazzo Strozzi Foundation which closed on Sunday. It was the foundation's most-visited show in its 20-year history and included loans from New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Tate in London and Washington D.C.'s National Gallery of Art.

Takashi Murakami is taking over Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales with a show featuring more than 150 works made over three decades.

The show, which opens on December 5 and runs to July 18, includes paintings, sculptures, video and installations including a new site-specific work made for the gallery's massive subterranean Nelson Packer Tank.

Also included is a golden room with gilded walls and floors that will be home to paintings and a sculpture inspired by Japanese art history.

Other nods to the past include his reinterpretations of woodblock prints by Japanese artists Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige and his take on Vincent van Gogh’s homage to Hiroshige.

A former member of Russian art collective Pussy Riot says she was recruited by the country's FSB security service to help in the planned murder of another member.

Rita Flores, who is also known as Margarita Konovalova, said she was offered around $36,000 to lure Pyotr Verzilov to Serbia where he could be kidnapped and killed but she escaped the country before it could be carried out.

Verzilov was married to Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova and was an unofficial spokesman for the group in its early days when it became a focus for protest against the regime of Vladimir Putin.

Flores made the claims during a video interview with her lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov published on YouTube by Port Media.

She said Zakhvatov helped get her out of Russia after the FSB threatened to kill members of her family, put her in jail and run a campaign that would see her portrayed as "the ultimate Satan of all Russia".

Judging by the cover of its new report into museum heists, someone at the EU law enforcement agency Europol understands a picture is worth a thousand words.

It shows a hooded figure brandishing a sledgehammer and advancing menacingly on some display cases while the report itself describes how "museum thefts are becoming increasingly aggressive, with a shift towards violent and forceful methods."

The report almost veers towards nostalgia for the days of gentleman thieves harking back to "non-violent" times when criminals used "deception and stealth" and "acted discreetly".

But it says more recent crimes including the $102 million Louvre heist in Paris and the theft of gold antiquities from the Drents Museum, in Assen in the Netherlands, show criminals using "more direct and confrontational approaches" and "a growing use of force".

1 - No.9 Cork Street, Frieze's full-time gallery in London's Mayfair, is celebrating its fifth anniversary with a series of shows. Among the artists whose work will be exhibited are Ndidi Emefiele, Fiza Khatri and Teresa Solar Abboud.

2 - Tributes have been paid to Italian video artist Fabrizio Plessi who died on Sunday aged 86. A statement from the organizers of the Venice Biennale said Plessi, who showed work at more than five editions of the event, "built one of the most original bodies of work in contemporary art".

3 - The suspended president of Marseille's Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem), Pierre-Olivier Costa, has been accused of sexually harassing staff and favoritism in hiring and issuing contracts. Costa, a former chief of staff to French first lady Brigitte Macron, denied the allegations which were detailed in a government investigation reported in Le Monde newspaper.

4 - The whole sixth floor of New York's Museum of Modern Art will be home to a blockbuster Constantin Brancusi show from October. Among the pieces coming from Paris are rarely lent sculptures, hand-carved furniture, films and photographs from the Pompidou Center's Atelier Brancusi.