The building boom in China was often a kind of arms race between cities trying to outcompete each other and grab global attention, typically without much care given to the urban context in which the tall buildings were placed. - Fast Company
A group of about 30 young workers and students will gather at Catholic University in DC next month and use hand tools to build a 45'x35' wooden truss, which will be used in the Paris cathedral's reconstruction following the 2019 fire. - The Art Newspaper
The treasures residing in august museums, the antiquities we revere. They acquire meaning as the stories around them grow. Problem is... - London Review of Books
More than 800 Polish artists, curators and critics have written to the country’s culture minister opposing plans to remove the director of the Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw. - Art Review
Sophie Haigney: "I thought, before seeing this video, that I was tired of art. … It was only after watching this video repeatedly that it occurred to me: What I was tired of was not art but the predictability of how we encounter it." - The New York Times Magazine
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
