The remains of a Roman harbor were found by a research team from the University of Ljubljana’s Institute of Underwater Archaeology (ZAPA) off the coast of Portorož, Slovenia.

There, more than 3,000 ceramic fragments were unearthed by divers from the university’s faculty of maritime studies and transport team. They also found two ancient ship masts, several wooden stakes, and rigging and sails parts.

The wooden stakes may have formed a type of a barrier to protect the coastline. Measuring more than three feet long, the two masts made from fir and spruce trees are “unique examples on a global scale,” the researchers told Artnet News.

Most of the identified pottery is sigallata, which was a popular kind of red pottery mass-produced during the 1st century CE. Often, it featured raised decorative designs. Much of the amphorae, kitchenware, and fine tableware shards would have been imported.

The wood artifacts will be preserved with melamine resin and, along with the other objects, stored at the Sergei Mašera Maritime Museum in Piran.

Attendance at national museums and galleries in the UK has dropped massively since the pandemic, even despite a lack of restrictions, according to a new report published by the UK government this month.

The report centers on data from a 15-museum network that includes institutions such as the British Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the V&A, and the Tate museums. Per the report, the amount of people that visited those museums during the first quarter of 2023 was more than a quarter fewer than a similar period before the pandemic.

Between 2022 and 2023, there were a total of 35.1 million visits to state-backed museums and galleries in the agency’s network, the report found. That’s about 14 million fewer visitors than the amount recorded from 2018 to 2019.

The report also found that, between 2022 and 2023, foot traffic from international visitors saw a sharp drop. Compared to pre-pandemic figures recorded in 2019, attendance at DCMS-sponsored museums and galleries plummeted by a striking 49.5 percent in 2023.

The report also showed that the museum network saw loans to other other museums in surrounding regions in the country decline. Institutions sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport loaned items to over 1,000 other UK cultural institutions, marking an 18 percent decrease compared to 2019.

An exhibition at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is set to reopen after having been closed to the public following a protest in which artists called for a ceasefire in Gaza and altered their artworks.

The conflict was sparked by the October 7 attack by Hamas, the militant group that killed 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped roughly 240 people. Since then, Israel’s bombing campaigns have killed 31,000 Gazans, according to the local health ministry.

During a protest in February, artists within the show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, titled “Bay Area Now 9,” altered their artworks as they called for a ceasefire in Gaza. Video of the artist Paz G spray-painting phrases to that effect onto one of their sculptures was widely shared on social media.

The museum subsequently closed the show and said it would store the works; the exhibition has remained shuttered ever since. But, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, the show has now reopened, and does include all the altered works. It is slated to run through early May.

In a statement posted to the YBCA website, the institution’s board of directors said the reopening, and the decision to include the works that were altered, “reflects our commitment to supporting artists’ voices and creating a space where diverse perspectives are welcomed, celebrated, and thoughtfully explored.” The statement added that “while the altered artwork remains unchanged since February 15, new signage will provide context regarding the alterations made by the artists. The opinions expressed by each artist are their own, and are not those of YBCA.”

On Wednesday, CNN’s Pamela Brown and Jake Tapper reported that New York Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers—who is (or at least was) reportedly being considered as independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential running mate—had told at least two people that the 2012 mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, never happened. One of those two people was Brown herself, who recounted how Rodgers approached her at a Kentucky Derby after-party in 2013 to complain about the media’s coverage of the shooting:

Brown recalls Rodgers asking her if she thought it was off that there were men in black in the woods by the school, falsely claiming those men were actually government operatives. Brown found the encounter disturbing.

CNN has spoken to another person with a similar story. This person, to whom CNN has granted anonymity so as to avoid harassment, recalled that several years ago, Rodgers claimed, “Sandy Hook never happened…All those children never existed. They were all actors.”

Rodgers responded on Thursday in a manner that, viewed within a narrow context, could be considered to be a denial: “As I’m on the record saying in the past, what happened in Sandy Hook was an absolute tragedy,” he wrote on X, the emaciated husk of a social-media platform formerly known as Twitter. “I am not and have never been of the opinion that the events did not take place. Again, I hope that we learn from this and other tragedies to identify the signs that will allow us to prevent unnecessary loss of life.”

It feels strange to parse the statements of a Super Bowl-winning quarterback as if they are from a candidate for a constitutional office, but under the circumstances, apparently, we must. So I’ll just note the obvious: Rodgers did not deny the substance of the story, which reported that he said these things in 2013. Given that Alex Jones was recently handed a $1.5 billion judgment for his years-long campaign to defame grieving Sandy Hook parents—spreading false conspiracies that bear a strong resemblance to what Rodgers is reported to have said—it’s not surprising that a guy who maybe wants to be vice president, and definitely does not want to be bankrupt, is not repeating them now. 

Johanna Hedva, an artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin, said their attempt to call Israel’s actions in Palestine an “undeniable genocide” ended up leading to the cancelation of a solo show planned to open at Germany’s Kunstverein Braunschweig tomorrow.

