It was the morning of July 11, 2022, when the Consul General of Mexico in New York City, Jorge Islas López, appeared at Arte Primitivo-Howard S. Rose Gallery. He was there as a representative of Mexico, trying to stop an auction and requesting the return of pre-Columbian goods that were being marketed online by the gallery. That day, he filed a reportwith Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. An investigation was launched.

That morning, Mexico rejected the auction on social media, as part of #MiPatrimonioNoSeVende (MyHeritageIsNotForSale), an online campaign that is led by the Mexican government. The campaign seeks to raise awareness of archeological goods that belong to Mexico and that are abroad illegally.

The Secretariat of Culture of Mexico and Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) disapproved two auctions conducted by Howard S. Rose Gallery because the gallery was selling pre-Columbian goods belonging to the cultural patrimony of Mexico, according to the bureau and institute. On July 11, 2022, the Secretariat said experts of INAH had identified 1,384 goods belonging to Mexico that were being sold in the auction. And on September 26, 2022, INAH’s experts identified more pieces, 152 of which were being sold by the gallery.

On November 10, 2022, Islas López said that he was going to reach out to all of the corresponding authorities regarding this case and rejected the auction.

“Nobody has the right to take the cultural and historical patrimony of a society and a country. Cultural patrimony tells us stories of the origins, the beginnings of a society,” Islas López said in an interview with ARTnews, speaking in the New York officeof the Consulate General of Mexico. “A community should not steal the identity of another community.”

In our Spring issue, we published Kyra Wilder’s poem “John Wick Is So Tired.” To celebrate the poem and the recent release of John Wick: Chapter 4, we sent four reviewers to three different John Wick screenings over the course of a week.  

Tuesday, March 21: Press Preview

The first thing we noted when we entered AMC Lincoln Square 13 for the New York press screening of John Wick: Chapter 4 was that film PR girls are way nicer than their fashion industry counterparts. Check-in was a breeze, and we were informed that since we had special blue wristbands, we didn’t have to turn in our phones. We hadn’t considered that we would potentially have to turn in our phones, but were relieved nevertheless. We were handed a very large stack of papers with a large John Wick logo at the top, containing detailed information about the franchise and a long explanation of the movie’s plot, which we chose not to read too closely for fear of spoilers. This heavy stack of papers was also where we first learned that the runtime was a whopping 169 minutes. This troubled us, mostly because we had had a lot of wine with dinner and were concerned that we would have to pee. The theater was packed with agitated-seeming nonjournalists who were somehow able to secure tickets. People wove up and down the aisles in a huff, frustrated by the first-come-first-served seating. A couple of women exchanged curse words over another woman’s volume. Multiple people arrived late with full take-out bags, their lack of discretion leading us to believe that the staff of the theater were not too concerned with enforcing the rules of this AMC John Wick press preview. 

The French crime film maestro Jean-Pierre Melville once said, “What is friendship? It’s telephoning a friend at night to say, ‘Be a pal, get your gun, and come on over quickly.’ ” In the universe of John Wick, it’s pretty much that too, but it’s a thousand guns, two dozen archers, bows, arrows, knives, swords, bulletproof suits, a sundry list of exotic ammunition, an attack dog, a blind assassin, dueling pistols, a fleet of luxury attack vehicles, and a handful of classic American muscle cars. Oh, and if you could bring them all to the Sacré-Cœur, in Paris, by sunrise, that would be great, thanks.

London’s art scene will likely soon be able to rejoice: a valuable portrait by Joshua Reynolds, one of England’s most famous artists, seems sure to remain in the city some of the time, albeit under somewhat unusual terms.

London’s National Portrait Gallery and Los Angeles’s Getty Museum said on Friday that they will jointly acquire Reynolds’s ca. 1776 painting Portrait of Mai (Omai), putting an end in sight for the tense race to keep the painting within England before its export ban runs out. Still, because the museums will work together on the planned acquisition, the painting will move between England and the US, and could even appear at the Getty during the Olympics in 2028.

The acquisition is not finalized yet, and there is still the possibility it will not go through if both institutions can’t pay their halves of the £50 million ($61.9 million) needed to keep the work from leaving the UK. It is known, however, that the National Portrait Gallery has nearly raised its half, and the Getty has often acquired works for greater sums, such as the $53 million it paid at auction in 2021 for a Gustave Caillebotte painting.

International joint acquisitions such as this one are extremely rare. Never before has a UK museum linked up with a US institution to obtain a work in a situation such as this.

Nicholas Cullinan, director of the National Portrait Gallery, said in a statement, “The portrait is unique in both British and world culture and yet has never been in a museum collection: now it has the potential to be in two, one facing the Pacific from where Mai came, and the other only yards from Reynolds’ studio, where it was painted. For the Gallery it is important that this outstanding portrait is for the UK public, and we will share it with other institutions across the country.”

Marcus, Vish, Jim and Andy celebrate the glorious return of club football and a very, VERY inglorious week for Tottenham Hotspur Football Club. Lol.

We chat about all of that nonsense, plus Marcus rallies to Roy the Boy’s defence and tips Crystal Palace for the Europa League (“clip that”). We also discuss what Jack Grealish really needs to add to his Chinese takeaway ahead of Man City vs Liverpool.

