Biennale Visions, Museum Power Plays

France’s biggest museum story is a twofer: new leadership at both the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay. The Art Newspaper reports that French president Emmanuel Macron announced two appointments on 25 February. Christophe Léribault, currently president of the Palace of Versailles, will become president and director of the Musée du Louvre after Laurence des Cars resigned on 24 February in the wake of a heist and a ticketing scandal. Annick Lemoine, currently director of the Petit Palais, will take over as president at the Musée d’Orsay, a post vacant since the sudden death of Sylvain Amic in August. The appointments were proposed by culture minister Rachida Dati, who is expected to leave the government this week to campaign for Paris mayor.

The Louvre transition comes with a very specific mandate. Macron, according to The Art Newspaper, said Léribault’s first mission will be the “appeasement” of a museum badly hurt by the theft of France’s crown jewels on 19 October and a string of scandals since then. He’ll also face unions that have led an “unprecedented series of strikes,” calling for wage rises and pressing issues around the museum’s ageing infrastructure. The Art Newspaper notes that, just before leaving, Des Cars presented a budget to the board that planned €100m for preliminary studies for a controversial redevelopment scheme, and €17m for technical masterplans. In other words: leadership change, yes—but also a big, immediate fight over priorities, spending, and trust.

If you’re wondering who these new leaders are beyond the headlines, the article gets into the details. Léribault is 62 and dedicated his PhD thesis to Jean-François de Troy (1679-1752), later publishing a monograph in 2002. He began as a curator at the Musée Carnavalet in 1990, joined the Louvre’s drawings department in 2006, and directed the Delacroix Museum in the artist’s workshop. He went on to head the Petit Palais in 2012, became president of the Musée d’Orsay in 2021 when Des Cars moved to the Louvre, and later took the Versailles post. Lemoine is 56, a specialist in 17th- and 18th-century European painting, and wrote her PhD on Nicolas Régnier.

The Art Newspaper also sketches out Lemoine’s track record, and it’s very exhibition-driven. Before directing the Petit Palais, she worked within Paris city museums and was in charge of the 18th-century Musée Cognacq-Jay collection. She replaced Léribault at the Petit Palais in 2022. The article credits her with staging critically acclaimed exhibitions including The Baroque Underworld: Vice and Poverty in Rome at the Villa Médicis and the Petit Palais in 2014 and 2015, and Valentin de Boulogne at the Louvre in 2017. She also led the art history department at the French Academy in Rome from 2010 to 2015, and ran the annual art history festival in Fontainebleau from 2015 to 2018. That’s a résumé built around scholarship plus public programming—useful at a museum like Orsay.

Now to the Guerrilla Girls, and a question The Art Newspaper says is hanging over a new Getty show: is it finally time for them to remove their masks? The piece focuses on the Getty exhibition How to Be a Guerrilla Girl (until 12 April), the institution’s first show drawn from its 2008 acquisition of 96 boxes—plus portfolios and flat files—of art and archival material. Anonymity comes up as both tactic and tension. “Kathë Kollwitz” and “Frida Kahlo,” two founding Guerrilla Girls featured heavily in the show, say anonymity protected members who feared backlash from galleries or critics, and it kept attention on systemic discrimination rather than personal grievance. But it also complicates the story of who made what, and how that collaboration actually functioned.

A key moment in the article is a 1990 poster that looks like an “unmasking” but isn’t quite. The Guerrilla Girls designed a poster shouting “GUERRILLA GIRLS’ IDENTITIES EXPOSED!” and then listed nearly 500 artists’ names—Eleanor Antin, Jenny Holzer, Faith Ringgold, Cindy Sherman, and many more. The Art Newspaper describes it as an “artful dodge or strategic tease” that might, or might not, include actual members. The Getty, importantly, isn’t revealing identities either. The Getty Research Institute curatorial team redacted names and phone numbers, and lead curators Zanna Gilbert and Kristin Juarez say two boxes containing unmasked photographs will remain closed and inaccessible until the deaths of the relevant artists. So the show preserves the group’s method even while putting it under glass.

Over in Venice, Artnet reports the list of 111 participating artists has been announced for “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition of the 61st Venice Biennale, curated by the team of the late curator Koyo Kouoh. The exhibition is being realized, Artnet says, according to Kouoh’s wishes by a handpicked team of collaborators she met with in Dakar last April: Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo, Marie Helen Pereira, Rasha Salti, and Kouoh’s assistant Rory Tsapayi. New York-based critic and journalist Siddhartha Mitter will edit the catalog. At a press conference in Venice, they described “In Minor Keys” as an invitation to tune into subtler emotional frequencies enabled by arts like music and poetry—aiming for “a radical reconnection” with art’s sensory and subjective role in society.

