The museum compares itself to Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Museum of Modern Art — but it has already moved to censor work as it walks a tightrope between its aspiration to be a world-class institution and the limits on free expression in Hong Kong. - Washington Post
A team of archaeologists working at Abu Ghurab, 12 miles south of Cairo, discovered this temple underneath the ruins of a temple that had been excavated in 1898. It is one of just six sun temples believed to have been built in ancient Egypt. - CNN
At an auction on Tuesday at Sotheby's New York, Frida Kahlo's self-portrait Diego y yo (depicting an image of her husband, Diego Rivera, on her forehead) sold for $34.88 million — roughly 3½ times the price of the previous recordholder, Rivera's The Rivals. - Hyperallergic
The house’s “Pre-Columbian Art & Taíno Masterworks” sale was preceded by an in-person protest, a slew of media articles, and a petition that circulated on change.org, signed by 44,767 supporters trying to halt the sale. - Artnet
"More than 96% of the union, which represents public-facing staff, library workers, educators, curators, conservators, and administrative and professional workers, voted to picket outside the museum (on November 17). … Workers are concerned about pay, safety, workplace diversity, requiring union membership and job growth." - AP
The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at around thirty-five thousand years old; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by roughly ten thousand years. - The New Yorker
Colour has a life beyond any individual perception. It exists as both the quality of a thing as well as an approach to that thing, or “a dance between subjects and objects, mind and matter.” - Prospect
To be fair to Pornhub, the Birth of Venus is definitely a "classic nude." But the larger issue is about how museums make money - and during COVID, "as in-person activity slumped, sales of licensed goods rocketed." Is it too much exposure? - The Guardian (UK)
You might think that's obvious, but it's not necessarily so to those in the capital city. Even during COVID, "London draws all the oxygen, not to mention the cash; once again, it’s as if nothing could possibly be happening anywhere else." - The Guardian (UK)
It's likely you find the French artist a bit, well, staid. Boring, even. But: "Quite a bit of wildness hides beneath the cloak of scholarship and respectability." - Hyperallergic
A longtime director fired, a bequest altered, plans for the sculpture garden to become a museum - there's a lot going on at LongHouse Reserve. (Some board members say there's not, and it's a "what do they call it, the 'noisy minority.'") - The New York Times
While some on this list are obvious, others may inspire an artistic pilgrimage - though Milan "is a chaotic hotchpotch of buttresses, pinnacles and a reputed 2,245 statues, part gothic, part classical. Like an overdressed model on a Milan catwalk." - The Guardian (UK)
"Slipcovers are what you put over a tired sofa or tatty armchair to refresh and resuscitate the worn-out object’s useful life. After the quarter-ton steel Die, Isermann’s light textile cube performs a resurrection ... avowedly secular and unequivocally domestic in form." - Los Angeles Times
Ahead of talks with Boris Johnson, Kyriakos Mitsotakis said, "Our position is very clear. The marbles were stolen in the 19th century; they belong in the Acropolis Museum and we need to discuss this issue in earnest." - The Guardian (UK)
Sometimes, fame is not great, and no, you shouldn't hot-wax a mural from the 1400s: "Since their discovery in 1844, the murals have been damaged by damp and incorrect preservative treatments." - BBC
