Fortune smiled on a British couple when they discovered what is believed to be a work by John Constable. According to the Daily Mail, the couple learned that the famous English landscape painter was indeed the author all along of an overlooked painting in the guest wing of the castle their family has owned for 800 years.

When Simon Houison Craufurd and his wife, Adity, inherited Craufurdland Castle, a 600-acre estate 25 miles south of Glasgow, Scotland, they also inherited debilitating maintenance costs of up to $127,000 a year. Despite running an events and vacation rental business out of the 16th-century castle, the Craufurds thought they might have to sell their ancestral home. 

That is, until they appeared on Millionaire Hoarders, a British reality show that follows a group of antique experts as they rummage around ancient homes in search of overlooked, but potentially priceless, treasure. 

Their hopes may have been fulfilled when the Millionaire Hoarders crew found what they believe to be a genuine Constable painting, despite the work’s having been dismissed as a fake by an auction house a decade earlier.

“It’s funny because it’s a painting that I have seen I don’t know how many times and I have never actually paid any attention to it,” Simon Houison Craufurd told the Daily Mail.

A Canadian company known for its immersive art exhibitions featuring the works of van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, and Claude Monet will significantly shrink its operations after filing for creditor protection in Delaware and Ontario.

The Toronto-based Lighthouse Immersive will reduce its operations to four or five venues by the end of September, down from its height of nearly 20.

In court documents filed in Delaware, Lighthouse Immersive cited increased competition from governments lifting restrictions on cultural institutions and multiple competitors as reasons for lower ticket sales. The company also did not have a “solid, long-term chief financial officer or a substantial financial department to keep up with the rapid expansion of the business.” Partner immersive experience company Impact Museums Inc has alleged that Lighthouse owes it $16.6 million, a figure the company disputes.

“Our goal is to emerge from restructuring a stronger company and continue to offer incredible shows to the public,” Lighthouse Immersive spokesperson Nick Harkin told ARTnews in a written statement. “”All of our Lighthouse ArtSpace venues currently operating are still open to the public. Two Lighthouse Immersive affiliate companies are currently undergoing restructuring in Canada. This in no way impacts the operations of our venues or the presentation of currently scheduled shows.”

Lighthouse Immersive and its 10 US affiliates filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy in Delaware on July 28. The following quotes are from court documents.

Things tend to be surreal at Watermill Center’s annual benefit, and this year was no different. One performer was left suspended in a bath of water drawing on Hamlet’s Ophelia. Another melted a block of ice with body heat alone, while a third sat still inside a police car as it was axed apart by a team of mechanics—a process that unfolded over two hours, as guests looked on.

All this took place on Saturday night in the Hamptons, where a modest size art crowd flocked to Long Island’s East End for the center’s annual STAND benefit held at the Watermill Center. This year’s event was themed around “The Body,” and saw artists pushing their corporeal limits.

The performance art center sits on a sprawling wooded property that bills itself as a testing ground, residency, and “laboratory” for experimental artists and performers. Founded in 1992 by artist and theater director Robert Wilson, Watermill is home to his collection and archive.

The benefit has for years been an attraction in the summer months as commerce quiets down and art world insiders leave the city for more scenic locales. Previous editions have featured 10 or so performances spread across the center’s grounds, taking place inside a concrete lobby and across a substantial gravel courtyard that opens into moss-covered backwoods.

Each year, the personalities attending range widely, from academic types to those with celebrity ties. Among them this year were artists Coco Fusco, Robert Longo, and Daniel Arsham, as well as actor Cuba Gooding Jr. and designer Carolina Sarria.

A group of miners in Serbia found more than just timber when they happened upon the remains of an ancient ship that archaeologists say may belong to the Roman Empire.

The ship, whose hull measures some 42 feet in length, was discovered in the village of Drmno, near what was once a Roman settlement called Viminacium. Because of the proximity to that region, archaeologists believe the ship was related to a city that was once sited there.

“We may assume that this ship is Roman, but we are unsure of its exact age,” Miomir Korac, the archaeologist spearheading the research being done on the ship, told Reuters. He estimated that it could be from the 3rd or 4th century CE.

Since 2020, at least one other vessel has been found in the area, which is close to the Mlava river. To date, archaeologists have found two ships and three canoes.

Viminacium was the humming site of significant activity during the 4th century CE, with emperors such as Theodosius even visiting the city, which is thought to have hosted some 48,000 residents.

Google celebrated the 116th birthday on Friday of sculptor, documentary filmmaker, and inventor Altina Schinasi with a pair of orange cat’s-eye glasses framing the company logo.

