VISUAL

Once the drawing was identified as a da Vinci, the Culture Ministry put an export ban on it and offered to buy it for €10 million. The current owner has an independent valuation of €15 million. He won't sell for less; the government won't pay more. - Artnet

"The plaintiffs" — local residents and a powerful labor union — "accuse the authorities of 'grave negligence', which they say exposed city dwellers, particularly children and those working to restore the cathedral, to dangerous levels of toxic lead dust." - The Guardian

Alexandra Lange takes a look at the New York City congresswoman's "ability to get her message across visually, through graphic design, through fashion, and through social media." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)

Sending the picture abroad was unanimously opposed by the expert team, who believed travel puts the prized work at grave risk. - Los Angeles Times

It's not enough that he sold his own NFT for $69 million. The graphic artist and some even richer tech and entertainment types have launched WENEW, which sells NFT images of "iconic" athletes, artists, and such. The platform's motto: "The Memory Palace of the Metaverse." - Artnet

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston have repeatedly rejected the heirs’ claims for paintings that were sold at the same auctions. - The New York Times

Two years ago in Germany's well-known Unicorn Cave, archaeologists discovered a deer knuckle with diagonal lines deliberately carved in it, Carbon dating has shown that the bone is 51,000 years old — before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe. But is it actually art? - National Geographic

Museum directors brought home an average annual salary of $320,600, compared to $317,500 in 2019. Meanwhile,visitor services associates, who were most impacted by job cuts, earned less in 2020: an average of $31,600 (full-time) compared to $32,600 in 2019. - Hyperallergic

Once the necropolis for the Pharaohs' capital city of Memphis, Saqqara has lately been the most exciting and productive archaeological site in Egypt. Here's an in-depth look at the location's riches and how they were found. - Smithsonian Magazine

In custody is not a gang of thieves who planned a Hollywood-style heist, but a 49-year-old construction worker, with the Twitter name ArtFreak, who was arrested on Monday. - The New York Times

What I did not expect was how these installations would speak to one another, and to me, about the pandemic. - Artnet

In early June in Milan, conceptual artist Salvatore Garau auctioned off an "immaterial sculpture" for €15,000. Now performance artist Tom Miller points out that he (with a crew of workers!) installed a similar work, titled Nothing, in a Gainesville park in 2016. He and his attorney have written Garau to seek a settlement. - Artnet

Banksy added an asterisk and a tiny bit of corporate-speak to the painting’s bottom right-hand corner: “*Subject to availability for a limited period only.” - Seattle Times

UK museums can hardly try to buy multi-million-pound works of art when they are making large numbers of staff redundant as a result of Covid-19. - The Art Newspaper

Last June Barbara Anderson founded Art on the Ave, which creates free exhibits in New York City neighborhoods by using empty storefronts as gallery space. - Christian Science Monitor