"The 1,700 pieces dating from the third to the 20th century have been given permanently by the Sir Percival David Foundation. They had been on loan since 2009. It means the British Museum now holds one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics ... outside the Chinese-speaking world." - The Guardian
"With just 23 days to go until the Dec. 7 reopening, the (office) of President Emmanuel Macron and the Archdiocese of Paris detailed the final inspection and ceremonial events leading up to the big day." The historic cathedral was ravaged by a catastrophic fire on April 15, 2019. - ABC News
Mr. Leeman was most struck by the cheeky mischief — like the A.I.-generated snubs of the artist’s show that rotated on a wall display, declaring it, among other insults, a “masterstroke of blandness.” - The New York Times
"The process" — taking place in a glass chamber in a gallery at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum — "will involve removing varnish that was applied during its 1975-76 restoration and will significantly change the look of the painting, making white paint whiter and dark areas more visible." - The Washington Post (MSN)
"The Vatican and Microsoft on Monday unveiled a digital twin of St. Peter’s Basilica that uses artificial intelligence to explore one of the world’s most important monument’s while helping the Holy See manage visitor flows and identify conservation problems." - AP
The Museum of the Bible is but one more example of “the massive extraction and transfer of cultural heritage objects from the colonized to the colonizers’ countries. Do American institutions still need to accumulate objects from other countries, considering how many they already own?” - The Wall Street Journal
The private sector’s reluctance to solve issues that are of great importance to public institutions creates an opportunity to instead build sector-specific tools that will “break the narrative we are sold by large tech companies.” - Artnet
"The seizures in Italy, France, Spain and Belgium netted 2,100 fake works attributed to more than 30 famed artists, including Andy Warhol, Amedeo Modigliani, Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Joan Mirò, Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore and Gustav Klimt," potentially worth €200 million. - AP
Prosecutors say Edoardo Almagià kept a list of trafficked antiquities in his NYC apartment, hidden inside a Renaissance-era chest beneath a marble statue of a deer. - Smithsonian
Ninety thousand Parisians died from war and starvation just a couple of years before the first Impressionist show. But “if most fans of Impressionism remain unaware of its intimacy with the horrors of what Victor Hugo dubbed ‘l’année terrible,’ it’s because the Impressionists did not picture them." - The Atlantic
Thanks to a long and protracted civil ward, “the country’s archaeological sites, ancient cities, and pre-Islamic artifacts have become easy targets for looters and unscrupulous art dealers.” - ARTnews
“I really believe that Los Angeles today is what New York was in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, what Paris was in the turn of the century. ...This is the spot.” - The New York Times
On November 7, the artwork A.I. God. Portrait of Alan Turing (2024) by the humanoid robot artist Ai-Da sold for $1,084,800 during the auction house’s Digital Art day sale. There were 27 bids for the portrait. - ARTnews
