“This time, the victim was a historic plaster model by the Italian artist Antonio Canova (1757–1822). On July 31, a misguided Austrian tourist snapped the toes off the Neoclassical sculpture Pauline Bonaparte as Venus Victrix, housed at [the town of] Possagno’s Museo Antonio Canova in northeast Italy, while attempting to sit on its lap for a photo.” – Artnet

As the Civil War raged, Kentucky was officially neutral – but it was a slave state. Freedom lay just across the river in Indiana, says poet Hannah Drake, whose nonprofit is preparing to install a kind of monument to those who dreamt of escape. “The memorial will start as a path of cast or carved footprints. That will lead people from nearby history museums to the river, where there will be limestone benches. Then there will be more footprints leading to the river’s edge.” – NPR

The planned reopening date is September 9, but of course not if infections start to crest again in New York. And, of course, “when it reopens, it will limit capacity to 25% and reduce its operating days to five instead of seven.” Then there’s the little matter of paying what the museum wishes, not what you wish. – Hyperallergic

There are the familiar objects that suddenly seem to glow with importance – toilet paper rolls, Lysol wipes – and then there are the new objects: the to-go cocktail pouch, the ultra-large Burger King social distance crown, the virus piñata to hit and kill, and, of course, Black Lives Matter facemasks. – The New York Times

Born in Calais, France, Fabrice Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. – Washington Post

Jason Farago: “Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place at all. Yet all around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis.” – The New York Times

Kitsch is a conflicted term—hard to strictly define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s joke about pornography, one knows it when one sees it. For the purchasers of kitsch in nineteenth-century Munich, reproductions of elaborate and intricate decoration were a means of class ascension. But they also signaled a type of bourgeoisie cluelessness concerning taste, discretion, and style. – JSTOR

David Nash at the University of Brighton in the UK and his colleagues have identified the source of 50 of the 52 large boulders, known as sarsens, that make up the monument’s iconic stone circle. By analysing the stones’ chemical composition, the team has traced their origins to 25 kilometres away from the monument, in the West Woods in Wiltshire. – New Scientist

“The removal of a pair of concrete murals by Pablo Picasso was completed Tuesday from a government building in the Norwegian capital of Oslo whose demolition was under way.” (That building, called the Y block, was damaged in the 2011 bombing-and-murder spree by right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.) “The total cost of the removal of the art pieces — to be preserved and installed elsewhere — and the demolition is estimated at 59 million kroner ($6.4 million).” – Yahoo! (AP)

The MOCAD board brought in outside counsel to investigate the allegations against Elysia Borowy-Reeder, who became director in 2013. In a release announcing her termination, the board said the investigation found that Borowy-Reeder’s “leadership fell short of its goals for diversity, inclusivity, and a healthy work environment.” – ARTnews

“As protesters have remade this avenue, forcing the removal of memorials to men who betrayed their country, covering the remaining plinths with graffiti and activating the street day and night with new forms of protest and community, they also have underscored deep connections between urban planning and old ideologies of whiteness, greatness and cultural ambition. They have made problematic the idea of the City Beautiful, a powerful late 19th-century American contribution to the annals of urban design.” – Washington Post

The study, conducted by outside consultants at the board’s request after two major scandals broke earlier this year, “found problems and deficiencies at all levels of the hierarchy — from the boardroom on down, museum leaders told staff members at an online meeting Tuesday.” At least, said one staffer, “I was encouraged by how honest [the presentation] felt.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

Joseph del Pesco, International Director of KADIST: “Sales of art in the US reached $29.9 billion in 2018 … Imagine if just 2 percent of that $29.9 billion did some good. That’s 600 million dollars reaching charitable organizations, about four times the yearly budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Now imagine if that $600 million was controlled by non-profits run by artists …” – Artnet

“A new report [by the RAND Corporation] claims that … the true size of the market in illicit antiquities may be ‘much smaller’ than is regularly reported. Perhaps more controversially, the report claims that ‘fuelling this disconnect between reported looting and assumed markets for these goods is the problem that bloggers, journalists and advocacy groups, although often producing high-quality research, are rewarded for sensational headlines and claims that bring attention to their issues and readers to their pages or sites’.” – The Art Newspaper

