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Said Monica Hanna, dean of Egypt’s Arab Academy for Science and Technology, addressing the argument that "Western museums" offer better security.

Quoted in "Now give us back Rosetta Stone and other treasures, Egyptians demand/Campaigners say the Grand Egyptian Museum opening strengthens the country’s moves to have ancient looted artefacts returned" (London Times).

 Said George Clooney, making some funny faces, about the Louvre heist.

Imagine a theft so big that you drop a thing like this in the getaway:

"This is the question raised with appropriate hippie optimism in 'Sixties Surreal,' an ambitiously revisionist exhibition opening on Sept. 24 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. It brings together about 150 works by 111 painters, sculptors, photographers, collagists, cartoonists, junk assemblage-ists, and at least one Kabballah-ist, most of whom were pushed to the sidelines of the ’60s art scene for various unkind reasons...."
"Of the 111 artists in the show, 47 are women... On a recent afternoon, I visited the studio of Martha Edelheit, a little-known, twice-widowed Manhattanite, now 94, who is about to make her Whitney debut.... She was part of a generation of proto-feminists who painted explicit nudes. In 1965, she recalled, she had a show at the Byron Gallery in Manhattan. The New York Times critic John Canaday came in to look, only to politely explain to the gallery owner that he couldn’t review 'that obscene woman.' Stretching 16 feet wide, across three panels, ['Flesh Wall With Table' (1965)']... embeds a group of female nudes in the space surrounding her drawing table. Languid bodies sprawl from edge to edge of the canvas, snoozing comfortably, their flesh graced with a rainbow of color that progresses from delicate ivories and pinks to dense ceruleans and purples."

"... on Thursday, one week after announcing that eight of the institution’s museums must submit their current wall text and future exhibition plans for a comprehensive review. The list borrows heavily from a recent article in The Federalist that objected to portrayals at several museums. It argued that the National Museum of American History promoted homosexuality by hanging a pride flag; overemphasized Benjamin Franklin’s relationship to slavery in its programming; and supported open borders by depicting migrants watching fireworks 'through an opening in the U.S.-Mexico border wall.'...:

I'm reading "White House Lists Smithsonian Exhibits It Finds Objectionable/The Trump administration highlighted material dealing with topics like sexuality, slavery and immigration" (NYT).

"Dominated by a giant, futuristic, silver staircase at its centre — to symbolise movement — the Fenix museum is in the eye of a political storm and a populist backlash against mass immigration in Europe and across the Atlantic in the US. The museum is housed in what was once the world’s biggest warehouse next to the port’s famous 'Holland-Amerika' pier, where millions of European migrants left Europe for America in the 19th and 20th centuries.... 'These docks witness the departures of millions, including among them iconic figures like Albert Einstein, the actor Johnny Weissmuller and artists Willem de Kooning and Max Beckmann — and welcomed just as many arrivals, shaping the vibrant, multicultural city that is Rotterdam today,' [said Anne Kremers, the museum’s director]."

From "Tornado-shaped museum invites political storm with art of migration/As Geert Wilders’ government clamps down on immigration, the Fenix museum in Rotterdam aims to show that the movement of people ‘has always been there’" (London Times).

"Great — if the administration is going to embrace stupid, it might as well go all the way. Just another incompetent boob doing a job they aren’t qualified for and they’ve no business doing. There are some parts of American history I don’t like — that doesn’t mean I get to pretend they didn’t happen or demand they be stricken from museums and textbooks. It’s how most of us learn. And if we actually learn the lessons our ancestors taught us, we don’t do those things again. Unless you are a Republican — then you embrace the wrongs of the past. And btw — art can make people feel uncomfortable sometimes — it’s supposed to evoke feeling!"

A comment, over at The Washington Post, on an article titled "She told Trump the Smithsonian needs changing. He’s ordered her to do it. Who is Lindsey Halligan, the attorney assigned to help remove 'improper ideology' from a major cultural institution?" (free-access link).

"When we interrogate systems of power and challenge historical narratives that center whiteness and colonial dominance, we do not divide, we restore balance."

Said Nicholas Galanin, a sculptor of "Indigenous heritage" who produced a work called "The Imaginary Indian (Totem Pole)" ("a wooden totem disappearing into floral wallpaper" (image here)).

From "Taking Aim at Smithsonian, Trump Wades Into Race and Biology/His executive order faulted an exhibit which 'promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct,' a widely held position in the scientific community'" (NYT).

Read the text of his "Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Restores Truth and Sanity to American History."  Excerpts:

"More than a decade ago, foundations for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, got out of the authentication business altogether. Keeping fakes from circulating is an important task but led to lawsuits that threatened their broader work."

From "Van Gogh or Faux? Weeding Out Fakes Is Starting to Take a Toll. Attributing a work to the artist generally requires authentication by the Van Gogh Museum, but lawsuits and an influx of requests have made it reassess that role" (NYT).

I watched it 10 times and felt quite mesmerized:

Defund NPR. It should survive on its own.

pic.twitter.com/dtm5qbbxix

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2025

"But the truth of the matter is, America’s history is too big for one building. I really think that what we did with the African American museum—which has become one of the most diversely visited museums in the world—is the right model. This is a two-sided coin. One side is about a community, about identity. But the other side is 'How does that identity shape all of us?'"

