Experts have felled 59 of the trees at the Villefermoy forest in the Seine-et-Marne region, and a further 26 oaks will be donated by four state-owned forests managed by the National Forestry Office. The massive restoration effort will need 1,000 French oak trees in total. - Artnet
“Gainsborough had a great deal of interest in musicians and likened a picture to a piece of music, once writing: ‘One part of a Picture ought to be like the first part of a Tune; that you can guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the Tune, and so I’ve done.’” - The Guardian
Excavating in an area between large temples at Luxor, a team led by famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass found the ruins of an entire working city — administrative offices, residences, a bakery, and so on, all the rooms containing everyday objects — from the reign of Amenhotep III. The discovery is being likened to those of Tutankhamun's tomb and Pompeii....
The 44"-by-34" depiction of Christ with the crown of thorns was thought to be by José de Ribera, a minor 17th-century Spanish artist, and had been slated for auction in Madrid with an expected value of about €1,500. Then curators at the Prado declared that there's "sufficient stylistic and documentary evidence" to believe it might be Caravaggio's work, and...
Perhaps, according to recent figures published by Nonfungible.com, which show that the average price of NFTs plummeted almost 70% from a peak of around $4,000 in mid-February to around $1,400 earlier this week. Since Bloomberg first reported the price crash on 3 April, sales have continued to decline. - The Art Newspaper
History's most expensive artwork, purchased by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, was supposed to be part of the Louvre's blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in 2019 and then go on long-term loan to the new Louvre Abu Dhabi. But Salvator Mundi hasn't been seen in public since its auction (and is rumored to...
The expansion would add nearly 100,000 sq. ft to the museum's current 200,000 sq. ft pavilion complex, which features concrete walls, bands of red cedar and copper roofs that all react to light and moisture in a forested Ozark setting. - The Art Newspaper
"The has set M+ the target of being the first museum of its kind in Asia and to be ranked among the top five museums in the world for visual culture. … To achieve such lofty ambitions, M+ needs international credibility. But given growing ideological tensions between China and the West, it is going to be hard for...
There was a minor uproar in December when Lincoln Center announced that Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo, which had dangled in the multi-story upper atrium of Philharmonic Avery Fisher David Geffen Hall since the 1960s, had been removed as part of the venue's renovation and would not be returning. Following a suggestion by former New York Times and New...
Art UK brings together over 3,000 public collections on one shared, economically efficient platform, allowing them all to reap the benefits of scale and technology in one of the largest arts partnerships put together in the UK. Art UK's Partner Collections have access to the Art UK Shop, enabling them to generate income without making any capital investment or...
There was quite some excitement in January of 2018 when President Emmanuel Macron announced that the 950-year-old, 2,300-foot-long needlework depicting the Norman Conquest would be lent to Great Britain in 2023, when its home museum would be closed for renovation. But a report following examination of the Tapestry finds that (as curators warned when the loan was announced) the...
"The police announced on Tuesday morning that they had arrested a 58-year-old man on suspicion of stealing both Vincent Van Gogh's The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) and Frans Hals's Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer from two museums in the Netherlands." The thefts occurred last year in March and August, respectively, from museums that...
It may be a hasty measure in which practical consequences have not been thought through, or it may, as some suggest, be an indirect boost to the Biennale, which looks with some suspicion upon those who want to ride its jet stream by setting up ancillary exhibitions in the city. - The Art Newspaper
"In 2008, the AAM admirably pledged to fight the trade in looted antiquities by passing a set of guidelines for its member institutions that own or acquire archeological material and ancient art. We recently put AAM member museums to the test to see whether they were actually complying with these guidelines. What we found is gravely concerning, not just...
"Crowds gathered on Saturday to witness the multimillion-dollar spectacle of 18 kings and four queens making the 7km journey (four miles) from the Egyptian Museum in central Cairo's Tahrir Square to … their new home in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation." - Al Jazeera