Plus, do donkeys pop up and score winning goals in the Champions League? And what do Newcastle and AI have in common?

Tweet us @FootballRamble and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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When the NFT trading platform OpenSea agreed to meet with representatives from Color of Change, staffers at the civil rights advocacy group assumed that meant that the largest and most prominent business in the space would be receptive to suggestions on making their business more inclusive.

Before their first video conference in April, Color of Change had found, through a series of quick searches, that OpenSea was facilitating and profiting from the sale of a slew of indefensibly racist and antisemitic collections of NFTs. (Non-Fungible Tokens are commodities based on crypto blockchains that usually signify ownership of digital art, videos, or photos.)

When questioned about those tokens in a series of three meetings that unfolded into September, OpenSea staffers defended their presence as a matter of not stifling users’ expression and creativity. Participants in the meetings from OpenSea, according to the Color of Change representatives, falsely claimed the inability to police their site, compared their platform to the Holocaust Museum, and ultimately defended leaving up NFTs that used the n-word, depicted Black people as racist caricatures, and that featured antisemitic, pro-Nazi content. 

OpenSea is far and above the most well-known and used NFT trading platform; it has accrued over 1 million users, who have traded billions of dollars worth of NFTs. One 2022 survey found that a quarter of Black Americans own crypto—only 15 percent of whites do—and Color of Change set up the meetings as part of an effort to make the space more hospitable for people of color. 

OpenSea’s response tracks with a broader hesitation to grapple with racial issues in Web 3, as the ostensibly decentralized apps and communities around crypto are collectively known. The heavily white, male community of Web 3 founders and developers who built a libertarian dream have sometimes been resistant to adjust to the reality of society’s persistent inequities. In 2020, in the wake of demonstrations over George Floyd’s murder, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced a controversial policy barring employees from debating “causes or political candidates internally that are unrelated to work.” A year later, his company quietly pulled language from its prohibited uses policy that explicitly barred users from using the crypto platform to “encourage hate” and “racial intolerance.” 

As her ski crash trial ends in her victory, why she splits opinion

Including the Super Mario Bros Movie, Renfield and Evil Dead Rise

In 1977, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn wrote to her best friend, Lucia Berlin, from the Hotel Boulderado, where she was staying while she looked for a house in Boulder, Colorado. Her “large corner room” became “a dormitory at night,” while “during the day we roll the beds into a cupboard in the hall.” She described the hotel as a “faded red brick run by post hippies,” a place for people on the make and on the move. This might not seem like a hotel that would have had its own stationery, but it did. The paper’s crest features a lantern and mountains, and the header reads HOTEL BOULDERADO in French Clarendon font: the typeface of Westerns and outlaws, of greed, gambling, and adventure. The hotel’s name, Dunbar Dorn recently pointed out to me, “is a combination of Boulder and Colorado, obviously, but the mythic El Dorado is ingrained everywhere in the West”—its lost city of gold.

I stumbled on this letter at Harvard’s Houghton Library, where a collection of Berlin’s papers are stored in a single cardboard box. Almost everything she saved over the course of her peripatetic life is compressed into this tiny space: correspondence, notebooks, reviews, manuscripts, applications for tenure. I am Berlin’s first biographer, and I often felt deeply moved as I worked through the box last summer. Berlin is my El Dorado, and I had been looking for her for so long … Though the archivists at the library had sent me scans of some of these documents during the pandemic, it wasn’t the same as touching pages she had once touched.

As I examined the yellowed paper, placing my own thumb over the smudged thumbprint at the top, I imagined Berlin reading Dunbar Dorn’s letter at her kitchen table in Oakland after a shift on the Merritt Hospital switchboard. Mostly, it’s about Dunbar Dorn’s journey from California to Colorado with her husband, Ed Dorn, and their children. Her emphasis is on their time on the road, not on their arrival—on transience over stasis and on quest over complacency, core values of the counterculture to which she, Dorn, Berlin, and their dispersed community of writers and artists loosely belonged.

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 243.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

With the first line. It was something I’d thought a lot about—I run marathons, and in those tense few days before the race, when I’m drinking water and carb loading and meditating on what’s going to happen, I watch John Wick, specifically because of the way Keanu Reeves runs. He looks so tired, but he’s winning. 

In the fall of 2021, I was tapering for a marathon and then I had to go to a funeral, and suddenly my John Wick time got invaded by real grief. And John Wick was good for that, too. 

After Rodri and Spain got tangled in the long grass at Hampden, Dotun, Andy and David are here to ask what’s going on with Spain. A one-off slip-up, or are they just short of talent right now?

Next, we answer your questions about Thomas Tuchel’s move to Bayern Munich! It’s a challenging time there: David argues that Bayern’s players drove the bus over Julian Nagelsmann, while Andy explains why there’s a whole heap of pressure on Bayern’s board as much as Tuchel now. 

Plus, Feyenoord are on course for their second Eredivisie title in 23 years, but they could have a tricky (Arne) Slot to fill come the summer…

Got a question for us? Tweet us @FootballRamble, @dotunadebayo and @andybrassell. 

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