Truck-Driver Artist Takes On New York, Italy Buys a Hidden Caravaggio, and Meryl Streep Tosses Big Bucks at a Bad Cause

Plus, your critic’s first Butterfly Net Prize for this month’s craziest moment

I f I’m counting correctly, this is my 50th monthly “in the news” piece, a storyline I introduced in 2021. Art news, that is — toward the end of every month, I survey the glass hive, reporting the good, the dubious, the bad, and the ghastly.

I tend to abhor hierarchies, but I’ll start with the good — or, I should write, wonderful — exhibition called He Built This City: Joe Macken’s Model at the Museum of the City of New York. It’s a one-object show that just opened, but what an object. Over the past 20 or so years, Macken, a truck driver and Queens native, has been making a 50-by-27-foot aerial-view model of New York City showing tens of thousands of buildings made with balsa wood, cardboard, an X-Acto knife, and Elmer’s Glue. Greenery, rivers, roads, bridges, piers, beaches, and plazas make for a sweeping panorama. Never has New York looked so good. Icons such as Paul Manship’s Prometheus bronze at Rockefeller Center and the water tanks topping city buildings make for a fantasy world.

Macken started small, thinking of Midtown Manhattan only, but the project grew and grew. He included the World Trade Center’s two towers as a memorial to those who died, tucking them beside the new Freedom Tower. A video of his project ran on TikTok last year. The museum’s marketing director tracked Macken to his home in Clifton Park near Saratoga. A long-term loan was negotiated. The show opened earlier this month. It’s fabulous. I like outsider art and, as Calvin Coolidge, my favorite president said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.”

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I follow heavy-hitter museum acquisitions, since they’re great artworks moving from private to public collections, and I love seeing museums beating the billionaires who stash trophy art in their man caves and billiard rooms, on their yachts, and by their infinity pools. On March 10, the Italian Ministry of Culture announced its purchase — for about $35 million — of a rare, long-hidden Caravaggio portrait. Caravaggio (1571–1610) was both the bad boy and the beacon light of Baroque painting, living la vida loca so fast and furious that he didn’t manage to get a whole lot of work done.

The portrait is from 1598 and is both an early picture — Caravaggio was mostly doing still lifes and genre pictures then — and a breakout one. The subject, Maffeo Barberini, is a young but confident, elegant, and imposing priest who later became Pope Urban VIII, reigning from 1623 to 1644. Urban ruled the Papal States with a big stick, or a hefty ferula, hired Bernini to redo much of Rome, sent Galileo to trial for heresy, practiced nepotism on an obscene scale, and put the Vatican in a deep debt hole. In painting Barberini, a socially and politically prominent man on the move, Caravaggio had arrived.

The portrait resurfaced in 2024. The Italians, like the French and the Spanish, tend to be secretive about the Old Masters they own lest the taxman cometh after them. The picture is going to the Barberini Palace, the palace Urban commissioned, designed by Bernini, Carlo Maderno, and Francesco Borromini. The palace is now at the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Antica, the national museum dedicated to pre-1800 painting.

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On March 16, the House of Representatives passed an amended extension of the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act, the anchor law governing Holocaust–era stolen art and its restitution. President Trump will probably sign it. A key change in the statute enhances plaintiff access to American courts rather than forcing them to litigate in foreign courts. These courts tend to be biased against restitution claims, which often aim to dislodge stolen art from public museums. This is good. The new law will limit the dismissal of claims on procedural technicalities, preferencing trials on the merits. This is also good. The most famous restitution case, involving Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, also called The Woman in Gold, and four other Klimts, nearly failed on these grounds.

My problem is the bill’s diminishment of a defense based on statutes of limitations. I’m all for restitution of art swiped by the Nazis — and they had lots of ways of doing it, from outright theft to coerced sales — but at some point a line will need to be drawn. Litigating 90- and 100-year-old crimes, which is what we’ll soon be facing, is too flawed a test of memory and documentation.

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I’ve been writing a lot about the Smithsonian Institution, a woke swamp crying for Drano and an Augean stable for which 1-800-HER-QLES needs to be called. This week, I read that Meryl Streep pledged a “seven-figure gift” to the long-nomadic, now digital-only National Women’s History Museum in anticipation of a brick-and-mortar home wasting $375 million in taxpayer and philanthropic money. The money’s going to an endowed fund to award a teacher-of-the-year award in women’s history. Surely that teacher of the year would rather walk barefoot over molten glass than tout the merits of Clare Boothe Luce, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Margaret Chase Smith, or, perish the thought, Phyllis Schlafly. Would she ever celebrate Margaret Thatcher? When French lieutenants’ women fly.

