Strike! at the Louvre

Plus, where to watch The Nutcracker at home and in theaters.

I’m back. Free letter today!

Miners in the Snow, Winter by Vincent Van Gogh (1882)

The Whitney Museum has selected the 56 artists and groups that will compose its 2025 Biennial, including the actor and writer Julio Torres, the New York Times reported. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer selected the group of artists, 60 percent of whom are millennials. Guerrero told the NYT that the show will explore themes “including infrastructure and kinship to understand how artists connect with the world and sometimes reject it, questioning the role that the United States has in global affairs.” You can see the full list of artists here.

The Louvre has closed as its workers have gone on strike, Le Monde reports. Staff are protesting working conditions, the state of which they’ve been very vocal about long preceding the infamous heist of its jewels. “We’re going to have a lot more strikers than usual,” Christian Galani of the CGT union told Le Monde Sunday evening. “Normally, it’s front-of-house and security staff. This time, there are scientists, documentarians, collections managers, even curators and colleagues in the workshops telling us they plan to go on strike.”

You have two opportunities to watch the Nutcracker without shelling out for live tickets. English National Ballet will stream its production on PBS Great Performances tonight (it will be streamable for free for 28 days after). You can also catch the Royal Ballet’s Nutcracker in select theaters December 21 and 22.

The Tate Museums’ director Maria Balshaw, who oversaw the Tate Modern and Tate Britain, is stepping down after nine years in her role, the New York Times reported.

The Guggenheim has a new award. Catherine Telford Keogh, a sculptor who uses found materials, is the first to win the $50,000 Jack Galef Visual Arts Award, which will be endowed biennially. She will use the money to support two projects: a solo show in Portland that “traces a history of instruments designed to measure, regulate, and discipline eating” and another that “examines contamination and microbial life in the Gowanus Canal,” ArtNews reported.

Across the pond, Nnena Kalu became the first neurodivergent artist to win the U.K.’s prestigious £25,000 Turner Prize. The Scottish abstract artist is autistic and has speech limitations which make art one of her primary modes of communication.

Many critics were surprised by the decision, as painter Mohammed Sami, who was shortlisted, seemed to be the frontrunner for the award, The Times reported.

London’s Barbican Centre, where I wept at the live-action My Neighbour Totoro by the Royal Shakespeare Company, will close in June 2028 for 12 months to complete a £451 million renovation, The Guardian reported.

Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is expanding. It announced plans to open a satellite space in the southern Netherlands city of Eindhoven in the next six to eight years, ArtNews reported.

While Western museums have increasingly returned Benin bronzes to Nigeria in recent years, the country finds itself in an interesting situation: it doesn’t exactly have the right place to put them on display, the New York Times reported. This wasn’t always, the case, though. The sculptures were expected to go to Benin City’s recently opened Museum of West African Art, but Nigeria’s president transferred ownership of the bronzes in 2023 to Ewuare II, the country’s current oba (king), who comes from the royal family from which the precious objects were originally looted. Ewuare II wants to build a royal museum to put them on display, but for that, funds must be raised. For now, the bronzes are on view (and in storage) around the country, including the Benin City National Museum.

How is the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra contending with…everything? Just fine for now it seems. Gianandrea Noseda told The Times that the orchestra hasn’t faced any interference in its programming from the Trump administration. But when asked if he feels like Shostakovich playing in the USSR his answer, he cheekily zips his mouth shut.

The leader of the protest at the Met Opera’s late November performance of Carmen released a letter apologizing to the artists and restating the protest’s aims—asking the board of directors of Lincoln Center to remove the late David Koch’s name from the neighboring theater, OperaWire reported. Maybe not an effectively executed protest if you have to explain its aims so many times afterward!

The Will Sharpe-starring Amadeus miniseries is finally coming to Sky on December 21. Will this get more people into Mozart? Maybe! “A short-form version of the Queen of the Night’s jaw-dropping aria from The Magic Flute features in episode five,” musical director Benjamin Holder told The Guardian. “I’d like to think that watching that will make people go: ‘Wow, that’s pretty epic.’”

The Dayton Ballet has decided to unionize under the American Guild of Musical Artists and will now begin the collective bargaining process, Dayton Daily News reported.

Lithuanian’s National Ballet, which is celebrating its 100th anniversary, is trying to boost its profile under its new artistic director, Jurgita Dronina, the New York Times reported. The company just produced a contemporary version of Coppélia, choreographed by Martynas Remeikis, and is working on a new Paquita by Manuel Legris.

Here’s something especially notable: the company has an average seat occupancy of 97 percent. And here’s my prediction: if we don’t see this company at New York City Center’s Fall for Dance in 2026, it will undoubtedly make it by 2027.

Can you believe that France has put more of Empress Josephine’s jewels on display? “Dynastic Jewels: Power, Prestige and Passion, 1700-1950,” a new exhibition at Paris’s Hôtel de la Marine (a museum, not a hotel), was actually supposed to feature Empress Eugénie’s now-stolen pearl tiara. But the show must go on—and it will, through April 6, Le Monde reports. ▲