“A statue of Mary Magdalene housed in the chapel of Saint Pilon in the Var, in southeast France, has been destroyed by vandals apparently unhappy with her lack of clothing. The perpetrators left a note at the scene saying they ‘did not accept that a great saint like Mary Magdalene [should] be represented in such a way’.” – The Art Newspaper

Historically, museums have used themed exhibitions, acquisitions schemes, or public programs to signal a shift, but otherwise they continue with business as usual. Real shifts must be seen from the sidewalk to the boardroom. There is an urgent and long-standing need for long-term commitments to diverse hiring and executive leadership, divestment from the police, accessibility, and a zero-tolerance policy for racism from staff or visitors. – Vanity Fair

There’s a lot going on right now. “Archivists, curators, and librarians nationwide are assembling the record of how the pandemic is impacting their communities in real time, collecting everything from makeshift masks to journal entries to protest signs. Their mandate is both urgent and sweeping.” – Wired

Even before the colorful public ballots of the early United States, actually, “people used the viva voce system, rooted in ancient Greece, where voters announced their candidate to a clerk. In some US colonies, voters would use objects, like corn and beans, to vote yea or nay; and in other states, people would line up on opposite sides of a road to signal how they were voting.” – Hyperallergic

Portland doesn’t exactly have the best history with its Black populations, including forced gentrification after decades of intense redlining. A 69-year-old artist says, “They tried to scoop us out of the city. … Now there are generations of Black artists working in Portland to create historical artifacts around our own existence to show that we have always been here.” – The New York Times

Thuy Van Vu’s empty classrooms feel eerily familiar right now, almost photographic. “The spaces she portrays are vast and full of potential, and also of a great, yawning absence. Where are the children? Their teachers? The chairs are piled awkwardly on top of the desks, everything pushed together, as if those who left were in a rush. There’s a sense that these desks and chairs have been lingering and might never be used again.” – Catapult

Police tear-gassed the gathering before the march began, killing L.A. Times columnist and KMEX news director Ruben Salazar (two others also died during the tear-gassing and shooting). “The Moratorium shifted creative paths for those who were present and those who heard about it on the news or from friends. It fueled an urgency to make visible the Chicano experience, one that had largely been left out of the history books — an urgency that remains resonant.” – Los Angeles Times

The current crisis raises the question of what exactly a museum is. Is it a collection of objects, or the staff that bring those objects to life and makes them accessible to the public? ‘We need to think about museums not only as repositories for things […],’ Nicole Cook, a member of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Union organising committee, writes via email, ‘but rather as vital centers for scholarship, education, and community, all core activities that revolve around people – and more pointedly, activities that rely on fully staffed museums.’ – Apollo

Art Basel organizers plan to present two new online viewing room initiatives in September and October, which they describe as “freestanding, thematic editions.” Unlike previous iterations of the Art Basel-branded viewing rooms, these will not be provided free of charge to exhibitors at the physical fairs. Instead, Art Basel will charge a flat fee of CHF 5,000 ($5,500) for each of the new editions. – Artnet

The $750-million building project is on schedule, with the completion planned for the end of 2023. The new Peter Zumthor-designed building has stirred controversy for its square footage as well as its cost. A symbolic groundbreaking will be set “when possible given the pandemic.” – Los Angeles Times

Well, as long as Jersey, 14 miles off the coast of France but 85 miles from England, counts as the British Isles. “The designs were scratched into small ornamental tablets known as plaquettes … [which] were made by the Magdalenians, a hunter-gatherer culture thought to have expanded out of Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal) and southern France after the peak of the last Ice Age.” – BBC

“The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in California has ruled that the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation in Madrid is the owner of Camille Pissarro’s 1897 painting Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie, which it purchased in 1993 from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. In 2005, the heirs to the work’s original owner, Lily Cassirer Neubauer, alleged in a complaint that the foundation knew upon acquiring it that the painting had been stolen by the Nazi regime in 1939.” – ARTnews

“Many of New York’s museum leaders have taken pay cuts to offset some of the financial damage their institutions are suffering from their Covid-related closures. But at a time when museums are facing their most severe financial downturn in decades, one that has led some to make painful cuts in staff, critics are questioning whether such reductions go far enough.” – The New York Times

“More than 100 staff members at the Tate galleries in England began an indefinite strike on Tuesday morning to protest the institution’s announcement that it would cut more than 300 jobs from its commercial arm, Tate Enterprises.” – Artnet

