Iraqi American artist Michael Rakowitz has called on the British Museum to return an artifact to Iraq in exchange for the donation of a large-scale work by him.

Rakowitz’s proposal will be addressed in a forthcoming visit between Iraq’s culture ministry and British officials in London next month during a scheduled British museum is tour, the Guardian reports.

Rakowitz has proposed the gift of his 2018 Fourth Plinth commission in Trafalgar Square to the Tate Modern, a British Museum affiliate overseen by the U.K. government, in exchange for the latter sharing ownership of an Assyrian artifact with Iraq. He began exploring the exchange in 2020, according to the Guardian, and is now moving closer to becoming a reality.

Rakowitz’s Fourth Plinth commission was a mythical Assyrian winged bull known as a lamassu made of date syrup tins. He wrote of his intentions to give a related work to the Tate Modern in a letter to the British Museum.

Through Rakowitz’s proposed deal, the British Museum would return one of the two Assyrian lamassu sculptures in its permanent collection. The sculptures were uncovered by a 19th-century British archaeologist.

Construction workers in Romania uncovered the tomb of a 5th century warrior and a cache of gilded artifacts, including an ornate dagger encrusted with jewels, while building the A7 Expressway that will run through eastern Romania, according to Live Science.

The tomb is one of four archeological sites that were discovered during construction.

Along with the warrior’s complete skeleton, archeologists found remains of his horse, a gold covered saddle, an iron sword, arrowheads, pieces of gold jewelry, and a golden mask that likely once covered the warrior’s face, Silviu Ene of the Vasile Pârvan Institute of Archeology in Bucharest told Live Science.

Ene and his colleagues told the publication Hungry Post English that, while the warrior’s ethnicity was not immediately clear, “we can assume that he lived under Hun rule.” The most well-known of the tribal, horse-riding nomads is Attila the Hun, who with his armies plagued both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire in the mid-5th century.

According to Live Science, the excavation was carried out under difficult conditions in poor weather. Flashlights often provided the sole form of illumination during the excavation.

A rare pair of large floral paintings by Queen Victoria are going up for auction at Hansons Auctioneers’s London showroom next week. The canvases are expected to fetch between £8,000 and £10,000 ($9,870 and $12,340) each.

Queen Victoria, who oversaw the expansion of the British Empire and made critical reforms to the monarchy, reigned from 1837 until her death in 1901.

Accompanying the paintings is a provenance letter in which Alexander Mountbatten, First Marquess of Carisbrooke and Queen Victoria’s last surviving grandson, reportedly identified them as her work, according to the Evening Standard.

“The royal items were purchased decades ago by the seller’s grandfather,” associate director of Hansons London Chris Kirkham said in a statement.

“I was astounded and delighted in equal measure when I discovered the paintings,” he continued. “I was asked to value a few items at a cottage in Surrey, but had no idea of the magnitude and importance of the antiques tucked away.”

Nevada Judge Miranda M. Du tossed a lawsuit filed against Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club — as well as major NFT trading platforms OpenSea and LooksRare — that alleged the parties failed to properly prevent and respond to NFT theft.

Robert Armijo, who filed the suit, was the owner of three BAYC NFTs that he purchased in November 2021 and January 2022. Armijo said that on February 1, 2022, he attempted to trade one of his NFTs on the messaging site Discord. Someone who purported to be interested in the trade sent him a link to initiate the trade, which Armijo clicked. The link was a phishing link that gave the hacker access to Armijo’s Ether wallet. The hacker then proceeded to steal Armijo’s NFTs and resell them on OpenSea and LooksRare.

When the lawsuit was filed last April, Armijo’s lawyers claimed that OpenSea and LooksRare failed “to implement common sense and reasonable security measures to prevent the foreseeable fraud and sale of stolen” property, the original complaint read. The lawsuit named Yuga Labs as a defendant for the company’s failure to “monitor its proprietary and exclusive ape community by denying entry to individuals whose access is predicated on a stolen BAYC NFT.”

The Judge dismissed the lawsuit for all defendants using reasonings respective to each defendant.

Yuga Labs had argued that the case, insofar as it concerned them, was moot because their company did not fall under Nevada jurisdiction as the company is incorporated in Delaware and has no employees in Nevada. Armijo’s lawyers tried to argue that because Yuga Labs does frequent business in Nevada that they could be tried in the state, but Judge Du disagreed.

Despite ongoing arrangements for its return, a stone relic looted from a Nepalese shrine in the 1980s is still on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The eleventh-century artifact featuring the Buddhist and Hindu god Vishnu was donated nearly thirty years ago from the personal collection of Steven Kossak, a former curator in the museum’s Asian art department whose dealings are now being scrutinized by academics, activists, and museum officials.

“This is the third thing that the Met is returning that was donated by the Kossaks,” Erin Thompson, an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice told ARTnews, referring to the wooden strut and stone statue that were returned last year. 

