ARTFIXdaily News Feed - Breaking News from the Art World

British Museum Could Loan £1bn Worth of Objects to Abu Dhabi Museum

Art Newspaper / July 16th, 2015

The British Museum could possibly loan around 500 collection objects worth about one billion pounds to the Gulf nation of Abu Dhabi. Works earmarked for the Zayed National Museum for possible loan include an Assyrian relief from Nimrud, the Banquet Scene (645–635BC), which was ...

Unesco Remembers The Alamo Among New World Heritage Sites

Business Insider / July 7th, 2015

Unesco has designated 27 more places to its list of world heritage sites. Properties from Texas to Turkey will now join over 1,000 cultural, historical, and natural sites around the globe that form the United Nations organization's list. The Alamo, one of five frontier missions ...

Islamic State Sells Looted Antiquities Online

ArtfixDaily / July 1st, 2015

Islamic State in Iraq and Syria is selling looted antiquities through eBay, Whatsapp, and Facebook in a fundraising effort. After U.S.-led airstrikes depleted Islamic State's $1 million daily oil revenue by nearly two-thirds, militants turned to the $3 billion global antiquities market for ...

U.S. Returns Valuable Trove of Antiquities to Italy

NBC / May 26th, 2015

American investigators relieved some American collections of looted antique artifacts worth multi-millions of dollars and presented them to Italy. In a repatriation ceremony on Tuesday, dozens of objects — including a 4th-century sarcophagus lid in the form of a sleeping woman — went on ...

ISIS Controls Museum, Historic Sites in Palmyra After Deadly Takeover

BBC / May 24th, 2015

Syria's ancient town of Palmyra was seized by Islamic State militants last week. Reports on Sunday put the death toll at about 400 civilians after ISIS took control, ransacked a museum and barricaded the town. ISIS has made a public show of destroying what they see as "false idols" in museums ...

Greece Passes On Legal Action Over Elgin Marbles

BBC / May 14th, 2015

Despite waging a high-profile campaign for their return, Greece will not take legal action against the UK over the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles, the Parthenon's famous sculptural frieze. About 30 percent of the marbles reside at the British Museum. They were acquired 200 years ago by Lord ...

NYC Prosecutors Seek Custody of $100M in Artifacts

Telegraph / April 16th, 2015

New York City prpsecutors are asking a judge for custody of a trove of 2,622 Hindu and Buddhist treasures plundered from South Asia and seized by U.S. authorities. New York storage facilities were raided from 2012 to 2014 to recover the relics as part of the investigation of art dealer Subhash ...

Is Egypt's Equivalent of the Mona Lisa a Fake?

History / April 7th, 2015

Francesco Tiradritti, a professor at the Kore University of Enna who serves as director of the Italian archaeological mission to Egypt, has dropped a bombshell: He believes “Meidum Geese” was most likely painted not during the 4th dynasty of ancient Egypt, but in the 19th century, reports ...

Tourists Killed in Shooting Attack on Tunisian Museum

AP / March 18th, 2015

A shooting attack Wednesday at the site of Tunisia's largest museum ended with 21 people killed, including 17 tourists. Two of those killed were gunmen after a firefight with security forces. The dead tourists came from Italy, Poland, Germany and Spain, said officials. Some may have been ...

Colonial Williamsburg Offers to Help Protect Iraq's Artifacts, Cyber Attack Follows

ArtfixDaily / March 12th, 2015

The website of Colonial Williamsburg -- www.history.org -- was hacked last weekend in one of several cyber attacks on U.S. websites by a group claiming to be Islamic State. The incident followed an event at Colonial Williamsburg where president Mitchell Reiss, a former senior U.S. ...

Did ISIS Destroy Replicas at Mosul Museum?

channel 4 / February 28th, 2015

The attack on antiquities by ISIS militants at the Nineveh Museum in Mosul, Iraq, last week might not have been as damaging as appears in the video. Experts say many of the statues destroyed in the propaganda piece were actually replicas. An Assyrian winged bull sculpture dating from ...

ISIS Destroys Ancient Artifacts at Mosul Museum

ArtfixDaily / February 26th, 2015

Artifacts from the birthplace of civilization were destroyed by Islamic militants. A 5-minute video posted Thursday shows fighters smashing statues dating from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires at Iraq's largest museum. A man in the video cites Mohammed's destruction of idols in Mecca as ...

Historians Capture World Heritage Site with 3D Laser Scanner

Live Science / February 24th, 2015

Historians Charles Matz and Jonathan Michael Dillon went to the Muslim holy city of Harar in Ethiopa to take 3D scans of the city's historic structures. They captured the crumbling contours of the UNESCO world heritage site, and in the process, created a new form of art by also digitally ...

Beard Glued Back on Damaged King Tut Mask

AL / January 22nd, 2015

The blue and gold braided beard on the burial mask of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun was hastily glued back on with

$58 Million in Looted Antiquities Discovered by Authorities

Christian Science Monitor / January 22nd, 2015

Warehouses owned by a Basel-based art dealer and his wife have yielded a haul of $58 million worth of looted antiquities, say Italian authorities.

U.N. Report Says Some 300 Cultural Sites Damaged in Syria

LA Times / December 30th, 2014

A report issued by the U.N. body known as UNOSAT counts 24 cultural heritage locations as being totally destroyed in Syria. There are about 300 sites damaged...

British Museum Angers Greece with Elgin Marble Loan to Hermitage

CNN / December 7th, 2014

Amid sanctions imposed by NATO nations on Russia over actions in Crimea and Ukraine, Great Britain has loaned "a marble ambassador of a European ideal" with a cultural message for Moscow.

Amal Clooney Advises Greece on Legal Bid for British Museum's Elgin Marbles

Daily Mail / October 15th, 2014

Actor George Clooney's new bride, Amal Alamuddin Clooney is going to bat for Greece in a quest to return the famed 2,000-year-old Elgin Marbles at the British Museum to their homeland.

Detroit Hit With a $4 Billion Proposal for City's Art

New York Times / August 27th, 2014

New York-based Art Capital has offered Detroit a loan of up to $4 billion in a new proposal that leaves the city's museum intact with its art used as collateral.

$27 Million Sale of Egyptian Statue Stirs Controversy

BBC / July 13th, 2014

A 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue expected to raise about £6m sold for £15.76m ($27 Million) at Christie's in London on Thursday.