Best Photos of the Day

What a find ! Just in time for Christmas, this rare vintage Papier Mache Santa Claus figure from the 1930's sold at Belle Epoque Auction in New York City on December 2nd for $1280. He stands 25 1/2 inches high, is wearing the traditional Santa outfit of the time, and is electrified so his head nods back and forth when you turn it on. Still works beautifully.

Terrell Tilford, founder and creative director of Band of Vices, with a painting, “Joie De Vivre-Exuberant Enjoyment of Life” (2023) by Patrick Henry Johnson, at the gallery in Los Angeles, Oct. 17, 2023. a number of smaller L.A. galleries, often in less obvious neighborhoods — including Residency Art Gallery, Band of Vices, Charlie James Gallery and others — are beginning to play a major role in the city’s art scene. (Philip Cheung/The New York Times)

A visitor views “October’s Gone...Goodnight,” by Barkley Hendricks at the Frick Madison in New York on Sept. 23, 2023. (Clark Hodgin/The New York Times)

Visitors at the Louvre in Paris on May 27, 2022. The Louvre says its increased admission price is unconnected to the Paris Summer Olympics and is part of a broader plan already underway. (Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times)

Melbourne’s city center, which reveals a wide mix of architectural styles — including Gothic and Romanesque Revivals and Art Deco — embedded amid glossy modern towers, in Australia on Nov. 25, 2023. Melbourne, long seen as Australia’s second city, is runner-up no more after officially edging past Sydney in population for the first time in more than a century. (Susan Wright/The New York Times)

Karen Finley, sketching a model at Art Basel Miami Beach, in Miami Beach, Fla., on Dec. 5, 2023. Finley, one of the NEA Four, revisits culture wars 25 years after a Supreme Court ruling — amid today’s culture wars — with a work at Art Basel Miami Beach. (Marian Carrasquero/The New York Times)

From left: designs by Pia Davis and Autumn Randolph, Norma Kamali, Jasmin Soe, Simone Rocha and Isabel Toledo, part of the “Women Dressing Women” exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, Dec. 4, 2023. The museum’s Costume Institute reimagines the record of fashion, celebrating female designers known but also those long, and wrongly, forgotten, writes the New York Times fashion critic Vanessa Friedman. (Dolly Faibyshev/The New York Times)

Signature Theater, an important Off Broadway institution, in New York, Nov. 30, 2023. The small theaters that help make the city a theater capital are cutting back as they struggle to recover from the pandemic. (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Edgar Degas, “Family Portrait (The Bellelli Family),” 1858-69, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on Aug. 18, 2023. (Jeenah Moon/The New York Times)

Anselm Kiefer at his studio in a Paris suburb, Sept. 29, 2022. The German artist brings a poetic impulse out of the filmmakers who train their cameras on him. (Julien Mignot/The New York Times)