Artnet also digs into how the show is structured conceptually. Kouoh’s team said she built the exhibition around “conceptual motifs” including “shrines,” “rest,” “procession,” and “schools.” The participant list includes 105 individual artists or collectives, plus six artist-led organizations—examples named include Denniston Hill in the Catskills, Dakar’s Raw Material Company, GAS Foundation in Lagos, and the Nairobi Contemporary Art Institution—folded into the “schools” motif recognizing ecosystems that convene, share knowledge, and offer havens. Two “shrines” will give prominence to Kouoh’s guiding lights: one dedicated to Senegalese artist, playwright, and poet Issa Samb (died 2017, 71), and the other honoring American artist Beverly Buchanan (died 2015, 74).

The Art Newspaper’s Venice report adds on-the-ground details and a few vivid curatorial anecdotes. It confirms the Biennale dates—9 May to 22 November—and says In Minor Keys will be staged in the Arsenale and the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. Kouoh’s team described the show as “neither a litany of commentary on world events, nor an escape” from intersecting crises, but a “radical connection” with art’s natural habitat in society. Research assistant Rory Tsapayi called the artists “channels to the minor keys” and “a collective score.” Rasha Salti described an April gathering in Dakar at Raw Material Company where, as they discussed artists, fruit fell from a mango tree—often enough, she said, that when it didn’t happen they paused in expectation.

From Venice to Los Angeles, The Art Newspaper previews a major time-based media presentation from the Julia Stoschek Foundation at the Variety Arts Theater in downtown LA. Curator Udo Kittelmann—who likes to call himself an “editor” rather than a curator—selected more than 40 works displayed on monitors and projections throughout the theatre’s maze-like spaces, alongside borrowed and archival materials. The show is titled What a Wonderful World: An Audiovisual Poem, taking its name from a Louis Armstrong song from 1967, a title the article notes was ironic even then. Stoschek says Los Angeles was chosen as “the city of moving images.” Admission is free, and reservations are recommended. The exhibition runs until 20 March.

The piece gets specific about what you’ll actually see inside. At dusk outside, videos appear on either side of the entry: Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978-79) and Sturtevant’s Pacman (2012). Inside the main theatre, Jon Rafman’s Oh, the humanity (2015) shows a blurred crowd surging back and forth, which Kittelmann calls a metaphor that “mirrors the times we are now confronted with.” The range stretches from early motion-picture history—Alice Guy-Blaché and Georges Méliès—to contemporary works by Doug Aitken and Arthur Jafa. Among the oldest is Max Skladanowsky’s Mister Delaware and the Boxing Kangaroo (1895). Another early film is Guy-Blaché’s The Consequences of Feminism (1906), described as humorous role-reversal satire.

Two ARTnews items and one Hyperallergic review are in today’s article set, but the full texts weren’t included here—so I can’t responsibly restate the specifics beyond what’s explicitly visible in the excerpts. ARTnews has a report titled “Ukraine Adopts Resolution on Evacuating Museum Objects From Conflict Zones,” and another titled “Volunteer Group Documents Smithsonian Wall Text as Trump Administration Presses Cultural Review.” There’s also an ARTnews piece titled “High Museum COO Resigns After Alleged six hundred thousand dollars Misappropriation, Case Referred to Federal Prosecutors.” Separately, ARTnews published an obituary headlined “Éliane Radigue, Composer of Epochal Electronic Sounds, Dies at 94.” Without the article bodies, I can’t verify names, quotes, dates, or the detailed claims a script would normally include, so I’m leaving those details out rather than guessing.

Hyperallergic, meanwhile, ran a review by Eileen G’Sell titled “By Design” Treats Women Like Objects, published 25 February 2026. The description attached to the article says the film features Juliette Lewis turning into a chair, and frames that premise as critiquing mass culture’s conflation of femininity with consumerism and envy. That’s the clear, documentable core of the review from the excerpt provided. Beyond that—plot specifics, other cast, and how the film resolves its premise—would require the full text to check accurately.

That’s it for today’s episode—links to every story are in the show notes. Come back tomorrow for more art world news you can actually use.

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