Yasmeen Lari retired at 60 after making her career designing some of Pakistan’s glitziest modern buildings for government and corporate clients. Then, after a severe earthquake, she went to help with reconstruction — designing simple houses that survivors could build themselves, using the debris, that cost a tenth of what NGOs spent on prefab concrete homes. And she’s gone on from there, developing one innovative and inexpensive structure after another, creating jobs for impoverished women at the same time. – The Guardian

“The Irish Museum of Modern Art … announced last week that it had been ‘requested to facilitate the construction of a temporary mortuary’ on its grounds as the ‘country prepares Public Health facilities to deal with Covid-19’.” – The Art Newspaper

How did this building, initially embraced as promising, if not visionary, come to ignite a scorched-earth debate in its final stages? The story of LACMA’s campus reconstruction—and the current opposition to it—reflects some of the thorniest questions at play in the operation of museums today: what they are meant to be, who gets to decide, and who is meant to pay for them. – Artnet

“A researcher at the University of Göttingen, Sebastian Kruss, has used [Egyptian Blue], which is also known as calcium copper silicate, to produce a new nanomaterial that improves infrared spectroscopic and microscopic imaging.” – Artnet

The debate here echoes similar ones going on throughout the art world. What is the purpose of the encyclopaedic museum: to present a rational version of the world in discrete categories, as they’ve functioned since the 19th century, or to challenge those hierarchies, taking into account the opening up of the canon that is taking place? – Apollo

“This is Pieter Bruegel’s circa 1562 world-masterpiece painting The Triumph of Death, a panoramic pandemonium of an army of skeletons laying waste to a barren burning landscape while murdering every human being in sight. Lately, I have spent so much time contemplating this painting, I feel I have almost been living inside it.” – New York Magazine

It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times

Jonathan Jones: “If [the widely-shared tweet is true], a crisis of loneliness is impending that may be one of the most fraught social consequences of COVID-19. The loss of direct human contact we’re agreeing to may be catastrophic. This, at least, is what Hopper shows us.” – The Guardian

Alex Greenberger: “[There’s] a difference between Hopper’s forlorn subjects and so many of us right now. They choose to live in modernity and find themselves alienated because of it. We choose to simply try to stay alive in the world today and a pandemic that has so far killed more than 36,000 worldwide is keeping us captive.” – ARTnews

With its building closed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, the museum’s administration let go most of its employees with a promise to pay them only through April 4; that promise has now been extended to May 4. – The New York Times

The Singer Laren museum, just outside the Dutch capital city of Amsterdam, said van Gogh’s “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” was stolen in an overnight raid. The painting — created in 1884 by the Dutch master, according to Reuters — was on loan from another Dutch institution, the Groninger Museum in the city of Groningen. – CNN

Think about the doge meme, for instance. “This meme is iconic, woah heritage, such icon.” (But for real: Memes show the power of photography and creativity, and the top memes deserve to be archived.) – BBC

A lesson in not making desperate promises, perhaps: “When Derek Fordjour was a little-known art student at Hunter College, before Michael Ovitz and Beyoncé began collecting his work, before his paintings came to sell for more than $100,000, the fledgling artist struck a deal with a New York gallery. He agreed, according to a lawsuit now being pursued in New York Supreme Court, to produce 20 works for $20,000.” Now the gallery says he owes 7 paintings – or $1.45 million. – The New York Times

Museums are silent, and the Tate Modern’s 20th anniversary celebration has gone mute. But the small galleries and artists of Britain are in much more dire circumstances. Says one close observer, “We might lose the really interesting emergent art, the stuff of the future, if we are not careful.” – The Observer (UK)

People in Britain – perhaps spurred on by Brexit fears, or perhaps it’s just a cyclical thing, this “return to traditional craft” – are learning everything from vase painting to making spinning wheels and clay pipes. – The Observer (UK)

The Yale School of Art, NYU’s Tisch School, and many other art schools are witnessing students demand partial refunds for the rest of the semester since they can’t access anything they need. And at the Rhode Island School of Design, the move to cancel classes came very late. “Some students suspected that by staying open for another week, the university was attempting to circumvent its withdrawals and leave of absences policy, which guarantees a 20% refund of tuition fees for withdrawals during the fifth week of the semester, but not beyond.” – Hyperallergic

Despite her nomination being rejected by Downing Street last year, the British Museum appointed her anyway. “The Cambridge don, who will take up the role for an initial period of four years on Monday, said she was delighted. ‘It was a visit to the BM which first inspired me to work on the ancient world,’ she told the Observer. ‘I have been a huge beneficiary of this and other museums in the country over the past 60 years, and am now delighted to be able to give something back.'” – The Observer (UK)

Not everyone is happy about this. “Opponents of LACMA’s building project have zeroed in on county funding that includes $117.5 million released last April, arguing that the money should be reallocated to address a pandemic that has led to mass shortages of much-needed medical supplies, such as face masks for health workers, COVID-19 test kits and ventilators for sick patients.” – Los Angeles Times

Despite petitions with thousands of signatures and attempts at local legislation, many galleries aren’t eligible for small business loans and other relief. “April 1 is quickly approaching and small storefront gallery owners who spoke with Hyperallergic say they are feeling increasingly anxious and helpless.” – Hyperallergic

“Anticipating lost revenues of more than $5 million because of the coronavirus pandemic, the Cleveland Museum of Art announced it will immediately furlough all part-time staff and temporarily lay off a portion of its unionized staff, which includes security guards. In addition, the museum mandated a five-hour-a-week reduction in salary for all nonunion employees, effectively reducing pay by about 11% to 15%.” – The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“Art Basel has now moved its Swiss edition — which regularly convenes nearly 300 galleries and is considered to be among the biggest art events each year — to run from September 17–20, with preview days on September 15 and 16. … Earlier this year, Art Basel canceled its Hong Kong fair entirely after the virus’s spread in the city prevented it from taking place.” – ARTnews

The Louvre, like museums all around the world, is closed. The humor of the meme about art like the Mona Lisa putting its feet up is its suggestion that the great, iconic works shuttered therein are letting us know how exhausted they were with our usual attention. – Washington Post

We knew, as the climate crisis deepened, that this global art world constantly on the move was coming under necessary pressure. Now the prophylactic stasis demanded by this pandemic has violently accelerated the art world’s reassessment of what all this travel was good for. The task of artists in this new plague year will be to reestablish painting, photography, performance and the rest as something that can still be charged with meaning, and still have global impact, even when we’re not in motion. – The New York Times

“We are deeply troubled by the far-reaching repercussions of [the school’s closure],” wrote the students to the dean, “which has … severely curtailed the viability of the unrivaled visual arts education that SoA claims to provide. In light of these circumstances, we believe that financial reimbursement must play a part in the university’s forthcoming actions.” Graduate students at other art schools are making similar demands. – Artforum

“Art spaces … are doing their part to meet the needs of medical professionals, packing up crates of gloves typically used to protect artworks from oil and dust on the hands of those touching artworks and sending off coveted N95 respirators that protect front-line health care workers from the virus.” – ARTnews

The nearly 150-year-old school, which counts Ansel Adams, Richard Diebenkorn, and Dorothea Lange as former faculty, says that it can’t continue to operate in the near term unless it joins a larger and more stable institution. Administrators expect to cancel all fall semester classes. Students graduating this spring will get their degrees; others are being strongly encouraged to transfer elsewhere. – San Francisco Chronicle