You can see how certain architectures for looking were created in the 19th century to produce what gets called “attention”—museums changing their hanging practices. The modern white-cube gallery, with a single line of works on the wall, is all about producing focused attention, a kind of one-to-one relationship between work and viewer. - The Nation
"Sotheby's will pay $6.25 million and adopt reforms to settle New York Attorney General Letitia James' lawsuit accusing the famed auction house of fraudulently helping clients avoid sales taxes on tens of millions of dollars of art purchases." - Reuters
"Restoration chief Philippe Jost says €140 million (around $148 million) still remains from the funds as the cathedral prepares to reopen next month. The surplus, sourced from both billionaire benefactors and countless small donors, will be used to support vital future preservation work on the 861-year-old Gothic monument." - France 24
The site welcomed a record-breaking four million tourists this summer alone, and up to 30,000 per day during the peak summer season. Records were broken this year when 36,000 visitors descended on Pompeii during one of the site’s Free Sundays. - Artnet
"The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan since 2009. It means the British Museum now holds one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics ... outside the Chinese-speaking world." - The Guardian
"With just 23 days to go until the Dec. 7 reopening, the (office) of President Emmanuel Macron and the Archdiocese of Paris detailed the final inspection and ceremonial events leading up to the big day." The historic cathedral was ravaged by a catastrophic fire on April 15, 2019. - ABC News
Mr. Leeman was most struck by the cheeky mischief — like the A.I.-generated snubs of the artist’s show that rotated on a wall display, declaring it, among other insults, a “masterstroke of blandness.” - The New York Times
"The process" — taking place in a glass chamber in a gallery at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum — "will involve removing varnish that was applied during its 1975-76 restoration and will significantly change the look of the painting, making white paint whiter and dark areas more visible." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world’s most important monument’s while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems." - AP
The Museum of the Bible is but one more example of “the massive extraction and transfer of cultural heritage objects from the colonized to the colonizers’ countries. Do American institutions still need to accumulate objects from other countries, considering how many they already own?” - The Wall Street Journal
The private sector’s reluctance to solve issues that are of great importance to public institutions creates an opportunity to instead build sector-specific tools that will “break the narrative we are sold by large tech companies.” - Artnet
"The seizures in Italy, France, Spain and Belgium netted 2,100 fake works attributed to more than 30 famed artists, including Andy Warhol, Amedeo Modigliani, Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mirò, Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore and Gustav Klimt," potentially worth €200 million. - AP
Prosecutors say Edoardo Almagià kept a list of trafficked antiquities in his NYC apartment, hidden inside a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer. - Smithsonian
Ninety thousand Parisians died from war and starvation just a couple of years before the first Impressionist show. But “if most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed ‘l’année terrible,’ it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them." - The Atlantic
