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Capturing The Movement Of Starlings As Art

Kathryn Cooper first films the starlings in 4K resolution. Then, working with clips that range in length from less than a second to more than a minute, she designs algorithms that help her select and splice together a compelling set of frames. - Nautilus

Holocaust Museum LA Plans To Transform Itself With Major Expansion

When it moved into its current location in 2010, the museum expected 15,000 visitors a year; by 2020, it was getting 65,000. Now, with an additional building by Belzberg Architects due to start construction next year, the museum plans to draw 500,000 annually by 2030. - MSN (Los Angeles Times)

A Wave Of Unionizing At US Museums, With Baltimore The Most Recent

"Workers at the Baltimore Museum of Art have announced plans to form a union, making the employees the latest in a nationwide push for better working conditions and higher pay at art museums, a field that suffers from drastic inequities." - Artnet

Gotta Love How This Year’s Documenta Artists Were Announced

In Germany on Friday, October 1, you might have picked up a copy of Asphalt—a publication that is sold to benefit poor and people struggling with homelessness. Within its pages, the art collective ruangrupa announced their artist list for the 2022 edition of Documenta. - Artnet

What’s Up With The Movie Museum’s Giant Orb? (Death Star?)

A big glass-and-steel ball is not vanishing into the mist. It sits there and it’s shiny and hard and you have to pay to get in. Doesn’t it also defy the whole point of a museum of movies, which is to take this vaporous art and give it substance and permanence? - Curbed

Veteran New York Antiquities Dealer Pleads Guilty To Trafficking In Looted Objects

"Nancy Wiener, 66, whose mother had also been a well-known expert in the field, acknowledged Thursday that she had taken possession of items that showed possible signs of looting … and presented them for sale with false statements of provenance." - The New York Times

Two Of Shanghai’s Major Museums Close Without Explanation

Last week the Long Museum West Bund shut for "facility maintenance," though it reopened two days later. Then the Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum announced, with no reason given, that it would close indefinitely starting October 1, normally the start of a busy holiday week. - The Art Newspaper

Come For The Star Wars, Stay For The Kara Walker…

At the Lucas Museum: “What would be fantastic is if people came looking for Star Wars and learn about Ralph McQuarrie and then they learn about Gentileschi,” Sandra Jackson-Dumont says. “If they come for Star Wars and leave having seen Kara Walker. - The Art Newspaper

Hunter Biden, Artist, Opens His Show. Are His Paintings Really Worth $500K?

As has been previously reported, his gallerist, George Bergès, is looking to fetch between $75,000 and $500,000 a piece for Biden’s paintings. And this has raised ethical issues the White House has not fully addressed. - Mother Jones

“Abstraction, I Think, Is Now Over,” Writes David Hockney

"It's run its course. … Its job was to take away the shadows that had dominated European art for centuries. It was only European art that used them. … The arts of China, Japan, India and Persia never use shadows or reflections." - The Art Newspaper

Why Don’t Museums Use Their Leverage?

In the museum world, there’s enormous potential stored in the museum’s permanent art collection – not as a financial asset, but as a lever for amplifying impact. Unfortunately, museums too often consider their collections to be exclusive. - MuseumNext

What Does A 550-Year-Old Tapestry Look Like After Four Years Of Cleaning? This.

The artwork, the oldest tapestry in the possession of the UK's National Trust, underwent 1,300 hours of conservation. While the colors are brighter and the detail work clearer, still murky is the question of where the piece spent most of the past five centuries. - The Guardian

Art Market Soars To Record £2.7 Billion, Driven By Online, NFT Sales

Having seen sales collapse by a third in the previous year because of the initial crisis caused by the pandemic, sales soared between June 2020 and June 2021 as auctioneers quickly adopted a more online approach. - The Guardian

Artists Are Questioning The Motives And Funding Of Their Own Galleries – And Countries

"Welcome to the life of a 21st-century activist artist, whose work is as likely to be exhibited at an international human rights tribunal as it is a museum, and in which death threats and cyberattacks are all in a day’s work." - The New York Times

How Munch Created His Madonna

The sketches below the surface show all the ways it could have gone wrong. - The Observer (UK)

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