"Freedom of information requests by the PA news agency to museums and galleries that receive public funding from the (national government) asking for details on absent items from the last 20 years found that more than 1,700 items were absent from collections." - The Guardian
An adviser to a Russian billionaire asserted in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday that he and his boss had been tricked by a Swiss art dealer into wildly overpaying for works of art and that a Sotheby’s expert’s opinions played a role in persuading them to pay the inflated prices. - The New York Times
Haring created the 1989 work titled Unfinished Painting as a comment on the lives unlived and the creativity unrealized because of the AIDS epidemic, which killed Haring himself a few months later. So when someone posted an AI completion on social media recently, reaction was swift and ferocious. - Hyperallergic
Six of the board's 30 members have stepped down since Colette Pierce Burnette suddenly left Newfields in November after only 15 months as CEO. Most of the ex-board members have said nothing publicly about their resignations, though two have given hints of unhappiness about the manner of Burnette's exit. - ARTnews
"Master’s degree student Shiran Canel — an Israeli-American Jew in her 30s who lives in the Chicago area — alleges the school discriminated against her during an admissions interview and then intentionally subjected her to a hostile environment following the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel." - Chicago Tribune (MSN)
Museum professionals publish scathing books that indict the very institutions that pay their salaries. The ethics of exhibiting plundered art are called into question by the public. Curators, struggling to answer questions about what they have in their collections, admit that they don’t actually know what they have or why they have it. - The Walrus
Ian Wardropper, the director of New York’s Frick Collection for the past 13 years, will retire in 2025, not long after the museum unveils its long-awaited renovation to the public. - ARTnews
More than 125,000 people have signed a petition decrying a proposal to replace the chapel windows designed by architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in 1859 with stained glass artworks. - ARTnews
Even as other industrial materials shops move away (and galleries open in their place), "For 50 years, Canal Plastics Center has enticed artists, designers, and architects in need of acrylic swaths at a fraction of the price of metal and glass." - Hyperallergic
eMuseum, the program that allows visitors to search an institution’s archives and collections suffered in the attack, as was a program named TMS, which stores donor names, loan terms, provenance records, the storage locations of artworks, and shipping information. - ARTnews
Dmitry Rybolovlev has been pursuing dealer Yves Bouvier from country to country with lawsuits alleging that Bouvier fraudulently inflated prices for multimillion-dollar artworks (such as Salvator Mundi) and pocketed the difference. Rybolovlev accuses Sotheby's of assisting Bouvier, and the trial starts next week. - The New York Times
Eike Schmidt's widely-praised tenure at the city's flagship museum just ended, and he's been appointed director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. But last summer Schmidt floated the idea of running for mayor with a nationalist party, and now he says only that he can't do both jobs. - The New York Times
An exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery grapples with how the museum ended up with ten fake works previously attributed to J.E.H. MacDonald, a member of the famous Group of Seven. - The Art Newspaper
Although there’s still plenty of fear about the consequences of unbridled artificial intelligence, the technology has now attracted so much funding, opened the door to so much creative potential and accumulated so much power that artists in every discipline are largely reconciling themselves to co-existing with it for the rest of their lives. - The Art Newspaper
