Someone even asked, “Are we going to pretend nothing happened?” But no, not at the fair itself: “To gain admittance at the Shed at Hudson Yards, visitors had to fill out an online questionnaire and upload their proof of vaccination or negative Covid test results before receiving a QR code. There were no exceptions. Even Michael R. Bloomberg, whose name graces the building, got stuck outside until he provided the proper documentation.” – The New York Times

“A new online art project based on data from the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Liverpool Biennial attempts to imagine 64 different curatorial statements and artist lists for future exhibitions, all ‘curated’ by a robot. … Each alternate universe is characterized by art speak that straddles the line between highbrow and utter incomprehensibility and is based on data drawn from actual Whitney and Liverpool Biennials past.” – Artnet

To date there are no large-scale programs or comprehensive models for dealing with defaced or removed monuments. However, the museum and heritage sectors — two professions that are founded on the essential notion of preservation — have been challenged by calls, largely from outside of these fields, suggesting that museums take in damaged or fallen monuments. – Hyperallergic

“The choice of collectives reflects the fact that few artists have been able to publicly show anything over the past year. It prompted judges to focus on groups of artists whose collaborative work has demonstrably continued, not always in the confines of a gallery. The shortlist is Array Collective, Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S), Cooking Sections, Gentle/Radical, and Project Art Works.” – The Guardian

The Brutish Museums argues, persuasively, that the corporate-militaristic pillage behind Europe’s “encyclopedic” collections is not a simple matter of possession, but a systematic extension of warfare across time. – The Baffler

Far from being a dyed-in-the-wool slice of historic Caledonian kitsch, tartan design is very much alive and well in the 21st Century – as evidenced by the stream of new examples recorded each year at the Scottish Register of Tartans. And the range of inspirations is as diverse as the designs. – BBC

“Libeskind, who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, has experience responding to traumatic events through architecture. He also served as masterplan architect at New York’s World Trade Center site as the city looked to rebuild following 9/11.” – Artnet

According to a newly filed lawsuit, in 2016, U.S. Customs seized a fragment of an ancient Roman statue that it believed had been stolen from Italy and illegally sold. The seller was a Brussels gallery; the buyer, “Kim Kardashian dba Noel Roberts Trust.” – ARTnews

“There are now more galleries showing contemporary art than those devoted to the entire rest of art history, with sales at auction houses following the same trend: in the years since photography entered the art world, contemporary art has replaced impressionist and Old Masters painting as the most sought-after, collected, exhibited, and expensive segment of the market.” – American Scholar

Scattered across 77,000 square miles of desert in northwest Arabia, the mustatils (the name comes from the Arabic word for “rectangle”) were built between 8,500 and 4,800 years ago, during the period known as the Middle Holocene, according to a report published last week in the journal Antiquity. – Artnet

“[Christopher] Marinello is one of a handful of people who track down stolen masterpieces for a living. Operating in the grey area between wealthy collectors, private investigators, and high-value thieves, he has spent three decades going after lost works by the likes of Warhol, Picasso and Van Gogh.” – The Guardian

It reportedly used 25m yen ($228,500; £164,700) of the emergency funding to build the statue. Noto officials have told local media it is part of a long term plan to lure tourists back after the pandemic. – BBC

Not granite or bronze, these new monuments by Deborah Willis, Sadie Barnette, Ebony G. Patterson, Courtney Bowles and Mark Strandquist, and Black Quantum Futurism, consist of outdoor sculptures and photography, storefront activations and performances. – The New York Times

“[It was] a 600-square-foot gallery-cum-warehouse that Arthur Sackler had commandeered as his personal storage facility, a deal he wrangled by dangling the possibility of eventually gifting the trove to the museum. … The ‘enclave’ had all of the benefits of being in the museum, with climate control, security guards, and prime New York City real estate, as well as its own number. Sackler had the locks changed so that Met employees could not enter the room.” – Artnet

Yes, LA MOCA is having trouble again. “MOCA’s current trials have come just as the museum was hoping to emerge from a tumultuous history that has included two short-term directors, a raid on its endowment to pay the bills and a proposed merger with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” – The New York Times

Judy Baca’s 2,700-foot mural Great Wall shows the history of the city, from pre-historic California through the 1950s. But the 1950s were a long time ago – and now a grant means the mural can stretch to a mile, bringing it up to the 2020s. – Hyperallergic

The planned demolition of the Derby Assembly Rooms, product of a 1970 architectural competition and former host to big acts from The Clash to Elton John, has the city divided and architecture preservation societies infuriated. – The Observer (UK)

Milan Ingegneria, a structural engineering and architecture firm, has won an €18.5m (£16m) bid to build and install a retractable arena floor that will allow visitors “to see the majesty of the monument” from its centre, culture minister Dario Franceschini said on Sunday. – The Guardian

He was a friend and foe to museums, writes Christopher Knight. And Carolina Miranda writes, “Over the course of his life, he helped bring to fruition — in whole or in part — designs by an array of award-winning international design stars, including Richard Meier, Renzo Piano, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and, most famously, Frank Gehry. Or perhaps most infamously.” – Los Angeles Times

Which wife? Well, for centuries, everyone thought it was Catherine Howard (the second of the beheadeds in the old rhyme). Instead, thanks to Hans Holbein’s clue (and an art historian’s tenacity), we now think the portrait is of Anne of Cleves (the second of the divorced wives, or in this case, annulled). – The Observer (UK)

“‘We want to take over these institutions; they do not belong to the oligarchs,’ Amin Husain, one of the demonstration’s organizers, told a crowd of about 40 activists before marching from Columbus Circle to the museum.” The institution, and the NYPD, disagree. – The New York Times

The Lyon-based artist Em Emem (a pseudonym, of course) uses mosaics to fill in gaps in street infrastructure, but also to make them gorgeous. “‘I’m just a sidewalk poet, a son of bitumen,’ he says. His work involves filling potholes and cracked walls on city streets with beautiful mosaic designs, a process he calls ‘flacking’ – a play on the French word flaque, meaning puddle or patch.”- The Guardian (UK)

The theme park had recreated Burden’s collection of street lamps that he made for the front of the LA County Museum in Los Angeles. “The court has ordered Rabbit Town to take down its Love Light installation within 30 working days since the verdict.” – Coconuts

The Shchukin Gallery, which sells Russian art in Paris and New York, is suing a Russian oligarch for damages and attorney fees of $950 million — in what might or might not be the culmination of an unusually tangled legal battle over three paintings by Kazimir Malevich and two by Natalia Goncharova that were, as Shchukin’s attorney puts it, “hijacked” and are now in an “art hostage situation.” – The Art Newspaper

“After laying off 25% of its full-time staff, including those who had been there since opening day,” the only Western European satellite of the St. Petersburg institution “finally reached the bottom of its reserves last month. Because the Hermitage [Amsterdam] is a private institution ineligible for [Dutch] government aid, it is now calling for one million euros in donations by May 1. … Whether that will even be enough to survive the pandemic is difficult to say.” – Hyperallergic