It appears that Arsenal’s pursuit of Galatasaray’s Sacha Boey is facing competition from Brighton & Hove Albion. The French right-back has caught the attention of Arsenal, who see him as a potential first-choice option in that position.

Initially, Arsenal made an offer of around £14 million for Boey, but Galatasaray rejected the bid. This rejection has reportedly sparked a bidding war, with Brighton now entering the fray by submitting a £16 million offer, surpassing Arsenal’s initial bid, as reported by the Sun.

Galatasaray is said to be holding out for a fee of £20 million for the talented defender. With Brighton now seemingly leading the race, Arsenal will need to improve their offer significantly if they want to secure Boey’s services.

The situation remains fluid, and it remains to be seen whether Arsenal will come back with an improved bid to compete with Brighton and meet Galatasaray’s valuation for Sacha Boey.

Just Arsenal Opinion

Arsenal has received positive news regarding the future of Reiss Nelson, as the young attacker is now expected to commit to a new long-term contract with the club.

Nelson had a limited role in the previous season, but his performances and contributions convinced Arsenal to reconsider their initial decision to let him leave in the summer.

Initially, the club offered him a short-term deal, but Nelson declined the offer and garnered interest from AC Milan and other clubs across Europe.

However, according to The Daily Mail, the player has now had a change of heart and is prepared to sign a new long-term contract, indicating his desire to continue his career at the Emirates.

This development will be seen as a significant boost for Arsenal, as they aim to retain their key players while also attracting new talent to the club.

As Asian American and Pacific Islander History Month winds down, it’s important to note
how many AAPI artists, architects, collectors, and activists have changed the course of art history in the United States and around the world. Here are 25 Asian American and Pacific Islander artists who have made key contributions to modern and contemporary art in a variety of mediums, styles, and movements.

Please note that we’ve included some non-US citizens who nevertheless spent significant time in the United States. They are marked with an asterisk*.

The two climate activists who protested at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in April by smearing paint on the base and case of a famous Degas sculpture have been indicted by a federal grand jury. The charges from the US Attorney’s Office are “conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States” and injury to an exhibit or property at the museum.

The unsealed indictment alleges that Timothy Martin and Joanna Smith, along with other unnamed co-conspirators, conducted research into potential targets at the National Gallery, alerted members of the media prior, and entered the museum with plastic water bottles filled with paint for the purpose of injuring an exhibit. It further alleges that Martin and Smith smeared that paint on the case, base, and floor surrounding Degas’s Little Dancer, Age Fourteen.

The protest by Martin and Smith, which happened around 11 a.m. on April 27, was aimed at bringing attention to the climate crisis. The protestors, members of the climate group Declare Emergency, also demanded President Joe Biden declare a climate emergency as well as stop issuing new drilling permits and subsidies for fossil fuels.

Federal authorities also allege that Martin and Smith caused $2,400 in damages and for the work to be removed for 10 days for repairs. The incident prompted the museum’s director, Kaywin Feldman, to issue a video statement on Twitter in response.

The two activists both self-surrendered and were taken into custody on Friday, according a press release from the Department of Justice. The release also states the case is being investigated by the Washington field office of the FBI, specifically the bureau’s Art Crime Team, with assistance from National Gallery of Art Police and US Park Police.

The dark and explicit dramas that are breaking taboos

Italian police say they have recovered more than 3,500 artifacts as the result of a long-term operation involving hundreds of officers. The operation resulted in the arrest of 21 suspects, according to CNN. The announcement was made at a press conference in Puglia on earlier this week.

The police department for the protection of cultural heritage, the Carabinieri, worked with the special operations group ROS and the “Cacciatori Puglia” airborne squadron to carry out dozens of searches against individuals suspected of looting and illicit excavations as well as the trafficking of stolen archaeology artifacts with “inestimable historical, cultural and commercial value.”

According to the Italian daily newspaper La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, the operation was nicknamed “Canusium,” a reference to the ancient name of the municipality where the trafficking group based its operations. Investigative work and precautionary measures spanned the regions of Puglia, Basilicata, Campania, Lazio, and Abruzzo, and lasted almost a year.

While 21 suspects have been arrested so far as part of Operation Canusium, investigators said there are a total of 51 suspects, including grave robbers, international traffickers, and a type of middleman known as a fence. The fences placed the illicit archaeology items, among them vases, jewels, oil lamps, and gold coins, up for sale in both domestic and international markets.

The 3,586 artifacts that have been recovered include loom weights, bell-shaped kraters, jugs, cups, plates, miniature vases, oil lamps, and coins from as early as the 4th century BCE.

