The collection of the brothers Morozov, full of Picassos, Monets, van Goghs, Matisses and such, is split between the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov and Pushkin in Moscow. Here's how the Fondation Louis Vuitton persuaded authorities to allow the first exhibition of the collection abroad. - Artnet
Almost everything you want from art is present: cogent ideas, flawless execution, a sweeping sense of history and a personal stamp that identifies every piece as unmistakably the work of a unique and capacious mind. But where are love and generosity? - Washington Post
Outdoor rock art made by ancient Native Americans in the Southwest is familiar to many; not so with the underground pictographs in the southern Appalachians, which date from 6,500 years ago up to the 13th century CE, during the Mississippian Period. - The Conversation
"A Danish artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork." Jens Haaning has titled the new piece "Take the Money and Run." - Artnet
Frozen heritage is melting from mountain ice in every hemisphere. As it does so, small groups of archaeologists are scrambling to cobble together the funding and staffing needed to identify, recover, and study these objects before they are gone. - Atlas Obscura
In their free time, some of the porters wrote on the large walls of the tezon grande, a room over 105 yards long that was used for cleaning out the goods. - Atlas Obscura
It is an understatement to say that the dispute over Dirk Obbink and the papyrus has shaken a scholarly world where ancient texts are entrusted to a set of experts whose erudition and experience have singled them out as special. - The New York Times
What's more, conservators and scholars involved say that the restoration has put to rest the big myth surrounding the sculpture: that Michelangelo went at it with a hammer out of dissatisfied frustration. (He had a better reason for never completing it.) - The New York Times
“We’re officially saying that the cathedral is now saved, that it’s solid on its pillars, that its walls are solid, everything is holding together. We are determined to win this battle of 2024, to reopen our cathedral in 2024." - Artnet
That might sound like a word salad, but portrait artist Devon Rodriguez's 20 million followers on TikTok really did bring him fame, money, and a place downtown. - The New York Times
"Though Nepal banned the export of ancient statues of deities through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act in 1956, these and other objects of cultural heritage have been looted frequently since the 1980s." - Hyperallergic
Re that Samson and Delilah purchase, National Gallery, er. "I was so shocked. ... We repeated the experiments to be really sure that we were not making a mistake and the result was always the same. Every patch, every single square, came out as fake, with more than 90% probability." - The Observer (UK)
