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Tate Modern Has 12.5 Million Social Media Followers. Here’s How

"We try to strike a careful balance between experimenting with TikTok and posting on Instagram, as Instagram remains our most reliably steadfast channel. It’s been our widest-reaching and most actively engaged audience for years, and accounts for around three quarters of our total video views." - The Art Newspaper

Russian “Artist” Threatens To Dissolve Picassos, Rembrandts, In Acid

Andrei Molodkin claims to be sealing original works of art by Picasso, Rembrandt, Warhol, Sarah Lucas, Andres Serrano and more in a safe designed to destroy them all with acid. - The Guardian

Taggers Cover Stalled LA Tower With Graffiti

“This was a giant building that a community of people is finding use in. It’s people making use of the things that others neglect or leave behind.” - Los Angeles Times

Notre-Dame’s New Spire Is In Place As Reconstruction Forges Ahead

"Scaffolding surrounding the spire came down this week, revealing the restored structure in a landmark moment for the cathedral, which was ravaged by a fire in April 2019. The soaring spire, crowned with a cross and golden rooster, peeks out of a dense grid of support beams." - The Washington Post (MSN)

Now Climate-Protesting Art Vandals Have Struck Botticelli’s “Birth Of Venus” (At Least They Didn’t Throw Soup)

"Two activists from Last Generation pasted images of a flooded Tuscan town over the goddess's giant shell on the 15th-century work (at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence) before being escorted to a police station." - AFP (Yahoo!)

Rijksmuseum To The Mob: Please Give That Frans Hals Painting Back, We Have An Exhibition Coming

The show will include 50 works by Hals — but not Two Laughing Boys With a Mug of Beer, which was stolen (for the third time) from the Museum Hofje van Mevrouw van Aerden in Leerdam in August 2020. Rijksmuseum director Taco Dibbets has asked publicly for its return. - The Guardian

University Of New Hampshire Closes Museum In Cost-Cutting Move

Declining enrollment— the main campus had 13,860 students in 2022, down from 15,479 in 2017—and inflated operating costs led to the multimillion-dollar deficit that resulted in eliminating 75 total jobs at the university, which included the art museum’s director and the three other staff members. - InsideHigherEd

Musée d’Orsay’s Virtual-Reality Van Gogh Show Sets New Attendance Record

"Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise,' which closed last Sunday, brought … in a total 793,556 visitors, or an average of 7,181 each day. The show’s A.I. and immersive V.R. experiences were largely ridiculed in the press, but they proved persuasive to new audiences." - Artnet

Climate-Protesting Art Vandals Throw Soup At A Monet

On Saturday, two young women from an activist collective called Riposte Alimentaire ("food counterattack"), the group responsible for a similar assault on Mona Lisa at the Louvre last month, hurled golden-yellow potage at Monet's Le Printemps at Lyon's Musée des Beaux-Arts. - Le Monde (in English)

This House Is Being Built By Living Trees

The strangeness of the building is that it’s meant to be occupied by humans, animals, and plants. The slowness of the building is that it’s made out of—made by, really—growing trees. - Fast Company

Cleveland Triennial Of International Art Shuts Down

In its first two iterations, FRONT drew hundreds of thousands of visitors and attracted the attention of visual arts media from around the world. But support for the 2025 show wasn’t as robust as for the two earlier exhibitions. - Cleveland.com

MoMA Returned A Nazi-Looted Chagall To Its Heirs, And Garnered A Large Fee

"MoMA, which acquired in 1949, received $4 million in compensation for giving it back under an arrangement negotiated by a restitution company that represented the seven heirs." - The New York Times

The Art World Excludes Most Of Us

A journalist who got immersed as a security guard and gallery assistant says, "I became initiated into the way that the art world wields strategic snobbery to keep people out. And I think it's deliberate and I think it's unnecessary." - NPR

Climate Protestor Charged For Defacing African American Civil War Memorial At The National Gallery Of Art

The protestor painted on the wall next to Augustus Saint Gaudens’s Shaw 54th Regiment Memorial, not the piece itself. However: Jackson Green "has been arrested and charged with defacing a memorial." - The Art Newspaper

A Deep Dive Into Visual Artists On The Small Screen

Visual art "doesn’t always translate that naturally to cinema as a subject. Just as you don’t get the full impact of a painting from a coffee table book, the camera can impose a distance from the art at hand – a secondary perspective that isn’t really needed.” - The Guardian (UK)

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