Philip Tinari's official title is Director of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, but he might be better described as a master of understatement.

His response to the South China Morning Post's investigation into the financial crisis facing China's private museums was a classic of its kind, only admitting "it has been a difficult year for museums throughout China".

It is a year that has seen Shenzhen's Jupiter Museum of Art close down, followed days later by Qingdao’s TAG Art Museum while others have seemingly gone into deep freeze with no new exhibitions.

The bust follows the boom years between 2016 and 2020 when an average of one new museum opened every two days, according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in China.

But it has created a wave of museums lacking the basics in budgeting and fundraising and struggling with wildly fluctuating visitor numbers at different times of the year and no state funding.

Tinari's own institution, the UCCA group of four museums including one based in Beijing's 798 art district, has run into trouble with staff reportedly not being paid on time.

Some of its financial woes are blamed on its landlord - the Chinese state - being less flexible over when the rent arrives.

He told the paper the museum was looking for a way to "sustainably fund our first-rate program for the long term”.

Austrian artist Herbert Brandl, who died on Sunday aged 66, has been posthumously awarded the country's highest honor - the Grand Austrian State Prize.

Brandl, who was known for his large-format paintings, died in his studio in Vienna. The Austrian government said the award was in recognition of "his outstanding life's work" which included representing the country at the Venice Biennale.

Previous winners of the annual prize include photographer Inge Morath, Renate Bertlmann and Bruno Gironcoli.

Fernando Martínez-Acitores is that rare beast - a politician who does what he says.

He told voters in the Spanish city of Burgos he wanted to put his hometown "on the global map" and he has done that with his public art plan making often mocking headlines around the world.

The deputy mayor has become the public face of a plan to build a 300-meter-high black statue of a bull in the city complete with viewing platforms in its horns.

The project, proposed by the Spanish Academy of Bullfighting, compares the statue to "other great national symbols such as the Eiffel Tower in France, the Statue of Liberty in the United States, and the Roman Colosseum in Italy", but has caused controversy in a country increasingly turning its back on the tradition of bullfighting.

Opponents have variously dubbed the idea as "deranged" and a "provocation".

It does not help the statue is based on El Toro de Osborne - a giant billboard silhouette of the animal installed on hilltops and by roads to advertise brandy that has become a national symbol and regular target for vandalism by supporters of different nationalist and independence movements in the country.

Filmmaker Fred Kudjo Kuwornu has won a $300,000 Dan David Prize for his work including We Were Here: The Untold History of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe which was first shown at the Venice Biennale last year.

Other winners include Abidemi Babatunde Babalola, a research archaeologist at London's British Museum who worked as lead archaeologist ahead of construction of the Museum of West African Arts due to open in Benin City, Nigeria, this year.

Nine prizes of $300,000 are handed out every year to "mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines" by the Dan David Foundation.

Its founder, who died in London in 2011, grew up in Bucharest, Romania, under both Nazi and Communist dictatorships before fleeing to Israel. Having initially worked as a newspaper photographer, he made millions from setting up a photo-booth business.

International visitors have not returned to the UK's Tate galleries in the same numbers since the pandemic and the country's decision to quit the EU, according to internal research.

Visitor numbers to the galleries, which include London's Tate Modern, show domestic audiences at around 95% of their pre-Covid level, but international visitors around 61%.

The figures, reported by The Art Newspaper, show visitors from outside the UK dropped from around 3.6 million in the three financial years before Covid hit to around 2.2 million for the first two full years after.

Tate Director Maria Balshaw told the paper they had lost hundreds of thousands of young European visitors aged between 16 to 24, saying "they are profoundly affected by the combination of Brexit changing their educational and work opportunities and then Covid profoundly affecting the end of their studies and the way they choose to live their lives. They are, in general, also travelling less.”

1 - Tributes have been paid to philanthropist Wallis Annenberg who died at home in Los Angeles aged 86. Annenberg used her family foundation, built on the success of her father's publishing empire, to give away around $1.5 billion and sat on the board of both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, giving $10 million to LACMA.

2 - The great-grandson of painter John Everett Millais has loaned more than 300 artworks and family heirlooms to the Perth Art Gallery in Scotland. Among the works given by Geoffroy Millais are 19 oil paintings, 150 sketches as well as letters and brushes belonging to the artist who was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

3 - Georg Baselitz has designed the sets and puppets for a production of Igor Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale which opens today at the Salzburg Marionette Theater in Austria. The 87-year-old painter, best known for his series of upside down or "inverted" canvases, has previously designed operas in his native Germany.