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The festive season is over, and the holiday season will soon be too. It’s back to the grind for many, but for others it means it’s all downhill to another rugby season filled with excitement and drama, mystery and intrigue. We’ve put together some themes and topics to ponder over before the 2025 season kicks...

With renovation work set to begin in September 2025, the Baden State Museum in the German city of Karlsruhe has been decided that it will move to the nearby Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden —raising alarm amid cuts to the state budget for art and culture . The Baden State Museum is closing its doors for a renovation of the landmark palace that houses it; the restoration is expected to take five years to complete. The institution holds objects and antiquities in its permanent collection spanning more than 50,000 years of international cultural, art, and regional history. As part of the move to the Baden-Baden’s space on Lichtentaler Allee, Baden State Museum director Eckart Köhne will oversee both institutions beginning in May 2025 through 2030. The museum’s administrative offices, however, will remain in Karlsruhe. The Baden-Baden will continue its planned programing through the beginning of 2026, with its first joint presentation with the Baden State Museum expected sometime in mi...

Japanese chemical company DIC Corporation announced in a press release Saturday that its board of directors had decided to “downsize and relocate” the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art , an institution in the city of Sakura, 25 miles northeast of Tokyo, that it owns. In August, ARTnews reported that the company, which is severly in debt, was reevaluating the future of the museum. In the press release, published December 26, the company said that the downsizing plan would see DIC Corp sell 25 percent of the 384 works in the museum that it owns. The total value of DIC Corp-owned works is $77.5 million, the company said in August. The museum would then relocate to “a facility in Tokyo that is accessible to many stakeholders and where the works of art can be more easily exhibited to the public.” The company is currently in negotiations with one location with the aim of reaching an agreement by March 2025. Two other options discussed for the museum, according to the press release, we...

A total of 38 photographs by Swiss-American photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019) was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA), the institution announced in a statement last week. The acquisition includes 34 photographs donated by the June Leaf and Robert Frank Foundation, and four works that were purchased using donated funds from the former Citibank chief executive John Reed and his wife Cynthia. The 38 images were made while Frank was in Paris in 1949. Some offer glimpses of street scenes such as children watching a blind street performer and a “circus” trolley car. Though Frank is primarily known for his highly influential 1958 book “ The Americans , which captured post-war American society, the recently acquired photographs were taken when he returned to Europe after living in New York for two years. “We are thrilled to add these important photographs to the Museum’s collection which give insight into Frank’s career while contributing to our ability to tell ...

PARIS  —  Louis Vuitton  is betting on a dose of Y2K nostalgia to perk up luxury consumers on New Year’s Day, when the reedition of its  seminal collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami  will land in stores in tandem with a campaign fronted by Zendaya. Murakami and Pietro Beccari, chairman and chief executive officer of  Louis Vuitton , spoke with WWD about reuniting more than two decades after the launch of the line that set the mold for collaborations between artists and luxury brands.  “Young people are reviving that era, and we want to connect with them through this re-release,” Beccari said in an exclusive interview conducted via email. The Louis Vuitton x Murakami collection is set to roll out next week with pop-up activations in seven cities worldwide that include experiences such as cafés, cinemas, care stations and vending machines where clients who purchase a piece from the collection can win gifts like stickers, Tamagotchi or t...

Last week, Swiss artist Reto Pulfer, Iranian artist Maryam Hoseini, and German artist Anna Witt demanded their work be removed from the inaugural exhibition at nonprofit Scuola Piccola Zattere in Venice. The show, titled  “One Year Score: Primo Movimento,” opened on November 22 and is scheduled to run until March 30, 2025. Three artists remain in the exhibition: Agnieska Mastalerz from Poland and Italians Ludovica Carbotta and Tomaso De Luca.   Scuola Piccola Zattere was founded in November by Victoria Mikhelson, the daughter of Russian billionaire Leonid Mikhelson, a close ally of Russian president Vladimir Putin and a public supporter of the ongoing war in Ukraine. Leonid Mikhelson was sanctioned by the UK government in 2022 and, while he has not been sanctioned by the US, several companies supplied by his operations have been. He is the founder and chairman of Russian natural gas producer Novatek, which supplies gas to Russia’s Sverdlov Plant. That plant was sanctioned...

Club Rugby wishes the rugby community a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. Club Rugby’s team of regular contributors wishes to thank all readers and viewers of our content for their ongoing support to ensure that we can continue to cover rugby from the ground up from a neutral/overview perspective and document and preserve...

Before 2024 even began, and arguably even before October 7, 2023, the art world was split on Israel and Palestine. But this year, the schism widened even further, until there was no room for nuanced debate. Suspicions of antisemitism and anti-Palestine sentiment proliferated in all corners, and looking to museums for guidance surely left some disappointed. Cultural institutions worldwide, from the Noguchi Museum in New York to Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland, and to Qatar’s Mathaf, were accused in 2024 of censoring artists and curators based, in many cases, on their pro-Palestine politics. The uptick in accusations was so dramatic in America that in March, the New York–based National Coalition Against Censorship launched the Art Censorship Index, an online tool that tracks the state of freedom of expression across the country. Censorship may seem black and white: an artwork is either altered or removed because of its politics, the thinking goes, and if the politics aren’t the issue, ...

