Markus Stegmann, the director of the Museum Langmatt in Baden, said that after subtracting buyer’s fees, its parent foundation will reap 42.3 million Swiss francs from the sale of the three paintings, enough to keep the museum operating. - The New York Times
After centuries of remaining largely inaccessible to the public, a rare manuscript featuring 2,500 pages of detailed illustrations and text documenting the history and culture of 16th-century Mexico is now available online. - Hyperallergic
"The path to God runs down the New Jersey Turnpike. About an hour from the Holland Tunnel, … a mirage appears: swirls of stone fluffed up into meringue peaks." Architecture critic Justin Davidson visits the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Robbinsville, just a few miles from Exit 8. - MSN (Curbed)
"Janet Sobel experimented. She would squirt paint directly out of a tube, drip it with an eyedropper, even pull wet paint across the canvas using suction from a vacuum cleaner. … Sobel's first drip painting was called Milky Way and finished in 1945 — two years before Pollock 'invented' drip painting." - Literary Hub
The agreement guarantees a 23 percent wage boost over the life of the contract, raising the minimum wage and promising annual raises. The cost of health care benefits will also drop, while expanding its coverage to part-time staff averaging 20 hours per week. - ARTnews
"The idea of the new show, called 'Reversos' (On the Reverse), is to take the viewer beyond the surface of an artistic image and to encourage them to see the physical painting, its back and its frame as objects that conceal – but can also reveal – secrets, stories and meanings." - The Guardian
“The funny thing is, in so much science fiction it was theorized that robots, A.I., all this stuff was going to take over the drudgery, the hard labor, and free up humans to do creative work. Instead the A.I. is taking over the creative work, and we’re all stuck doing the hard labor.” - The New York Times
"These new, full-color space photos reveal spectacular snapshots of the vast structure of the cosmos, including a massive galaxy cluster in the Perseus constellation, an object nicknamed the 'Hidden Galaxy,' an irregularly structured galaxy, a globular cluster packed with myriad stars, and the gorgeous Horsehead Nebula." - Wired
The Mocking of Christ, by the 13th-century Italian painter Cimabue, was sold at auction, reportedly to collectors in Delaware, for €24.2 million. The French government promptly declared the painting a "national treasure," barring export for 30 months, giving the Louvre time to raise funds to match the bid. - Artnet
The director of the Museum Langmatt in Switzerland described the upcoming auction at Christie's of three Cézanne paintings as an "emergency measure," saying that the sales will finance an endowment and compensate the heirs of a Jewish dealer forced to sell the artworks during the Nazi era. - The New York Times
According to a statement from Ukraine’s Interior Ministry, a missile launched by Russia caused significant damage to the Odesa Fine Arts Museum, one of the most important Tsarist-era palaces in Odesa’s historic city center. - ARTnews
A controversial Hungarian law bans the "display and promotion of homosexuality" in materials accessible to children, such as books and films. The museum recently hosted the World Press Photo exhibition, featuring shots of LGBT people in the Philippines. - BBC
The notorious art object, titled America, was stolen from an exhibition at Blenheim Palace in England in 2019. There's as yet no indication of the whereabouts of the object itself, which is widely presumed to have been melted down. - The Guardian
Two members of the British group Just Stop Oil took hammers to the glass protecting Diego Velázquez’s "Rokeby Venus" at the National Gallery in London. (This isn't the first time that painting has been damaged by a protester: it was attacked by a suffragette in 1914.) - CNN
