The organizers of this year's Venice Biennale are looking to close the door on the controversy surrounding Russia's pavilion by closing it to all but a select few.

Reports in Italy suggest the controversial site will only be accessible for four days during the preview period running from May 5 to 8 when there will be events for the press, curators and VIP collectors.

It will then promptly close on the official opening day of May 9 with the only way to see the show being a series of screens installed over its windows playing multimedia recordings.

The solution, reported to have been thrashed out between biennale president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco and Russian pavilion commissioner Anastasia Karneeva, is an attempt to stall further pressure being brought to bear on the organizers.

Last week, the event’s international awards jury publicly said it would not consider “countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC)” for the Golden Lion award.

Italian Minister of Culture Alessandro Giuli has already said he will not attend the preview and opening ceremony on May 9 and the European Commission has threatened to withdraw funding.

The number of antiquities seized by French customs last year - up 12% on the year before - including Bronze Age swords, coins and fossils.

Tributes have been paid to Ittai Gradel, who exposed the theft of thousands of treasures from the British Museum, after his death aged 61.

Gradel's discovery of the crime led to the resignation of then-director Hartwig Fischer after it emerged the London museum had ignored the expert's earlier warnings that valuable antiquities were being stolen and sold online.

He tried to persuade the museum to investigate in 2021 but it was only two years later it admitted around 2,000 items from its collection were stolen, missing or damaged.

Awarding him the British Museum medal shortly before his death from cancer, current director Nicholas Cullinan said it was in recognition of his "expertise" and "passionate determination that wrongs should be righted".

BBC culture editor Katie Razzall, who reported his death, said Gradel was a "complete one-off" whose photographic memory helped uncover the extent of the scandal.

A police investigation into the thefts is ongoing.

A Russian disinformation outfit is accused of being behind a fake news report putting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the frame for an audacious art theft.

Images shared online, manipulated to appear like an authentic report by the BBC, seem to show Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Cherries hanging on his office wall.

The real painting was one of three stolen from the Magnani Rocca Foundation villa near Parma in Italy last month in a raid that lasted barely three minutes.

Journalists from the France24 TV news network reported the fake images, which were circulated on X earlier this month, got hundreds of thousands of views.

They said an image of the stolen painting had been edited into a video released by the Ukrainian government and is believed to be the work of a group called Storm-1516 which regularly targets European governments with disinformation.

The foundation was set up following the death of collector Luigi Magnani. All three stolen works, which also include paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri Matisse, are still missing.

The saga behind the transfer of the Gelman collection of Mexican art has taken another turn - to the tune of $150 million.

That was the size of the loan given to the owner of the collection - Mexican millionaire Marcelo Zambrano - by banking giant Santander which now manages it and plans to show the best of it at their new cultural center later this year in Spain.

Spanish newspaper El Pais, which reported the existence of the financial agreement, said the collection which includes work by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo will serve as collateral for the loan which has a term of 12 and a half years.

That raises the prospect it could be lost to the Zambrano family - and Mexico - if they default on it which will trigger alarm bells in Mexico where concerns have already been raised about the temporary export of it to Spain.

More than 350 Mexican cultural professionals have signed an open letter urging the authorities to be more transparent and enforce export permits that allow nationally significant works to only temporarily leave the country.

The 160-strong collection created by Jacques and Natasha Gelman was acquired by the Zambrano family in 2023 who have indicated they want it to go on show in Mexico in the long-term.

1 - A Mickalene Thomas portrait of the legendary dancer Josephine Baker is expected to sell for around $350,000 at an auction raising money for a scholarship fund at Yale School of Art. The sale at Sotheby's in New York next month also includes works by Do Ho Suh, Josef Albers and Richard Prince.

2 - San Francisco has appointed a local government veteran to become the city's first executive director of arts and culture. Mayor Daniel Lurie said the appointment of Matthew Goudeau would help his administration "do a better job supporting those artists and organizations who are driving our city’s economic recovery.”

3 - Artist and curator Liu Ding and historian Carol Yinghua Lu will curate the 2027 Istanbul Biennial. The pair said they wanted the event, which will run from September 18 to November 14, to "restore the critical rigor and visceral greatness of ideas and art".

4 - The Yves Klein Foundation will award its first research grant later this year and then award two a year from 2027. The grants of around $7,600 will be available to people aged under 35 with a PhD or postdoctoral degree "conducting research in art history, aesthetics, or the humanities".