Said Lonnie G. Bunch III, quoted in "How Lonnie G. Bunch III Is Renovating the 'Nation’s Attic'/The Smithsonian’s dynamic leader is dredging up slave ships, fending off culture warriors in Congress, and building two new museums on the National Mall" (The New Yorker).

"These seem to have been generated from a dutiful checklist of issues that includes Indigenous rights, race, abortion, disabilities, ecological destruction, gentrification and gender fluidity. The issues are important.... But their articulation in the work is, in most cases, feeble, perfunctory and completely illegible without the accompaniment of convoluted, brain-draining texts. Some of these veer into self-parody. Carolyn Lazard’s medicine cabinets filled with Vaseline, we’re told, are the products of an 'artistic practice [that] traces everyday encounters of Blackness, disability, and opacity, focusing on the daily acts of maintenance we hold in common, in and against the privatization of life itself.'..."

Writes Sebastian Smee, in "A superb Whitney Biennial, marred by flimsy politics/The 81st edition of this closely watched survey of contemporary art is the best in a decade" (WaPo)(free access link).

"... and is separated from the rest of the museum with opulent green curtains. A staff member is posted outside to prevent the entry of any visitor who does not identify as a woman, and guests can indulge in a $325 high tea service featuring fancy finger food.... The American artist behind the lounge, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to the private museum’s owner, told the tribunal that the practice of requiring women to drink in ladies lounges rather than public bars only ended in parts of Australia in 1970 and that in practice, exclusion of women in public spaces continues.... But she said she 'got a rise' out of the discrimination complaint and was 'pretty excited' when she learned it had been filed over her work. 'It carries it out of the museum and into the real world.'... Kaechele attended the tribunal Tuesday flanked by 25 female supporters dressed in pointedly court-appropriate attire — think pearls, suits and stockings...."

From "She made an artwork that excluded men. A man sued for discrimination" (WaPo).

"In another... he released dozens of leopards and lions among his guests once they had finished eating. On one occasion, he let poisonous snakes loose among the crowds at the gladiatorial games, causing widespread death and injury.... Elagabalus was also known to dress entirely in precious silks and draped himself with gems.... Elagabalus was rumoured to have consulted his physicians about an early version of a sex-change operation, and he took a series of male lovers. He was said to have spent his days in the company of women in his palace, singing, dancing, weaving and wearing a hairnet, eye make-up and rouge. 'The soldiers were revolted at the sight of him,' wrote one ancient historian. 'With his face made up more elaborately than a modest woman, he was effeminately dressed up in golden necklaces and soft clothes, dancing for everyone to see in this state.'"

"'When we talk about Black people and time,' [one curator] says, 'we’re talking about stolen labor, stolen time—and each of these images steals it back.'... [The curators] show that Black people around the world have been reposing, alone and in each other’s arms, for a long time...."

"Moreover, many researchers in the 19th and 20th centuries then used such collections to advance deeply flawed scientific agendas rooted in white supremacy — namely the identification of physical differences that could reinforce models of racial hierarchy."

"... that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions. Even the missing money in the work has a monetary value when it is called art and thus shows how the value of money is an abstract quantity. Haaning's new work Take the Money and Run is also a recognition that works of art, despite intentions to the contrary, are part of a capitalist system that values a work based on some arbitrary conditions."

Said the Kunsten Museum's exhibition guide, about the 2 completely blank canvases it chose to display, quoted in "A Danish artist has been ordered to repay a museum after delivering blank canvases" (NPR).

The museum had advanced Jens Haaning over $75,000 so that he could recreate an earlier work of his in which he attached actual cash to the canvas. In that earlier work, the money was supposed to represent the wage gap between Danish workers and Austrian workers. Haaning is considered a "conceptual artist," and the new work expresses a concept that the museum made a show of understanding (or pretending to understand).

"... had an undeniable flair, even if its iconography was hard to parse. More poignant was a strip of blue fabric with the word 'pence' in white letters that had seemingly been torn—in anger? sorrow?—from a 'trump pence' flag. A white poster board was stencilled with... 'time to cross the rubicon.'... [Photographs of] graffiti... such as 'power to the people!' and 'where are you thomas jefferson?!,' along with—easy to parse—an S.S. symbol.... [A] photojournalist, Madeleine Kelly, donated the protective vest she was wearing when she was kidney-punched by a female protester who shouted, 'That bitch is photographing us!' When Kelly returned home, she found a slit in the vest; she’d been the victim of an attempted stabbing. For the record, no one at the museum seems much interested in acquiring the furry Viking-style headpiece famously worn by Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman (not that he’s offering it)...."

"In the last few years, we have witnessed museums in acts of mass self-flagellation. Collections must be decolonised, recontextualised, purged and sent for conservation in perpetuity. Naughty Gauguin, nasty Picasso, horrible, horrible Hogarth. There is a card on sale in the Royal Academy shop designed by the illustrator David Shrigley. It reads: 'It’s a complete disgrace I am deeply offended by everything.'"