Recourses

What role does art play in protest?

While some artists may intentionally create works that respond to political circumstances, others may do so by default. Protesting policy, war, or social norms, artists challenge the status quo and give voice to a movement. An artist and activist, LaToya Ruby Frazier, employs and upends documentary traditions as a means to disrupt media stereotypes. Interrogating how…

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Art historians try to identify enslaved Black child in an 18th-century portrait

The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) took a major step toward interrogating a controversial 18th-century group portrait in its collection centering on an early benefactor to the university, Elihu Yale. Responding to criticism of the painting’s subject from students and others, the YCBA removed the work from a gallery wall and replaced it with…

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Major museum casts fresh doubt over the authenticity of $450M ‘Salvator Mundi’

The “Salvator Mundi,” which sold for $450 million at Christie’s auction house as a fully authenticated Leonardo da Vinci, has been downgraded by curators at the Prado national museum in Madrid, Spain. It was bought in November 2017 by the Saudi culture minister, Prince Badr bin Abdullah, apparently for the Louvre Abu Dhabi. The downgrading…

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Virtual Museums Challenge the Art World’s Status Quo

Stuart Semple still remembers the first time art knocked him on his ass. It was the late 1980s and 8-year old Semple was at the National Gallery in London, face to face with Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers. “The painting leapt off the wall; it was like it was hovering. It totally overloaded my system. My…

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Can AI Truly Give Us a Glimpse of Lost Masterpieces?

Recent projects used machine learning to resurrect paintings by Klimt and Rembrandt. They raise questions about what computers can understand about art.   In 1945, fire claimed three of Gustav Klimt’s most controversial paintings. Commissioned in 1894 for the University of Vienna, “the Faculty Paintings”—as they became known—were unlike any of the Austrian symbolist’s previous…

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National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC plans to return looted Benin cockerel to Nigeria

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, plans to return a brass cockerel looted in 1897 by British troops from the royal palace in Benin to Nigeria, and is in contact with the relevant authorities there, a spokeswoman says. The cockerel, the only work in the collection to have been plundered in the sacking…

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David Adjaye plans slavery museum in Barbados as new republic severs ties with Britain

Complex that will include a research institute for the Barbados Archives—a 400-year-old documentation of the British transatlantic slave trade The architect David Adjaye is to design a major new heritage site in Barbados, the country’s prime minister announced this weekend. The new site on the Caribbean island will lie next to a burial ground where…

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Follow the money: Christie’s bets on Hong Kong with vast new headquarters as clients in Asia spend over $1bn so far this year

Kong headquarters in 2024 where it will launch year-round auctions. The move, to the Zaha Hadid-designed luxury tower The Henderson, comes as Asian spending topped $1bn in the first half of 2021, accounting for a record 39% of all sales. Though the shift to Asia was in evidence long before the pandemic, buying in the region has certainly accelerated over the past year, with Asian buyers tripling versus the first half of 2020.

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