According to court documents filed in the Southern District of New York, KAWS sent Leong and the companies a cease-and-desist letter in 2020. A lawsuit from KAWS followed in 2021.

The artist claimed that Leong and the companies had created hundreds of works that infringed on the his copyright, many of them featuring KAWS’s famous skull-faced Companion. These works, the artist said, had a collective retail value of more than $63 million.

Court documents revealed that one of the companies went as far as to boast about its ability to create “custom hand-reworked reproductions” of KAWS’s works and their price point, which is significantly lower than authentic figurines and sculptures designed by the artist. That public admission was enough for the court to find that Leong and his associates “knowingly intended to sell counterfeit KAWS goods.”

Kaws’s legal team, which includes the attorney Aaron Richard Golub, submitted 154 counterfeit works as evidence of copyright infringement to the court and noted that such works not only damage his reputation but also “chill the market for his original work because purchasers fear inadvertently acquiring a counterfeit”—a constant problem for the artist, who reportedly spends up to $40,000 a year on counterfeit identification.

According to Artnet News, which first reported the news, Golub and the KAWS legal team will follow up this ruling and seek a judgment against another defendant in the case, Jonathan Anand. Golub declined to comment on the judgment.

Also known as Cullinan I, the Star of Africa is a 530-carat white diamond cut from the Cullinan diamond, a 3,100-carat stone that was mined near Pretoria. A smaller, sister stone was also cut from the massive Cullinan diamond and is set in the Imperial State Crown. Both the scepter and the crown are traditionally used by British monarchs during ceremonial occasions.

A Change.org petition calling for the stone to be returned to South Africa has already garnered over 8,200 signatures by Friday afternoon.

“The diamond needs to come to South Africa. It needs to be a sign of our pride, our heritage, and our culture,” Mothusi Kamanga, a lawyer and activist in Johannesburg, told Reuters. “I think generally the African people are starting to realize that to decolonize is not just to let people have certain freedoms, but it’s also to take back what has been expropriated from us.”

Not everyone agrees, however, that the stone should be returned.

“I don’t think it matters anymore. Things have changed, we’re evolving,” Johannesburg resident Dieketseng Nzhadzhaba told Reuters. “What mattered for them in the olden days about being superior… it doesn’t matter to us anymore.”

The scepter is one of more than 100 objects collectively known as “The Crown Jewels,” which date back to the 17th century, and, per a Town and Country report, “are traditionally a major part of the coronation ceremony when a new monarch officially takes the throne, because each has a special meaning connected to the monarch’s reign.”

The Sovereign’s Scepter with Cross, in which the Star of Africa is set, is “meant to represent the crown’s power and governance” and has been an integral part of coronations since it was created in 1661 for King Charles II’s coronation. It has been used in every coronation ceremony since and was last publicly seen last September when it was placed on the Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin during her state funeral.

The discourse around once great colonial powers repatriating works that they were given—or took with force—has been become increasingly heated. These calls for repatriation, however, have typically focused on artifacts like the Parthenon Marbles and the Benin Bronzes.

The replica idol was discovered after “elaborate” investigations by the Idol Wing of the Tamil Nadu Police during which 35 idols at the temple were checked for authenticity, according to The New Indian Express reported Wednesday. The idol, in which Lord Shiva is depicted as the supreme teacher of yoga, knowledge, and music, Shri Dakshinamurthy, was traced to the Cleveland Museum of Art in Cleveland, Ohio after an “ongoing audit at several temples in the delta region.”

In Cleveland, the idol is displayed as Shiva – Lord of Music. The 2.5-foot-tall bronze statue weighs about 92 pounds and is dated to between the ninth and 13th centuries. According to the provenance listed on the museum’s website, the idol was sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1971 by Doris Wiener Gallery in New York City. It is unclear where or when the gallery acquired the idol. 

In 2021, Nancy Wiener, Doris’s daughter and owner of an eponymous Upper East Side gallery, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and “possession of stolen property in connection with the trafficking of looted treasures from India and Southeast Asia,” admitting in court that she falsified provenance documents in order to cover up unsavory details in the history of works she sold to major US museums and through auction houses, according to the New York Times.

