The Trump administration is slashing 200,000 federal jobs, and this week, the arts world is feeling the burn. Shelly C. Lowe, the first Native American chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, got the boot. Meanwhile, museums and libraries are bracing for budget cuts sharper than a Picasso sketch, with some public art programs already in the dumpster.

It gets worse: historical erasure just went next level. Pages honoring Black Medal of Honor recipients and Japanese American WWII units? Poof! Gone from government websites. Critics are calling it a cultural wipeout, and the fear is real: less funding, fewer jobs, and a whole lot of neglected art collecting dust.

With public collections left hanging and institutions scrambling, the question is: how much of America’s creative legacy is about to vanish?

Sofia Gubaidulina, one of Russia’s most groundbreaking composers, has passed away at 93. Known for her deeply spiritual and experimental music, she defied Soviet censorship and left an indelible mark on contemporary classical music.

Encouraged by Shostakovich, she fused traditional and modern elements, pushing boundaries with her compositions. Her works, performed by legends like Gidon Kremer and Anne-Sophie Mutter, explored themes of faith, human struggle, and transformation.

Gubaidulina was one of the first Soviet composers to reflect a deep connection with religious themes. She has commented:

“As a believer, I understand religion in the literal sense of the word, as re-ligio, which means a re-establishment of connections, a re-establishment of the legato of life. There is no more serious task for music than this”.

(Anyone else obsessed with behind-the-scenes of art creation? Watch a beautiful trailer of a documentary film about her creative process here.)

Imagine losing a €15 million masterpiece for nearly 90 years, only to have it pop up at an art fair. That’s exactly what happened at TEFAF Maastricht this week, where a lost portrait by Gustav Klimt made a grand reappearance.

The painting, depicting Ghanaian Prince William Nii Nortey Dowuona, vanished in 1938 during the Nazi occupation and was thought to be lost forever. That is, until a private collector showed up with it in, let’s say, less-than-museum-worthy condition.

Beyond the price tag, this rediscovery sheds light on Klimt’s more diverse subjects and the complex history of looted art. TEFAF, once again, proves it’s the place where lost masterpieces come back to life.

Meta just got hit with a lawsuit in France, and this one’s got some serious “we told you so” energy.

French authors and publishers are accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s empire of straight-up looting their work to train its AI models: without asking, without paying, and without a second thought.

Their claim? Meta scraped copyrighted books, articles, and other written works to feed its algorithms, potentially creating AI-generated content that competes with the very writers it stole from. Oof.

Meta’s response? A casual shrug.

If the lawsuit sticks, it could force Big Tech to rethink how they “borrow” creative content—and maybe, just maybe, start compensating the people who actually wrote it.

This week in "People Who Hate Art Doing the Most", we’ve got far-right politicians and activists taking their frustrations out on museum walls.

🇬🇷 Athens: Greek MP Nikolaos Papadopoulos stormed into the National Gallery and vandalized four paintings, calling them "blasphemous." The artworks depicted religious figures in modern, unconventional ways, too unconventional for Papadopoulos, who took matters (and probably a sharp object) into his own hands. He got detained but walked free thanks to parliamentary immunity. Must be nice.

🇫🇷 Paris: Over in France, a far-right group decided that an exhibition featuring portraits of veiled women at the Basilica of Saint-Denis was too inclusive for their liking. Instead of expressing their discontent through, you know, words, they covered the artworks and trashed the display.

While institutions and authorities condemn these attacks, the growing tension between politics, religion, and art signals an increasingly hostile environment for cultural freedom.