The walkout, which involved about half the museum’s staff, has shut the museum down for several days (a reopening date has not been set), and the employees involved say they plan to withhold their labor until their demands are met. - Seattle Times
"In 2020, Danish antiquities dealer Dr. Ittai Gradel began to suspect an eBay seller he had been buying from was a thief who was stealing from the British Museum. … More than two years later, the museum would announce that thousands of objects were missing, stolen or damaged from its collection." - BBC
A hacker group called RansomHub said it was behind the cyberattack that hit the Christie’s website just days before its marquee spring sales began, forcing the auction house to resort to alternatives to online bidding. - The New York Times
"Brett Callow, a threat analyst at Esmisoft, a cybersecurity firm based in New Zealand, posted on X an image of a post from (the website of cybercriminal gang) RansomHub with a blurred sample of some of the information contained in the trove." - Artnet
“Rey says that instead of eating enough and regularly I have been particularly sustaining myself with coffee and alcohol. I admit all that, but it will still be true that I had to key myself up a bit to reach the high yellow note I reached this summer.” - The Art Newspaper
The prize was established in 1988, initially as a biannual event, and was then awarded every year from 2007, other than in 2020 due to Covid lockdowns. But the prize was not given out in 2023, though no announcement was made that it had been cancelled, and it will not reappear in 2024. - The Guardian
When it fully opens later this year, 1¼ miles north of the Pyramids, the GEM will be, at over 5 million square feet, the world’s largest museum devoted to a single civilization, with a large and well-staffed archaeological research and conservation center. Can GEM change the course of an entire field? - Nature
"Spanish police have recovered a painting by the late artist Francis Bacon that was stolen from a banker's Madrid home in 2015. The €5m work is one of five portraits of the banker, José Capelo, who was a friend of the artist. Three of the stolen paintings were recovered in 2017." - BBC
This one is a formal painting of HRH The Princess of Wales (that's Kate Middleton to you and me) by Zambian-British artist Hannah Uzor for the cover of Tatler magazine. The image's reception on social media, like that of the red portrait of King Charles III, is less than rapturous. - ARTnews
At least 1,000 paintings that the artist Damien Hirst said were “made in 2016” were created several years later, the Guardian can reveal. - The Guardian
It's not just that the job is delicate; it has to be done quickly, because the site is undergoing a slow-motion landslide due to two winters of heavy rains. The ground under the chapel is now moving at the rate of roughly seven inches per week. - LAist
When her infant daughter became hungry at the museum, says Megan Mzenga, she sat down on the nearest couch to nurse; a male staff member then told her — contrary to the Walker's policy, it turns out — that she had to do that elsewhere in the building and called an escort. - ARTnews
Here are four more beefs between art-world honchos, spanning from the ‘50s to the aughts, that are, regardless of when they took place, truly for the ages. - Artnet
It was a "reassuringly solid result of $346.5m ($413.3m with fees) from its Modern evening sale—within its pre-sale estimate of $340m-$493.5m (calculated without fees)." - The Art Newspaper
Reeling with a $1 million budget deficit on a $4 million budget due largely to "the Basquiat fiasco," the museum wants to re-allocate the $1.8 million it was given from the estate of Margaret Young from its designated purpose of acquiring new works for the permanent collection. - The New York Times
