Dozens of monuments and artworks await repairs and conservation that may never be forthcoming because of rising maintenance costs and shifting priorities to newer memorials. - The New York Times
"The public continued to interrogate museums over their treatment of workers, their attachments to patrons with problematic sources of wealth, and their dragon-like hold on items of questionable provenance." And then there's Hunter Biden … - Artnet
It's happening with works by the likes of Klimt, Picasso, Rembrandt. Most controversially, if the only surviving photos of a lost work are in black-and-white, the software adds color. - The Washington Post
News accounts described its dozens of donated artifacts, including Confederate memorabilia. Based on historical records, some have also speculated the capsule might contain a rare photo of deceased President Abraham Lincoln. - The Guardian
Made via an elaborate, 16-step process with a rare cotton that only grew along the banks of the holy Meghna river, the cloth was considered one of the great treasures of the age. It had a truly global patronage, stretching back thousands of years. - BBC
Elyn Zimmerman's rock-and-water installation Marabar was erected in 1984 in the courtyard of the National Geographic Society — which now has other plans for that space. Then American University came to the rescue. - The New York Times
Sorted into categories such as "Missing masterpieces", "Ancient art", "Prehistoric peoples", African-American and indigenous North American history, and "Royal treasures", here are nearly a hundred pieces of (mostly) good news. - Smithsonian Magazine
"Are those towers the most powerful act of recycling that California has ever seen? Maybe." Christopher Reynolds recounts the history of their building, including the 100,000-pounds-of-pressure stress test they had to pass so as not to be demolished. - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
The self-consciousness isn’t necessary; Disney transcended the high-low debate a long time ago. A better question is whether a major art institution dedicating programming to a multibillion dollar corporate behemoth best serves a viewing public. - The New York Times
"The Belgian government plans to set up an expert commission with the Democratic Republic of Congo that will determine the fate of thousands of museum artefacts acquired by Belgium during the colonial era, with a view to making the first restitutions in 2022." - The Art Newspaper
“I feel like I was hired with one clear mandate from the board which, they like to say, is to put the ‘national’ back in the National Gallery and think about how we serve the American people, because our funding in large part comes from the American taxpayers.” - The Guardian
The 26-foot-tall artwork, known as the “Pillar of Shame,” had stood at the University of Hong Kong for nearly a quarter-century and honored the hundreds, if not thousands, of students and others killed on June 4, 1989, when the Chinese military crushed pro-democracy protests. - Washington Post
Chicago has a forest of imposing skyscrapers, and nothing else like this squat concoction of glass and steel that looks from the outside like a spaceship docked in the heart of the Loop, and reveals, on the inside, the city’s most vertiginous and spectacular atrium. - Chicago Reader
RX France is challenging the validity of the process, claiming that it has received two written commitments to the fairs from RMN-Grand Palais, the public body that owns the beaux-arts building, in 2019 and in 2021. - Artnet
