“What they have is the bare minimum, the scaffold of an education department,” says Shellyne Rodriguez, an educator whose contract was cancelled in March. “If you don’t have educators, you don’t have a department. It’s like closing a school but the principal still shows up every day.” – The Art Newspaper

That five of the six new hires are people of color, and that all are women, is in line with Sandra Jackson-Dumont’s vision as the museum’s self-described “chief diversity officer.” – Los Angeles Times

Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh, a touring show conceived by “swashbuckling” Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and U.S. management and events company IMG, was pulling in big crowds at London’s Saatchi Gallery before the COVID lockdown. But new reporting suggests that the contract between IMG and Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities to provide artifacts for the show may be illegal. – ARTnews

“The raid Tuesday and Wednesday targeted … Donald ‘D.B’ Henkel, 60, a self-described artist who is accused in a sealed FBI search warrant affidavit of orchestrating a years-long conspiracy involving previously unknown paintings by well-known artists and counterfeit sports memorabilia. … Federal law enforcement officials are calling [the scheme] a national crime ring with conspirators operating in Metro Detroit and at least three other states.” – The Detroit News

“Armed with axes and hand saws, the team of 25 craftsmen and women, who belong to a collective called Carpenters Without Borders, managed to build one of the 25 trusses that made up the wooden roof of Notre-Dame that they say is identical to the original.” – France 24

Following recommendations from the architect and the retired general running the reconstruction as well as the new culture minister (and based on a rapidly solidifying consensus to stop arguing about design possibilities and get to work), President Macron has officially backed away from the idea he floated months ago of a contemporary replacement for the original roof and 19th-century neo-Gothic spire that were destroyed in last year’s fire. – Yahoo! (AP)

“Instagram was one of the first apps to fully exploit our relationship with our phones, compelling us to experience life through a camera for the reward of digital validation.” – New Statesman

What’s more, says artistic director Kevin Buist, “It’s not clear if there will be an event in 2021, and if there is, it’s not clear who will run it.” The largest contemporary art exhibition in the U.S., which takes place over three weeks in 160 spaces in Grand Rapids, Mich. and features two $200,000 grand prizes (one given by a jury, the other by public vote), ArtPrize typically draws about half a million visitors. – Artnet

“A measure of relief may come from a century-old system set up by Rodin himself allowing the museum to sell up to 12 replicas of select sculptures every year. The bronzes are cast in special workshops in a process overseen by the museum and bought by art galleries, private collectors or other museums. Rodin’s priceless originals are mainly carved out of marble.” – Yahoo! (AP)

With wealthy collectors no longer travelling, most art business is now conducted online. Art dealers are typically reporting a 70% drop in sales, according to a recent survey conducted by The Art Newspaper and Pownall. Up to a third of galleries are expected to fold, with smaller ones particularly vulnerable. The shift to online auctions has seen an equally dramatic slump in secondary market revenues at Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips. – The Art Newspaper

Celebrating Mount Rushmore isn’t remembering history; instead it requires spectacular acts of forgetting. How could we honestly claim to see in this anything worth defending? – Chicago Tribune

“In September 2018, a devastating fire ravaged Brazil’s National Museum [in Rio de Janeiro]. Now, yet another Brazilian cultural institution — the Federal University of Minas Gerais’ Natural History Museum and Botanical Garden (MHNJB) in Belo Horizonte — has fallen victim to an inferno.” This is, in fact, the sixth museum fire in the country in the past decade. – Smithsonian Magazine

“An alumnus has filed a suit to save a fresco at the University of Kentucky that depicts enslaved people; a Black artist whose work is shown with it also wants the mural to stay.” – The New York Times

Protesters pulled down the status and dragged it to Inner Harbor, where they dumped it. “The Columbus statue was dragged down as people marched across the city Saturday demanding reallocation of funds from the police department to social services, a reassessment of the public education system, reparations for Black people, housing for the homeless, and the removal of all statues ‘honoring white supremacists, owners of enslaved people, perpetrators of genocide, and colonizers.'” – Baltimore Sun

The “immersive” show had to be adjusted from a walk-in experience in Paris for Covid-19 safety in Toronto. – BBC

Well, it’s an idea, anyway, and far – far – from the worst idea Boris Johnson has proposed. “The devil, though, is in the detail, a territory that Boris Johnson finds notoriously hard to navigate.” – The Guardian (UK)

From all indications, the Museum of Ice Cream is melting down. Spending was slashed in January. In March, Bunn temporarily closed the permanent installations in New York and San Francisco, and laid off around 200 workers. – Forbes

“Tate, the British museum network that facilitates it, reconstituted the prize in light of the coronavirus pandemic. In lieu of the main £25,000 ($32,200) award, 10 artists and collectives are taking home what are being called Turner Bursaries awards of £10,000 ($12,500). … Half of the winners this time are nonwhite, and as usual for the Turner Prize, which often skews toward conceptual art, most do not work in traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture.” – ARTnews

They’re grand spaces now in decay – which gives them altogether another kind of beauty. – The Guardian

There’s no reason why the art gallery as we know it, a 19th century invention, should last forever. But there’s also no sign of an alternative on the horizon. As with other small New York businesses that’ve been closed since mid-March, it’s not clear how many galleries will be able to hold out long enough to reopen. – The Nation

At a moment when the world’s museums are being called out for ingrained and unexamined inequalities, the American Museum of Natural History is one of the few to take decisive action. Art institutions, by contrast, have largely engaged in hollow gestures. – The New Yorker

Paolo Cirio scraped over 100,000 auction records from the past ten years of Sotheby’s sales and is now offering digital reproductions of the auction lots for 1/100,000th of the price they sold for. – Artnet

Andrei Filatov, a rail transport and investment magnate (who is also chairman of the Chess Federation of Russia), has offered to purchase the long-controversial statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History that depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by half-naked American Indian and African men on foot. He’d made a similar offer for a statue of Alexander Baranov, the Russian colonial governor of Alaska, in Sitka that activists want relocated. – The Art Newspaper

“Scholars in the work of surrealist Frida Kahlo have searched for more than six decades for The Wounded Table, a 1940 oil painting illuminating her pain over the breakup of her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera that hasn’t been seen since an exhibition in Poland. And the historians strongly reject the idea that the mystery of its whereabouts has been solved, as claimed by a Spanish art dealer who says the painting is now sitting in a London warehouse awaiting a buyer willing to spend more than 40 million euros.” – Yahoo! (AP)

Stephen Russell at the University of Alabama at Birmingham developed the course “Prescribing Art: How Observation Enhances Medicine” to teach students to slow down and observe without worrying about the pressures of the examination room (it turns out that Mary Cassatt was excellent at capturing the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis), but also to spot students’ own biases and teach them (as Russell puts it) “the tolerance of ambiguity.” – Artnet

“For decades, the Met’s programming has been associated with a kind of elegant classicism. The Breuer, it seemed, would allow the museum to strike a new balance between grandeur and something more outré. … But the Met didn’t follow the Whitney’s lead in that respect — most exhibitions were dark and relatively traditional in their presentation. … [But] since the opening of the Met Breuer, the Met has reoriented its modern and contemporary strategy with far better results.” – ARTnews