A spate of cultural vandalism continued earlier this year when part of a buried Stone Age monument in Wales was crudely excavated and left to the elements.  

Julian Baker, a 52-year-old man from Abertridwr, Caerphilly, filmed himself unearthing the 4,500-year-old relic on Eglwysilan mountain and posted the video to Facebook, according to local heritage officials. In a first prosecution of its sort in Wales, Baker has been ordered to pay £4,400 (roughly $5,600) for its restoration. Additionally, he was given a four-month custodial sentence, suspended for two years, at the Magistrates Court in Wales, according to the BBC. 

The buried monument is two large sandstones with “enigmatic” cup marks carved into their surface. Experts guess that the stones “may have acted as route markers or demarcated territorial boundaries.” In the video, Baker roughly separates a panel of rock art from the stone.

Baker was charged with executing “unauthorized work affecting a scheduled monument” and acting to “destroy or damage an ancient protected monument”.

“This damage is a serious incident at a rare class of prehistoric monument in Wales,” a spokesperson for Welsh government heritage body Cadw told the BBC. “Significant archaeological information has been lost forever, and although some evidence may remain, the significance and value of the part of the monument damaged has been significantly diminished. We welcome the court’s decision in this case, the first we have submitted under section 28 of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979.”

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An auctioneer who pleaded guilty to helping produce a group of faked Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings has avoided jail time, instead receiving a sentence of probation and community service from a Los Angeles court on Friday.

The case was related to the saga surrounding a 2022 exhibition about Basquiat held at the Orlando Museum of Art in Florida. That show touched off an FBI raid, the firing of the museum’s director, and legal action that is still ongoing.

Included in the show were a group of works that the museum’s director at the time, Aaron De Groft, claimed had been produced in 1982 while the artist lived in Los Angeles. He said that after that, they were left in a storage unit, then forgotten. De Groft claimed they were major rediscoveries.

But doubt started to emerge after the New York Times ran an investigation that questioned these works’ authenticity. One expert on branding seized on the FedEx typeface that appeared in one of these paintings. He said the shipping company hadn’t started to use that typeface until 1994, more than a decade after these works were allegedly produced.

After the FBI investigated the 25 paintings, seizing them in a dramatic raid that made headlines around the world, Michael Barzman, the auctioneer who today was sentenced to probation, was interviewed by federal agents. Speaking to them in 2022, he claimed he had no role in the production of the works.

The public mural Banksy painted about domestic violence, titled Valentine’s Day Mascara, is being sold back to members of the public for $153 (£120) a share.

The London-based Red Eight Galleries is brokering the deal between the owner of the townhouse property in the British city of Margate where the mural was painted, and Showpiece, a fractional ownership platform.

The mural has an estimated value of $7.64 million (£6 million) through an evaluation by Robin Barton of Bankrobber gallery. The fractional ownership sale of Valentine’s Day Mascara will take place on August 22 with a total of 27,000 shares.

“Realistically, we are looking to achieve between £1m and £1.5m,” Usher told the Art Newspaper, which first reported the news of the sale.

The mural features a 1950s-style housewife with a swollen, black eye, a bruised cheek, a swollen lower lip, and a knocked-out tooth. She wears a bright blue gingham dress, an apron, and yellow latex gloves, and has her arms out.

Walking out on Picasso, as Françoise Gilot did in 1953, could not eliminate his impact on her own art and life. The ambiguity is right there in the final lines of what remains her most notable creation, the best-selling 1964 book Life with Picasso, coauthored with Carlton Lake: when she left Picasso, “he burned all the bridges that connected me to the past I had shared with him. But in doing so he forced me to discover myself and thus to survive. I shall never cease being grateful to him for that.”

It’s a peculiar statement that accords her rejected lover the motivating agency in her own self-discovery. And it’s unsupported by any careful reading of the rest of the book, which paints a clear-eyed picture of the world’s most renowned artist at the height of his fame, but also a vivid self-portrait of an inexperienced young woman from a privileged background—she was just 21 when she met the Spanish painter, who was 40 years her elder—who nonetheless had the sharpness of perception and toughness of spirit to enter an inherently unequal relationship without sacrificing her identity to it. I suspect that Gilot’s survival instinct was just as inherent as her sense of self. And survive she did: when she died this past June, she was 101.

Early on, Gilot experimented with abstraction but then seems to have accepted Picasso’s dismissal of abstract painting as merely a “kind of invertebrate, unformulated interior dream.” In any case, her paintings up through the 1960s are primarily representational—and, as with many French painters of her generation, they show the strong imprint of Picasso’s influence.

Later she began to alternate between imagistic and nonobjective modes, though she always attributed autobiographical content to her abstract works. In writing about her 1979–80 composition The Hawthorne, Garden of Another Time, a luminous arrangement of flat, clearly demarcated color forms, she described it as embodying “the recollection of looking toward my paternal grandmother’s garden in Neuilly”—the affluent Paris suburb where she was born in 1921—“through the red stained-glass windows of the billiard room on the second floor.” Distilling her memories and perceptions into abstract form, she often secreted fragments of imagery within her works, blurring the distinction. Still, it can be argued that it was in her efforts toward abstraction that Gilot achieved her true independence as an artist. There, she was free to use color, as she said, “to exaggerate, to go beyond, to pursue the extreme limit of what is suggested by the pictorial imagination.”

She also achieved double-barreled success, as both a painter and a writer: Though academic attention to her career has been scarce, her exhibitions were legion, and in 2021 a couple of her paintings sold for $1.3 million each through Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Her book Life with Picasso sold millions of copies worldwide and was succeeded by Matisse and Picasso: A Friendship in Art (1990) and the autobiographical Interface: The Painter and the Mask (1983).