"It took all of six minutes for Massimo Pulini to realise that the small oil painting due to go under the hammer in Madrid earlier this month with a guide price of €1,500 ($1,800) could be worth millions. … Within two weeks, Spain's culture ministry to impose an export ban. The painting was pulled from auction. Pulini, a...
For their study, the researches utilized artificial intelligence technology to examine the writing on the scrolls, comparing the look of certain letters and analyzing patterns that appear in the ink. The study did not offer details on the identities of the two possible authors of these texts. - ARTnews
From reducing waste and maximising urban greenery to collaboration and lobbying for change, solutions to reduce pressure on the planet are now taking centre stage. - Dezeen
It seems that, in many places, a multitude of vermin took advantage of the lack of traffic in museums during the pandemic to stage an invasion and, potentially, a delicious banquet. (Mmmm, priceless historic textiles!) A sharp-eyed conservator at the Getty in L.A. noticed an increase in noxious lepidopterae last April, early on — and so began the museum's...
Jerry Saltz and Kenny Schachter team up to "test" the NFT market. "To be clear, NFTism doesn’t necessarily disrupt anything but rather presents a market alternative to the traditional gallery system. In the process, it ushered in a unexpected audience of crypto collectors, empowered a whole new generation of artists with easy access to that audience, and instilled the...
The paint, developed at Purdue University's mechanical engineering department, reflects 98.1 percent of the sun's rays, while the strongest heat-resistant white paints currently on the market reflect 80 to 90 percent. The new pigment's superpower is that, by absorbing so little infrared heat, it actually cools the material it's covering below the ambient temperature. (So far, tests show 8...
"The study centred on four paintings inspired by the Ballets Russes, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev's itinerant dance troupe, which Picasso produced in no more than a few months while working at a friend's studio in Barcelona in 1917." - The Art Newspaper
For 45 years, the light sculptor has been designing and building a complex inside Roden Crater, a volcanic cinder cone about 50 miles northeast of Flagstaff. In his 70s (he turns 78 this year), he had begun to think there was no hope of living to complete his ambitious plans. Then $10 million in seed money arrived from (of...
"The entire board of Museums Aotearoa has abruptly quit after concerns about its governance and management. The organisation’s remaining executive director, Phillipa Tocker, is refusing to comment on the situation, despite being implicated in a report that the board resigned over 'fundamental disagreements' with her." - Stuff (New Zealand)
For centuries, great architecture involved innovation and invention within the context of established, tried-and-true styles, materials and techniques — and the result was buildings that were inspiring and durable. Then, argues scholar and critic Witold Rybczynski, came the 20th century, Le Corbusier and all that followed: the architecture profession became so insistent on invention and originality that, all too...
One of the departing execs, the director of human resources, left over conflict with his boss, the deputy director, and alleged retaliation which he said constituted a "hostile environment." The other was senior curator Mia Locks, who joined the museum in 2019 in part to oversee its new IDEA Initiative (for inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility); in her resignation...
Well, it's obvious, right? The New York governor "is currently resisting calls to resign over allegations of sexual harassment. So what better way to prove that he is definitely not a phallocratic bully than to 'ram through,' as one outlet puts it, a super-tall tower called Penn 15, and a vast development around it?" - The Observer (UK)
In 2020, after the death of George Floyd at the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin, "a team of researchers from the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis launched the George Floyd and Anti-Racist Street Art database to record and map anti-racist street art in the wake of Floyd’s murder. Crowdsourced through an online submission form, the database now includes more than...
Artist Kenneth Tam started to keep a spreadsheet as microaggressions arose at the beginning of the pandemic. Then the micro became far too macro. "The rise of racist attacks, some of them horrifyingly lethal, has galvanized Asian-American artists around the country. They are leveraging social media to raise awareness, gathering to protest despite the pandemic precautions, making new work, and...
A rock wall, and a water feature as well, to be precise. "This is a debate in which everyone is a little right, and a little wrong, and this kind of argument can take a deceptively large toll on collective goodwill. The Cultural Landscape Foundation is an enormously valuable group when it comes to educating the public about mid-century...