Even protest art understood what she meant to Britain. "If you don’t care about something, you don’t need to deface it. In 1977, only one image in British life was sacred enough for the Sex Pistols to defile: the face of the Queen." - The Guardian (UK)
"More than 70 stolen antiquities, some more than 2,000 years old, were seized from collections in the U.S. and returned to their native countries of Italy and Egypt this week." And 27 of those were from the Metropolitan Museum of Art - which probably knew these goods were hot. - NPR
This distinction between the messy and the neat, the organic and the planned, helps us understand why London so often dislikes modern buildings. Modern architecture is often plain, clean, formal — it disrupts and diminishes London’s brouhaha of shapes and styles. - The Critic
Daisy Lafarge’s debut novel, Paul, takes a unique approach to an ongoing question: How, in the age of the #MeToo movement, should we interact with the work of men like Paul Gauguin? - The Atlantic
Some of the images, like Grant Wood's American Gothic and van Gogh's The Night Café and Hokusai's The Wave, work pretty well. Others, like Munch's The Scream and Kehinde Wiley's portrait of Barack Obama, wellll ... (We can't decide about Leonardo's Last Supper and Picasso's Guernica.) - Artnet
The largest storm ever recorded in the country, Typhoon Hannamnor roared through on Monday. Luckily, no serious destruction has been reported, but several sites such as the Seokguram Grotto and the Bulguksa Temple in Gyeongju will require careful repairs. - ARTnews
“If we do three smaller events around an opening, it’s just that much better for the artist and for my team to be able to reconnect with people and be able to talk, instead of the one big blow-out type of celebration. But there are going to be artists that want that.” - Hyperallergic
Located on Benjamin Franklin Parkway just opposite the Rodin Museum and Barnes Foundation, Calder Gardens will include both a building (designed by Herzog & de Meuron) and landscaped outdoor spaces to display a rotating selection of Calder's mobiles and stabiles. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"At a time when Philadelphia architecture rarely rises above the goal of extracting money from land, Calder Gardens promises to be a work of art itself. Ideas about Calder's creativity and Philadelphia's history are embedded in every detail. Yet the design is no mere intellectual exercise." - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Already there are famous mobiles and other pieces by "Sandy" Calder at the Museum of Art, PAFA, Federal Reserve Bank, and Free Library, plus major works by his father (the fountain in Logan Square) and grandfather (the statues on City Hall, including of William Penn on top). - The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Advanced scanning techniques revealed that beneath the plain white wall that makes the milkmaid's bright yellow and blue clothes stand out, Vermeer had originally painted extra details," including a wooden jug rack and a basket. - Yahoo! (AFP)
We followed up with several museums on their grand pronouncements from 2020 to see what they’ve actually followed through on, how their plans have changed, and what still remains to be done. - ARtnet
“While it’s absolutely true that this AI art couldn’t exist if it weren’t trained on copyrighted images and the work of artists, the end result is something we don’t have a precedent or parallel for,” Baio told me. “This technology is a black-box machine that generates high-quality imagery endlessly. - The Atlantic
The torrential monsoon that has swamped the country has damaged the 4,500-year-old ruins, which were once the largest city in the Indus Valley civilization. There have been no floods at the site yet, but some walls have cracked, and a few have collapsed, due to the downpours. - AP
"In June and July, Pennsylvania and Washington quietly became the first two states in the nation to explicitly list non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as digital assets subject to sales and use taxes." - Hyperallergic