Doris Wiener passed away in 2011. In the criminal complaint, prosecutors alleged that both she and her mother were involved for “decades with a network of smugglers and middlemen to obtain looted and stolen antiquities from across Asia,” investigative reporter Jason Felch reported on his blog about the illicit antiquities trade Chasing Aphrodite.

Nancy Wiener, prosecutors said, inherited “hundreds of illicit works” after her mother passed away. Then she “discarded their records, and arranged for inaccurate ownership histories” in order to sell the works. According to the criminal complaint, she then consigned 380 of the works to Christie’s, which sold them under the title The Doris Wiener Collection for $12.8 million in 2012.

Some of the items in Nancy Weiner’s possession when she was arrested in 2016 were smuggled into the United States by the prolific antiquities smuggler Subhash Kapoor, who was sentenced to a 10-year sentence in Kumbakonam, India last year, according to the New York Times.

The Cleveland Museum of Art did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Procuring a tank isn’t as easy as renting a limo. However, according to Bynum, a years-long tank enthusiast, it was easier than one might think. It started with a GoFundMe page.

“I have had the goal to ride a tank for years now, and with the opportunity of prom around the corner, it is only natural that the two mix,” Bynum said in this description on his GoFundMe page. The cost for “shipping” and the night’s rental—a meager $1000. 

The campaign raised a total of $1675.

According to KOIN 6 News, a Portland-based CBS affiliate station, which first reported the story, Bynum’s idea to rent a tank came after he found out his school would set up a special parking lot for the students pulling up to the museum. All Bynum and his best friend, Sam Tetro, had to do was find a tank. 

Bynum called a group in Minnesota that rents battle tanks “for films and stuff,” but the price was steep: $20,000. He also called a museum in Oregon, but they didn’t have something he could use. Someone at the museum did, however, connect Bynum to Steven Greenburg, a collector of military gear who was exactly the kind of man Bynum needed. 

“[I called] the guy and within about 15 minutes we had a deal worked out,” he told KOIN.

Originally, the tank expedition was to be manned by only Bynum and Tetro, according to Oregon’s KPTV. They didn’t have dates. That is until Bynum asked a girl named Mycah Chala to join their tank ride to the museum with a sign that read “I’d be tankfull if you went to prom with me!”

There was more to the tank than just wanting to make a prom entrance worthy of General Patton. According to Insider, Bynum’s father was a “history buff who loved tanks.” He also suffered from Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia. He told his father in February about his idea. “He just thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard,” Bynum told Insider. A few days later, his father passed away. 

“I knew that if I did this, whether he was right there in front of me or holding my hand from somewhere else, I knew that I would be honoring that spirit of adventure and doing good things,” Bynum said to Insider, adding that perhaps next year he would skydive into prom.

With this windfall, which will flow into the PES coffers through 2024, the organization will be able to expand its hub in Newark, double the number of artists who can participate in its residency program, and hire much needed staff.

“There are so many ways that this funding allows us to realize many of our long-standing goals,” the PES co-directors Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Pauline Jampol told ARTnews via email.

PES is rooted in art tied to social discourse and activism and the directors say that besides the obvious benefits of expansion, the Mellon Grant money will help them encourage artists in PES programs “to really flex their imaginations during their times with us.”

Like many small non-profits, PES runs with a relatively small crew. The Grant money will also allow Wahi and Jampol to bolster their staff starting with the addition of a Residency Manager and a Director of Development, who will help with PES’s expansion plans and influx of artists.

The Newark expansion will include new studios for the increased number of artists in residency and a new gallery with space for outdoor public art projects that is surrounded by a city park. In Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where PES first began in 2010, the organization will open a hybridized residency program and exhibition space. Another downtown Manhattan space will open in the fall.

“I didn’t think we needed to be in Chelsea, it’s already full of galleries, and when I looked at Tribeca it’s even further away,” Lindemann told ARTnews. “Don’t get me wrong there’s a lot of really good galleries there. But the idea of the sort of ‘Great Jones neighborhood’ seemed more ‘Old New York’, and kind of retro. And Venus is a little retro.”

