Now the city won't even require auction houses to be licensed, let alone disclose such things as whether they have financial interests in the items they're auctioning. The change is part of a broader package passed by the City Council to help businesses recover post-pandemic. - The New York Times
“I am not going to get rid of the conceptual art that was acquired for the collection and is exhibited. But I intend to diversify the offer, introduce other narratives. No one said that you should only deal with pro-environmental, gender, or queer art that is promoted by the Western cultural institutions.” - ARTnews
“My goal was very simple: Smithsonian will be the place people point to, to say ‘This is how we should share our collections and think about ethical returns,’” Lonnie G. Bunch III, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, said in an interview. - The New York Times
The city council of the occupied, now-largely-destroyed Ukrainian city says that more than 2,000 works, including paintings by the renowned 19th-century artists Arkhip Kuindzhi and Ivan Aivazovsky, were taken by Russian forces to Donetsk, which has been occupied by Russia since 2014. - The Guardian
Russian soldiers and intelligence officers, along with "a Russian-speaking man in a white lab coat" and a film crew, entered the Melitopol Museum of Local History and stole an entire collection, which had been carefully hidden, of 2,300-year-old Scythian gold ornaments, plates and weapons. - The New York Times
The exhibition in Boston is "a referendum, of sorts, on just how far the MFA and its peer institutions have evolved when it comes to grappling with the issue of white racism following the murder of George Floyd." - Boston Globe
Take the NFTs, for example: "banal, tasteless and pointlessly surreal ... The ambiance was somewhere between that of a particularly bad high school art exhibition and a video game expo." - Washington Post
During WWII, Fidelin also preserved Man Ray's entire studio. "Without her preservation, Strauss said, 'we’d be missing a whole chunk of Dada and Surrealist paintings, drawings and objects.'" - The New York Times
It only took 270 to get the yellowed varnish off. Looks like the 19th century wasn't as dark and dreary as one might previously have concluded, hey. - BBC
Glory Samjolly, paints oil portraits of Black business owners, artists, writers, and intellectuals in the styles of the European old masters, but she also runs an Instagram account where she posts historical works of Afro Europeans. - The New York Times
The Mariupol City Council says that "Russian forces have seized more than 2,000 pieces of artwork from the besieged port city of Mariupol," and the works "have been taken to Russian-occupied Donetsk." - Washington Post
Since the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020, Shovlar’s income has dropped by 60%. He says trade with the EU, where 99% of his clients are based, is now “virtually impossible” and the 30 to 50 sales he was making a week have dwindled. - The Art Newspaper
"An upstart museum in (Bangalore) has launched an open-source digital encyclopedia of ... the subcontinent's rich artistic history, dating from 10,000 years ago to the present. Included on the free platform, which went live last week, are thousands of articles on famous artists, movements, disciplines, techniques, and other topics." - Artnet
"It is an astonishing output for a region of six million people, featuring elegant libraries and special educational needs schools, as well as dramatic concert halls and bridges – in a place once derided as 'the ugliest country in the world'." Oliver Wainwright explains the change. - The Guardian
The Investigative Committee of Russia has opened a “rehabilitation of Nazism” case against Kulik. If he’s found guilty, the artist reportedly faces a fine of up to three million rubles, forced labor for up to three years, or imprisonment for up to three years. - Artnet
