"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)
"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!)
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
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
"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
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)
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
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, 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
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
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
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)
We’re almost a quarter of the way into the new century, after all, and painting didn’t die off as a great art form before Matisse, Picasso, Gwen John, Alice Neel, and David Hockney. - The Guardian (UK)
For one thing, stop with the dire warnings about density. "Today’s housing debate may be couched in different terms, but Australia’s first apartment boom suggests that opponents of rapid change in housing stock should tread carefully before making doom-laden prophecies." - The Guardian (UK)
The effect of the national concorso system is that successful applicants may be placed somewhere geographically inconvenient or at odds with their own expertise. ‘You may have a collection of Renaissance art and you are sent a curator that specialises in performance art from the 1960s." - Apollo