Lindemann started Venus Over Manhattan in 2012 and, since then, the gallery has worked to raise the reputations of underrecognized artists like Robert Colescott and Peter Saul. The new location’s opening show, a solo exhibition of work by Richard Mayhew, fits nicely with that approach. Mayhew is the only living member of the Spiral Group and, at 99-years-old, he “has never really had a major New York show, and really deserves one,” Lindemann said. “Perhaps that is hyperbolic, but he definitely deserves more attention than he’s been given. And he fits our kind of vibe.”

(Mayhew’s last solo gallery show, Richard Mayhew: Transcendence, was in 2020 at ACA Galleries.)

So does the neighborhood, which is an under-the-radar art destination. 55 Great Jones Street, where Venus opened a location in 2022, was once Andy Warhol’s studio and apartment. Jean Michel Basquiat also lived there from 1983 until his death in 1988. There are other galleries nearby as well. Quite a few. Eric Firestone, Aicon, and LaMama all have galleries on Great Jones between Lafayette and Bowery. Venus’s new location sits at 39 Great Jones Street.

The area may not be as trendy as TriBeCa but Lindemann sees that as a plus. “I don’t know if it’s a better competitive area you know?” Lindemann said. “More people will go to Chelsea on a Saturday, sure, but we have good foot traffic. And honestly, it feels like an opportunity. Rents in Chelsea, there’s a lot of vacancies because they went very high. And then Tribeca just jumped on the bandwagon and rents skyrocketed. Great Jones is a great opportunity. At the end of the day, it’s also a better neighborhood. It’s more fun to walk around.”

An underrated perk, according to Lindemann: much better restaurants than Chelsea.

Mayhew’s Natural Order, which opens May 6, will be the new gallery’s inaugural show.

In December, 31 of the museum’s 176 employees sent an open letter to Thomas Dermine, who, as Belgium’s Secretary of State, oversees federal museums. The letter detailed a number of allegations of inappropriate behavior.

Draguet seemed nonplussed by the allegations when they were first made public. He told the Belgian news outlet RTBF, which broke the story, that the allegations were “a surprise because there is obviously a lot of suffering and a lot of pain in this letter and we don’t didn’t notice it, nor was it heard in the consultation bodies with the unions.”

Draguet is also a professor in the art history and archaeology master’s degree program at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Since the allegations surfaced, RTBF interviewed a number of Draguet’s students, some of whom said they were made to feel humiliated during oral exams and that he made transphobic and sexist remarks. Others said it was not uncommon to leave the class in tears.

When RBTF asked Draguet about “presence of feminist or decolonial issues” at his museum and of the addition of “inclusive writing” in museum communiqués, he noted that “the Royal Museums are a scientific institution and not of activism” and that there is no legal obligation to use inclusive language.

After the letter was reported, additional museum staff came out against Draguet, describing the director as “someone who is stuck in the past century” and a person who doesn’t hesitate to use to make inappropriate remarks, “even in meetings.”

Draguet will resign from his post on April 30 at the end of his third term as museum director, which began in 2005. Up until recently, he was actively seeking a fourth term. According to RBTF, he will continue working with the federal government’s scientific institutions, putting his expertise “at the service of heritage projects for the major strategic plan of federal museums.”

The Belgian Royal Library’s director, Sara Lammens, will act as interim director of the museum while a new leader is sought out.

50 graves were found at the site, which was once the Roman town Lutetia, home to Gallic Parisii tribe. Lutetia’s cemetery, known as the Saint-Jacques necropolis, was first discovered during excavations in the 19th century and first used between the first and third centuries. 

According to El Pais, archaeologists at the time were concerned more with objects of value and ignored the skeletons they found, despite the information about ancient Paris that could be obtained from the people and objects buried there. The gravesite was ultimately forgotten about.

“What’s so exceptional about this is that we have a window into our past, which is quite rare in this city,” Dominique Garcia, president of France’s National Institute of Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP), told the French broadcaster Europe 1. “Drawing on their funeral rites, we can reach a kind of general vision of the people who lived in Paris in the second century,” he added.

