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
The British Art Show is being staged at four venues across the city. But 26 artists have pulled out in protest after accusations of censorship at a controversial 2021 exhibition at one of the galleries, the Whitworth. They are also unhappy about reports its director was being "forced out". - BBC
In other words, the sentence was meant to scare off or inhibit potential fraudsters with the threat of substantial incarceration time. With it, Judge Stein seemed to view the art market as rife with fraud. - ARTnews
An as-yet-unidentified man and woman walked into Taglialatella Galleries in Manhattan, headed to a Basquiat screen print, searched it on their phone, took it off the wall and tried to walk right back out. A gallery assistant stopped them, though they did manage to steal a two-thirds-empty bottle of whiskey. - Hyperallergic
In each case, the text at the bottom of the image was the prompt fed into the program, and the picture above, the output. Just to stress: that’s all it takes. You type what you want to see and the program generates it. - The Verge
"These latest thefts are in keeping with Putin's attempts to erase Ukraine's independent history and promote his own expansionist model of a new Russian empire. ... These works have been chosen to undermine Ukraine's national identity. Paintings by western European artists have not been targeted." - The Guardian
The charges against Jean-Luc Martinez, who stepped down last year, concern five antiquities allegedly taken illegally from Egypt and sold to the Louvre Abu Dhabi. - Artnet
Perched in a helicopter some 650 feet up, scientists used light-based remote sensing technology (lidar) to digitally deforest the canopy and identify the ancient ruins of a vast urban settlement around Llanos de Mojos in the Bolivian Amazon that was abandoned some 600 years ago. - Smithsonian
He had knowledge, taste, charm; two high-profile galleries; a beautiful partner and baby daughter. Now he's in prison for fraud, internationally reviled, and owes $86 million. As one friend-turned-victim puts it, through "a toxic mix of arrogance and alcohol, ... he's sabotaged his entire life for short-term greed. It's just stupidity." - The Guardian
