Category: visual

“Christie’s auction house has agreed to pay $16.7 million to the Manhattan District Attorney for failing to properly collect New York sales tax between 2013 and 2017. The bombshell settlement, which follows a lengthy investigation into the company, was announced by the DA’s office today.” – Artnet

The team, led by archeologist Pieter van Dalen, were caught digging at the Macatón cemetery in the town of Huaral during the state of emergency on Sunday, April 4. The group from the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos were taken into custody for breaching Peru’s strict lockdown measures, despite their claim that they were simply securing the national heritage that was left exposed at the site as agreed with the ministry of culture. – Artnet

“No matter how much people enjoy looking at it, blue is a difficult color to harness from nature. … Plants seldom produce blue hues. When they do, their pigments rarely remain stable after extraction.” (There’s indigo, of course, but any friction on the fabric causes it to fade.) Molecular chemist Erick Leite Bastos writes about how he and colleagues found a way to derive the pigment he named BeetBlue from the red root vegetable. – The Conversation

Several drawings appear to depict a bulkier shoulder and more vertical arm—a more structurally sound arrangement. But one of these sketches (below) was marked up by an unidentified hand with red ink that tilts the arm outward. – Smithsonian Magazine

Two pots of hot tar took flame at an entrance to the old palace that’s being rebuilt to house the ethnographic collections of Berlin’s various museums. The incident sent black smoke through the city, but actual damage was limited to discoloring of the building’s façade. The $700 million project has been bedeviled by schedule and cost overruns as well as controversy over the contents of its collection, which includes a number of the Benin Bronzes. – Artnet

The work that began Monday focused on the museum’s 1965 Leo S. Bing Center, a 600-seat theater designed by architect William L. Pereira that has been used for film screenings, musical performances, talks and other events. Interior demolition of three other buildings — Pereira’s 1960 Hammer and Ahmanson buildings as well as Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates’ 1980s Art of the Americas building — is underway as well. – Los Angeles Times

At the Perth Museum and Art Gallery in Scotland, conservators working to preserve the remains of an ancient priestess or noblewoman named Ta-Kr-Hb opened her sarcophagus and found two paintings of a goddess in a red dress called Amentet. – Smithsonian Magazine

Plywood started going up about two weeks ago after vandals began smashing windows of closed businesses. That led to more plywood from store owners who feared they might be next. Things were starting to look bleak all over town. Already artists are out and about, painting  murals to combat the growing blight as the novel coronavirus pandemic forces continued closures of local businesses and restaurants. – Seattle Times

“The huge growth of the art market at its top end is surely, as Michael Shnayerson suggests, a function of the spiralling number of billionaires and increasing disparities of wealth. He also points out that successful artists are a very select few: the huge majority make at best only a few thousand dollars a year from their art. The question remains: how good is all this extremely expensive stuff?” – Times Literary Supplement

Recent thefts of van Gogh and van Dyck paintings indicate that the answer is no. “Alarm systems and uniformed guards are still in place, of course, and the sale of museum-famous stolen art has never been easy. But … cavernous floors are now largely empty throughout the day, not just at night. Police departments in many places are stretched thin by illness. Social distancing has meant that the many people who might once have witnessed a burglary are now tucked in at home.” – The New York Times