“The thieves used a basket lift to access the room directly, forced a window and broke display cases to steal the jewels, before escaping on two-wheelers.” What is believed to be the Empress Eugénie’s crown, broken, was later found outside the museum. - Euro News (Yahoo)
‘Luxury needs this link to the world of culture, because that is what gives it its nobility, its legitimacy, its roots,’ says Jean-Michel Tobelem, a professor of management at the Sorbonne and expert in cultural policy. - Apollo
The Stirling Prize for the country’s best new building of the year, awarded by the Royal Institute of British Architects, has gone to the Appleby Blue Almshouse, a project providing affordable housing for seniors in London’s Southwark borough. It’s the second Stirling Prize for architects Witherford Watson Mann. - Dezeen
It’s been suggested that she was the artist’s daughter, a servant girl, or even a sibyl from Greek mythology. Scholar Andrew Graham-Dixon writes that he now believes she was the daughter of Vermeer’s most important patrons and was dressed as Mary Magdalene. - The Times (UK)
The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner once said: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” For much of their history, football stadiums used to be more bike shed than cathedral but their time has now spectacularly come. - The Guardian
“Showing in real life that democracy is melting away before our very eyes, I think it’s a powerful symbol that helps express the feelings and the sadness and the horror of Americans." - Washington Post
A Tulane anthropologist was clearing out underbrush when she came upon a stone slab inscribed with Latin text. She called an archaeologist colleague, who investigated and learned that it was a first-century tombstone for a sailor in the Roman navy and had been missing from an Italian museum for decades. - Smithsonian Magazine
"I have yet to meet someone who really believes that there will be less digital or AI in the world 10 years from now than there is today. It’s not a question of if, but when." - ARTnews
Using augmented reality (AR), the artists intervened in the gallery’s 19th-century paintings—generic and imagined landscapes, portraits of affluent settlers and grandiose historical scenes—digitally superimposing cosmological figures, pow-wow dancers and suffocating layers of ivy. - The Art Newspaper
This fall alone, the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the UC Irvine Orange County Museum of Art have exhibitions curated by students ranging from high-schoolers to grade-schoolers. Professional staff assisted, but they put the kids through their paces. - The New York Times
Excessive deterioration due to deferred maintenance is the reason city officials have given for their (controversial) decision to demolish the (controversial) Brutalist artwork. However, newly rediscovered documents indicate that the city has not been the party responsible for the fountain’s upkeep. - Artnet
“About 150 original bronzes have been returned to Nigeria over the last five years. … Their public display inside the $25m state-of-the-art museum in the city of Benin … was to be the crowning moment of an almost century-long effort to reclaim Africa’s stolen art.” An uplifting story — the reality is messier. - The Guardian
That’s not to say, mind you, that the moai walked by themselves. A new paper published by two archaeologists lays out, through observation and experiment, how the Rapa Nui people likely rigged up the moai and walked them from the quarry to their platforms. - Artnet
