"A Miami federal judge ruled this week in favor of the Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, who, for a few weeks in 2019, was the talk of the art world after his work Comedian, a banana duct-taped to a wall, sold at Art Basel Miami Beach for $120,000." - ARTnews
After facing years of heavy criticism nationally and internationally, the museum worked with a group of experts from the African diaspora in Belgium to rethink the controversial statues on display. - BBC
The museum retains its Neoclassical facade from 1905, courtesy Edward Broadhead Green, and its modernist addition from the '60s, courtesy Gordon Bunshaft. The 1905 building has been given new life. Its original staircase out front, removed during the Bunshaft project, is now back - ”a gesture that renews the building's majesty” - and the galleries have been given fresh...
The 300 items were assembled for a 2013 exhibition by the Allard Pierson Museum in Amsterdam; the show was at a German museum when Russia invaded and illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. Dutch authorities were unsure where to return the pieces and stored them until courts decided the case. - ARTnews
"'The wood was placed in our wood bin weeks ago when it was taken down. It has been processed with other wood since then,' (said a) spokesperson. … The piece, entitled Fencelines – A Collective Monument to Resilience, comprised hundreds of wooden slats that community members in Richmond had painted." - ARTnews
Some Brits might bristle, but Paris's building height restriction lessons are real. "Skyscrapers are like air travel: they used to be as glamorous as the jet set, but now they’re in a Ryanair phase – generic, dull and predictable, a default option for unimaginative property companies." - The Observer (UK)
For good reason. "The museum traces its origins back to when King Leopold II set up the International Exposition of 1897. As part of that, 267 Congolese men, women and children were taken by force to Belgium and exhibited to the public ... on the site where the museum stands." - BBC
"'How many enslaved people is a psychiatric hospital worth?' This question, etched into a mirror and displayed in the panopticon of a psychiatric hospital in Porto, Portugal, prompted the administration" to close the whole exhibition down on opening day. - Hyperallergic
So if you're posting in outrage or joy or sadness or with complicated feelings that need many minutes of discussion to express, you're doing what the Brooklyn Museum hoped you'd do. - The New York Times
Ben Davis: "For me, getting an overview of the twists and turns of the Komar & Melamid corpus here … is something like a moment of zooming out from a maze, seeing it from above, and realizing suddenly that there is no way out." - Artnet
Philip Kennicott: "They are accidentally beautiful, rather like an 80-degree day in January is accidentally pleasurable. To some, they may suggest the science-fiction scenography of a dystopian film; to others, they render the present moment visually akin to Eugène Atget's 19th-century France — haunting, sepulchral, yet oddly beautiful." - MSN (The Washington Post)
Jean-François Bélisle, currently director of the Musée d’art de Joliette in Quebec, "arrives in Ottawa during a troubled period where a strategic plan to make the institution more accessible to diverse audiences and to emphasize Indigenous knowledge has created controversy and disruption." - The Globe and Mail (Canada)
The 36-year-old artist known as Jago says he uses the same techniques his Renaissance forbears did. He's so highly regarded for his ability to capture human featured and emotions in stone that he already has his own museum in Naples. - The Guardian
There is an important difference between a building that is “open to the public” and a public building, and that distinction may explain the palpable sadness among art lovers on social media after news of the sale broke. - Washington Post
