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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.

Vittorio Sgarbi, Italy’s controversial junior culture minister, resigned as he continued to face mounting scrutiny over an array of matters, including a possible connection to a stolen painting and an ongoing investigation by the country’s antitrust body.

It was the latter inquiry that Sgarbi cited when he announced his resignation at a conference held late in the day in Milan on Friday. That investigation centered around the money that Sgarbi allegedly pocketed when he made public appearances at culture events.

Last year, the Italian daily newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano reported that Sgarbi had made about €300,000 over the course of nearly nine months from conducting such appearances, spurring the antitrust body to investigate. Sgarbi previously defended himself, claiming that he had merely taken “a fee for what I’ve done all my life, what any writer or lecturer does: I talk about art.” But the antitrust body said that in fact, these fees were “activities incompatible with a government office.”

On Friday, as he resigned form his post, Sgarbi said, “According to the Antitrust notice, I could not talk about art to avoid conflict of interest. And therefore I would like to announce here my resignation as Undersecretary of State for Culture.”

Meanwhile, last month, Sgarbi had faced an investigation over his alleged connections to a Rutilio Manetti painting that was stolen in 2013. Il Fatto Quotidiano claimed that a similar-looking Manetti painting that went on view in 2021 in the Tuscan city of Lucca was the heisted one. The one in the Lucca show had reportedly come from the Villa Maidalchina, which Sgarbi owns.

The British Museum will display a small grouping of items it has recently recovered in a new exhibition. Those objects represent just 10 of the 351 that have been recovered amid ongoing investigations into a vast array of that were damaged or stolen, or went missing.

The majority of those 2,000 items were classical gems and gold jewelry. None of the objects had been on public display recently.

An unnamed staff member, later revealed to be senior curator Peter Higgs, was fired in connection with the stolen items. He had listed some of those items on eBay for as little as $51, and is thought to have conducted the thefts over a period of around 25 years. In the wake of Higgs’s firing, director Hartwig Fischer and deputy director Jonathan Williams resigned.

The museum has been working to rebuild after destructive reports in the British press about how it handled the missing items. After the British Museum was urged to strengthen its records for its collection to prevent future thefts, board chair George Osborne promised a £10 million digitization project.

The British Museum said the incident “sparked a renewed public interest in these objects,” and prompted a display exploring the significance of classical gems and their impression left throughout history. In addition to being worn as jewelry, classical gems were used as seals or simply collected as beauty objects, especially by royalty, aristocrats and artists.

A GoFundMe campaign to replace a statue of Jackie Robinson stolen last week from a baseball complex in McAdams Park in Wichita, Kansas has raised over $185,000 in just five days.

The amount is more than double the $75,000 the statue was estimated to have originally cost when it was first erected in 2021 by the League 42 Foundation, a nonprofit introducing baseball to youths in Wichita.

The largest donations are reported to have come from Major League Baseball, according to foundation executive director Bob Lutz, and from an anonymous former MLB player, according to Wichita police chief Joe Sullivan.

The statue was discovered to be stolen last week with only the statue’s feet remaining. Then, on Tuesday, remnants of the statue were found burned when the local fire department responded to a trash can fire in a park seven miles away, the Associated Press reported. Police said the theft was caught on surveillance, but they have yet to apprehend a suspect.

In a statement, Lutz, said, “As law enforcement searches for the culprits of this crime, we remain devoted to our mission of providing low-cost baseball and education opportunities for our 600 kids, ages 5-14. They are as heartbroken over this theft as any of us and we are determined to replace the statue.”

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The Headlines

CRIMINAL EVIDENCE ON VIEW. As promised, the British Museum will exhibit some of the small Roman gems stolen and recently recovered, among the nearly 2000 objects missing, damaged, and allegedly pocketed by a former senior curator at the museum. Some 350 items have been recovered to date, in the ongoing investigation that continues to shake the institution. Among the pieces to be displayed later this month, is a bust of Cupid from the 1st or 2nd Century BCE. “We promised we’d show the world the gems that were stolen and recovered – rather than hide them away,” George Osborne, chair of the museum Board of Trustees, told the BBC.

FRANKENTHALER FEUD. An amended legal complaint was filed against the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, by Frederick Iseman, the artist’s nephew. He has expanded on earlier allegations against members of the artist’s family, including his cousin, the artist Clifford Ross, whom he says was using foundation funds to bolster his own artistic career in a “pay-to-display machine.” [ARTnews]

The Digest

Judy Chicago became the most famous feminist artist of her generation when, for her monumental Dinner Party (1974–79), she enlisted hundreds of women volunteers to contribute craftwork to her giant triangular table. On that table, Chicago set plates dedicated to notable women from history, from the goddess Ishtar to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. But in lieu of food, she served each woman a unique ceramic vulva, decorated as a tribute to her work.

This iconic installation toured 16 venues in 6 countries, with a message to women everywhere: you are never alone, even if you find yourself isolated in the domestic sphere. And in 2001, The Dinner Party became the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum’s feminist art center.

Though clearly popular, The Dinner Party, like much of Chicago’s work, has also received plenty of criticism—for both its TERF-y equation of womanhood with vulvas, and for its whiteness. In 1984 critic Hortense J. Spillers pointed out that Chicago had included only one Black woman, Sojourner Truth, and represented her unlike the others, with faces instead of a vulva. Spiller calls the result “symbolic castration.”

Even though Chicago enjoys the status of feminist icon, and of being a household name, her retrospective at the New Museum in New York, titled “Herstory,” hasn’t exactly been a buzzy blockbuster. That’s probably because Chicago is not quite the artist we need right now: in 2024 she is known for a version of feminism that is popular and palatable, but also pretty narrow.

While many are tempted to write off Chicago completely, I find myself a nervous witness to a trend afflicting a younger generation that seems to feel that history—say, that of second-wave feminism—is bad, since people were more racist, sexist, and imperialist back then. They’re not wrong, but the attitude misses the importance of learning from history and from elders like Chicago: you can grow from others’ mistakes, and you would be wise to honor the trailblazers who made sacrifices to carve imperfect but important paths for change.

November 26, 2023 – February 3, 2024

December 8, 2023 – February 3, 2024

December 16, 2023 – February 4, 2024

January 5 – February 3, 2024

January 5 – February 3, 2024

November 24, 2023 – February 10, 2024

December 1, 2023 – February 11, 2024