In a lengthy statement posted to Instagram, Hedva claimed that they had tried to insert that phrase into a press release for their show and that the institution’s leader had rolled it back to refer to “ongoing genocide.” Hedva claimed the phrase was then further re-edited, with the latter word changed to now read “wars.”

Hedva also claimed that the director, Jule Hillgärtner, had her last day at the museum today as a result of the situation. Hillgärtner is still listed on the Kunstverein Braunschweig’s website as the museum’s director; the museum did not respond to an inquiry from ARTnews as to whether her employment status has changed.

According to Hedva, the museum claimed that the show, titled “Are You Willing to Break It,” was officially canceled because the museum was “understaffed.” On its website, the Kunstverein Braunschweig indicates that the show is “suspended for capacity reasons,” but does not mention Hedva’s claims that they disputed the language in the press release. The description of the exhibition is no longer available on the website.

A Kunstverein Braunschweig spokesperson said that Hillgärtner had departed the museum, and that Benedikt Johannes Seerieder, the curator of the Hedva show, had left the institution at the end of his contract a month ago. Regarding Hedva’s allegations about the show’s press release, the spokesperson said, “I was not involved in the editorial process, so I can not provide any further information at this time.”

On Wednesday, the Dwight D. Opperman Foundation announced the 2024 recipients of the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Leadership Award. The winners: businessman Elon Musk, right-wing media kingpin Rupert Murdoch, lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, felonious Wall Streeter turned philanthropist Mike Milken, and actor Sylvester Stallone. The Foundation hailed these “iconic individuals” for their “extraordinary achievements.”

Veteran corporate lawyer Brendan Sullivan, who was Oliver North’s attorney during the Iran-contra scandal and who now chairs the RBG Award, noted, “The honorees reflect the integrity and achievement that defined Justice Ginsburg’s career and legend.” And the chair of the foundation, Julie Opperman, a big Republican donor and the widow of publishing titan Dwight Opperman, who once was CEO of Thomson Reuters, remarked that the award embraces “the fullness of Justice Ginsburg’s legacy.”

Attaching Ginsburg’s name to Musk, who has amplified racist and antisemitic posts and ideas on X, and Murdoch, whose Fox News purposefully spread Trump’s disinformation about the 2020 election and has repeatedly deployed falsehoods to challenge and undermine the values that Ginsburg fought for her entire life, seemed an odd and inappropriate choice. That’s what Ginsburg’s family believes. 

It has released a statement denouncing the awards:

The decision of the Opperman Foundation to bestow the RBG Women’s Leadership Award on this year’s slate of awardees is an affront to the memory of our mother and grandmother, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her legacy is one of deep commitment to justice and to the proposition that all persons deserve what she called “equal citizenship stature” under the Constitution. She was a singularly powerful voice for the equality and empowerment of women, including their ability to control their own bodies. As it was originally conceived and named, the Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Woman of Leadership Award honored that legacy by recognizing “an extraordinary woman who has exercised a positive and notable influence on society and served as an exemplary role model in both principles and practice.” This year, the Opperman Foundation has strayed far from the original mission of the award and from what Justice Ginsburg stood for.

1. The Divine Celebrity

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.” It is interesting that he felt the need to specify that Lohan had not died, although ultimately his assertion of her power is difficult to deny based on the evidence of Lindsay Lohan, which may not exude the surfer-y, gilded vibe he might have hoped for, but which does act as a poignant document of Lohan’s skill, her raw and uncomfortable magnetism.

“Lindsay has an incredible emotional and physical presence on screen that holds an existential vulnerability,” Phillips argued in his artist’s statement, “while harnessing the power of the transcendental—the moment in transition. She is able to connect with us past all of our memory and projection, expressing our own inner eminence.” “Our own inner eminence” is an odd, not entirely meaningful phrase, used in a typically unmeaningful and art-speak-riddled press release. What the artist seems to say or to imply, however, is that Lohan’s obvious ability to reach inside herself and then—without dialogue—vividly suggest her depths onscreen acts as a piquant reminder of our own complexity, the way each of us is a celebrity in the melodrama of our lives.

What makes Lindsay Lohan art and not a perfume advertisement, aside from the absence of a perfume bottle? The same quality, perhaps, that makes—or made—Lohan herself a star, as well as, once, a sterling actress. All Phillips’s talk of transcendence and the existential may be overblown, but then stars tend to be overblown, as evidenced by the superlatives so often used in descriptions of Hollywood and its denizens: “silver screen,” “golden age,” “legendary,” or “iconic.” “Muses must possess two qualities,” the dance critic Arlene Croce claimed in The New Yorker in 1996, “beauty and mystery, and of the two, mystery is the greater.” At first blush, Lohan might not have seemed like an especially mysterious muse, with her personal life splashed across the tabloids and her upskirt shots all over Google. In fact, her revelations are a trick, the illusion of intimacy possible because she has enough to plumb that we can barely touch the surface. We can see her pubis and her mugshots and the powder in her nostrils, but it is impossible for us, as regular, unfamous people, to know what it feels like to be her.

