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

The event organizer has been badly affected by lockdowns and bans on public gatherings in recent months as governments have tried to restrict the spread of the coronavirus. The MCH group decided to completely cancel its flagship Art Basel show, which was originally scheduled to take place in June, amid worries about health risks and global travel restrictions. – Bloomberg

The Federalist organized the 150-person protest at the statue. “Speakers supporting the statue used the protest to rail against a broad range of issues including abortion and religion. One woman called for the removal of ‘the feminists and the homosexuals’ from the City Council.” – The New York Times

It started as math, transitioned to both epidemiology and morality, and now holds sway among the public as well. But the idea of a “wave” wasn’t inevitable. – Boston Review

Six people were arrested in France, with two accused of organized theft and four of concealing the theft. “The artwork, part of a series made by Banksy during a visit to Paris in 2018, was stolen from the Bataclan in January 2019. Video footage showed the hooded thieves cutting through the fire door. Detectives announced earlier this month they had found the work in an abandoned farmhouse in the Abruzzo region east of Rome.” – The Guardian (UK)

A new “museum” in Sydney is intended to be built on a flood plain, with no clarity about permanent collections, no storage on site, and so much more that’s even worse. “The new Powerhouse in Parramatta is set to be an embarrassing example of worst practice by international museum standards. Ironically the current Powerhouse would not loan valuable pieces from their collection to any institution so poorly equipped.” – Sydney Morning Herald

Most of the statues are bad art in any case, with the Confederate ones intended to pave the way toward a white supremacist future. “Even if most of the hero statues remain standing, we should follow the pigeons: Desecrate them, at least. We must activate our skepticism about the ways dubious heroes are foisted on us. And we must build new kinds of memorials.” – Los Angeles Times

Even when there is no pandemic to worry about, most of these places have pared existence for the long-lived back to its grim essentials. These are places nobody would choose to die. More important, they are places nobody would choose to live. “People ask me, ‘After COVID, is anyone going to want to go into a nursing home ever again?’ The answer is: Nobody ever wanted to go to one.” – New York Magazine

While some have suggested placing these statues in a museum or leaving them to deteriorate naturally, I propose another way: a statue of limitations, where towns and cities would hold a mass review of their monuments, say every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagine them, or remove them from the public square for good. – The Atlantic

Nessie may be hiding, the monster’s faithful believers will think. Every time the scientists come, Nessie dives deeper and hides. She’s a diva. She’s the Garbo of the animal kingdom. She knows when to do her headline-grabbing cameos and when to disappear. – The Daily Beast

“So much of the city has been demolished before we’ve even discovered and documented it. It means that, despite the generations of development, Cairo is not a place where you can walk around and really feel history, or identify who did what when. It’s so muddled.” – The Guardian

In consultation with art world professionals—artists, dealers, curators, museum administrators—we identified dynamics and ideas on the horizon, some with trajectories tracing into the past, others more sudden in origination. – ARTnews