The ruins of the Bronze Age settlement, which include a palace and a large industrial and goods-storage complex as well as other structures and over 100 cuneiform tablets, are at Kemune in the Mosul reservoir in Iraq, where a drought led to a major draw-down of water. - Newsweek
The case that led to the arrest of the Louvre's former director has spread to the US: the Manhattan D.A. office has impounded five items in the Met's Egyptian collection that are connected to two dealers in Europe who are now charged with criminal conspiracy, fraud, and money laundering. - Artnet
"Amid war with Russia, the city’s challenge is to integrate tens of thousands of residents displaced from fighting in eastern Ukraine without sacrificing Lviv's aesthetics or derailing its efforts to become a sustainable, livable European city." - The New York Times
"It is almost five years since President Emmanuel Macron announced his revolutionary plan to return African heritage to the continent. … But following Macron's historic declaration, the French government’s position on the restitution of cultural property is 'confused'." - The Art Newspaper
Last week, Jean-Luc Martinez, ousted as the museum's director last year, was indicted for complicity with the trafficking of stolen Egyptian antiquities purchased by the Louvre Abu Dhabi. Now the Louvre "has decided to bring a civil action before the jurisdiction in charge," though it's not saying against whom. - Artnet
"Each of the five branches of the US military (the air force, army, coast guard, marines and navy) has its own collection, curator and exhibition schedule. Most of the works in these collections do not show violence ... (but rather) enlisted soldiers' day-to-day routines." - The Art Newspaper
“That’s unheard of. It used to be a gentleman’s sport done by gentleman for gentleman. Now these gentleman and gentlewomen of the trade are getting hand-cuffed. People who have wings of museums named after them aren’t accustomed to being handcuffed and that has had an impact.” - The Guardian
"The preservation project calls for some of the capsules to allow for real-life living in a separate locale. Those in museums will be refinished by the Kurokawa architectural office, which went over the original designs to figure out how each box could be detached with minimal damage." - AP
"Think of planet Earth, there are people destroying it," he proclaimed as security guards dragged him away. Don't worry: the painting's fine, and the protective glass in front of it has been cleaned. - CNN
Landscape architect Julie Bargmann's work "to revitalize toxic sites and reconnect them to their communities has earned her the nicknames 'Toxic Avenger' and 'Queen of Slag.'" - The New York Times
"The Cultural Workers United (CWU) movement, as AFSCME has dubbed their campaign, has taken hold at museums like MOCA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art," and now the Academy Museum. - Hyperallergic
The FBI's Art Crime Team is really quite interested "the authenticity of 25 paintings that the Orlando Museum of Art says were created by Basquiat and are on exhibit there." - The New York Times
The best thing at the Portland Art Museum isn't the Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera show that's been traveling the country since 2018. It's the huge, collaborative murals in the museum's sculpture court. - Oregon ArtsWatch
Honestly: "How does an operational railway, an entire rotunda or indeed a three-metre-tall working sculpture of a floating tap manage to go missing?" A dig (and some online appeals) aims to find out. - The Guardian (UK)
Is the hacking of Seth Green's Bored Ape actually illegal? Perhaps not. It "illustrates the limits of the free, frictionless world promised by crypto—and its many misunderstandings around ownership." - Wired
