"A Danish artist was given tens of thousands of dollars by a museum to reproduce an old sculpture. Instead, he pocketed the money and called it a new conceptual artwork." Jens Haaning has titled the new piece "Take the Money and Run." - Artnet
Frozen heritage is melting from mountain ice in every hemisphere. As it does so, small groups of archaeologists are scrambling to cobble together the funding and staffing needed to identify, recover, and study these objects before they are gone. - Atlas Obscura
In their free time, some of the porters wrote on the large walls of the tezon grande, a room over 105 yards long that was used for cleaning out the goods. - Atlas Obscura
It is an understatement to say that the dispute over Dirk Obbink and the papyrus has shaken a scholarly world where ancient texts are entrusted to a set of experts whose erudition and experience have singled them out as special. - The New York Times
What's more, conservators and scholars involved say that the restoration has put to rest the big myth surrounding the sculpture: that Michelangelo went at it with a hammer out of dissatisfied frustration. (He had a better reason for never completing it.) - The New York Times
“We’re officially saying that the cathedral is now saved, that it’s solid on its pillars, that its walls are solid, everything is holding together. We are determined to win this battle of 2024, to reopen our cathedral in 2024." - Artnet
That might sound like a word salad, but portrait artist Devon Rodriguez's 20 million followers on TikTok really did bring him fame, money, and a place downtown. - The New York Times
"Though Nepal banned the export of ancient statues of deities through the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act in 1956, these and other objects of cultural heritage have been looted frequently since the 1980s." - Hyperallergic
Re that Samson and Delilah purchase, National Gallery, er. "I was so shocked. ... We repeated the experiments to be really sure that we were not making a mistake and the result was always the same. Every patch, every single square, came out as fake, with more than 90% probability." - The Observer (UK)
Colorizing film might have gone out the window, but with two new books using the process to add color into black-and-white photographs of the 19th and 20th centuries, ethical questions arise. One writer describes the process as "part of the democratisation of history, a tool to develop empathy and a connection with the past." - Irish Times
"Public art is widely viewed as a tool to tell a more complete and honest narrative of Richmond’s struggles with equality. And how the city decides to uplift people and places with public art has the potential to be a nationwide model, or a litany of pitfalls to avoid." - The Guardian (UK)
The Oklahoma-based company Hobby Lobby—whose billionaire owner Steve Green founded the Museum of the Bible in 2018—purchased the tablet from Christie’s for nearly $2m in 2014, with the intent to display it at the museum. - The Art Newspaper
