Also, the Ford Foundation should return to Detroit but won’t — all defying your art critic’s good sense.

T hough it’s midsummer, the art world still makes news. Here’s a look at some of July’s top stories. And greetings from Santa Fe. I’m here for a few days for the opera but will also savor the ambiance of Willa Cather, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Roswell. I promise not to hitch a ride with a flying saucer.

But, first, what’s the news from 1066, specifically the Bayeux Tapestry’s upcoming trip to London? No flying saucers, but Halley’s Comet does figure in the fragile, embroidered tapestry, made a few years after William the Conqueror’s Norman invasion of England in 1066. It’s set to travel to the British Museum in the fall of 2026, displayed there until 2027. In documentarian detail — it’s 230 feet long and 20 inches tall — and in vibrant color, it tells the story of the fight over who would succeed Edward the Confessor, England’s childless king, and, after much angst, the Battle of Hastings, the battlefield death of poor Anglo-Saxon King Harold, stuck in the eye with an arrow, and William’s coronation as king. There’s lots of battlefield mincemeat but also scenes of everyday life among the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans.

I’ve seen it twice in Bayeux. We can look at pictures of the tapestry till the mounted, armored cavalry comes home, but it has to be seen for us to be awed. Appearing in it are 623 people, 202 horses and mules, 55 dogs, 505 various other animals, among them camels, lions, and minotaurs, 37 buildings, 41 ships, and 49 trees. Latin inscriptions explain events that can’t be visually deciphered. Figures are rudimentary but bold and lively. Whoever designed it was the Cecil B. DeMille of his — or her — age.

The tapestry is first documented in a 1476 inventory of the Bayeux cathedral’s treasures. Since then, threats to its physical safety have come from Calvinist vandals, the Jacobins, Napoleon’s bungling curators, the Prussians in 1871, and the Gestapo’s stab at smuggling it to Berlin in 1944. The tapestry is now displayed in a museum in Bayeux. The French are building a new museum, also in Bayeux, so the tapestry will go to London as its old home transitions to the new.

This is a bad, mad idea. I’m all for cultural exchange, but the tapestry’s the zenith of creativity, a unique and awesome historical artifact, and very, very delicate. The French agreed to roll it up, haul it in a truck, through the Chunnel, on English roads, security courtesy of a half-ass Labour government, to London and the just-robbed British Museum, whose building needs a $1 billion overhaul. All to boost politicians’ egos. And it’ll be a huge money maker for the British Museum. There’s no anniversary that would make a tapestry show timely. Save it to 2066, the thousand-year anniversary of the Battle of Hastings.

The British have tried to borrow the tapestry before, each effort rejected because of the tapestry’s condition. French conservators now say it’s fit to go. But nothing is new about its condition. It’s still a 230-foot-long, thin, nearly thousand-year-old embroidered piece of cloth.

Trucks are better, jolt-wise and for temperature and humidity controls, and rollers are high-tech now, so packing the tapestry will be less traumatic than it was in, say, 1562, when it was rushed into hiding, chased by Calvinist kooks. Still, it’s a risk. Old textile art is rare, and the Bayeux Tapestry is one of the great monuments in Western art. Bayeux’s a short jump from England. And it’s best to be seen in context. William the Conqueror and his wife, Queen Matilda, are buried in Caen. The beaches of the D-Day Landing and the nearby war cemeteries show us how contested this pretty part of France once was. The Brits, in return for the tapestry, are sending the Sutton Hoo treasure trove of Anglo-Saxon art to France. Who among the French will care?

President Macron and George Osborne — who is the chairman of the British Museum’s board, the former chancellor of the exchequer, and a failed archenemy of Brexit — pushed hard for the loan. Why? Macron is nearing the end of his time as president, is probably bored, and loves a good party where he’ll be celebrated. Who knows? Madam Macron might have chased him with a pole axe until he said oui.

Osborne, who’s championing the return of the Elgin Marbles to the Greeks, is desperate to salvage his reputation, sullied by his slashed budgets while he was chancellor, and by the Brexit flop, and 14 years of wretched, failed Tory rule of which he was an engineer. Osborne, by the by, said the other day that a permanent loan of the Marbles to Athens is a 95 percent done deal. There’s still no evidence that the Greeks — rather than the British public — own them, but public ownership of art treasures is a triviality when vanity needs to be assuaged.

The Smithsonian’s back on the bad-news page. It seems that artist Amy Sherald’s Trans Forming Liberty, her full-length, broad-shouldered, bewigged black, trans take on the Statue of Liberty, dressed in Lilly Pulitzer to boot, won’t be traipsing a D.C. runway. Neither will her American Sublime exhibition, slated to open at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in a few weeks. Sherald, Lady My Way Or The Highway, pulled her splashy survey show when the NPG hesitated to display the Trans Forming Liberty portrait, fearing to offend and inflame. Sherald is crying censorship and going nuclear. I reviewed American Sublime when it was at the Whitney earlier this year — I liked it but wrote that Trans Forming Liberty, well, lowered the tone, to be, as I always am, tactful. It’s not good art.

Preposterously, the Smithsonian, the NPG’s master, said in a statement, “We understand Amy’s decision to withdraw her show” — stiffing the institution that in 2018 commissioned her to do a portrait of Michelle Obama, which made Sherald famous. Her exit leaves the NPG with a canyon-size hole in its exhibition schedule. The Smithsonian, embracing difference in all its rainbow colors, might understand, but I don’t. The Sherald show isn’t hers. It’s the museum’s, and the museum committed to pumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into it before Lady Pique pulled the plug. At this point, the NPG ought to be in the driver’s seat, even though it has no director. In May, President Trump fired Kim Sajet, the longtime director and DEI doyenne, after which Sajet said, “You can’t fire me . . . I quit.”

