The policy change was unanimously approved by Greece’s Central Archaeological Council. But pet owners shouldn’t rush to make plans, as the organization did not specify an implementation date for the new regulations.

Pets still won’t be allowed at popular sites like the Acropolis in Athens, Knossos in Crete, Olympia, and Delphi due to their large annual populations of visitors, as well as as ancient theaters, temples, graves and monuments with mosaic floors.

Currently, only guide dogs for disabled visitors are allowed into the country’s archaeological sites.

The decision is “a first, but important, step toward harmonizing the framework of accessibility to monuments and archaeological sites with the standards of other European countries, where entry rules for pets already apply,” Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said in a statement.

The new policy stipulates that dogs need to be on a leash no more than 3 feet long. The animals can also be carried by their owners in a pouch or a pet carrying case. Larger dogs will be required to wear a muzzle.

The culture ministry said pet owners will also be required to show health certificates for the accompanying animal and carry the supplies needed for picking up poop in order to be allowed entry into the archaeological sites.

For pet owners who change their minds about visiting these historical areas with their furry friends, the ministry said there will be cages installed at the entrances to more than 110 archaeological sites.

The news of the policy was first reported by the Associated Press.

According to prior reports, 58-year-old archaeologist Manolis Psarrosan, an employee at the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, was left unconscious in the street last week with  “broken ribs and fractures to his nose and face.” The archeologists believe the attack is linked to the expansion of tourism on the island of Mykonos. Due to the abundance of archaeological sites in Greece, local archaeological services have the power to veto development plans. 

According to The Washington Post, Psarrosan has been involved in several cases that allege violations, including “illegal constructions”, on Mykonos and has been called as a witness in related trials. Additionally, has helps monitor approvals for building permits for hotels and entertainments centers. The archaeological service alleges that some local officials refuse to record illegal activity among those that bring tourism and the money that comes with it to the island, in fear of physical retaliation. Psarrosan was currently taking part in an investigation of “arbitrary building activities in areas of archaeological interest” on two beaches on Mykonos. 

The protesters have called for increased police protection for officials and archeologists who are involved in “contentious inspections.”

“There are problems caused by the high level of tourism development on many islands, but Mykonos is by far the worst,” said Despina Koutsoumba, the head of the archaeologists’ association. 

The Headlines

THE COLLECTORS. Billionaire Mitchell Rales, who cofounded the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Maryland, has joined a bid to acquire the Washington Commanders football team, Axios reports. Rales, who was captain of the football team at his high school in Bethesda, Maryland, has signed on to an attempt to acquire the team that is being led by private equity titan Josh Harris (cofounder of Apollo). Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal asked superstar musician Alicia Keys if she and her husband Kasseem Daoud Dean (aka producer Swizz Beatz) would ever consider starting a museum for their vast art holdings. “Some type of traveling museum would be tremendous,” Keys said. “Everyone should have access to experiencing art and understanding how they can have it in their lives.” In 2019, Antwaun Sargent profiled the couple in ARTnews.

REMEMBERING A GIANT. The revered British artist Phyllida Barlow, who won fame for grand but never grandiloquent abstract sculptures, died on Sunday at the age of 78, as Tessa Solomon reported earlier this week in ARTnews, and Barlow’s many friends and admirers have been paying tribute to the artist. In the Guardian, the art critic Adrian Searle writes, “She played and fought with her recalcitrant materials, in an art of pleasure and complaint. What a loss this is.” Writer Katy Hessel told Artnet News that her “all-engulfing sculptures question the limitless potentials of the versatile medium.” And Harper’s Bazaar republished an interview it conducted with Barlow in 2014, when she showed her work at Tate Britain in London. “I want visitors to feel they’ve become part of the work, physically engaged,” she said.

