Cash-poor museums to generate money by selling nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. Last year, NFTs, usually pegged to the high-flying but volatile Ethereum cryptocurrency, took the market for art and collectibles by storm, with sales estimated in the tens of billions. - The New York Times
For all intents and purposes, Rita and Jerry Alter were a totally normal couple living in the New Mexico suburbs—except for one thing. They had a stolen Willem de Kooning painting worth $160 million hanging behind their bedroom door. - Smithsonian
Funded by the US Embassy as part of the World Monuments Fund's 15-year Future of Babylon project, the current work includes stabilization and conservation of the Lion of Babylon statue, the Ninmakh Temple, and the famous Ishtar Gate, which will be completed this summer. - The Art Newspaper
"Schnabel's 23-painting show at the Centro de Arte Comporaneo (in Málaga) was expected to open on Friday, but it will no longer kick off as planned, since it became impossible for the museum to obtain all the works on time." - ARTnews
The paper argues that eye-catching elements in a Pompeiian home would have been important status symbols, with buildings designed to highlight some features while minimizing others. Using angled walls or building raised floors, for instance, would have made a home’s interior seem larger and more impressive. - Artnet
"A museum in the besieged Ukrainian port city of Mariupol dedicated to the 19th-century artist Arkhip Kuindzhi, whom both Russians and Ukrainians embrace as their own, was destroyed by an airstrike on Monday morning, Ukrainian media and the head of Ukraine's artists union reported." - The Art Newspaper
The dismissal came in the wake of a performance art mishap at the museum that saw Yaser Khaseb accidentally fall into a large, artist-designed pool of oil while performing an aerial act above it. - Artnet
In 1980, an art thief known as "Erik the Belgian" stole a set of half a dozen Flemish tapestries, created by a follower of Rubens, from a small-town church in northern Spain. Within two years, all six were retrieved, except for one 2'x2' fragment, now recovered and reintegrated. - Smithsonian Magazine
The region of Svaneti, a pair of protected valleys high in the Caucasus Mountains, was where the rest of the country sent its finest work when the armies of Byzantium or Persia or the Ottomans or Russia came a-conquering. Here's a look at where those treasures are kept today. - Apollo
"The tombs, which are believed to have housed senior officials from the Old Kingdom and First Intermediate period, date back to as long ago as 2700 BC. ... Archaeologists found not only well-preserved paintings, but also small statues and pottery as well as stone and wooden coffins." - Deutsche Welle
As bad as things often got after the wars started in 2003, art and artists in Iraq's capital never went completely dormant. Now galleries are starting to open and some artists who fled abroad are returning home. - Artnet
A careful examination of the 13 Pro noted visual glitches caused by the device’s intelligent photography, including the erasure of bridge cables in a landscape shot. “Its complex, interwoven set of ‘smart’ software components don’t fit together quite right,” the report stated. - The New Yorker