And the Smithsonian evidently never said it would ditch Trans Forming Liberty. It proposed a contextualizing video that would show interviews with visitors responding to the picture. Sherald emphatically didn’t want “to open a debate on trans visibility,” she said, but isn’t fostering debate among a museum’s goals? And what’s wrong with thinking — and saying — that we’ve had oodles of trans visibility, enough for a case of indigestion or, beyond that, enough to convince us that trans ideology is a flimflam and a farce.

Trans Forming Liberty is a schlock picture, having no depth and no elasticity. It’s a billboard. There’s one reading. It’s colorful but dull. It’s also Sherald’s parody of her own work, as if she simply imagined Ru Paul as Lady Liberty, easy-peasy for her. “It’s not right for our audiences” is a perfectly good reason for a museum to tweak an exhibition it’s paying for, but Lady Highfalutin’s tactic is “Like it — that dose of estrogen, that Adam’s Apple, and that fuchsia wig — or lump it.”

When I reviewed American Sublime, I wrote that Sherald, now a big star and having moved from Baltimore, where there’s lots of reality, to New York, risked losing what’s best about her work — its honesty, charm, and quiet mystery. Nothing kills good art faster than New York fads and frenzies.

Worse than doing Trans Forming Liberty, high on flash and low on nuance, Sherald has let fame go to her head. She’s a limited artist. I wondered in my review where she’d go next, since her tricks tank is edging toward the refill light. Will Lady Hissy Fit evolve into Lady Has Been? I doubt it. She won’t starve. She can always do portraits of rich people.

American Sublime was slated to tour to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and the National Portrait Gallery in D.C., but Washington isn’t San Francisco, and it’s not Chelsea. That the Smithsonian blithely believed that all were on the same wavelength tells us lots about how off-piste the Smithsonian has become — and how extreme. And doesn’t Sherald have any common sense? It’s a government-owned museum, and it’s 2025, not 2024. The vibe has changed. The NPG is also a family museum, unlike SF MoMA. Does San Francisco even have families? Kids have enough trouble with civics. Do we need to muddy the meaning of the Statue of Liberty with Trans Queen Story Hour?

American Sublime is organized by SF MoMA, whose director blathered the other day about “shared humanity,” the newest woke cliché, wondering, I suppose, why there’s no trans head on Mount Rushmore. This put me in a questioning state of mind. I assume that SF MoMA, which assembled the show, and the Smithsonian, which is the renter, have a contract with provisions for who controls the objects list and interpretation and, more to the point, for cancellation. Are acceptable grounds for cancellation detailed, events like a foreign invasion or an act of God, and I don’t mean Lady Weasel’s whims?

I asked for a copy of the contract, not holding my breath as I await. I say sue, and ask large. In a Trump lawsuit, the going demand for damages is $10 billion.

It’s a challenge to divine the state of the art market, in part because dealers are cagey about sales and, in part, because what we call the art market is hundreds of markets, many niche — contemporary art and Old Masters paintings, yes, but there’s the market for watches, Old Master drawings, wine, vintage cars, jewelry, Judaica, carpets, silver, stamps, and what has to be the quietest market, Canadian art. My spies pleased me in reporting that Old Master art is attractive again after a long, steady descent. Pendulums swing, and art by Boucher, Rubens, and Murillo, to pull names out of my hat, are proven survivors of the test of time. Something painted six months ago and priced at a million bucks? I’m skeptical.

A dollop of anecdotal evidence on the doldrums in the macro art market came on July 17, with the cancellation of the 2025 installment of the Art Show in New York, the classy art fair held every year since 1988 by the Art Dealers Association of America. It’s a marquee event. ADAA is calling it a “strategic pause.” I’ve reviewed it for NR nearly every year and enjoyed seeing its fresh meat in contemporary and modern art, mostly flat art.

For the 80 or so dealers whose booths line the aisles at the Park Avenue Armory, the ADAA fair, and every fair, is a risky investment in time and money. The big bucks are in the big-name artists nabbed by big, international firms, with the truly big spenders coming to the Art Show for the party but buying elsewhere, quietly, from the big enchiladas. The middle market is moribund, or under-the-radar, since the art dealer’s position as mediator has so eroded. Many dealers have told me over the years that they don’t make money at art fairs but still do them for the visibility, new contacts here and there, camaraderie, and loyalty to the profession.

In six short weeks, I’ll get the temperature of the field in a big art fair that’s not being canceled, the Armory Show, produced by Frieze, an international arts organization.

Heather Gerken is the new president of the Ford Foundation, sitting on a $16 billion endowment. She succeeds Darren Walker, who transformed the foundation into the supreme flower of DEI and, through its grants, a high-octane engine in the race-explains-everything movement in museums. He’s the chairman of the National Gallery of Art’s board and needs to be fired in a cleanse-the-palate move if not for Ford’s many terrible grants. Gerken was the dean of Yale Law School, sick with the antisemitism that she didn’t much resist. She told Jewish students to “see a counselor.” She set conservative students up to be caught in woke traps. Is she a high-end academic bureaucrat? We’ll see.

Her academic field is election law. Will Ford put its millions and billions in ranked-voting scams, weighted votes, and endless recounts till, that is, the left candidate wins? We’ll see. She ought to address the dismal Ford Foundation art gallery at its E. 43rd Street headquarters in Manhattan. Before that, her first piece of business should be moving the Ford Foundation back to Detroit, nixing its Foundation for Social Justice, and living among real people. Detroit is where the money’s from, and I hear it’s on an upswing.