Last week the adult website launched an online guide to erotic(ized) artworks at six of the world's great museums. Then one of those institutions started legal action over Pornhub's infringement of intellectual property rights. (The Louvre made threats but has backed off.) - Hyperallergic
The Western institutions who now hold the looted treasures have been assuming the works were destined for a state-sponsored Edo Museum of Western African Art. Now the hereditary king of the Benin people insists they must go to a museum at his palace. - BBC
"The museum's programs are to reflect three core themes: the history of the site, the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt's global discoveries, and an examination of colonialism and its consequences." - Deutsche Welle
The UN's cultural heritage organization had been warning for years that unchecked building development was destroying the beauty and character of the old port city's docks and their grand Victorian structures. - BBC
There’s a language of defacement, according to artist Shanequa Gay, who’s just finished restoring her Reframing Herstory (2019) mural on Edgewood Avenue near the Georgia Beer Garden. - ArtsATL
The museum will stop publishing its online journal Open Space and its podcast Raw Material, drop its film programming after the fall season, and, at the end of this year, shutter its offsite Artists Gallery at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco's Marina District. - San Francisco Chronicle
"The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts has voted to approve Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto's proposed redesign of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. The decision … was not without controversy." - Artnet
Pope.L is finally having a moment, "but he does not take it for granted. 'The institution is always about itself,' he says of museums." - The Guardian (UK)
Thinking of all of the immersive Van Gogh shows, a critic wonders, "Can an artist’s work be reimagined to give an audience in modern times an even more intimate contemporary relationship with the art?" - The New York Times
Why? "Yoshiharu Tsukamoto of Atelier Bow-Wow, one of Japan’s livelier practices, has objected that 'we independent artists are banned and totally deleted from the list of the designers.'" - The Observer (UK)
One descendant: "Everything that are and were essentially derived from their relationship to their community, and that's from their intellectual achievements to their wealth, which was stolen wealth." - NPR
U.S. prosecutors want to return "a 10th-century Khmer sandstone statue said to have been plundered more than 20 years ago from a temple." - The New York Times
The exhibit, which used plaques on benches and Cold War rosebushes to convey info about Britain's nuclear past, was threatened with a lawsuit. - The Observer (UK)
The restoration work not only reveals the rogue addition of an upturned smile, but also a jarring strip of dirty sky added to make the canvas square rather than rectangular. - The Guardian
At a museum in Bologna, cameras and sensors of the ShareArt system record how many people view particular works, for how long, from how far away, and where exactly they concentrate their gaze. This data could help optimize gallery layout and even the scheduling of exhibits. - Bloomberg CityLab
