American art lovers are being asked to put their hands in their pockets to support the country's pavilion at this year's Venice Biennale.

A webpage set up by the nonprofit American Arts Conservancy, which is organizing this year's exhibition of work by sculptor Alma Allen, includes an online fundraiser inviting visitors to donate a minimum of $100 up to $10,000 at the click of a button or give a custom amount.

The site said donating towards this year's show is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to restore America’s artistic presence abroad while realigning its foundations at home".

The American entry has already proved controversial even before its opening next month - it recently emerged William Eggleston and Barbara Chase-Riboud both turned down the chance to take part with Chase-Riboud saying she decided "as a world citizen, this was not the moment".

The choice of Allen to represent the United States also raised eyebrows after it emerged he had not applied for the commission and was approached by curator Jeffrey Uslip despite the pair not having met.

Artist Robert Lazzarini claimed he had been chosen for the commission last year only for the deal to fall apart over a lack of financial backing.

The amount raised from Christie's sell-out sale of the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection of Indian Painting and Calligraphy in London yesterday. It was led by the sale of a 17th-century painting A Courtier Holding a Book, ascribed to Manohar, which went for around $771,000 - more than seven times its pre-sale estimate.

Full marks for honesty to the team behind Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) whose press release announcing the opening of its new wing said it comes "after four years of construction and ten years of headaches".

The addition to the museum in Tasmania has been built to house founder David Walsh's collection of rare books and also features work by Anselm Kiefer and Julian Charriere.

It is connected to the main building by a series of sandstone tunnels and sits beneath Kiefer's monumental amphitheater Elektra which is filled with his sculptures and paintings.

The opening of the new wing in June coincides with the installation of a nine-meter-high timber tower designed by Yhonnie Scarce which is adorned with 1,400 hand-blown black glass daisy yam plants.

The car is the star in a new exhibition of Mexican artist Damian Ortega opening in Brazil next month.

His work Cosmic Thing consists of a dismantled Volkswagen Beetle with many of its component parts suspended in the air.

The work will be a major part of the show curated by Adriano Pedrosa opening at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) on May 15 along with 34 other works from his career before it moves to Santiago, Chile, from November 12.

His car is not the only vehicle in the art world spotlight at the moment - Vienna's Heidi Horten Collection has installed a life-size concrete cast of a Porsche sports car by Gottfried Bechtold.

The work, which weighs over 16 tons, is prominently installed at the museum’s main entrance in the director’s parking space.

1 - Donald Judd's ranch office in Marfa, Texas, opened to the public for the first time on Saturday. The building, which will host talks and tours, is one of eight buildings opened as part of a guided tour organized by the Judd Foundation across the desert city where the artist lived and worked for more than two decades.

2 - A former locomotive manufacturing works in Amsterdam being transformed into a museum by the Dutch collective Drift is set to open later this year. Co-founder Lonneke Gordijn said she hopes the building, which will be home to some of their large scale works involving drones and light installations, will offer visitors "time and space".

3 - Beeple's Regular Animals - robot dogs with hyper-realistic human heads modeled after tech billionaires including Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - will be roaming Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie from today. The show, which runs to May 10, is free and is being held to mark the city's gallery weekend.

4 - South Korea's Art Busan fair opens to VIPs on May 21 with more than 110 galleries from 18 countries taking part in the event which runs to May 24. Its founder Sohn Young-hee said around a quarter of the galleries taking part are from outside the country and mark its move from "a regional event" to a "global art fair".

5 - The royal trip to the United States of King Charles III and Queen Camilla is set to include a reception later today at the New York HQ of Christie's. It comes after an earlier visit to the city's 9/11 memorial and museum where the couple will attend a wreath-laying ceremony.

6 - The European Union has imposed sanctions on the director of Russia's State Hermitage Museum. It described Mikhail Piotrovsky as "a close associate of Vladimir Putin" and said he had "publicly endorsed Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine" and served "the Kremlin’s goal of legitimising its territorial claims under the guise of academic work".