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Not the crown jewels mentioned below, but certainly very impressive jewels! It’s a pair of hand jewels from around 1750 by an anonymous artisan.
COURTESY RIJKSMUSEUM, AMSTERDAM
Artists
Banksy struck again! The pseudonymous street artist emblazoned a painting on a garage in Port Talbot, Wales. “I’m a bit overwhelmed at the moment, to be honest,” the man who owns the structure said. [The Guardian]
Tim Burton will have a show at the Neon Museum in Las Vegas next year. [Las Vegas Weekly]
Developing: “The queen of Belgium’s makeup artist was grilled by police this week over the theft of crown jewels from neighboring Luxembourg.” [New York Post]
Museums
A visitor to the Uffizi in Florence recently had a heart attack while viewing Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) and, thankfully, is recovering. The museum’s director, Eike Schmidt, said, “I’m not a doctor . . . all I know is that visiting a museum like ours, which is so full of masterpieces, can certainly cause emotional, psychological and even physical stress.” [The Art Newspaper]
Alicia Eler: “How the Minnesota Museum of American Art came back from the brink of death.” [StarTribune]
The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles has a new restaurant on tap for early next year. It’s going to be called the Audrey, and it will sport “seating for up to 115 diners, with cocktails, small production wines,” and “soulful, elevated cooking with a Southern California feel.” [Eater Los Angeles]
After six months of restoration, a Noguchi donated to the San Diego Museum of Art in 2012 has gone on view there for the first time. [Times of San Diego]
Michael Scotto visited Marco Leona, the head of research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to discuss the scientific methods the institution uses to study works. A teaser: close examination of a 1949 Carmen Herrera has resulted in some surprising findings. [NY1]
The Market
And speaking of Herrera, one of her paintings is included in an upcoming benefit auction for Miss Porter’s School, the girls high school located in Farmington, Connecticut. Agnes Gund and Oprah Winfrey are serving as honorary chairwomen for the event, which will feature only art by women. [The New York Times]
The Times‘s “Show Us Your Wall” column checked in with Benjamin Bradley, who has a formidable cache of Christmas collectibles. [The New York Times]
Opinions
New Criterion editor Roger Kimball is not so excited about Kaywin Feldman’s being hired to lead the National Gallery of Art, penning a jeremiad about her support for causes like diversity and gender equity. [The Wall Street Journal]
Meanwhile, Tristram Hunt, the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, writes: “In an era of deepening nationalism and parochialism, where accounts of ethnic purity and manifest destiny abound, the ability of museums to tell complicated stories of hybridity and cosmopolitanism is vital.” [The Art Newspaper]
Trump-Adjacent Items
Actress Louise Linton, the wife of Treasury Secretary and noted art collector Steve Mnuchin, has returned to Instagram. She took a break after some of her actions on the social media app defined her as “something of a Marie Antoinette of the digital age.” [Page Six]
EnviroBuild, a British building company that focuses on sustainable materials, paid $25,000 at auction to be able to name a rather unpleasant-looking serpentine creature. The name it chose: Dermophis donaldtrumpi. [The Hill]
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