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“The legendary actress visits Christie’s galleries at Rockefeller Center and finds herself captivated by the gilded sculpture.”  Thus trumpets the tagline for Nicole Kidman’s assignation with Constantin Brancusi’s bronze and gold leaf Danaïde (1913), circulated online this past spring in advance of the work’s auction.  The “cinematic short film” produced by Christie’s indeed reveals the Hollywood star finding herself… duly captivated. She rushes an unnamed caller off the phone to stalk the sculpture in her stilettos from behind a circular curtain. To the tune of David Bowie’s “Golden Years,” Kidman gazes fixedly into Danaïde ’s burnished, nearly vacant visage. The camera cuts intermittently to a speculative montage of her inner experience.  Like some ancient oracle, the sculpture’s mere presence unleashes a series of visionary insights into its presumed (read: decidedly fantastical) origins: from all manner of Greek statuary to easter...

By Steven White & Adam Julian Photos by Andy McArthur/Caroline Lewis St Patrick’s College, Silverstream won their third straight College Sport Wellington Premiership First XV title at a wild and windy Jerry Collins Stadium today, trampling  Wellington College 38-14. Winning their 10th Premiership and third in a row for the first time, Silverstream bettered their 35-14...

If 2025 was the year of the museum robbery, perhaps 2026 will be the year of the recovery. On Friday, Italian police announced that they had recovered three artworks stolen in March from the Fondazione Magnani Rocca near Parma in Northern Italy, according to Reuters . The recovered paintings are Paul Cezanne’s Still Life with Cherries  (1890), Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s late-career  Les Poissons  (1917), and Henri Matisse’s  Odalisque on the Terrace  (1922). Their collective value is said to be in excess of $10.4 million. A  report  by the BBC in March noted that  Les Poissons , the sole oil on canvas, is worth the most, valued at around €6 million ($6.9 million). The Cézanne and Matisse are both works on paper. The Cultural Heritage Protection Unit of the Carabinieri, the national gendarmerie of Italy, found the works in an apartment in Parma; nine Moldovan nationals have since been placed under investigation. The...

The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP), an organization founded in Berlin in 2016, announced today that it has added AI capabilities to its provenance research tool, Legacy Explorer , which launched last year. Legacy Explorer is currently able to search five archives, including the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg archive at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, as well as several others that organize property cards and photographs. A sixth archive will be added later this month, according to a statement from the JDCRP. Prior to this AI sync, users would have to search each archive individually. Now, the AI document-scanning tools, along with partnerships with organizations and archives around the world, will allow researchers to pull information about the same cultural object from different sources at the same time. There are still dozens of other databases and archives for looted artwork and artifacts that contain information about Nazi-looted art ...

The High Line and the Chanel Culture Fund have commissioned artist Alison Nguyen to create a new film examining the overlooked history of one of New York’s best-known cultural landmarks. Prior Occupants , as Nguyen’s work is titled, is the fifth installment in the High Line Originals series and the second produced in partnership with the luxury brand’s arts initiative. The film will premiere on September 8 and screen daily through early November on the High Line Channel, the park’s public video space at 14th Street. Rather than focusing on the High Line itself, Nguyen turns her attention to the nearby Westbeth Artist Housing, a former Bell Laboratories complex where talking movies, television, and other technological breakthroughs were developed and where part of the Manhattan Project’s research for the atomic was once conducted. In 1970, it was converted into affordable artist housing, whose notable past tenants have included Robe...

A “stunning” British collection of 318 Jurassic-era fossils has been sold to the Natural History Museum Abu Dhabi, the Guardian reports, in what some have described as a loss to the nation. The trove was collected by UK fossil hunter Chris Moore along the Jurassic Coast, a UNESCO world heritage site in southwest England that is rich in fossils dating from 200 million to 245 million years ago. They include ichthyosaurs, fish, and crustaceans, among other creatures, some of which could be new species. The collection was initially offered to the Natural History Museum in London and to Amgueddfa Cymru (a natural history museum in Wales) for what is said to have been an eight-figure sum. Both museums passed, citing a lack of funds. In first making the collection available for purchase to those museums, Moore was following the area’s fossil-collecting codes, which specify that scientifically important specimens must first be offered to UK-registered institutions for...