Deity sculptures are considered living gods in Nepal. The Vishnu relic is a highly symbolic rendition of the god surrounded by a pearl-and-flame aureole with his consort Lakshmi on one side and the eagle Garuda on the other. Standing on a raised platform with lotus decorations, Vishnu is depicted in his four-armed form with raised hands holding weapons: a discus and a club.

Thompson, who has advised on earlier Nepalese repatriation efforts, had visited the Met two weeks ago to take a closer look.

“The museum not only has donations from the family, but it has at least eight loans from them,” she said, adding that the Vishnu relic currently sits in a gallery near an exhibition including other Asian artifacts donated by the Kossaks through their Kronos Collection. “Once you know that someone is acquiring artifacts without looking too closely as a source, the first thing you should do is look deeper.”

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The Headlines

ANOTHER ART ATTACK. On Thursday, protesters at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth spray painted the logo for the oil and gas company Woodside atop a prized Frederick McCubbin painting, the Guardian reports. The piece was covered with clear perspex, apparently preventing it from serious damage. One person was arrested. In a statement, the activists alleged that Woodside is causing the “ongoing desecration of sacred Murujuga rock art” because of its activities on the Burrup peninsula, north of Perth. Woodside, for its part, said that there has not been any impact on the 50,000-year-old rock art in the area, and that it “has a proven, more than 35-year track record of safe, reliable and sustainable operations.” The protest follows a string of protests last year that saw climate activists throw paint (or other substances) on paintings, or glue themselves to them, in efforts to draw attention to their cause.

JOB POSTINGS. The next director of the Seattle gem that is the Frye Art Museum will be Jamilee Lacy. She is coming to the Evergreen State from the Providence College Galleries in Rhode Island, where she is director and chief curator, and spoke with the Seattle Times about her plans. Over in Vermont, the Shelburne Museum has established an associate curator position for Native American art, and named Victoria Sunnergren—a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Delaware—to the post, per ArtDaily. And in case you missed it: Ron Clark, the founding director of the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program, is stepping down after an incredible 54 years, and artist Gregg Bordowitz (an ISP alum and faculty member) is taking his place.

The Digest

Clearing, one of the New York galleries that helped trigger a groundswell of artistic activity in Bushwick in the early 2010s, is set to leave that neighborhood after more than a decade there.

This March, Clearing will relocate to the Bowery in Manhattan, where it will be sited about a block away from the New Museum and the gallery Sperone Westwater. Taking over three floors of 260 Bowery, Clearing will now occupy 6,600 square feet—a smaller amount of space than it had in Bushwick, but in a more central location that puts the gallery a short walk away from a host of Lower East Side art spaces.

“There’s nothing wrong with Brooklyn, but there’s more to New York than Brooklyn,” Olivier Babin, the gallery’s founder, said in a phone interview. “We’re not leaving for a bigger or better space. We’re leaving for a better location.”

The deal was brokered by Kelsey Coxe at Portman Realty, who a spokesperson for Clearing said was attempting to make forays into the art world, working recently with clients such as the artist-run space and bar Beverly’s.

Clearing started in Bushwick in 2011, and now also has venues in Brussels and Los Angeles. Babin has stated that he was initially lured to Bushwick by the relatively low cost of real estate there, which allowed him to open up shop in an airy former auto shop that was bigger than many other spaces in Chelsea or the Lower East Side.

An out-of-this-world haven, accessible only by boat, the Fondation Carmignac on the picturesque Porquerolles island sits on a 37-acre estate where a farm once stood. Upon setting foot on this Mediterranean island between Marseille and Saint-Tropez, you’ll never want to leave. A village looms ahead, but the temptation to follow the sign reading “Fondation d’art contemporain 0,6 km” is too strong. The ascending road on the left takes you up to this contemporary art space, once the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 movie Pierrot le Fou.

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In the 1980s, French architect Henri Vidal turned this quaint farm into a villa, which he had built on a small artificial hill, overlooking the sea. Shortly after, Édouard Carmignac, one of the world’s top art collectors, fell in love with the estate while attending his daughter’s wedding there and made Vidal an offer on the spot, thinking he’d turn the villa into a cultural venue. It took 30 years for Vidal’s daughter to get back to Carmignac.

Carmignac created his namesake family foundation in 2000 to steward his collection, and in 2009, he added the Carmignac Photojournalism Award to the “production of an investigative photo reportage on human rights violations, geostrategic issues in the world,” according to the foundation’s website. (The 2023 edition focuses on electronic waste in Ghana.)

Carmignac acquired the Domaine de la Courtade vineyard in 2013, and the retrofitting of the Villa, under the aegis of the studios Barani and GMAA, began the following year. Because the site is part of a nature reserve, called Natura 2000, erecting any new buildings on the site was out of the question. To create the 16,500 square feet of art galleries needed to transform the villa into a contemporary art space, they had to dig under the existing building.

“I had finished touring with my band, Moriarty, and was already bombing my father with ideas,” said Charles Carmignac, who joined the venture in 2016. “My first contribution was musical, I wrote with bass player Stephan Zimmerli a score for all the actors of the project, designers, architects, artists—in hopes that it would help them work in harmony.”

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