Tlingit artist Alison Marks made it to answer the male gaze that permeates the contemporary Pacific Northwest market. She said, “Many of the male artists working today are kind and gifted and admirable people, but there are these very detailed anatomical works on the market representing the female form.”

The art show “includes 10 solar-powered signs installed in parks around the city. Each sign flashes climate-change-related phrases in English and in Spanish, Russian, French and other languages used in nearby neighborhoods.” The show – city-supported! – even gets environmental justice walking tours.

Said no one ever … except this woman in Spain, who gave Mary eyeliner and a bright pink headscarf, and who said, “I’m not a professional, but I always liked to do it, and the figures really needed to be painted. So I painted them as I could, with the colours that looked good to me, and the neighbours liked it.”

The writers of a letter say that Rencontres d’Arles Photography Festival director Sam Stourdzé has to take real action. This year’s numbers are damning: 12 men and three women, but that’s not all: “Throughout the world female artists who have been trained in the best art schools constitute more than 60% of the graduates. Yet, they receive less support, pay, and rewards, and represent barely 20% of the artists exhibited in France.”

Writer Achy Obejas has some thoughts: “Ana Mendieta is the president of Coca-Cola and a double-agent. She invented the sitcom, the telephone, birthed Amazon, came over with 14,000 kids and got deported with 2,021 others, mostly murderers. Ana Mendieta fears that if she weren’t an artist, she’d be devoted to a life of crime.”

Ex-employees of a Philadelphia museum have been questioned in the theft of thousands of living insects and lizards, and investigators appear close to wrapping up the case, a police spokesman told The Daily Beast.

“Lavinia Fontana [was] a Mannerist widely considered to be the first professional female artist, and Sofonisba Anguissola [was] an Italian noblewoman who served as King Philip II of Spain’s court painter.” Both women were praised by the likes of Michelangelo, van Dyck, and Vasari, and Fontana was blessed with an extraordinary husband who — in the 1580s, mind you — put her career ahead of his own.

“A month before the much anticipated unveiling of the revamped Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Md., a contracting firm that oversaw the ambitious expansion there has sued the foundation that runs the institution … [for] breach of contract and mismanagement, adding that a ‘torrent of changes’ the foundation had demanded repeatedly disrupted and delayed work” — work which the contract claims it still hasn’t been paid for.

“One of the challenges of designing systems for buildings like the [now-destroyed National] Museum of Brazil is balancing the fear of fire itself with the damage that typical fire suppression systems like sprinklers can inflict on precious artifacts. But according to the experts I spoke with,” writes Rachelle Hampton, “that balance can really only be considered post-mortem.”

The Washington couple has decided to donate its Duchamp art to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where the works will raise the profile of the Smithsonian modern art museum. “This is the art world equivalent of the Wizards getting LeBron James,” said Hirshhorn board chairman Daniel Sallick. “Any museum in the world would want this collection.”

“Timed to the 50th anniversary of Duchamp’s death, the gift [from Aaron and Barbara Levine] includes 35 works by Duchamp as well as 15 portraits and related photographs and works on paper by his contemporaries Tristan Tzara, Man Ray and others.” Says the Hirshhorn’s board chair, “This is the art-world equivalent of the Wizards getting LeBron James.”

“The warehouse-like buildings of Redrock Stockport beat five other shortlisted candidates to win the Carbuncle Cup, awarded by Building Design to what its readers deem to be the biggest architectural eyesore of the past year. Judges were left unimpressed by the ‘awkward form, disjointed massing and superficial decoration’, while readers called it an ‘absolute monstrosity’.”

Visitors began lining up before 8 a.m. on the last day of the holiday weekend, which was the first of the museum’s September Walk-up Weekdays. Several hundred were waiting when the doors to the Smithsonian’s newest venue opened at 10 a.m.

Nate Heller surveys the, er, concept – from Marcel Duchamp right up to Tino Sehgal’s no-paper-trail-whatsoever performance pieces and Darren Bader’s “lasagna on heroin” (a hunk of lasagna injected with heroin) – and considers such issues with conceptual art as insuring it (tricky) and storage (doesn’t need much).