Following catastrophic floods that have crippled the Emilia-Romagna region, Italy has announced a plan to raise museum admission fees across the country by €1 in an attempt to help save “cultural heritage” that has been damaged during the floods, according to a report by The Art Newspaper.

The price hike is part of a €2 billion aid package announced by Italian culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano which would run for a scant three months, only at state-run museums, from June 15 through September 15. Still, there is some controversy over how much good the meager price hike would actually do.

According to The Art Newspaper, “some cultural commentators [warn such a measure] could drive Italians away from museums” and, already, only around 20% of the Italian population visited a museum in 2022.

Critics say that the price hike will hurt those who already found museum admission fees too pricey.

“I don’t think that this policy is right, if only for an evident lack of social equality,” Giuliano Volpe, a professor of archaeology at the University of Bari and former advisor to Dario Franceschini, the former culture minister, told The Art Newspaper. “The country should be helping the young and unemployed.”

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced earlier this week that it has commissioned Kara Walker to create the first site-specific installation for its Roberts Family Gallery.

For the project, Walker is planning a large-scale installation responding to the gallery’s glass enclosure. The piece will also address historical preservation techniques. SFMOMA curator of contemporary art Eungie Joo is organizing the showing, which will be open to the public with free admission in July 2024.

“Informed by the fear and loss experienced as a global society during the COVID-19 pandemic, Walker’s new commission helps us consider the memorialization of trauma and the objectives of technology. Facing Howard Street and the world, her striking installation will allow us to move towards wonder and healing,” Joo said in a statement.

This is the first time an artist has made a site-specific installation in the space, which boasts floor-to-ceiling windows on two sides. The gallery has previously featured installations by such artists as Richard Serra, Diego Rivera, and JR.

Walker, who examines histories of anti-Black racism and misogyny, sometimes in controversial ways, has shown at the museum over the last 25 years.

Artist Shellyne Rodriguez was arrested on Thursday after the New York Post published video footage in which she appeared to hold a machete up to a reporter.

Rodriguez was arrested at the 43rd Precinct in the Bronx on Thursday morning and was released that same day. The New York Police Department said that Rodriguez had been charged with misdemeanor counts of menacing and harassment in connection with the incident, which took place Tuesday.

That same day, Rodriguez was fired by Manhattan’s Hunter College, where she was formerly an adjunct professor in the art department. Hunter released a statement in which it said that the school “strongly condemns the unacceptable actions of Shellyne Rodriguez.”

After the story was picked up by right-wing publications, Rodriguez released a statement saying that the school had “capitulated” to “racists, white nationalists, and misogynists.”

On Friday, the School of Visual Arts, where she had also been an adjunct professor, “made the decision not to new Shellyne Rodriguez’s contract,” the school wrote in a statement to ARTnews.

To be British is a very complicated fate. To be a British novelist can seem a catastrophe. You enter into a miasma of history and class and garbage and publication—the way a sad cow might feel entering the abattoir. Or certainly that was how I felt, twenty years ago, when I entered the abattoir myself. One allegory for this system was the glamour of Martin Amis. Everyone had an opinion on Amis, and the strangeness was that this opinion was never just on the prose, on the novels and the stories and the essays. It was also an opinion on his opinions: the party gossip and the newspaper theories, the Oxford education and the afternoon tennis.

The British male! Or at least the British bourgeois male, with his many father figures, both real and acquired. From certain angles, in certain photos, Amis looked like Jagger, and so he became the Jagger of literature. He was small, true—I feel a permanent pang of camaraderie at his line in The Pregnant Widow about a character who occupies that “much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven”—but he was also hypermasculine. It wasn’t just his subjects: the snooker and the booze and the obsession with judging all women “sack artists.” It wasn’t even just the style: an inability to leave a sentence alone without chafing at every verb, the prose equivalent of truffle fries. It was also the interview persona, all haughtiness and clubhouse universality, however much that could be contradicted in private by thoughtfulness and generosity of conversation.

But most of all, his British maleness was in the purity of his comic perception of the world. He practiced a very specific form of oral literature—anecdote, putdown, punchline, alcoholic joke: monologues from the ruined-dinner table. This morning I picked up an old copy of Money taken from my parents’ house and there they were, the riffs: “You just cannot park round here any more. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here any more. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving.” Or: “I should have realized that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Americans mean that they can play tennis.” Or: “This guy had no future in the frightening business. He just wasn’t frightening.” A novel by Amis is an apparatus for each line to find its best exposure. ” ‘Yeah,” I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”