Sak Tz'i' was an ancient but small city, caught between more powerful neighbors; scholars weren't aware it had existed until they found inscriptions describing its defeats. Nobody knew where Sak Tz'i' had been, until a Chiapas rancher showed a researcher a carved limestone slab he'd found. - The New York Times
We showed average Americans pairs of paintings side by side. Each of the pairs are similar in style, motif and period, but one work was by a male artist and the other by a female artist. Participants were in two groups. One group saw the artists’ names and the other didn’t. - The Conversation
"Self-Portraits: Masterpieces from the Uffizi ... is the first to kick off a series of 10 exhibitions that the Florence-based museum will loan to (the Bund One in Shanghai) over the next five years. ... The partnership with the Bund Museum is generating some $6 million for the Uffizi." - Artnet
The arrival of widely available image synthesis models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has provoked an intense online battle between artists who view AI-assisted artwork as a form of theft (more on that below) and artists who enthusiastically embrace the new creative tools. - Ars Technica
These new AI capabilities confront the world with a mountain of questions over the rights to the images the programs learned from, the likelihood they will be used to spread falsehoods and hate, the ownership of their output and the nature of creativity itself. - Axios
"The Victoria and Albert Museum in London is in talks to potentially return a collection of Asante gold artifacts that were looted during a British military raid of the Ghanaian city Kumasi in 1874." - ARTnews
Ememem "has made a speciality of filling divots and potholes with multicoloured mosaics made from tiles of different sizes and different hues, arranged in striking geometric patterns. Some bear his signature, often in the form of an image of a trowel underscored by his name." - The Observer (UK)
"This particular sculpture ... was stolen on the night of June 16, 1999, from the house of its caretaker in Thalkhu Tole. The community was heartbroken: 'When it was lost, we felt as if we lost our history, we lost everything.'" It's been found, at a museum in Singapore. - Hyperallergic
Abortion: Yes, artists make art about it. But they'd kept it somewhat quiet for years. Now? Everything's on the table - and in some cases, out front. - The New York Times
Even protest art understood what she meant to Britain. "If you don’t care about something, you don’t need to deface it. In 1977, only one image in British life was sacred enough for the Sex Pistols to defile: the face of the Queen." - The Guardian (UK)
"More than 70 stolen antiquities, some more than 2,000 years old, were seized from collections in the U.S. and returned to their native countries of Italy and Egypt this week." And 27 of those were from the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which probably knew these goods were hot. - NPR
This distinction between the messy and the neat, the organic and the planned, helps us understand why London so often dislikes modern buildings. Modern architecture is often plain, clean, formal — it disrupts and diminishes London’s brouhaha of shapes and styles. - The Critic
Daisy Lafarge’s debut novel, Paul, takes a unique approach to an ongoing question: How, in the age of the #MeToo movement, should we interact with the work of men like Paul Gauguin? - The Atlantic
Some of the images, like Grant Wood's American Gothic and van Gogh's The Night Café and Hokusai's The Wave, work pretty well. Others, like Munch's The Scream and Kehinde Wiley's portrait of Barack Obama, wellll ... (We can't decide about Leonardo's Last Supper and Picasso's Guernica.) - Artnet
The largest storm ever recorded in the country, Typhoon Hannamnor roared through on Monday. Luckily, no serious destruction has been reported, but several sites such as the Seokguram Grotto and the Bulguksa Temple in Gyeongju will require careful repairs. - ARTnews