The skeletons, which included men, women, and children, were found in wooden coffins that had been burned, as was the Parisii’s custom. As such, only small bits of wood and metal nails were left behind apart from the skeletons. About half the graves, INRAP said, had small objects with them including ceramic and glass cups and jugs were, the remains of bits of clothing like pins, belts or traces of shoes. Some skeletons had a coin placed in their mouths of in the coffin, likely an offering to the god Charon who would ferry the dead to the underworld.

An offering pit was also found, with the complete skeleton of a pig, an additional small animal, and two large ceramic containers likely “aimed at ensuring the deceased’s survival in the afterlife,” El Pais said.

Scientists hope that the discovery will not only shed light on the lives of the Parisii but also but provide material for DNA testing from which they can learn more about the health of the ancient Parisians.

At the Sotheby’s Modern Evening sale next month, an oil painting by Edward Hopper, Cobb’s Barns, South Truro (1930–33), will hit the block with an estimate of $8 million–$12 million. That work is one of eight on the auction docket in May owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is also selling pieces of lesser value by Hopper, Maurice Prendergast, and John Marin.

Yes, the Whitney is dabbling in deaccessioning, the institutional art world’s perennial bogeyman. Sell-offs have a tendency to evoke spite and bile among the art world’s old guard. But, for many, it is now just part of a natural progression. 

“We want to grow the collection,” Jane Panetta, curator and director of the collection at the Whitney, told me over the phone last week. “This is part of hitting that goal, and it’s a goal we’ve had for a while, really since the museum moved to its current location in 2015.” 

“The permanent-collection hang held following the Whitney’s move to the Meatpacking District in 2015, “America Is Hard to See,” was a catalyst that initiated the curators to look at the holdings anew, Panetta said.”

Panetta also framed deaccession as within Whitney’s founding principles, in particular its mission to show work by living American artists. Changing the collection is about acknowledging that the America of today is starkly different from what it was decades ago, much less a century ago.

“We’re always thinking about how one defines ‘the museum of American art,’ being mindful of wanting the collection to accurately represent the United States,” Panetta said. “We think that means the collection has to evolve. We have to try and close critical gaps, and having endowment funds for acquisitions is a key means to doing that.”

This is not the first time the museum has grappled with what it means to be an American artist. During Thomas N. Armstrong III‘s run as museum director in the 1970s and ’80s, an artist without a US passport or a green card was not considered a true American, and the museum even considered deaccessioning works by artists without proper paperwork. One near casualty of that rule: Japanese-born artist Yayoi Kusama’s 1962 Air Mail Stickers. Luckily, the rule was ousted in 1990. 

Among the most vocal critics of deaccessioning has always been the prominent industry group Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD). While the AAMD has no legal power, it can and has sanctioned museums that deaccession works for any reason other than bolstering their collection. An AAMD sanction essentially bans offending museums from loaning artworks, sharing resources, or engaging in other collaborative efforts with the association’s member institutions. 

Meanwhile, those in favor of deaccessioning, like San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Christopher Bedford, are often considered radical. In Bedford’s previous position at the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), he came under fire in 2020 for attempting to sell works, primarily those by white male artists like Andy Warhol and Brice Marden, for up to $65 million. That money was to be earmarked for “collection care” and to acquire contemporary works by women and people of color, thus freeing up other money for salary increases. The effort was abandoned after severe pushback from BMA board members, staff, and art critics. Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight famously wrote that the proposed sell-off made the museum “the leading poster child for art collection carelessness.”

(Bedford’s predecessor at SFMOMA, Neal Benezra, was also a deaccessioner, selling off a cherished $50 million Rothko from the museum’s collection in 2019.) 

One can’t help but wonder what Knight might have said to Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of MoMA in New York, who mandated that works in the collection that were more than 50 years old be sold to other institutions, so that MoMA could acquire works by living artists and stay, well, modern.

