“The huge growth of the art market at its top end is surely, as Michael Shnayerson suggests, a function of the spiralling number of billionaires and increasing disparities of wealth. He also points out that successful artists are a very select few: the huge majority make at best only a few thousand dollars a year from their art. The question remains: how good is all this extremely expensive stuff?” – Times Literary Supplement

Recent thefts of van Gogh and van Dyck paintings indicate that the answer is no. “Alarm systems and uniformed guards are still in place, of course, and the sale of museum-famous stolen art has never been easy. But … cavernous floors are now largely empty throughout the day, not just at night. Police departments in many places are stretched thin by illness. Social distancing has meant that the many people who might once have witnessed a burglary are now tucked in at home.” – The New York Times

“[It’s] the greatest art scam in Canadian history,” says art dealer Don Robinson, who suffered a stroke because of the stress he endured in his campaign against a market awash with forgeries. “The more you dive into a pool of garbage, the more you get to know the garbage within it,” says Ritchie Sinclair, Norval Morrisseau’s former assistant and another key figure in exposing the scandal. – The Art Newspaper

While overall crime in the city fell in March compared with a year earlier, commercial and residential burglaries rose 26% to 942, according to a New York City Police report. The sometimes elaborate security systems put in place could soon be put to the test. – Bloomberg

“Projecting a shortfall in revenue of at least $7 million by the end of this fiscal year, New York City’s Whitney Museum has laid off 76 staff members. In an email sent Thursday afternoon, museum director Adam Weinberg told staff that all of the affected employees have been at the Whitney for two years or less and would receive five to six weeks’ pay dating from the museum’s closure.” – Hyperallergic

Jerry Saltz: “Even an art-lover lifer like me has to admit much of the art world infrastructure feels like it’s already in the balance. Some of it may be gone even now. In three months, or six months, or — God forbid — 12 or 18 (there has never been a vaccine for a coronavirus)? There will be galleries on the other side of this chasm, and museums, and artists making work, of course. But I worry that such a sundering will only exacerbate the inequalities that more and more dominate this universe, with megagalleries and art stars surviving and the gap between them and everyone else only widening, rendering the scrappier artists and galleries something close to invisible.” – New York Magazine

The fact that all 28 Van Gogh paintings, from six separate thefts, were eventually recovered should offer hope that The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring will eventually return to its home in Groningen. – The Art Newspaper

Why? “He recommends everyone drawing with open eyes. ‘I would suggest they really look hard at something and think about what they are really seeing.'” – The Guardian (UK)

That’s right, it’s not a portrait: It’s a doortrait. – The Guardian (UK)

And now it wants to win over its critics by being honest about how many of its artifacts had tainted histories – or were entirely fake. – The New York Times

Via this year’s deeply reimagined Sydney Biennale, now called NIRIN: “The impact of COVID-19 is both a significant challenge and a threshold for new beginnings. An international art world that has called persistently for radical socioeconomic change is now faced with just that in large measure, albeit in ways that it is not in a position to readily absorb.” – Hyperallergic

The email was grim, and employees who had done all of the prep work for April tours aren’t being paid for that work. On the other side of things for educators – though not for 76 other staff members who were laid off – “MoMA’s email to educators came only days before New York City’s Whitney Museum sent its own freelance education staff a hopeful message: it hopes to launch a new online teaching initiative that could keep them employed.” – Hyperallergic

“Suddenly he was in a drab, dehumanizing place, first a stable in California, then the barracks of Topaz, Utah, where he spent most of his time in internment. It was bleak, hot, arid and dusty, and he missed green things, trees and gardens. He moved quickly to establish an art school, both at Tanforan and later Topaz. And when he represented the camp at Topaz, the sense of displacement became dreamlike, even surreal, a luminous landscape that looked just a bit scorched, with a few dark buildings in the midground standing in for the enormity of what was happening there.” – Washington Post

To bring real value, any A.I. application needs loads of quality data—which is doubly problematic in our small and notoriously opaque industry (dealers l-o-v-e to hoard sales info). Without greater transparency, A.I. can do only so much. – Artnet

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