K Road Chronicles | Online series By Six Since the day man emerged from caves more than 200,000 years ago, our basic needs have not changed. We need very little to survive. We need food, water, shelter and warmth. Everything else is optional. The right to food is a basic human right agreed to by international law. Yet, while the lines at Aotearoa’s food banks and community meals are longer than a Peter Jackson trilogy, we are dumping hundreds of tons of perfectly good produce in landfills. Join us as we spend a day with Lola, a food rescue driver, at KiwiHarvest, collecting and distributing unwanted food around Auckland City to charities and food banks, including Waka of Caring. What started as a project to inject more significance into her life for KiwiHarvest CEO and founder Deborah Manning 12 years ago has rescued more than 13 million kilos of food otherwise destined for landfill. In our capital city, we hitch a ride with the team at Kiwi Community Assistance. ...

This has been a monumental year for further insight about Stonehenge’s creation. Researchers are now positing that the iconic stone circle may have been erected in an effort to unite ancient farming communities, CNN reported . Earlier this year, experts discovered that Stonehenge’s central six-ton altar stone may have come from more than 450 miles away in Scotland . It was previously known that the sarsen stones came from 16 miles away from the site, in what is now the British town of Marlborough, and that the smaller bluestones were brought from 125 miles away, from the Preseli hills in what is now Wales. Mike Parker Pearson , a professor of British later prehistory at University College London, has proposed that Stonehenge’s very creation may hinge on the stone’s geographical distance. Stonehenge, he claims, may have been the result of early efforts to unite farmers and their communities across the British Isles during a time of social change. The stones could have been a gift or ...

2024 has been marked by the exponential presence of self-taught artists in museums, galleries, and art fairs. Increasingly sought by collectors from various horizons, represented by a vast community of art dealers, and included in a broader spectrum of art history curriculums, these artists have secured the attention of educators, art critics, and museumgoers—suggesting a new normal as to who counts as an “artist” in the first place. As a curator at the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM), I have witnessed the expansive networks working assiduously to bring once marginalized artists to the fore. Among them is the Brazilian self-taught artist Madalena Santos Reinbolt, the subject of a retrospective I am developing in collaboration with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Working on an exhibition about the legacy of the Catalan-born psychiatrist Francesc Tosquelles earlier this year, I found myself moved by his belief that institutions—notably museums—always have to fight their “concentr...

In January, several industry insiders predicted there would be more attention paid this year to Indigenous and Native art. That month, Phillips was gearing up to hold “New Terrains,” its first selling exhibition of contemporary Indigenous and Native art at its New York headquarters. Quickly, it became apparent that the predictions made around the time of the Phillips show were correct. Later that month, the Venice Biennale would announce its artist list for the main exhibition, “Foreigners Everywhere,” which included numerous Indigenous artists.  Now, 2024 is nearly complete, and further proof that Indigenous art is on the rise has arrived in museums, auction houses, and galleries. Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee), the artist who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, got representation with Hauser & Wirth . Emmi Whitehorse, a Diné painter who showed in the Biennale’s main exhibition, gained a new auction record at Phillips, wher...

A painting by Venetian Renaissance artist Giorgione (1473/74–1510) has been found among the Bavarian State Painting Collections in Munich, Germany. The double portrait of the young Giovanni Borgherini from Florence with his teacher and Venetian polymath Trifone Gabrieleau has been on display at the Green Gallery in Munich since 2011. After a comprehensive analysis by art historians and a technological investigation, three other compositions were discovered hidden beneath the surface of the painting. These efforts provided rare insight into the the working methods of Giorgio da Castelfranco (1473/74–1510), known as Giorgione, who despite his early death had a major impact on the art of his time. “The painting is of inestimable value, it is a spectacular stroke of luck for the Alte Pinakothek and a sensation for Italian art history,” Andreas Schumacher, head of the collection for Italian paintings at the Alte Pinakothek, told Monopol .  “The discovery of a Giorgione in the Bavari...

The UK government is considering an upgrade of its “right to personality” law that could gain artists new safeguards against generative artificial intelligence models capable of mimicking their styles. Per the Financial Times , the Labor administration today launched a review of how AI companies train their technology by scraping digital content—a process that has already courted controversy among creators in the UK and US. New legislation based on its findings is expected to be proposed by the government within the next two years. The consultation reportedly aims to ban the development of AI tools that would allow users to replicate—or come very close to replicating—the image, distinguishing features, or voice of public figures and groups. The report includes plans to provide creators an improved rights mechanism, which in this context means that AI companies such as OpenAI might need to secure licensing agreements with artists to use their copyrighted material for data scraping. U...

