The week in art news: Barbara Kruger at Serpentine, Venice Biennale announces artists, Mets merch giveaway and more…

Pointed political provocateur Barbara Kruger returns to London for her first institutional solo show in over 20 years. The 79 year old American artist is best known for her bold and brash graphic design that parodies advertisements and leaves you thinking.

While Ai Weiwei claimed in an interview on Sky News that political censorship in the West is “exactly the same, sometimes even more ridiculous” than in China under Mao Zedong. Ai slammed western artists, saying they are too “corrupted by capitalism” to defend freedom of speech.

The New York Mets are giving away merch designed by artists Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler. The first 15,000 attendees to their games against the San Francisco Giants and the Colorado Rockies will be in line to pick up tote bags and bucket hats. Let’s go Mets! Number one art collab in the world, baby!

Across the city, a lawsuit threatens to tear apart the family-run Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. The suit, filed in the New York Supreme Court by Frankthaler’s nephew, Fredrick Iseman, claims board members abused their position for personal gain. The board dismissed the claims as baseless.

A psychedelic sixties painting made by the Beatles has sold for $1.7M at Christie’s auction house. The trippy acrylic artwork was made over two days, while the fab four were holed up in the Tokyo Hilton.

We’ve got our tickets, have you? The Venice Biennale has announced the 332 artists participating in the main exhibition. Curator Adriano Pedrosa said they would prioritise artists who had never shown before at the exhibition.

Tate has hired two new curators of Asia-Pacific art. Hera Chan joins from Tai Kwun Contemporary, while Alvin Li has worked with the gallery since 2021 and was previously a contributing editor to Frieze.

The British Government rewrites restitution law. In 2020, the government intended to remove oversight from national galleries and museums returning artefacts to their country of origin, but those plans have now been scrapped.

Meanwhile, the interim director of the British Museum Sir Mark Jones said he would support loaning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Sir Mark made the comments to The Times, where he also defended the museum’s controversial sponsorship by BP.

The Greeks could take some advice from the Egyptians: fake it ‘til you make it. A plan to bring in tourists by reconstructing part of the ancient Menkaure pyramid has been praised by the head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, while one expert described it as an “absurdity”.