Born August 4, 1907, Schinasi was a native New Yorker who studied art in Paris. She began her creative career as a window dresser for New York’s Fifth Avenue luxury storefronts.

In her role as a window dresser, she helped Salvador Dalí fully realize and execute his window designs at Bonwit Teller & Co. department store. At the same time, she took art classes at the Art Students League of New York, where artists Howard Warshaw and George Grosz were her instructors.

After noticing the lack of options for women’s glasses, she invented the harlequin shape, or cat’s-eye, glasses for which she is probably most known. One shop owner took to her creation and grabbed the rights to the frames for six months, leading to her design’s huge success as a must-have fashion accessory among American women in the late 1930s and ’40s.

Schinasi’s invention earned her Lord & Taylor’s American Design Award in 1939 and received recognition from notable magazines such as Life and Vogue.

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In Kathmandu, a region of Central Nepal located in the nation’s Bagmati Province, a local Buddhist monastery dating back to the 11th century is now publicly displaying previously undocumented artifacts from the region that it has long held. It now serves as a museum, and the first of its kind in the area.

The monastery project, which officially opened July 29, was funded by the Rubin Museum of Art in New York after the repatriation of two artifacts to Nepal. In January 2022, leadership at the Rubin announced that the museum—founded by private collectors in 2004 and focusing on art of the Himalayas—returned two ancient wooden sculptures to Nepal after researchers found that the pieces had been taken illegally from religious sites. Items returned from the Rubin and the Metropolitan Museum of Art are on display in the Itumbaha monastery’s collection.

The opening of the museum drew attention from Nepali activists. A group of local repatriation advocates scrutinized the museum’s involvement in the project, viewing it as a means of diverting attention from other repatriation claims. During the 1970s and 1980s, Nepalese religious sites were the subject of looting; recent campaigns led by repatriation advocacy groups have sought to rectify this by bringing restitution claims for items with ties to vulnerable sites against museums in the United States.

In an interview with ARTnews, Rubin Museum executive director Jorrit Britschgi said that the initiative had come out of discussions with researchers on the ground in Nepal after the 2022 repatriation. Britschgi said initial talks centered around how the museum could lend support to the local context in Nepal. He posed questions to the museum’s board overseeing funding of what could come out of the repatriation. “What is important is for us not to assume this is what people need,” Britschgi said.

The museum was able to step in as a financial backer, and took on an “advisory role” in inventorying the monastery’s collection, he added, clarifying that the project was always envisioned as being community-led.

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The Headlines

MULTITASKING. Art historian and curator Iwona Blazwick—who stepped down as director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London last year, after some two decades at the helm—is staying busy. Last summer, she was named chair of the Royal Commission for AlUla’s Public Art Expert Panel in Saudi Arabia. Now, Artforum reports, she has been tapped to curate the next Istanbul Biennial, which is slated to run September 14–November 17 next year. That biennial appointment is one of the most high-profile posts on the international art circuit and has previously been held by Elmgreen & Dragset (in 2017), Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (2015), and Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann (2011). Blazwick’s plans for Istanbul have not yet been announced. Watch this space.

MODERNIST ARCHITECT MYRON GOLDFINGER, who made his name designing inventive residences in the New York area, died on July 20 at the age of 90, the New York Times reports. He made “homes by amassing basic shapes—half-circles, blocks, triangles—into dramatic sculptural statements that seem both modern and ancient,” Clay Risen writes. His “houses are omnipresent in the New York metropolitan region yet little known to the architecture or art communities at large,” art dealer Mitchell Algus wrote in ARTnews last year. Goldfinger was a student of Louis Kahn and decided to specialize in homes to avoid having to be part of a huge studio; his wife, June, handled their interior design. Algus wrote, “In a profession where publicity had become essential in building reputations and getting commissions, Goldfinger let his work speak for itself.”

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Visitors may be flocking to Europe this summer, but the number of people who can visit Greece’s most famous archaeological site will soon be capped at 20,000 per day.

On Wednesday, the Greek government announced that visits to the Acropolis in Athens will be limited to that quota next month, and subject to hourly entry limits based on the time of day.

According to the Associated Press, Greek culture minister Lina Mendoni said the new controls are needed to prevent bottlenecks and overcrowding. The monument complex has seen as many as 23,000 people per day coming to the UNESCO World Heritage site, most of them as part of large groups arriving before noon.

“The measure will address the need to protect the monument, which is the main thing for us, as well as (improving) visitors’ experience of the site,” Mendoni told the Associated Press.

Mendoni called it a “huge number” in an interview with the Real FM radio network. “Obviously tourism is desirable for the country, for all of us. But we must work out how excessive tourism won’t harm the monument.”

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