As with the Museum of Sex, in New York City, and the Museum of Ice Cream, in San Francisco, the Disgusting Food Museum is conceptually closer to an amusement park than to a museum. There are eighty-five culinary horrors on display—ordinary fare and delicacies from thirty countries—and each tour concludes with a taste test of a dozen items. – The New Yorker

Justin Davidson refuses to relinquish hope. “The MTA, Amtrak, and NJ Transit have jointly released not one but two possible visions for rebuilding the rest of the Dantesque complex. And, lo and behold, they are both aspirational and realistic. The design … amalgamates the jumble of bureaucratic fiefdoms, decades’ worth of duct-tape fixes, and a thicket of conflicting agendas into a rail hub that might one day be a thing of, if not quite beauty, at least satisfaction — maybe even pride.” – Curbed

Instead, it’s a way for independent digital artists to make a living. “Beneath the glossy auction houses, breathless headlines and outrage, there is a global ecosystem of crypto artists who entered the once-niche NFT art space motivated by passion and curiosity. Most aren’t raking in millions or leading major sales. But many are making a decent living — ditching side gigs, supporting families, paying for college, buying houses — all by selling art in a form most of us hadn’t even heard of until the Beeple sale.” – Washington Post

When artist Tabitha Soren had her third child, a friend suggested she photograph the experience. “Time can turn photographs into metaphor or allow them to become a symbol instead of a documentary picture; at this particular moment, mothers’ needs are on the minds of the country. [The resulting project] is about what mothers don’t show: the emotions and psychological states that we’ve all been socialized to bury.” – The Atlantic

On the 10K Mount Scorluzzo in Italy, “the Austro-Hungarian soldiers who occupied those barracks were fighting Italian troops in what became known as the White War. There in the Alps — removed from the more famous Western Front, a site of bloody trench warfare between Germany and France — troops climbed to precarious heights in the stinging cold to carve fortifications into the rock and snow.” Now everything they abandoned in 1918 is coming to a museum. – The New York Times

Like the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s, NY’s City Artist Corps is a relief program that “will pay hundreds of local artists to beautify and activate public spaces across the city with murals, public artworks, performances, and more.” – Hyperallergic

Some of the nation’s top (male) artists are unhappy about the lack of drawing classes, bemoaning the lack of compulsory drawing classes at the Royal College of Art, Slade, and other art schools. Apparently, one says, “You now have people who are more interested in conceptual art – which is actually what you do if you can’t draw.” – The Observer (UK)

Broad’s vision was of a Champs-Elysées on Grand Avenue, but all with his stamp on it. “Broad’s ambitions ought to prod Angelenos to consider what they think should be central to their city. Emperors, bureaucrats and billionaires mold cities to their desires, but so could humbler aspirations. … To better serve its future sense of place, Grand Avenue may require less architecture and more humanity.” – Los Angeles Times

Someone even asked, “Are we going to pretend nothing happened?” But no, not at the fair itself: “To gain admittance at the Shed at Hudson Yards, visitors had to fill out an online questionnaire and upload their proof of vaccination or negative Covid test results before receiving a QR code. There were no exceptions. Even Michael R. Bloomberg, whose name graces the building, got stuck outside until he provided the proper documentation.” – The New York Times

“A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all ‘curated’ by a robot. … Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between highbrow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on data drawn from actual Whitney and Liverpool Biennials past.” – Artnet

To date there are no large-scale programs or comprehensive models for dealing with defaced or removed monuments. However, the museum and heritage sectors — two professions that are founded on the essential notion of preservation — have been challenged by calls, largely from outside of these fields, suggesting that museums take in damaged or fallen monuments. – Hyperallergic

“The choice of collectives reflects the fact that few artists have been able to publicly show anything over the past year. It prompted judges to focus on groups of artists whose collaborative work has demonstrably continued, not always in the confines of a gallery. The shortlist is Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works.” – The Guardian

The Brutish Museums argues, persuasively, that the corporate-militaristic pillage behind Europe’s “encyclopedic” collections is not a simple matter of possession, but a systematic extension of warfare across time. – The Baffler

Far from being a dyed-in-the-wool slice of historic Caledonian kitsch, tartan design is very much alive and well in the 21st Century – as evidenced by the stream of new examples recorded each year at the Scottish Register of Tartans. And the range of inspirations is as diverse as the designs. – BBC

“Libeskind, who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, has experience responding to traumatic events through architecture. He also served as masterplan architect at New York’s World Trade Center site as the city looked to rebuild following 9/11.” – Artnet

According to a newly filed lawsuit, in 2016, U.S. Customs seized a fragment of an ancient Roman statue that it believed had been stolen from Italy and illegally sold. The seller was a Brussels gallery; the buyer, “Kim Kardashian dba Noel Roberts Trust.” – ARTnews

“There are now more galleries showing contemporary art than those devoted to the entire rest of art history, with sales at auction houses following the same trend: in the years since photography entered the art world, contemporary art has replaced impressionist and Old Masters painting as the most sought-after, collected, exhibited, and expensive segment of the market.” – American Scholar

Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity. – Artnet

“[Christopher] Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh.” – The Guardian

It reportedly used 25m yen ($228,500; £164,700) of the emergency funding to build the statue. Noto officials have told local media it is part of a long term plan to lure tourists back after the pandemic. – BBC

Not granite or bronze, these new monuments by Deborah Willis, Sadie Barnette, Ebony G. Patterson, Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, and Black Quantum Futurism, consist of outdoor sculptures and photography, storefront activations and performances. – The New York Times

“[It was] a 600-square-foot gallery-cum-warehouse that Arthur Sackler had commandeered as his personal storage facility, a deal he wrangled by dangling the possibility of eventually gifting the trove to the museum. … The ‘enclave’ had all of the benefits of being in the museum, with climate control, security guards, and prime New York City real estate, as well as its own number. Sackler had the locks changed so that Met employees could not enter the room.” – Artnet

Yes, LA MOCA is having trouble again. “MOCA’s current trials have come just as the museum was hoping to emerge from a tumultuous history that has included two short-term directors, a raid on its endowment to pay the bills and a proposed merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” – The New York Times

Judy Baca’s 2,700-foot mural Great Wall shows the history of the city, from pre-historic California through the 1950s. But the 1950s were a long time ago – and now a grant means the mural can stretch to a mile, bringing it up to the 2020s. – Hyperallergic