The work in question, sold for roughly $1 million early this week, is Ivan Aivazovsky's painting Moonlit Night. Ukraine's prosecutor-general tweeted that the item had been looted from the Mariupol Museum of Local Lore. The auction house claims that it sold a different Aivazovsky work with the same title. - Artnet
"I am frustrated by how often repatriation activists have to reinvent the wheel, which is another reason that I think social media has been so important." - ARTnews
"Cairo's citadel, one of the Egyptian capital's most prominent landmarks, opened another wing housing two semi-circular towers to the public on Sunday. … (The 12th-century fortress) was the base of Egypt's government for over 700 years." - Reuters
“We’re at the place where the straw breaks the camel’s back,” Kate Scher said. She called the crisis a “combined product” of the museum’s lack of long-term funding, the pandemic, and shifts in audience habits and philanthropic priorities. - Seattle Times
MoMA had shut down completely. It would not reopen until the following day. Visitors were ferried to the exits. Outside, a soft-spoken museum employee was assisting would-be museumgoers with refunds. “They’re protesting Gaza—our trustees are funding it,” he explained. “We can’t let you see the artwork. There are too many protesters.” - The Nation
"After more than a decade of work, scientists from Argentina, Chile and the United States have successfully dated the Huenul 1 cave paintings in Argentina’s Patagonia region. … The oldest paintings in the cave date back 8,200 years, several millennia earlier than previously suggested." - El País (Spain) (in English)
"The 13 layoffs include salaried and hourly employees on (the) roughly 100-person staff. Front-line support staff … will not be impacted by staff reductions." In addition, museum director Mark Bessire is taking a voluntary 20% reduction in his annual salary. - Portland Press Herald
Arne Glimcher said the controversy surrounding Close is not his concern. “There has been too much about Chuck that isn’t about the art,” he said. “I only want to talk about the art.” - The New York Times
The exhibition, "showing at the Palestinian Museum in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, a collection of protest that is as much about the art that is not there, lost in the war that rages in Gaza, as about the art that is on display." - The New York Times
"The online campaign began after an influencer encouraged his followers to ‘spam' the museum's Instagram posts with 'return the moai' comments. The British Museum said it deactivated comments on one social media post." - BBC
Danielle Mckinney had "spent her entire professional life pursuing photography without showing in a commercial gallery, but soon she had dealers on both coasts, solo shows lined up and a waiting list of collectors and institutions interested in acquiring her paintings. She was excited and perplexed." - The New York Times
The last Harlem show at the Met, in 1969 (!), contained no Black artists. This one is going to be different. Some works were stored in family members’ basements, for instance, and needed serious renovation. - The New York Times
The Wayfarers Chapel "sits on the Palos Verdes peninsula, which is prone to landslides. Cracks had begun to appear in the structure, and several panes of glass had broken in recent months.” - The Guardian (UK)
