Sebastian Smee: “I ask this knowing it is the wrong question. It is wrong not just because huge numbers of people think Renoir is, in fact, great, as well as adorable, joyous and life-affirming. But also because, for many of the rest of us, Renoir is not ‘less than great.’ He is awful. Hideous. Beyond the pale.” – Washington Post

“The 275-year-old auction house — which agreed … to sell itself for $2.66 billion to French telecom tycoon Patrick Drahi — could soon get at least two counteroffers from rival investors, The Post has learned.” – The New York Post

“The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the organisation that oversees Berlin’s state museums, says it will appeal to the United States Supreme Court to dismiss a claim for the Guelph Treasure filed by the heirs of a consortium of Jewish art dealers who say they sold the artefacts under duress in the Nazi era. The heirs say the treasure is worth at least €200m.” – The Art Newspaper

Taring Padi have been inspiring change in Indonesia since the late 1990, and they’re not stopping yet. Why? Well, governmental corruption turns out to be not only the province of one overthrown general, but of much of the new governments as well. – Hyperallergic

The fashion industry in Africa is on the rise, especially in cities like Kinshasa and Capetown. But while fashion designers might get noticed in Paris and New York, models have a different story. As Naomi Campbell noted in 2013, “Top designers often shun black models completely or opted to include just one in their shows.” – Der Spiegel

When the parent company for 18 different Art Institutes closed without warning earlier in 2019, students were supposed to get their loans discharged under the Closed School Discharge program. But wait: “Students at the Art Institute of Phoenix have received denial letters from their loan companies, which state that they cannot discharge the loans because the Art Institute of Las Vegas is still open.” – Hyperallergic

In 1977, artists fought for a sculpture park in Yorkshire – but it was a very, very uphill climb. “More than 40 years later the stubbornness appears to have paid off. The YSP is at the heart of Yorkshire Sculpture International (YSI), a new festival” that is changing the area. But it started with an idea that politicians, residents, and local businesses didn’t want. – The Guardian (UK)

We can’t say it better than this: “The career of Joan Mitchell, who once likened Clement Greenberg to a ‘toilet seat,’ ought to remind us of how tribal the art world continues to be. There are those who want to belong to clubs and acquire the proper affiliations, and there are others who don’t or can’t belong to anything of the sort, even the cliques that would gladly welcome them. Academics are fond of repeating that Mitchell was ‘a second generation’ Abstract Expressionist, as if that were the clubhouse she wanted to enter, and got stuck in.” But there’s a lot more. – Hyperallergic

The original “restoration” in a small town in Spain reminded many people of, well, Tintin. This is different, and better. – The New York Times

Sherald knew she had the mural space on a Target in Philadelphia, and she wanted to paint someone who, to her, represented the community. A young woman in an arts program provided the spark. The subject, Najee Spencer-Young: “My mom called me. She was like, guess what? … I was like, what, Mom? I’m in a job interview. I can’t be on the phone. She was just like, you up on a mural. I said, what?” – NPR

Now this is a worthy portrait subject: “Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphilj was the power behind the papal throne, and the reputed lover as well as sister-in-law of Pope Innocent X. Nicknamed Papessa – the lady pope – Donna Olimpia was an ardent feminist, championing Rome’s prostitutes and nuns alike.” – The Observer (UK)

“According to the first POWarts Salary Survey, a report on wages and various sectors of the art industry conducted by the Professional Organization for Women in the Arts, … the median salary for respondents with a bachelor’s degree was $60,000. By contrast, the median for respondents with a master’s degree was $62,000 — just $2,000 more. (The median for respondents with a doctorate degree was $73,500.)” – ARTnews

“I’m a design curator, so sometimes the most simple, economical, and elegant way to do something is the most effective,” says Michelle Millar Fisher of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, who sees the crowdsourced spreadsheet as a way to fight “the culture of silence and fear” in the museum world. “[You can] literally see collegiality and solidarity appearing cell by cell in the sheet.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Less than a tenth of the hundreds of millions promised has been donated, the French culture ministry said Friday. Only €80 million of the €850 million pledged has been handed over — and most of that has come in small sums given by ordinary people.” – France 24

“The intricate work to clean and restore its extraordinary windows, statues and other features is being carried out under the strictest security measures to avoid any repeat of the fire that severely damaged Nôtre-Dame Cathedral in Paris in April.” – Yahoo! (AFP)