“I think that’s an exciting direction for public art to take, for people to feel a sense of authority and ownership over their shared space and what it should look like. We have a city full of blank walls, of boring, drab streets, of spaces where we could have more public conversations. We have a city full of brilliant artists who want to contribute to those conversations, and a city full of activists who have messages to share, so this is a really exciting moment during which people are taking to the streets and just making art.” – SpacingToronto

If you’re Los Angeles artist Michael Gittes, you paint 1800 small pieces of work, one for each worker, and deliver them to Brooklyn. The artist: “I decided to paint flowers because even though these people are all part of a big beautiful garden, I wanted them to know they were all individual flowers, and without them, there would be no garden. I wanted it to have a ‘secret admirer’ kind of vibe.” – Washington Post

The volunteer’s lawyer: “He bitterly regrets his actions … My client is consumed with remorse,” after admitting he set three small fires that destroyed the organ and stained glass dating back to the 16th century.. – The Guardian (AFP)

The school said in March that it was likely to close, but after more than $4 million in donations, the 149-year-old institution says it can open in the fall for one more full year. But it will need to raise money, specifically from the sale of art by faculty and alumni, to keep afloat after years of declining enrollment. – Hyperallergic

Some images of New York’s abandoned schools: The final, haunting date on the calendar that says “Today is … “; lessons still up about the coronavirus on science classroom whiteboards; all of the school’s plants consolidated into one room, with a couple of turtles, for ease of care. – The New York Times

Rapid development in India is threatening knowledge of how humanity came to be. Sites are crumbling into rivers, being turned into rice fields, and being destroyed for buildings. “With sites holding the evidence of India’s past rapidly disappearing, reearchers worry about whether complex questions about humankind’s distant past can be answered.” – Wired

You can take one of two paths through the 20-year-old museum as it reopens, and nothing is comforting – not that that’s new. “Tate Modern has never been a relaxing place to visit. But we’ve never needed its clear eye for the restless more than we do now, as we learn the true meaning of modern times.” – The Guardian (UK)

Historically, the purpose of monuments, says Ken Lum of Monument Lab in Philadelphia, “has been to activate or even sustain a certain narrative of memory which people of influence have deemed worthy or important to maintain. They are mnemonic devices.” And, traditionally, they’ve usually been large sculptures of men. (If they were of women, those women were usually fictional or allegorical figures rather than actual people.) But that has changed over the past few decades, with the standard-bearer being Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Now that a whole slew of old-style monuments is being removed, Carolina Miranda looks at what might be replacing them. – Los Angeles Times

Online, that is. “Every day at sunset, Artist — an anonymous conceptualist who legally changed their name to question the biases built into the phrase ‘American Artist’ — will replace every image of an artwork on the Whitney Museum’s website with a picture of plywood, effectively boarding up the pages. The site’s unassuming white background will be turned black, obscuring all text in the process. Titled Looted, the work calls into question what is being stolen and through what means.” – Artnet

The workers — public-facing staffers who watched over galleries and answered questions about art — had announced plans to unionize with AFSCME in early November over concerns related to wages and working conditions. Days later, they were all laid off via email. The Marciano also announced it would shut down its galleries due to low attendance. A month later, the museum made the closure permanent. – Los Angeles Times

Her departure has unleashed a tempest in the art circles of Canada, where the Montreal museum is viewed as something of a national treasure; the debate over why Nathalie Bondil was let go has led to such confusion and rancor that the government has stepped in to investigate. – The New York Times

So far, at least, this isn’t as bad as many people had feared. A presidential spokesman, talking about plans to turn the historic Istanbul monument back into a mosque, said that Christian images that Muslim worshipers would face during prayers (i.e., toward Mecca) would be hidden at those times and uncovered when Hagia Sophia is open to visitors. He added that mosaics and paintings in other parts of the building would pose no problem. – Artnet

Now that the matter of a contemporary spire or roof for the medieval landmark has been settled, here’s an update on removing the (partially melted) scaffolding around the outside of the cathedral (a delicate and difficult process), clearing out the debris inside, restoring the vaults and gables and rebuilding the roof. – The Art Newspaper