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THE HEADLINES

TIKTOK ART BAN. The latest US bill to ban TikTok is worrying some artists who rely on the platform for income. The animator “Rigatoni” Garrido told Hyperallergic her TikTok posts redirect viewers to her merchandise shop, helping build a fanbase more effectively than Instagram. The app has also been “pivotal in the growth and success” of Amanda Kelly’s miniature art career, said the creator who goes by PandaMiniatures, and is part of TikTok’s Creator Program. “What I love the most about sharing my art on TikTok is hearing from followers who resonate with my work,” she said. Still, artists also say that with or without the app, they won’t stop creating. 

HIDDEN MESSAGE. Not everyone saw it, including the Whitney Biennial curators. But Demian DinéYazhi’s neon sign sculpture at the New York exhibition which opened to previews yesterday, did refer directly to the war in Gaza, in what may be a telling example of how artists are creatively addressing the subject in today’s divisive climate, and within an exhibition described by some critics as veering away from overt political messaging on the whole. Patient observers of the DinéYazhi piece caught some of the neon lights slowly flicker to spell out “Free Palestine.” Later confirmed by the institution, curators told the New York Times they hadn’t been aware of the phrase, and had initially offered a broader reading of the work.

THE DIGEST

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

The drawings in Marian Zazeela’s exhibition at Artists Space in New York look like words being born. Most of them are not even words, exactly, but accumulations of marks making their way through transformative stages somewhere between the embryonic and the etymological.

Zazeela’s ornate style of drawing and calligraphy has been synonymous for decades with the work of her partner, the minimalist musical composer La Monte Young. The few musically aligned drawings in “Dream Lines,” an exhibition of nearly 50 works made between 1962 and 2003, include an early poster advertising a series of performances by Young and fellow drone devotee Angus MacLise, as well as sketches for what would come to be album covers.

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But most of the drawings now on view in Tribeca look like searching gestures that fluctuate between differing states of legibility. One brain-scrambling sketch of curlicue forms from 1962 (it’s untitled, like all but a few works in the show) seems to bear the strange phrase “frow word” before rearranging itself to look more like “word” spelled both backward and forward—and then, after that, “draw word.” Another from 1963 features extremely tiny lines of blurred black flourishes suggestive of writing over top an index page from the back of a book—intimating a store of information that has been obscured and hidden well away.

Zazeela’s style is rooted in calligraphy but also grows and sprouts in different ways. And looking at her drawings—most of them in ink or pencil, and for the most part in black and white—is a curious exercise in an age when writing itself has so fundamentally changed. When is the last time you wrote something in cursive? Or had to decipher something written by hand? As it were, on my way to see “Dream Lines,” I realized I had forgotten a pen to jot down notes and wandered around looking for somewhere—anywhere—to buy one. The little drug stores and the 7-Eleven I checked no longer stock even simple Bics.

In the decade before her death, in 1999 at age 32, artist Belkis Ayón stumbled upon the mythological story of Sikán in a book about Abakuá, a secret Afro-Cuban fraternal organization exclusive to men. At the time, she had been painting with vivid colors, but as she delved deeper into the story of Sikán, her palette would shift to blacks and whites, with an emphasis on light and shadow.

“Sikán is the woman sacrificed by men in an attempt to obtain her sacred voice,” Ayón once said in a 1993 interview.

It is these Sikán-related works that would garner acclaim for Ayón, who was born in Havana in 1967. Her art would be included in the 1993 Venice Biennale, the 1994 Havana Biennial, and the 1997 Gwangju Biennale. More recently, her 2016 retrospective would travel to five US cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and Houston, as well as the 2022 Venice Biennale, surrounding a sculpture by Simone Leigh. And now, it is the subject of an exhibition (through April 25) at Miami gallery David Castillo, the artist’s first commercial showing since her death 25 years ago.

At the gallery, each work is a door into the artist’s imagination. Organized chronologically and presenting pieces made between 1989 to 1999, the exhibition begins with Ayón’s first representation of Sikán in Sálvanos Abasi (Abasi Save Us), from 1989, where a genderless figure with dark, fathomless eyes, no mouth, and a small sacred fish hanging from her necklace stares intensely back at the viewer. In the myth, Sikán, a princess, accidentally catches a sacred fish, considered the reincarnation of a king, that jumps into her bucket while she fetches water from a nearby river. This fish contained the secret voice that would lead whoever cares for it to prosperity. When the Abakuá men learn of this, they send serpents to scare Sikán and then sacrifice her, believing the fish’s secret voice to have entered Sikán’s skin.

Ayón continues with her own version of this story, looking for openings and closures in the myth. In 1993’s Vamos (Let’s Go), a genderless figure that appears to be Sikán has fish scales now encrusted on their body as they present the sacred fish to the other phantasmagoric figures. In Siempre Vuelvo (I Always Return),  also from 1993, Sikán is depicted as risen and resurrected into a dark cosmos. Her mouth remains covered, her hands crossed. Beneath her spirit, three bodies appear to be those that sacrificed her, gesturing upward.