Even the Met’s own head of costume has said; “I think the power of fashion is that it can reflect the zeitgeist.” So what does last night’s Gala tell us about the time we’re living? Ironically, by saying nothing as the world burns around them, the guests gave a very clear sense that we’re still living in a gilded...
The rebuilt of Glasgow School of Art’s Mackintosh building "favours the cheapest over the most suitable bid" according to a Glasgow architect. - Glasgow Live
There are thousands of life-sized engravings of anthropomorphic figures on the low ceilings of the three-mile-long cave complex, whose ceilings are as low as two feet. Researchers were able to see the drawings thanks to 3D photogrammetry scans. - Smithsonian Magazine
The site of Captain John Smith's 1607 settlement, still a rich archaeological source, is on a low-lying island in Tidewater Virginia, tucked between the James River and a swamp — and now caught between rising sea levels and increasingly frequent flood-level rainstorms. - MSN (The Washington Post)
Statements about art from inside the silos are considered absolutely true, but not in a general, humanistic way. Thus balkanized, the art world increasingly evinces mutual suspicion, self-policing, and declamations of political conformity. It extends less and less permission to make art, or speak of it truly. - Arts Fuse
The unnamed defendant, 49, and an accomplice were caught after taking Monet's De Voorzaan en de Westerhem (1871) from the Zaans Museum in Zaandam, the Netherlands last August. (They dropped the painting while fleeing on a motorcycle.) - ARTnews
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