More than two years after eleven artworks were stolen in a burglary in Poland, the works have been recovered, according to Polish international news network TVP World . At a value of more than $186,600, the stolen collection includes 10 paintings and one photograph by such notable artists as Damien Hirst, Banksy, and Takashi Murakami. The theft took place between March 24-255, 2022, in the southeastern Polish city Przemyśl. The works were in the process of being moved from the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv to Switzerland. There was a break in the case on December 9, which lead to the recovery of the stolen contemporary works. The authenticity was subsequently confirmed by foreign experts, Malgorzata Taciuch-Kurasiewicz from the District Prosecutor’s Office in Przemyśl told Polish state news agency PAP . The recovery was possible due to joint efforts between the District Prosecutor’s Office in Przemyśl and officers of the Provincial Police Headquarters in Rzeszów, along with representat...

The long-running legal saga over Marlborough Gallery dealer Pierre Levai has deepened further with yet one more lawsuit, this one centered around the gallerist’s final months. His son, Max Levai, has now alleged that Pierre was held “captive” by Marcia Levine, a beneficiary to his trust whom Max’s lawsuit describes as a “long-time paramour.” Per that lawsuit, which was filed on December 9 in New York’s Supreme Court, Pierre’s wife, Rosemary Levai, was “aware” of Levine’s relationship with him. The suit , which was first reported this weekend by the New York Post , alleges that Levine “kept him sick, starved, and physically incapacitated so as to better misappropriate his assets and the assets of the trusts with which he was associated.” Levine is also accused of having obfuscated details about Levai’s health so as to keep family members out of the loop. Max Levai is now suing to keep a trust set up by Pierre from disbursing funds to Levine. According to the lawsuit, there is more th...

Brigadier-General Vanessa Hanrahan has been named the latest Canadian Forces Provost Marshal (CF PM) and has taken the helm of the Canadian Forces Military Police Group (CF MP Gp). This significant leadership transition occurred on December 10, 2024, in a formal ceremony hosted at His Majesty’s Canadian Ship (HMCS) Carleton, located in Ottawa. The event marked the conclusion of Major-General Simon Trudeau’s tenure and the start of Brigadier-General Hanrahan’s. “The work of the Military Police continues to strive toward and support a safe and welcoming place for all within the Department of National Defence, Canadian Armed Forces and the larger defence community. Together, we will face new challenges and seize opportunities within our organizations to enhance military police capabilities, always prioritizing the safety and security of the defence community. I congratulate Brigadier-General Vanessa Hanrahan on their appointment as the new Canadian Forces Provost Marshal,” expressed ...

Canada’s sixth and concluding Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship (AOPS), the future HMCS Robert Hampton Gray, took to the water on December 9, 2024, in Halifax. This marks the culmination of a significant chapter in the Royal Canadian Navy’s fleet development efforts under the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). “Today’s launch of the sixth and final Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ship for the Royal Canadian Navy represents a major achievement for Canada’s shipbuilding industry and a key milestone in the National Shipbuilding Strategy (NSS). This ship, designed and built by Canadian workers, is an example of the federal government’s ongoing commitment to strengthening our naval capabilities. The NSS continues to create good paying jobs, stimulate innovation and ensure the long-term sustainability of our maritime industries. As we launch this vessel, we reaffirm our dedication to supporting members of the Royal Canadian Navy and safeguarding Canada’s waters for generations to come,” said ...

North Vancouver, BC – Seaspan Shipyards recently celebrated a monumental achievement with the naming and pre-launch ceremony for the Royal Canadian Navy’s (RCN) new Joint Support Ship, the HMCS Protecteur. This vessel, a testament to Canadian engineering and collaboration, holds the distinction of being the longest naval ship ever built in Canada. The HMCS Protecteur represents the culmination of years of dedication and expertise from Seaspan’s workforce and its vast network of partners. As the fifth vessel constructed by Seaspan under the National Shipbuilding Strategy, this ship embodies a collective effort involving thousands of Seaspan employees, government officials, Navy personnel, and an extensive supply chain that spans the country. During the ceremony, Teri McKinnon, the ship’s sponsor, carried out the traditional naval ritual of christening the ship by breaking a bottle of Black Hills Estate Winery Brut against its bow. As she officially named the ship Protecteur, McKinno...

K Road Chronicles | Online series By Six Why am I called Six? Six is a perfect number.  In numerology and Judaism, six is associated with love, care and creativity.  Six is a lucky number in Chinese business communities. Six means a steady cash flow.  Six is referenced in the Holy Bible as the symbol of balance, new beginnings, forgiveness and objectivity. God created the universe in six days.  Six is about objectivity. Besides, when you introduce yourself as Paul, people quickly forget your name.  When you are introduced as Six, people remember you.  People have shared their stories with me over four seasons of K’ Road Chronicles.  Now, in our final season, I fell I have an obligation to share at least part of my story with you.  My family is usually very private, and I had to ask all of them for permission to write this. To a passive observer, I was a loner. I didn’t even engage with my sister. Today I guess they might s...