The supposed whiteness of ancient statuary is intertwined with larger ideas of Whiteness in European culture, and the sense that colorizing the statues somehow cheapens them could well be rooted in racialized thinking. - Washington Post
Patterned after the famous "Monuments Men" who tracked down treasures looted by the Nazis, a group of archivists, archaeologists, art historians, and other specialists are training as military reservists, ready to assist during armed conflicts. One specialist described it as "cultural first aid" training. - MSN (The Washington Post)
"The J. Paul Getty Museum is returning its Orpheus group of sculptures — a significant group of nearly life-size terra-cotta figures known as 'Orpheus and the Sirens,' some of the museum's greatest antiquities — to Italy. The objects ... have been determined to have been illegally excavated and exported." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
Rather than not build at all, he was prepared to build what the dictator demanded of him. As a result, Boris Iofan is now remembered not for his considerable talent, but for the way that his buildings came to define Stalinist architecture as it was practiced from Warsaw to Beijing. - MITReader
Tarsila do Amaral's painting Sol Poente (Setting Sun) is one of 16 artworks (not including stolen jewelry and cash) that were conned out of, or simply taken from, the widow of a Rio de Janeiro art dealer by her daughter, working with a bogus clairvoyant and a supposed candomblé priestess. - ARTnews
A very popular exhibition of minimalist and conceptual art this summer at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art features major pieces by Marcel Duchamp, Sol LeWitt, Frank Stella, and others. The art was collected by the government of the last Shah and put away by the Khomeini regime. - AP
Painters, sculptors and other visual artists stand to get a payout when their work is resold at auction and by galleries, in a government move designed to help sustain thousands of artists currently working below the poverty line. - Yahoo
"Analysts ... first mined Google Street View footage in cities around the world for images of hundreds of residential streets and some 2400 iconic buildings. Then, they calculated the proportions of all those edifices to find out how closely each adhered to the Golden Ratio." - Mental Floss
"A Yayoi Kusama pumpkin, Rashid Johnson mosaic, and a monumental Jeff Koons sculpture — in the likeness of an endangered marine mammal — are among the 40 new and commissioned public artworks to be installed throughout (the capital)." - ARTnews
The as-yet-untitled sculpture, to be placed near the library at King's College, is, like the one planned for Imperial College, London, made of stacked steel rectangles. But while the London statue looks like a LEGO man with an enormous erection, the Cambridge one appears entirely G-rated. - The Art Newspaper
While cases regarding repatriation may be complex, the authors say, “they often present rich opportunities for enhancing understanding for all involved” by allowing the full histories of certain objects to come to light. - ARTnet
“It may seem counterintuitive, but sometimes burying excavated ancient art and architecture is the best way to keep it safe from environmental and human threats,” writes Alexandria Sivak on the Getty Foundation’s website. - Smithsonian
The 20-foot-tall memorial, titled ALERT and planned for the South Kensington campus of Imperial College, London, is a stack of rectangular volumes intended by Gormley to represent a person squatting. Well, that's not what comes to mind for most folks when they see it. - ARTnews
Institutions in Ukraine hadn't been prepared to pack up and evacuate their collections, certainly not on a large scale. But (as Putin himself has made clear), this is a war on Ukraine's existence as a nation and culture, and the country's visual heritage is at severe risk. - The New York Times
