It is a case of give with one hand and take away with the other for the landmark Watts Towers in Los Angeles.

A $22 million overhaul of the arts center at the site is due to start later this year just as conservation work on the towers themselves has stopped for lack of funding.

The towers are made up of 17 structures built by Italian immigrant Sabato "Simon" Rodia over three decades using found materials and have been hailed as a monumental example of folk art.

The $22 million will pay for more parkland and flood-resilient landscaping around the towers with $10.1 million of the cost met by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos.

Daniel Tarica, who manages the city's Department of Cultural Affairs, told the LA Times he hoped restoration work would be finished on the center and the towers before Los Angeles was seen "on the world stage" in the 2028 Summer Olympics.

The doppelganger effect was in full flow at this year's Archibald Prize where Michael Zavros's portrait of his lookalike won the People's Choice award.

His painting of Australian Jewish community leader Alex Ryvchin came out top after 45,769 people cast their vote for the best picture in the awards at Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Zavros said he first became aware of his subject after several family members told him they had seen him on television only to discover it was Ryvchin they had seen.

He said: "By a strange connection – a physical likeness – I found common ground with Alex and realized that what unites us as Australians is far more powerful than what divides us. It is truly humbling that the work has resonated so strongly with audiences to the exhibition."

The size of art collector Jorge M. Perez's private sculpture park at his home in the ski-resort of Snowmass near Aspen, Colorado. Perez, who made his fortune in Miami real estate and gave so much money to the city's art museum it was renamed after him, recently led a rare tour of the grounds.

Tributes have been paid to dancer and artist Simone Forti who has died aged 91.

The LA Dance Project said she "transformed the relationship between visual art and dance" while gallerist Mara McCarthy described her as "a supreme human" and an "inspiring artist".

Her death comes three years after she received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.

The same year also saw a major show dedicated to her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Boston's Northeastern University has learned the first lesson of public art - you need to take the public with you.

Cicely Carew said she was "left out in the cold" by the controversy surrounding her sculpture Rooted which was installed on campus in 2024 but removed a year later after howls of protest from students.

The main problem was not the giant translucent plexiglass flowers themselves, which she describes on her website as a "striking visual metaphor for nature’s perpetual cycles of growth and renewal", but their location in Krentzman Quad where generations of students had posed for graduation pictures.

Thomas Vannatter, former public art manager at the university, told the Boston Globe the people in charge had forgotten "public art is artwork that people have to live with every day in their day-to-day lives."

1 - George Henry Longly is unveiling a major new public artwork, Chronos, by the River Thames in London next month. It is carved out of stone and marble and is more than 45-feet wide and 22-feet-high. It will be unveiled at the city's Fresh Wharf on August 12.

2 - The Dallas Museum of Art is reopening its education center in September after it suffered millions of dollars of damage in a rainstorm four years ago. The city council approved a $6 million grant to repair the damage which included a collapsed ceiling and buckled floors that forced its closure.

3 - Seoul's National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art opens a show by Christine Sun Kim tomorrow. The exhibition, which runs to November 29, is centered around a large-scale video animation and is the latest collaboration between the museum, its chosen artists and the LG Electronics company that looks to explore "the intersection of contemporary art and digital technology".

4 - London's National Portrait Gallery is launching a contemporary art series, Artist Focus, with a show of self-portraits by Issy Wood. The exhibition, which will run from October 9 to February 28, will include seven paintings never seen in public before.