"Six fragments of wall frescoes stolen from the ruins of ancient Roman villas have been returned to Pompeii's archaeological park after an investigation by Italy's cultural protection police squad. Three of the relics, which date back to the first century AD, are believed to have been cut off the walls of two Roman villas in Stabiae, a historical site...
Police in Berlin have captured Abdul Majed Remmo, the fifth and final suspect connected to the shocking 2019 jewel heist at Dresden's Green Vault Museum. … Authorities had been searching for the 22-year-old man since he evaded capture in a sting operation late last year. He is the twin brother of fellow suspect Mohammed Remmo; … one of...
Art critic Enid Tsui looks at the perennial controversy over Rirkrit Tiravanija's performance piece untitled (pad thai), in which the artist creates a "micro-utopia" by cooking the eponymous noodle dish in the gallery and sharing it with everyone in attendance (which means the kind of people who go see performance art in galleries). - South China Morning Post (Hong...
Early on, positive press rolled in for the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, focusing on the MFAH’s safety precautions for guests, who would be allowed a welcome distraction during the pandemic. But behind the scenes, employees were growing increasingly frustrated with the risks they encountered while working low-wage jobs to keep the museum running; their job duties had been...
"The contentious objects, known to have been looted from the Benin Royal Palace in 1897, are scattered across some of the most prominent museums the world over. … Artnet News reached out to 30 museums known to hold Benin bronzes to ask for an update on their position on restitution, and the status of objects in their collection." Here...
"The reopening of Paris museums this week finally gives billionaire tycoon François Pinault the chance to showcase his vast contemporary art collection in the French capital, with works ranging from stuffed pigeons to slowly melting chairs. The museum's launch in a converted 19th-century commodities exchange, blocks away from the Louvre, was put on hold twice due to the coronavirus...
The museum, which plans to reopen only five days a week at first, is looking to save £10 million a year after its visitor numbers collapsed in lockdown. - Evening Standard
"And it's starting off with a bang: an encrypted Michelangelo painting of the holy family, Doni Tondo (1505-06), just sold for €140,000 ($170,000). The museum will split the proceeds with Cinello, an Italian company that has patented a new way to make digital facsimiles of famous paintings, … produced in the dimensions of the original piece, and purport to...
"Researchers examined 11 caves and rock-shelters , which feature art dating from 45,000 to 20,000 years old. … The scientists found that the art, which is made with red and mulberry pigments, is being physically weathered by a process known as haloclasty — when salt crystals form as a result of repeated changes in temperature and humidity." - CNN
"The challenge is a conversation starter and design exercise. It’s also a needed counter to commercial real estate developers, whose ideas of density tend to be based on a single principle — how many dollars they can squeeze out of every square foot — with little regard for green space or other community needs. (Case in point: those sad,...
The goal is to form a wall-to-wall union representing workers in nearly every aspect of museum operations. “We’ve got conservators, we’ve got people working in security who are on the floor, we’ve got frontline workers, educators, administrative staff,” says Elizabeth Norman, an Assistant Manager of Gallery Experience in the visitor experience department, one of the organizers. “There’s just a...
Chinese archaeology has a very different history from Egyptian archaeology. It has largely been done by local, Chinese archaeologists, for one thing; it was not an imperialist project. And it was also tied, early on, to nationalist claims of identity. - Washington Post
Christopher Marinello spends his life tracking stolen masterpieces. "I get a huge amount of tips, usually on WhatsApp. ... Sometimes they are from informants I work with, but I have to sift through a lot of garbage. I once had a guy tell me the original Mona Lisa in the Louvre was a fake, and that he had the...
And that seems like something to celebrate, and take advantage of, to a lot of museum directors. "We know that all museums’ audiences will be more local, which offers a great opportunity for arts and culture to sit at the heart of their communities, especially where those communities have experienced such hardship over the past year." - The Observer...
A massive government redevelopment plan - funded and touted by Prime Minister Narenda Modi - will demand "the demolition and relocation of iconic Indian institutions: the National Museum of India, the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), and the National Archives Annexe." Photographer Ram Rahman: "The suspicion of altering history by removing archival documents is something many...
