"The Antiquities Trafficking Unit is very much a victim of its own success. Set up in 2017 … to curb the smuggling of cultural heritage, it has seized 3,604 illicit items." 2,281 of those are still there; here's a look at eight of them. - The New York Times
"Scholars have long believed that apprentices learned their craft before they were allowed to carve reliefs for rooms like this one," the Chapel of Hatshepsut in Thebes. But one archaeologist says that apprentices did work on the wall reliefs: you can see the corrections the masters made. - ARTnews
When Boris Johnson’s spokesperson was asked on Tuesday, he said: “I won’t pre-empt their meeting, obviously, but the possession of the marbles is a matter purely for the museum. It’s not one for the UK government.” - The Guardian
The museum compares itself to Paris’s Centre Pompidou and New York’s Museum of Modern Art — but it has already moved to censor work as it walks a tightrope between its aspiration to be a world-class institution and the limits on free expression in Hong Kong. - Washington Post
A team of archaeologists working at Abu Ghurab, 12 miles south of Cairo, discovered this temple underneath the ruins of a temple that had been excavated in 1898. It is one of just six sun temples believed to have been built in ancient Egypt. - CNN
At an auction on Tuesday at Sotheby's New York, Frida Kahlo's self-portrait Diego y yo (depicting an image of her husband, Diego Rivera, on her forehead) sold for $34.88 million — roughly 3½ times the price of the previous recordholder, Rivera's The Rivals. - Hyperallergic
The house’s “Pre-Columbian Art & Taíno Masterworks” sale was preceded by an in-person protest, a slew of media articles, and a petition that circulated on change.org, signed by 44,767 supporters trying to halt the sale. - Artnet
"More than 96% of the union, which represents public-facing staff, library workers, educators, curators, conservators, and administrative and professional workers, voted to picket outside the museum (on November 17). … Workers are concerned about pay, safety, workplace diversity, requiring union membership and job growth." - AP
The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at around thirty-five thousand years old; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by roughly ten thousand years. - The New Yorker
Colour has a life beyond any individual perception. It exists as both the quality of a thing as well as an approach to that thing, or “a dance between subjects and objects, mind and matter.” - Prospect
To be fair to Pornhub, the Birth of Venus is definitely a "classic nude." But the larger issue is about how museums make money - and during COVID, "as in-person activity slumped, sales of licensed goods rocketed." Is it too much exposure? - The Guardian (UK)
You might think that's obvious, but it's not necessarily so to those in the capital city. Even during COVID, "London draws all the oxygen, not to mention the cash; once again, it’s as if nothing could possibly be happening anywhere else." - The Guardian (UK)
It's likely you find the French artist a bit, well, staid. Boring, even. But: "Quite a bit of wildness hides beneath the cloak of scholarship and respectability." - Hyperallergic
A longtime director fired, a bequest altered, plans for the sculpture garden to become a museum - there's a lot going on at LongHouse Reserve. (Some board members say there's not, and it's a "what do they call it, the 'noisy minority.'") - The New York Times
While some on this list are obvious, others may inspire an artistic pilgrimage - though Milan "is a chaotic hotchpotch of buttresses, pinnacles and a reputed 2,245 statues, part gothic, part classical. Like an overdressed model on a Milan catwalk." - The Guardian (UK)
