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Norton Batkin, the founding director of the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College’s influential program that has fostered multiple generations of curators, died earlier this week, the institution announced Friday.

Batkin was brought on to lead CCS Bard in 1991 and served in that role until 2008. He also served as the dean of graduate studies from 2005 until 2021, and as a vice president beginning in 2009.

During his entire tenure at Bard, a small liberal arts college in upstate New York, he was a professor of philosophy and art history.

“Norton always put the students and the value of a solid education above all else, believing always in the value of their scholarship,” Tom Eccles, the current leader of CCS Bard, wrote in a statement on Instagram.

Bard College President Leon Botstein, meanwhile, wrote, “Norton established CCS’s reputation for exacting intellectual standards and innovation in its Master’s Degree curriculum and in its exhibitions. He recruited a mix of outstanding teachers and renowned practitioners, and forged an international network of artists. Norton initiated the Audrey Irmas Award for Curatorial Excellence, which is awarded annually to leading curators from around the globe.”

The ruins of a seafront villa, believed to be where Roman philosopher Pliny the Elder witnessed the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, were uncovered near Naples, Italy. The site was found during an excavation to build a playground.

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, Pliny the Elder sailed from his home toward the volcano in an effort to rescue people. His nephew and adopted son Pliny the Younger wrote about having witnessed Pliny’s death from toxic gas not long after.

Pliny the Elder was a wealthy commander of the Misenum fleet, which protected the coast from pirates, and a prolific writer, primarily known for his compendium on natural history.

Mount Vesuvius’s eruption decimated the region, including notable Roman cities like Pompeii and Herculaneum.

The ruins of Punta Sarparella were recently excavated after a swimming pool from the site was removed to make way for a playground. Located in Bacoli, a commune of Naples that was known as Misenum during ancient Roman times, when it was a major port city, the town matches Pliny’s written descriptions.

Curators and artists have called on the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC), a contemporary art museum in Iowa, to reverse its plan to deconstruct a large-scale, water-bound installation by artist Mary Miss, after the museum said the Land art piece is unsalvageable after years of structural decay and that reengineering it would be too costly.

In letters addressed to the museum’s director Kelly Baum and published by the arts advocacy group Cultural Landscape Foundation, detractors of the removal plan—including the museum’s former deputy director Jessica Row, arts philanthropist Emily Rauh Pulitzer, critic and art historian Lucy Lippard, and artist Martin Puryear—objected to the plan to remove Miss’s Greenwood Pond: Double Site. The piece, constructed of wood that lines a body of water behind the museum’s main campus, comprises a pavilion and a pedestrian walkway that bends around the lagoon’s edge.

Critics of the move to demolish the work, which was installed in 1996 as part of a commission from the DMAC, questioned the museum’s attempts to raise enough funding to salvage the piece and said the removal would result in a major loss to the canon of environmental art, of which Miss, who is now 79, is a key figure.

“It would be a huge loss to the environmental and land art communities,” Lippard wrote in her letter to Baum, which was also sent Cultural Landscape Foundation and reviewed by ARTnews. Last year, Lippard organized a re-staging of the 1971 exhibition “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” which included two installations by Miss.

In a letter dated January 31, Rowe, who served as deputy director from 1987 to 2004, described the Greenwood Pond as a “living masterpiece” that “revitalized” a neglected part of the DMAC’s campus. In the 1990s, the DMAC commissioned Miss, alongside artists like Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to create public artworks for its campus. While the wood in Miss’s work has faced weather-related damage, the pieces by Serra and Nauman, which were made of industrial materials, have not encountered similar threats.

The World Monuments Fund (WMF) has transferred management of three protected sites in the Angkor Archaeological Park to Cambodia’s Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor (APSARA), effective January 31.

APSARA now oversees conservation efforts and long-term projects formerly managed by WMF, many of which are dedicated to the preservation of the ancient heritage sites.

“This transition is a historic moment for Angkor,” Bénédicte de Montlaur, president and chief executive of WMF, said in a statement. “At the beginning of this project in 1989, international intervention was necessary to help redevelop the conservation skills of local technicians in order to carry out necessary work. Over the years, reliance on international expertise has declined significantly across WMF projects at Angkor, and we are delighted to see Apsara reclaim full responsibility for day-to-day maintenance and future conservation work at these three sites.”

Angkor, located in Cambodia’s northern province of Siem Reap, is home to the Ta Som and Preah Khan Temples, the Churning of the Ocean of Milk Gallery, as well as lush forests, dating to the 9th and 15th centuries. UNESCO has deemed it one of the most important archaeological sites in Southeast Asia, and it was inscribed as a world heritage site in 1992.

However, efforts to preserve the precious relics were imperiled by the Cambodian Civil War of the 1970s, when many heritage workers were killed in the fighting or forced to flee overseas. During the Khmer Rouge regime, antiquities looting skyrocketed at Angkor, with scores of its treasures trafficked out of the country.

A man died on Friday after falling at Tate Modern in London, the Times of London reports. After the incident, the museum closed for the day.

“We are very sad to report that a member of the public passed away at Tate Modern this morning,” the museum said in a statement to the Times. “The police are not treating the event as suspicious, but we have closed the gallery for the day as a mark of respect. All our thoughts are with the person’s family and friends at this time.”

The Metropolitan Police said that they had been called to the scene at 10:45 a.m. and that the death was being considered “unexpected but is not thought to be suspicious.” A victim has not yet been identified to the public.

It is the second time in the past five years that a person has fallen at Tate Modern.

In 2019, a six-year-old French boy was thrown by Jonty Bravery, who was a teenager at the time of the incident. Despite having fallen 100 feet, the boy survived, though he suffered a brain bleed and broken bones. The boy now uses a wheelchair.