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Restored Ghent Altarpiece Is Finally Back Home — In A $6 Million Bulletproof Display Case

The van Eyck masterpiece is the most stolen individual artwork we know of (one panel is still missing after 87 years), and its Flemish custodians have given it a €5 million, 20-feet-tall, meticulously climate-controlled, bulletproof display case as part of a €30 million installation at St. Bavo's Cathedral in Ghent. - The Guardian

Germany Tries To Figure Out How To Go About Returning Benin Bronzes

"On the heels of a German state visit to Benin City, … the culture ministry and museums are now playing catch-up. … Culture minister Monika Grütters has called a meeting with relevant state culture ministers and museum directors in April to try to find a national strategy to address the handling of objects and art that were looted from...

China’s Architects Turn Attention To Ailing Villages

After a couple of decades of enormous urban growth led to thousands of emptied-out villages, both Chinese government policy and the mood of ordinary people there have turned toward the countryside and its revitalization. Architects are joining the effort, using traditional building methods and materials to create less expensive structures that are easy and cheap to maintain. - The...

How Architecture Reinforces Racism

“The logic of the ghetto is to limit you. It says you cannot go here, or do this. If freedom is about that ability to move, then a protest machine that is mobile is important.” - Bloomberg

3,000-Year-Old Bronze Bull Unearthed By Rainstorms At Site Of Ancient Olympic Games

An archaeologist working at Olympia noticed what turned out to be one of the horns of the bull figurine sticking up out of the mud following a heavy downpour. The bronze is estimated to date from about 900 to 700 BC; because it has burn marks, scientists believe it was part of an offering to Zeus, to whom there...

Under Pressure, Chair Promises That Hong Kong’s Big New Contemporary Art Museum Will Obey China’s National Security Law

The chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority, the Lincoln Center-like complex under construction on the harbor, publicly pledged that curators at the District's flagship museum, M+, will see to it that all exhibitions comply with the law, which prohibits "acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign powers." The statement comes after a week of...

Unprecedented: The Smithsonian Is Searching For Six Museum Directors

The institution has never searched for six directors simultaneously — although it has never had to develop two new museums at once, either. The absences come at a jarring time, when normal operations are in flux and finances are strained. - Washington Post

3,000-Year-Old Gold, Silk, Jade Discovered In China Could Rewrite History

"The treasures unearthed at the Sanxingdui site in Guanghan, Sichuan, belonged to a highly-developed civilisation that may have lasted for thousands of years but never appeared in any historical records. … quality and craftsmanship far exceeds that of artefacts made at the same time in other parts of China." - South China Morning Post (Hong Kong)

After National Backlash, Australian Festival Cancels Artwork That Was A Very Bad Idea

"On Tuesday afternoon organisers of the festival, which is run by the Museum of Old and New Art , announced that the work by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra – in which he planned to immerse a Union Jack flag into the donated blood of Indigenous people, as a statement 'against colonialism' – would no longer go ahead." -...

How To Understand NFTs And What It Means For The Art World

"Imagine digital Beanie Babies, but with only one existing copy of each. For art works, the N.F.T. format functions a little like a museum label noting the piece’s provenance—a proprietary stamp, attached to digital pieces that can still circulate freely across the Internet. In new online marketplaces such as Nifty Gateway, SuperRare, and Foundation, artists can upload, or “mint,”...

Is It Wise To Build A $915 Million Museum On A Site That Keeps Flooding?

"The Parramatta River in Sydney broke its banks on Saturday, flooding the path that runs alongside the museum site and inundating the ground floor of a four-level car park slated for demolition as part of the museum’s construction. It is the second time in just over a year that the proposed site for the museum has been inundated by...

What Do NFTs Mean For The Art World?

Even the middlemen whom NFTs are designed to cut out are trying to understand what this revolution means for them. Mario Paredes runs Mexico City’s Galería Unión and said he’s been hearing about NFTs “every day since, I think, two weeks ago.” He said he personally doesn’t get it. “I think when people buy art, what they need is...

Opposition Growing To Proposed Ordinance To Restrict Chicago House Museums

“This zoning proposal would make the future uncertain for existing cultural exhibits and house museums and could derail efforts already underway to open new cultural institutions in historic buildings in residential communities.” - Chicago Sun-Times

World’s Oldest Wooden Sculpture Is Far More Ancient Than We’d Thought — 12,500 Years

That's more than twice as old as Stonehenge and the Giza Pyramids and by far the oldest surviving piece of ritual art. The new dating means that the Shigir Idol, as it's called, dug up from a peat bog in the Urals in 1890, "challenges the ethnocentric notion that pretty much everything, including symbolic expression and philosophical perceptions of...

Germany In Talks To Return Benin Bronzes To Nigeria

As the issue of repatriating art and artifacts looted by European colonizers came to the fore over the past few years, Berlin came under pressure not to include its holdings of Benin bronzes in the new Humboldt Forum. Now high-level officials are negotiating the return of the bronzes — taken by British soldiers who destroyed the Benin royal family's...

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