BEST
Fasten your seatbelts because between the biennials, triennials, and quinquennials worldwide, 2017 will be a massively busy year for art.

Aside from all that, what shows do you most need to see in Europe in 2017? We’ve got you covered.

Harmen Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (circa 1640). Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

Seventeenth-century Dutch still life gets a moment in the sun, as J.K. Rowling tweet-teases us with a Harmen Steenwyck painting that she says “sums up everything I’m working on at the moment.”

We all needed a moment of levity, and an artist provided it when he briefly modified the iconic Hollywood sign in an ode to newly legal uses of marijuana in the Golden State.

The Louvre. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

WORST
Best known for his book and television series Ways of Seeing, art critic John Berger died at 90.

Legendary Berlin gallerist Barbara Weiss died of a long illness at just 56 years of age.

A fire, a flood, and fears of terrorism led to drops in revenue and attendance at the Louvre.

Egypt, too, sees its museums struggling amid drops in tourism revenues.

Will Facebook never learn? Yet again, the social media site censored a classical artwork just because of a little nudity.