It was long thought the giant reflective pool in front of the statue of Athena acted as a mirror, sending light shimmering across its golden surface. The 3D model, however, showed the light barely reached her shins. - Artnet
“The man was filmed while spraying the graffiti on one of the original walls of Chan Chan, a pre-Columbian city 500km (300 miles) north of Lima that is visited by thousands of people a month. … Some Peruvians questioned how he was able to damage the wall unchallenged.” - BBC
“Hollyhock House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s eclectic Los Angeles masterpiece, is under threat of closure and losing its UNESCO World Heritage Site status amid drastic budget cuts proposed by the city’s mayor Karen Bass.” - Artnet
The Chinese crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun and the American entertainment executive David Geffen are slinging written accusations at each other in federal court in New York, each claiming to be the rightful owner of Alberto Giacometti’s “Le Nez” (“The Nose”). - The New York Times
It’s not just description. “They started with the audio description of short films and then studied ways of translating the visual language of works of art into audio — including words, effects and music — and creating a mediation tool.” - El País
“Children respond instinctively to art. They have not built up defences, or preconceptions about it, and the earlier you take them to galleries and expose them to different styles and mediums, the more open and receptive they will be.” - The Guardian (UK)
The founding artists “could no longer sit ‘with their arms crossed and do nothing,’ about what they saw as a dire gap in their country’s art infrastructure, said Nu Barreto, the visual and plastic arts curator of the country’s first biennale.” - The New York Times
“Martine Gosselink, the director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, whose collection includes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring …, said the turmoil had left her team wary of lending pieces to the US … amid the uncertainty wreaked by Donald Trump’s funding cuts and ideological impositions.” - The Guardian
This French museum’s show offers a flashback to the era when, apart from the works including those displayed here, the artists who created them were reviled and persecuted. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
“The highly resistant mold covers objects in a white coating and has been detected in 12 museums, including the National Museum of Denmark and Skagens Museum. Known as aspergillus section restricti, it belongs to a group of fungi that can survive in extreme environments such as the deep ocean or near volcanoes.” - The Guardian
“It transformed, for better and worse, audience expectations at museums worldwide. … It taught curators to propound a global view of art — or perhaps no view at all. Its influence ripples through the rethought MoMA — but also the selfie stations of the Museum of Ice Cream.” - The New York Times
“The cuts will affect 20 full-time and nine part-time workers, and eliminate another 13 positions that were either vacant or would not be backfilled … as the museum grapples with low visitorship, loss of funding and a multimillion-dollar structural budget deficit.” - KQED (San Francisco)
The Piprahwa gems were discovered on the estate of an English landowner in India in 1898; they were inside reliquaries labeled as containing the cremains of Siddhartha Gautama himself. Sotheby’s was set to auction them in Hong Kong this week — until India demanded their repatriation and threatened lawsuits. - NBC News
Now it is in the cross-hairs of President Trump, who issued an executive order in March that seeks to address what he described as the Smithsonian’s promotion of “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive,” singling out the African American museum as a particular offender. - The New York Times