The museum is another woke racket. At its website, “equity and inclusion” is the ruling lingo. Its virtual exhibitions include Until We Are All Free: Faith, Women, and Social Justice; We Who Believe in Freedom: Black Feminism DC; and Feminism: The Third Wave celebrating loudmouths like Barbara Mikulski. Shows such its good online exhibitions — The Women of NASA, Sojourner Truth, and The WAVES of World War II — can happen at the American History Museum, which is massive.

“A dingo got my baby,” cried Meryl Streep in A Cry in the Dark, where she played an Australian mother, and what a whiz with accents Streep is. The Women’s History Museum will be worse than a baby-killing dingo. It’ll be a forever Trot cockroach. Congress should kill it.

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Artnet is the very useful online database, starting in the late 1980s, that provides historical prices paid at auction for art. Since then, it has expanded to host online auctions, report art news, and research trends in the marketplace. This past week it published its annual Intelligence Report for 2025. Its By the Numbers section reports that fine-art auction prices increased 13.3 percent from 2024 to 2025, a good result considering that ultra-contemporary art auction prices dropped 67.9 percent. “Fine art” includes paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, and decorative arts as opposed to things like jewelry, watches, booze, and cars. People are less likely to buy a painting when the paint’s still wet.

Prices for art selling for more than $10 million increased by 36.1 percent, a rise powered in part by three Klimt paintings that sold in 2025 for a total of $390.7 million. Public art-auction sales totaled $20.7 billion in 2025, up 9 percent from 2024. Auction prices for objects selling at $50,000 or less dropped by 2 percent. On March 12, Art Basel and the UBS Global Art Market Report said that total art-market sales, and this includes auction and dealer sales, totaled $59.6 billion in 2025, up 4 percent from 2024 but still below the $67.8 billion peak in 2022. Overall, these reports show a modest recovery from the 2023 to 2024 dip.

European Old Masters are a small part of the auction market. The top Old Master price for Canaletto’s Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day — $43.9 million — dwarfed the runner-up, Guido Reni’s David Contemplating the Head of Goliath, which sold for $14.3 million. Besting the Canaletto were not only the Klimts, one of which sold for $236 million, but paintings by Van Gogh, Rothko, Mondrian, Picasso, and the hyped-to-kingdom-come Hockney, Basquiat, and Kahlo.

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There’s more good news from the University of Notre Dame, which I covered last week when reviewing its wonderful Raclin Murphy Museum of Art. Columbus is front and center — the life of Columbus, that is, in the university’s expansive suite of wall murals depicting his life. They were painted in the early 1880s by art professor and official university artist Luigi Gregori.

In 2020, among the most blighted years in the history of Gregorian timekeeping, Christopher Columbus fell hard from grace. Protesters demanded that the murals go — he and the discovery of America by Europeans were banners of oppression. The university agreed to cover them with specially made tapestries that could be removed. It was a good compromise. The admissions office then was in the university’s Main Building, by the murals. Whether an applicant is a victim or an oppressor, the murals were a distraction. Of course, no one today is either, since Columbus and his times are 500 years in the past.

They weren’t destroyed as some wished, and, over time, wise minds understood that hot tempers would cool and that many in the victimhood industry would be revealed as charlatans and pimps, as has been the case. The murals are now to be uncovered three times a year for a week. They were on view while I was visiting campus. The admissions office has moved to its own building. No one drowned in their tears or broke a finger from pious wagging. I hope one day soon the covers will go forever. They’re part of the institution’s history. Columbus was a beacon light of adventure and exploration and a hero.

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Since this is my 50th art news piece, I’m introducing a new award — the Butterfly Net Prize — for not just a dumb idea but a line of thinking about some aspect of the arts that’s crazy. My first award goes to Howard W. French, a Columbia professor who wrote last week in Foreign Policy that he hoped America would lose our war against the despotic, terrorist, antisemitic, homophobic, and misogynist mullahs in Iran because giving Trump a win couldn’t be countenanced. Why? He’s a “malignant narcissist,” “megalomaniacal,” and, besides, he’s pushing a “vulgar and grandiose” remaking of the White House. It’s the ballroom, he tells us. The ballroom? French might hate neoclassicism, look pudgy in black tie, and do a lame foxtrot, but let’s lose a war . . . to Iran, of all places . . . over a ballroom?

I love the idea of a White House ballroom, though the Trump plan is too big. Ballrooms should be frilly and fancy. What does French want? A funeral parlor? French teaches, by the by, at Columbia’s journalism school, which should be closed along with all journalism schools since they breed lazy, effete, conformist, and captured reporters rather than the scrappy, skeptical, working-class reporters of yore, men and women who loved scoops and the sound of cracking feet of clay. Is French part of the “fifth column’? Is he deranged? What about Foreign Policy, which accepted, edited, and published his piece? You tell me.

Alas, a Butterfly Net Prize, given the extent of Trump Derangement Syndrome, would mean World War II–style production and endless shortages. There are so many people like French who are that insane. How could Columbia let him go near young people?