Category: visual

“The Ajanta Caves, 30 spellbinding Buddhist prayer halls and monasteries carved, as if by sorcery, into a horseshoe-shaped rock face in a mountainous region of India’s Maharashtra state, … were ‘discovered’ by accident in 1819 … [after being] abandoned by those who created it as long ago as AD 500.”

“The con artists realized they had been tricked when they tried to deposit 1.7 million Swiss francs (€1.5 million) in a Geneva bank and were told that the banknotes were mere photocopies.”

“One of the central victims of the clash was the Berninis’ Fontana della Barcaccia, a fountain of a half-sunken ship that sits at the foot of the famous steps in piazza di Spagna. In addition to being left looking like it had a hangover, filled with beer bottles, balloons, and trash, at least 100 scratches were made to the travertine sculpture, damage that one Italian official called ‘permanent and irreparable’.”

“Anticipating that [Hermann] Nitsch’s disturbing oeuvre might upset Mexicans already alarmed by the bloodshed ravaging their country, the Museo Jumex … abruptly canceled an exhibition that was scheduled to open this week. The pre-emptive decision by the Jumex Foundation, which runs the museum, has been denounced by collectors, curators and art critics as an embarrassing act of censorship by a group striving to establish itself in the international art circuit.”

“Federal law enforcement authorities in New York announced Tuesday that they had returned to Italy two pieces of that country’s cultural heritage stolen decades ago before being brought to the United States: a painting attributed to the 18th-century artist Giambattista Tiepolo and an ancient Etruscan bronze statuette of Herakles.”

“Two claimants to a collection of medieval Christian treasure filed a suit in the U.S. District Court in Washington on Monday against the German government and the government-controlled museum that owns the artifacts.”

“A good comic can take something mundane and familiar and make you see it an unexpected way, whether it’s Dave Chappelle talking about ‘grape drink’, or Louis CK ranting about his four-year-old daughter. Magritte will do the same by sticking a silk mask on an apple. Or having a cloud enter a room by a door.”

“The gift all but closes the book on a collection that was started in the mid-1800s by Baron Nathaniel von Rothschild and his brother, Albert, and became entwined with 20th-century history.”

“With the recent loosening of US restrictions on trade with Cuba, prisoner exchanges and the promise of warmer relations to come, the two countries are closer than they have been for 50 years. But for those Cuban exiles in the US whose art was seized by the Cuban authorities in the 1960s, restitution of their property is still no closer. Cuba continues to reject the charge that the art in question was stolen, and has no mechanism for its return.”

“Great French artists fed Picasso’s changing styles, while the city itself – with its sleaze and bohemianism – inspired his imagination.”