The Digest

A recently unearthed document suggests that Leonardo da Vinci’s mother, Caterina, was kidnapped from the Caucasus region and enslaved. That paper, which concerns the emancipation of a Circassian named Caterina, was found by historian Carlo Vecce, who has written a novel based on the theory. [The New York Times]

The Kunsthaus Zurich said that it will take a more proactive approach to studying its collection for works that may have been looted by the Nazis, setting up a commission of independent experts. It said that it would also like to see a Swiss national commission created to carry out such investigations. [AFP/Times of Israel]

Greek government archaeologists staged a five-hour strike on Tuesday, in response to an assault on a colleague in the Athens area last week. Some believe that the attack was a reprisal for his efforts to regulate development on the vacation hotspot of Mykonos. They are calling for greater police protection. [The Washington Post]

The government of the Netherlands has returned the remains of nine Indigenous people to the Dutch Caribbean island of St. Eustatius. The remains had been taken by archaeologists more than three decades ago, and the island’s Culture Department had called for their return. [The Associated Press]

Benin said that it will stage a pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, its first time participating in the big show. Curating it will be Azu Nwagbogu, the founder of Lagos’s African Artists’ Foundation, who was director of Cape Town’s Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa from 2018 to 2019. [The Art Newspaper]

Architect Christian Wassmann has designed a home for his family on a hilltop overlooking New York’s Hudson Valley that has as a key component a gargantuan boulder worthy of Michael Heizer. [Architectural Digest]

The Kicker

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY. In the New York Times, Adam Nagourney has a deep dive on the $1 billion Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which is scheduled to open in Los Angeles in 2025, and got Rahm Emanuel on the horn to talk about the play that he made for the project when he was mayor of the Windy City. “I can’t speak to the gain for L.A. but I can speak to the loss for Chicago,” Emanuel said from Japan, where he is now U.S. ambassador. “It was competitive and we wanted it.” He added, “You can see I still get emotional talking about this.” [NYT]

In an incredibly ambitious move, the Onassis Foundation in Athens has staged “Plásmata: Bodies, Dreams, and Data” a digital exhibition in Pedion tou Areos, or Ares’ Battlefield, an old military training ground since converted into one of the city’s largest parks..

“And you know, it was like a battle,” Afroditi Panagiotakou, the Director of Culture at the Onassis Foundation, told ARTnews. Reclining on a couch at the Onassis offices, wearing a mesh disco suit and platform heels, Panagiotakou discussed the challenge of orchestrating the massive public undertaking. 

“When it comes to the things that we do in our own venue, we really have zero concern on whether we’re going to be liked or not,” she said. “But when we go to the public space, there should be none of this confidence. You have to find the tricky balance between: how am I going to present worthy, challenging works, and also respect the fact that I’m acting in a public space.”

This question seems to sum up Panagiotakou’s personality, which contains both an assertive sense of her tastes and values, while being deeply aware of her duties. Aside from her civic ethos, Onassis’s cultural funding is second to none in Greece and represents a huge responsibility for all involved.

The assertion came days after UNESCO announced the first formal talks between the U.K. government and Greece regarding the potential reunification of the ancient statuary with the Athenian monument.

Jonathan Williams, the deputy director of the London institution, said during a UNESCO meeting Friday that “these objects were not all hacked from the building as has been suggested,” according to the Guardian.

The sculptures, comprising fifteen metopes, seventeen pedimental figures, and a section of a frieze depicting a festival procession, were taken from Athens in 1801 by the Scottish diplomat Lord Elgin during the Ottoman occupation of Greece. In successive campaigns for their return, Greece has cited correspondences between Elgin and Giovanni Battista Lusieri, an Italian artist who oversaw the operation, that detail their removal from the 5th-century B.C.E. temple with the use of marble saws.

In one letter penned to Elgin, Lusieri requested a “dozen marble saws of different sizes” be sent to Athens “as quickly as possible” and even conceded that he had “been obliged to be a little barbarous” during efforts to dislodge a sculpted relief panel.

“Over the years, Greek authorities and the international scientific community have demonstrated with unshakeable arguments the true events surrounding the removal of the Parthenon sculptures,” Greece’s culture minister, Lina Mendoni, said in a statement to the Guardian. “Lord Elgin used illicit and inequitable means to seize and export the Parthenon sculptures, without real legal permission to do so, in a blatant act of serial theft.”

The British Museum acquired the works in 1816. Amid the decades-long restitution debate, the U.K. government has maintained that decisions regarding the British Museum’s collection are outside of its purview.  For its part, the museum has claimed that Ottoman leaders granted Elgin permission for the excavation, while Greece has rejected the idea that occupying powers have authority over cultural heritage.

There is also debate over which nation has the best facilities to ensure the sculptures’ preservation. In 2009, Greece unveiled a five-story glass-enclosed museum at the foot of the Acropolis custom-built for the display of ancient statuary.

No date has been set for the talks between England and Greece’s respective ministers of culture.

