A Self-Guided Tour for Members - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The National Park Service has revised its plans to redevelop the Tidal Basin region of the National Mall in Washington, DC. The plan zeroes in on West Potomac Park, which Trump picked in May as his preferred site for the planned National Garden of American Heroes. One leading historic preservationist interpreted the plan as a way to create space for the project, reports the Washington Post. “The plan that we saw is really about making the space for the Garden of Heroes,” Charles A. Birnbaum, founding president and CEO of the nonprofit Cultural Landscape Foundation, told the paper, adding that, however, “the Garden of Heroes is not included in the plan” and that it “feels like a placeholder for something else that’s going to be inserted.” The Cultural Landscape Foundation, headquartered in DC, was established in 1998 to educate the public about the nation’s shared landscape heritage. It calls attention to threatened sites and gives a biennial $100,000 landscape architecture prize.

Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum removed an ancient Egyptian mummified head from view because there was no “informed consent from the deceased individual,” the museum said. The move has upset some conservative politicians in Scotland, with one alleging that it is a sign of “woke madness.” According to the Times of London, the museum had previously displayed the mummified male head in its galleries. But it has now been moved to storage, and in its place is a notice reading: “We have removed human remains from this display as a mark of respect.”

Scott Mescudi, the rapper known as Kid Cudi, announced on Instagram that he is working on a biopic about the oft-mythologized New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The film, titled JEAN, will be written and directed by Cudi, who will also star as the titular artist. Cudi shared an image of the first page of a draft of his script, dated August 25, 2026, and said that filming is set to begin in 2027. In his post, Cudi writes that people have been encouraging him to play Basquiat for years but that “no project actually came to be” so he decided to write it himself. He shared a mock-up of a poster for the film featuring a black and white photograph of himself as Basquiat, stylishly dressed in a suit and tie and smoking a cigarette, with a wig mimicking Basquiat’s trademark free-form dreadlocks. “This isnt the final just a rough,” Cudi writes about the wig. “trust me we gon get it perfect.”

Upcoming deadline for MFA program applications at University at Buffalo The University at Buffalo Department of Art invites applications for its MFA in Studio Art degree. The UB MFA is a two-year program in which students, faculty, visiting artists, and curators participate in an energetic, interdisciplinary dialogue around contemporary art. Students develop independent studio practices alongside thematic labs, research, academic electives, seminars, studio visits, group critiques, and exhibitions, while engaging with vibrant local and international arts communities. Our graduates go on to build acclaimed careers in the arts. The Department of Art is situated within an “R1” designated research University, enabling access to knowledge bases across a wide range of creative and academic fields. The department, located in the Center for the Arts, houses the Departments of Art, Media Study, Theater and Dance as well as the UB Art Galleries’ CFA Gallery. Our curriculum encourages interdisciplinary studio practice and research.

If you liked Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G the first time around, you’ll like this less; if you disliked it, you’ll dislike this more; if you suspected it was racist, you’ll be more emboldened to say so – especially as Baron Cohen has dreamed up a whole new character apparently to pre-empt and mock precisely that objection. Broad and crass as it often is – in fact always is – this Ali G sequel is sometimes funny: the athletic vigour of our hero’s pranking and punking is like the umpteenth Jackass film at which you might find yourself laughing, and Baron Cohen blunders with the semi-intentional force of an XL bully into the issue of whether jokes are still allowed. Unlike the first film, Ali G in Da House from 2002, this is not a full written-through narrative. It is basically another live-ammo series of hoaxes with some spectacular bad taste perpetrated upon the deserving and less deserving; it satirises the shamelessness of anti-woke free speech martyrs, punching up and down with grossout cringe, and the targets include some big names who shouldn’t be revealed here.

20. First We Take Manhattan (1988)The synth-heavy production on 1988’s I’m Your Man has always been divisive – even Leonard Cohen’s longtime collaborator Anjani Thomas subsequently expressed misgivings – but on its opening track, it really works. The Pet Shop Boys-ish arrangement chafes against Cohen’s growling vocal, amplifying First We Take Manhattan’s shiver-inducing sense of brooding menace.19. Going Home (2011)Seven years – and a personal financial crisis – after 2004’s half-hearted Dear Heather, Cohen returned to the studio with his powers freshly marshalled. As if to underline the point, Old Ideas opened with the sharply witty Going Home, on which Cohen’s muse addresses the listener directly, disparaging the artist himself as “a lazy bastard in a suit”.18. Memories (1977)Cohen famously called his 1977 LP Death of a Ladies’ Man “a catastrophe”, which perhaps reflected more on its drug- and booze-soaked recording with dangerously erratic producer Phil Spector than the finished album. It’s an outlier in Cohen’s catalogue, but one with much to commend it. Certainly, he maintained an understandable fondness for the rock’n’roll-influenced Memories, often performing it live.17.