The artwork is entirely digital. It’s part of a new, citywide augmented reality art show called Amp’Up Seattle. By downloading a free app with the same name, anyone can access eight virtual artworks that appear layered over the existing cityscape — like Pokémon Go for art.  But you won’t be catching Pikachus or other fantasy critters. Instead, you’ll be viewing a different perspective of Seattle, one inspired by the recent protests for racial justice.  – Crosscut

A viral video has surfaced of a woman confronting Brazilian artist Romero Britto at a busy gallery and shattering one of his sculptures in front of him as he fumbles to retrieve the work. Shared last week with hashtags such as #moodflip and #karen—a pejorative term used in the US to describe a white woman who uses her privilege to demand her own way at the expense of others—the video has received nearly three million views. Yet some users called the act “well-deserved” and said that they “had no choice but to stan” but the woman. – The Art Newspaper

The market for Black artists’ work is hot right now, and some re-sellers are pocketing enormous profits — none of which are going to the actual creators of the now-high-value asset. So the curator of the Christie’s exhibition “Say It Loud (I’m Black and Proud)” and the house’s management, after consulting the artists, came up with a remedy. – Artnet

The murals were, as one versed in the history of white supremacist rhetoric in the U.S. might guess, created in the 1930s. In one, “Development of the Sciences by artist Albert C. Runquist, white researchers are on the top level, while Indigenous people are on the bottom, using basic stone tools.” Another refers to white people “preserving our racial heritage.” – KLCC (Oregon)

Sure, one might wonder why one of the United States’s greatest traitors has a statue in the United States Capitol Building, but that’s a long (racist) story. In any case, it’s time for the statue to leave. “The recommendation to move the Confederate general’s monument to the [Virginia Museum of History and Culture] was made unanimously by the Commission for Historical Statues in the United States Capitol during a meeting on August 7.” – Hyperallergic

Talk about your unprecedented times. Buckingham Palace needs a plumbing update, so the paintings, including Vermeer’s The Music Lesson and two Rembrandts, have to find a temporary home, and the Queen’s surveyor sounds thrilled about it: “In a way, we’re obliged to do it. … We’ve got to get them out of the picture gallery for the building work.” – The Guardian (UK)

During the height of the first wave of the coronavirus, it seemed this day would never come. Now, “it’s odd how the surreal can become de rigueur. At the Gardner I barely noticed the masks, the arrows on the floor, the laminated signs tacked virtually everywhere.” – The Boston Globe

Rebuilding Notre-Dame begins by recounting the history of the gothic cathedral with close-ups of its gargoyles, bells and sacristy alongside the rector Patrick Chauvet talking about his sense of vocation. This footage was made three months prior to the fire for a Targo documentary on Chauvet. The ensuing scenes include drone images of the cathedral’s blazing fire, of crowds of shocked onlookers and of firemen struggling to extinguish the flames, followed by interviews with Chauvet, General Jean-Louis Georgelin, who is charge of the cathedral’s reconstruction, and Paris’s mayor Anne Hidalgo. – The Art Newspaper

Given their prevalence in the great cathedrals of Europe, it is easy to imagine that pointed stone arches and soaring ribbed vaults are Christian in origin. But the former dates back to a seventh-century Islamic shrine in Jerusalem, while the latter began in a 10th-century mosque in Andalucia, Spain. In fact, that first known example of ribbed vaulting is still standing. – The Guardian

The multistory, ochre-and-white mud-brick houses in the UNESCO-listed old city of Sanaa had already been weakened by bombs and artillery during Yemen’s six-years-and-counting civil war. But this year’s monsoon season, the rainiest in recent memory, is seeing some of those buildings simply fall to pieces. – France24 (AFP)

“While a final agreement is still pending, the Iraqi government has reportedly consented to a $15 million settlement over 4,000 disputed antiquities in the Museum of the Bible’s collection, which have been handed over to Iraqi control based on the suspicion that they were looted. In exchange, the museum may retain the right to display some of the objects on loan.” – Artnet

The non-profit organisation High Line Art, which commissions public art projects on and around the elevated park in Chelsea, launched a platform of artist proposals this week, and says that comments from the public will be reviewed by its curatorial staff. The deciding vote, however, will ultimately be made by Cecilia Alemani, the director and chief curator of High Line Art, and her staff. – The Art Newspaper