As an artwork that encompasses a sprawling landmass as well as decades’ worth of crafting to customize it as a man-made offering to the cosmos, Roden Crater may be “an order of magnitude too great” for conventional means of art-world funding, said Michael Govan—whereas, “when a university comes in, they have particle accelerators. They see what Roden Crater is as an element of the university, and it makes sense, even by scale.” – ARTnews

Her expression is a stealthy contrast to the blank-eyed stare of Jackson, who would remain on the new twenty’s back side, demoted but not fully displaced. Should the bill one day materialize, the composition of Tubman and Jackson, two faces of the same vexed coin, would serve as an apt emblem of Americans’ habit of historical equivocation. White supremacists and abolitionists have no doubt that each contributed to the character of our country; there are “very fine people” on both sides of the bill. – The New Yorker

In the early days, by creed, a graffiti artist would ask neither for permission nor compensation. Now, after courting the former, artists at 5Pointz were receiving the latter. Graffiti was once a countercultural threat that conservative forces roundly maligned as a racially coded stand-in for urban delinquency. Now, graffiti had not only helped catalyze gentrification of one of the city’s fastest growing neighborhoods, but was also being handsomely rewarded for it, with legal recognition by a judge and jury. – The New Republic

“After years of financial crises, shifting leadership and painful internal debate about its future, the National Academy closed its museum, separated from its school and began selling off its Manhattan properties in 2016.” Says one of the organization’s co-chairs, “The National Academy became the thing that devoured itself. The museum and school were draining all the resources. There wasn’t any money for the programmes that would actually improve the academicians’ lives.” – The Art Newspaper

“The chief executive of the Serpentine Galleries, Yana Peel, resigned on Tuesday after a newspaper investigation revealed she had connections to a cybersecurity firm whose technology has been used to target journalists and human rights activists.” – The New York Times

Once ivory towers of culture, far removed from politics and controversy, museums have increasingly come into the spotlight as sites of protest and places where equity, diversity, and inclusion have become imperatives. – ARTnews

“Most of the time, the remains of the monument are so poorly guarded that anyone can buy a ticket ($4 for foreigners, 60 cents for Afghans), walk in and do pretty much whatever he wants. And many do. Souvenir-hunters pluck pieces of painted stucco decorations from the network of chambers or take away chunks of fallen sandstone. Graffiti signatures, slogans, even solicitations for sex abound.” – The New York Times

While the financial deals carved out by Christie’s with buyers, sellers and third-party guarantors (one of whom is often thought to be the firm’s owner itself, François Pinault) remain a closely-guarded secret, Sotheby’s obligatory filings were revelatory in many cases.  – The Art Newspaper

The purchase, by Mr. Drahi’s BidFair USA, returns the only publicly traded major auction house to private ownership after 31 years on the New York Stock Exchange. – The New York Times

The opening of a €600m super-museum in Berlin has been postponed to next year, raising sceptical eyebrows among locals wary of the German capital’s growing tendency to deliver large public building projects late and over budget. – The Guardian

The most common theory is that the 500-year-old artwork is sitting in storage in Switzerland — specifically in Geneva, where, according to The New York Times, more than a million works of art are kept in secretive tax-free warehouses by collectors and galleries. But last week, another theory emerged in an opinion piece by art dealer Kenny Schachter published on Artnet: that the last known privately-held Leonardo is on a luxury yacht owned by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. – CNN

The Cuban government, which regularly arrests artists and journalists, also expected to welcome a record-breaking 5.1 million tourists this year. Cuba’s leaders are well aware that cultural capital is one of their nation’s major assets. Rage, pain, and dissent were not only openly on view in this Bienal but were featured and promoted with hashtags like #CubaEsCultura. – New York Review of Books

There’s an idea in vogue that if an artist or writer can just talk to enough different people about their experiences in the city, they can give us a clear vision of San Francisco as it is now, as it was, and perhaps even as it will be. We may approach something like the Platonic ideal of the city’s so-called “soul.” – The Baffler

A whole host of Stirling Prize-winning architecture practices have declared an emergency in response to accelerating climate change. Calling for a “paradigm shift”, they unveiled 11 pledges to bring architectural practice in line with planetary limits and called on other UK designers to sign up. – dezeen

“The museumification process of a living cultural landscape and the consequences of the loss of ancestral knowledge in managing water, agriculture, sustainable production and occupation of the land, as a consequence of profit-guided, short-term decisions, as well as the absence of a holistic vision, is far more harmful than the airport alone, which is only a logic outcome of this misunderstanding.” – dezeen