“[Paleontologist Paulo] Buckup, who has worked at the National Museum since 1996, led the group’s harrowing entry into the museum. ‘There were constant collapses while we were inside. There were falling objects and lots of smoke. In one area we realized there was a real risk of the ceiling collapsing, we could not assess when the third floor would fall.'”

This, then, is a familiar distinction, the contrast between scrutiny of art’s social background and the connoisseur’s concern with artworks’ visual qualities. In principle, perhaps these two approaches are complimentary. But in practice, they seem to come into conflict.

The world’s most expensive artwork, which was purchased for the Louvre’s UAE franchisee last fall at a price of $450 million, had been scheduled to go on view there on September 18. Now the Abu Dhabi government has called the occasion off, with no explanation and no new date yet given.

“Founded in 1818 [in Rio de Janeiro], the museum is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution and one of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin America, amassing a collection of some 20 million scientifically and culturally invaluable artifacts.” Says one Brazilian scientist, “The importance of the collections that were lost couldn’t be overstated. They were unique as it gets: Many of them were irreplaceable, there’s no way to put a monetary value on it.”

Firefighters and museum staffers were able to remove some items from the burning building in Rio, so it will take time for the scale of the destruction to become clear, but here is an overview of what the museum contained, including an 11,500-year-old skeleton, coffins from ancient Egypt, frescoes from Pompeii, pre-Columbian and indigenous art and artifacts, and a major fossil collection.

“Rows of pigments in tubes, jars, and bowls are visible through the doors of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. … There are the products of nineteenth-century chemical innovation — viridian green, cadmium orange, and the chrome yellow with which van Gogh was infatuated but which, over time, has begun to darken his sunflowers. But at the heart of the Forbes Collection are the natural pigments that were the staples of painters’ inventories before chemically synthesized paints replaced the impossibly esoteric, the dangerously toxic, the prohibitively expensive, and the perilously fugitive.”

When Glenstone opens its new facility to the public next month in Potomac, Md., the art museum will do so at a moment when something new is stirring in the art world: a powerful sense that too many museums have become a victim of their own success, and a new paradigm for experiencing art is desperately needed.

With interest in what is now the world’s most expensive artwork continuing as it goes on view in Abu Dhabi, a recently spotted reference in historical documents may change the story of how the painting came into the collection of King Charles I of England. It seems as if His Majesty may have confiscated Salvator Mundi from one of his subjects.

“Scholars and digital experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London have posted online the contents of two notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci, enabling devotees of the Renaissance polymath to zoom in and examine his revolutionary ideas and concepts.”

In the series of quakes that shook the island of Lombok earlier this month, the concrete homes that have become the modern standard “became death traps” – they fell to pieces because they had no flex to move with the earth when it shook. The few remaining old-style houses, with thatched bamboo walls and woven-reed roofs, are the ones that survived with little or no damage.

With Earl Powell’s 26-year tenure coming to an end, the museum has the opportunity to revitalize its programs and modernize its operation, according to interviews with 22 current and former employees and industry experts. The selection of its next leader — expected to be made next month — could determine whether it continues to hew to the past or emerges at the forefront of a quickly evolving museum industry.

“The search for the next director of the National Gallery of Art has revealed deep divisions within the federally funded institution, a palace of high art that is dogged by old-fashioned ideas about museum operations and staff claims of widespread mismanagement. … With [Rusty] Powell’s 26-year tenure coming to an end, the museum has the opportunity to revitalize its programs and modernize its operation, according to interviews with 22 current and former employees and industry experts.”

Artist Sean Matthews opened his show “Recycled Play” at the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pa. on August 17; the installation’s centerpiece was “Fair and Square,” a repurposed swing set with the chains rewelded so that the seats were extended and suspended like the Scales of Justice. Alas, two of the exhibit’s first visitors evidently looked at “Fair and Square” and saw a swing set.

“At a time of mounting protests over sponsorship by fossil fuel companies, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum and the Mauritshuis in The Hague both terminated arrangements with the country’s largest oil and gas firm this summer.”