Last week, Italy announced that a fragment belonging to the Parthenon’s eastern frieze on loan from a Sicilian museum would stay in Athens. The artifact, depicting the foot of the goddess Artemis peeking out from a tunic, was returned as part of a four-year loan agreement between Greece and the Antonio Salinas Archaeological Museum in Palermo. In return for the fragment, the Acropolis Museum loaned Italy a 5th-century B.C.E. statue of the goddess Athena and a 8th-century B.C.E. amphora.

“Sending back to the context of its origins a small, but significant, fragment belonging to the Parthenon has a very strong symbolic value,” Sicily’s councillor for culture, Alberto Samonà, said in a statement. “It is also a response to the international debate [around the Parthenon artifacts].”

Christopher Marinello in front of Henri Matisse’s Woman in Blue in Front of a Fireplace, looted by the Nazis from art dealer Paul Rosenberg. The painting has now been returned to his heirs thanks to Marinello’s intervention.

COURTESY CHRISTOPHER MARINELLO

Shepard Fairey was finally arrested in L.A. [The Detroit News]

A third of the collectors on our 2015 Top 200 list have opened museums, The Art Newspaper finds. [The Art Newspaper]

President Obama is set to sign an order creating the Basin and Range National Monument, an 1,100-square-mile area in Nevada that includes Michael Heizer’s storied City work. Harry Reid, who had long lobbied to protect the piece, is overjoyed. [Las Vegas Review-Journal]

The Bowes Museum in northeast England will host the UK’s first-ever Yves Saint Laurent exhibition. [The Art Newspaper]

The Park Avenue Armory has received a $65 million endowment from the Thompson Family Foundation. [Artforum]

Hisachika Takahashi and Yuki Okumura’s “Memory of Past and Future Memory” at Annet Gelink in Amsterdam. [Contemporary Art Daily]

Authorities in Casal di Principe, Italy (one of the country’s major crime hubs) have decided to convert the villa of a former mob boss into a temporary museum. [The New York Times]

Christopher Marinello is the “Sherlock Holmes” of the art world. [Yahoo! News]

Greek museums are being forced to close due to lack of funding. [The Art Newspaper]

Past Documenta curators have decentralized the exhibition by organizing events and conferences in the years preceding the show (Okwui Enwezor, the 11th edition, 2002) or by recruiting a worldwide team of “agents” who served as co-curators and placed projects in locations as remote as Banff, Cairo and Kabul (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, 13th edition, 2012). Similarly questioning the notion of centrality, the roving Manifesta contemporary art biennial takes place in a new city for every edition.

But this move by 2017 artistic director Adam Szymczyk reaches a new level of dispersion, as Athens will host a significant portion of the show. The move reflects the split between northern and southern Europe, Szymczyk indicated when presenting the dual-venue plan at a symposium yesterday in Kassel. He also explained that just as Germany was at the center of massive changes afoot in Europe in 1955, when the exhibition was founded, so Athens is emblematic of the challenges facing Europe after the economic crash of 2008 and the crippling austerity measures that have followed.

“[The] position of host—with all the privileges involved—appears to be no longer tenable and begs to be questioned, if only temporarily,” according to a statement from the organizers. “Thus Documenta’s undisputed position as host will be abandoned for another role, that of guest, in Athens.” Using a flurry of current curatorial buzzwords, the announcement further indicates that the show will avoid the taboo of “parachuting in” since the three-year windup between now and 2017 is aimed not only at organizing a show, but also at “producing knowledge.”

The Athens portion of the exhibition will open early, in April, with the Kassel portion opening, as is customary, in June.

The curatorial team was also introduced at yesterday’s conference. It includes Pierre Bal-Blanc, director of France’s Contemporary Art Center (CAC) Brétigny; Hendrik Folkerts, curator of performance, film and discursive programs at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum; Hila Peleg, founder and artistic director of the Berlin Documentary Forum, which examines film, photography, art and other contemporary cultural practices; Dieter Roelstraete, senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Monika Szewczyk, visual arts program curator at the University of Chicago’s Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Curator and writer Marina Fokidis will head up the artistic office in Athens; she founded the Kunsthalle Athena and the arts and culture publication South as a State of Mind. Fokidis also curated the third Thessaloniki Biennale for Contemporary Art in 2011 and was the commissioner and curator of the Greek Pavilion at the 2003 Venice Biennale Athens.