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The bankrupt Belgian airline Sabena has auctioned off a Magritte painting it owned to help pay laid-off staff. “The picture, appropriately of a sky bird – L’Oiseau de Ciel – has sold at auction for €3.4m (£2.4m) to help the staff that the line was forced to pay off when it went into bankruptcy in November 2001.”

There has been a campaign to erect a statue of Nelson Mandela in London’s Trafalgar Square, “close to South Africa House, the scene of 40 years of anti-apartheid demonstrations and 28 years of protests against Mr Mandela’s imprisonment.” But the government’s public art commission has rejected the statue on aesthetic grounds. London’s Mayor Ken Livingstone disagrees with the decision. “I am appalled that an all-white committee sitting in Westminster can dismiss the idea of putting a great international statesman in this prominent place.”

Artist Anish Kapoor’s work has grown so large in recent years it could be mistaken for architecture. Now he’s been asked to produce some architecture. The city of Naples has asked Kapoor to “design a new underground station – a complex piece of infrastructure that is usually the preserve of architects and engineers. ‘They’re mad,’ he says. ‘It’s folly. They don’t know what they’ve let themselves in for. But it’s wonderful; I can’t imagine anything better than doing a tube station’.”

Museums squeezed by tough financial circumstances are trying to cope by shaving budgets. This is okay for the short term, But Adrian Ellis writes that “the risks creating a sort of ‘living dead’ institution, in which variable costs (programmes, exhibitions etc.) have been squeezed disproportionately because fixed costs are just that — fixed. Many museums in the sector are therefore going to need to take more radical steps if they are to thrive rather than simply survive in some semi-inert limbo, the usual non-profit alternative to actually closing the doors. The question is, of course, what sorts of steps?”