The writer Ben Lerner, whose most recent piece of fiction published in the New Yorker, “The Ferry,” touches on matters related to museum collections, has a theory similar to Barr’s. “A work of art or a library or museum collection or any significant form requires subtraction as much as addition, right? It requires omission, deaccession, etc., not just hoarding,” he said in an interview with the New Yorker.

Oddly, the 2020 Sotheby’s sale in which the Baltimore Museum was to sell those works also included works from the Brooklyn Museum by Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Claude Monet. And, while the BMA pulled its works two hours before the sale, the Brooklyn Museum did not. It wound up making around $20 million.

Both sales were possible because the AAMD relaxed its rules in April 2020 around the use of “restricted funds held by some institutions” in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. While the association’s rules didn’t actually change, the group placed a “moratorium on punitive actions”  and granted leeway for using “proceeds from deaccessioned art to pay for expenses associated with the direct care of collections.” 

The AAMD codified that policy last year, permanently allowing museums to use funds generated by deaccessioned art for “direct care” of objects in a museum’s collection, with specific criteria for what constitutes “direct care.” Selling work to offset operating costs or salaries is still taboo. On the task force that wrote the policy: Bedford, along with Glenn Lowry, director of the Museum of Modern Art.

For those keeping track: Lowry and MoMA kicked off the last major news cycle about deaccessioning this past September, when Sotheby’s announced it was selling 80 works worth approximately $70 million that had been on loan to MoMA since 1990.

Not everyone was happy with AAMD’s decision. In 2021 Erik Neil of the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia, said to the New York Timesof the policy, “if you want to flip paintings, there are many other types of institutions where you can do that, and they are called commercial galleries.”

The Whitney’s deaccession plan may be in lockstep with AAMD guidelines, but then so was Bedford’s BMA plan, and we know how that turned out. The Whitney artworks, according to Panetta, are only from areas where the museum has “deep holdings, where we have stronger and similar examples by the very same artists—Prendergast, Marin, Hartley, and, of course Hopper.” The BMA argued the same thing about its Warhol holdings. 

Still, Panetta understands why the idea of deaccessioning works is considered verboten. “I think people get anxious with the deaccession because it seems to kind of undo that goal” of the museum being a “permanent steward of the objects that it collects,” she said.

While the Whitney plan doesn’t include a monumental work analogous to the Warhol that the BMA attempted to sell in 2020, Hopper’s name is all but synonymous with the museum. And while the painting going up for auction didn’t make it into the museum’s recent Hopper show, it did hang in the Oval Office during President Barack Obama’s tenure, which should at least keep the bid cards waving come May. 

As to whether the sale will generate a backlash, we’ll just have to wait and see. 

According to a press release by National Museum of Antiquities of Leiden, the dig was led by Lara Weiss and Daniel Soliman, curators of that institution’s Egyptian and Nubian collection, and Christian Greco, who serves as the director of the Museo Egizio in Turin, Italy.

The dig team found several tombs shaped like small temples, many with detailed information about who had been buried there. The largest tomb belonged to Panehsy, a steward of the Amun Temple in Karnak. The temple in Panehsy’s tomb was elaborate, with a gated entrance, a courtyard, columned porticoes, and a tunnel that leads to underground burial chambers, according to Archeology.org.

Among the decorations were a statue of Panehsy worshiping the goddess Hathor, mother of Horus, who was often depicted as a beautiful young woman wearing a headdress of cow horns that once framed a great sun disk, a lioness, or a cow. Also discovered was a carving of Panehsy with his wife Baia, “the singer of Amun,” sitting at an offering table. 

Four smaller tombs were found at the site, Hyperallergic reports, including one for Yuyu, who made gold foil for the royal treasury, and three for unidentified persons. Weiss, whose research is focused on Egyptian social dynamics, told Hyperallergic she was fascinated by the glimpses into daily life the cemetery brought into focus: “The choices people made in their tomb decoration, how they were inspired by others, and what all this says about the social relations of people.”

The National Museum of Antiquities has been excavating at Saqqara since 1975, and in 2015, the Museo Egizio became an official partner in the project. Earlier this year, archeologists found at Saqqara what could be the oldest known mummy in Egypt.