Since the UK left the EU on 31 January 2020, Shovlar’s income has dropped by 60%. He says trade with the EU, where 99% of his clients are based, is now “virtually impossible” and the 30 to 50 sales he was making a week have dwindled. - The Art Newspaper
"An upstart museum in (Bangalore) has launched an open-source digital encyclopedia of ... the subcontinent's rich artistic history, dating from 10,000 years ago to the present. Included on the free platform, which went live last week, are thousands of articles on famous artists, movements, disciplines, techniques, and other topics." - Artnet
"It is an astonishing output for a region of six million people, featuring elegant libraries and special educational needs schools, as well as dramatic concert halls and bridges – in a place once derided as 'the ugliest country in the world'." Oliver Wainwright explains the change. - The Guardian
The Investigative Committee of Russia has opened a “rehabilitation of Nazism” case against Kulik. If he’s found guilty, the artist reportedly faces a fine of up to three million rubles, forced labor for up to three years, or imprisonment for up to three years. - Artnet
"A trove of sculptures and objects by the design duo Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne are hitting the auction block at Sotheby's to help fund the Musée d'Orsay's forthcoming research and archive center." - Artnet
"Archaeologists exploring the site – which was discovered amid the Roman ruins in the town of Osuna, 55 miles (90km) east of Seville – say the Phoenician-Carthaginian cemetery dates back to the fourth or fifth century BC." - The Guardian
“Once a decade or two, Boston’s architectural establishment breaks out of its inherent conservative aesthetic comforts and heeds a call for some inventiveness.” - Bloomberg
The furious response that Yanktonai Dakota artist Oscar Howe wrote when rejected for the 1958 Philbrook Indian Annual competition because the abstract painting he submitted was "a fine painting, but not Indian" still resonates today, while Howe himself went on to produce a very impressive body of work. - Smithsonian Magazine
A late Bronze Age stone head depicting Anat, the ancient Canaanite goddess of love and war (and the sister of Baal), was discovered by a farmer in the southern Gaza Strip. - BBC
A report by the French daily Libération uncovered serious allegations of racial and sexual harassment, and even assault, at six of the 14 museums run by the municipal government. Mayor Anne Hidalgo has ordered that all cases be handled expeditiously and that preventive measures be implemented. - Apollo
"The first heritage task force of its kind, the Blue Helmets includes officers from Italy's specialist police force for art crime, and ... art historians and restorers. Its main tasks include assessing damage to heritage, planning conservation, and preventing looting and trafficking after terrorist attacks or natural disasters." - The Art Newspaper
Yikes, says Rowan Moore: "The proposed building is, not to put too fine a point on it, a brute. ... It is out of scale with its surroundings and disconnected from them." - The Guardian UK)
Tamara Lanier is fighting "to reclaim the daguerreotypes of her ancestors from the Peabody Museum at Harvard University," where they'd been since Louis Agassiz commissioned the photos in the 19th century "to 'prove' his white supremacist ideas about race." - Hyperallergic
Yes, the reclaiming started in the 1960s. But "today's new cohort of designers is going a step further – not just questioning western dress forms, but searching for and breathing new life into lost aesthetics, craft and processes." - The Observer (UK)
