Tag: art

132 works vanish from Ottawa’s $14.4-million Indigenous art collection, police never called

The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations says it found no evidence of theft or “ill-intent” after 132 pieces disappeared from its $14.4-million Indigenous art collection.

Police were never called, and the department still cannot explain what happened to the paintings, jewelry, sculptures and other taxpayer-funded works, according to documents obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter.

“There was no finding of theft or ill-intent,” officials wrote in a January briefing note titled The Indigenous Art Collection. No explanation was provided for that conclusion.

“Efforts are underway in an attempt to locate the remaining unaccounted-for artwork,” the department said. Another review of its regional offices is now underway.

The collection dates back to 1965 and contains 5,176 works, including individual pieces valued in the six figures. Artworks were stored in an unsecured warehouse or shipped to regional offices for decoration.

The department has contacted 32 artists or estates connected to 47 of the missing works but has refused to identify the pieces or their creators publicly, Blacklock’s reported.

“This went on for decades,” Conservative MP Jamie Schmale told the Commons heritage committee last November.

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Thieves Steal Four Renaissance Artworks in Sicilian Museum Heist

Thieves stole four works attributed to the Sicilian Renaissance painter Antonello da Messina from a regional museum in the Sicilian city of Messina on the Italian Ferragosto holiday, the news agency LaPresse reported Sunday.

The thieves bypassed alarm and security systems Saturday evening at the MuMe regional museum to make off with three of the five surviving panels of the San Gregorio Polyptych, dated from 1473, as well as the double-sided panel depicting the Virgin Mary and dead Christ in Pietà, which was removed from an armored display case, LaPresse reported.

“We are devastated by what happened. They were two of Antonello da Messina´s most important and best-known works. It is a tremendous loss for the museum, the city, the community and the art world,” MuMe director Marisa Mercurio told the ANSA news agency. She said the theft occurred just before 10 p.m.

The Italian government in March bought a devotional painting titled “Ecce Homo” by da Messina for $14.9 million from Sotheby’s auction house in New York – raising the profile of the early Renaissance painter.

Lynda Albertson, an art-crime analyst, said the works are instantly recognizable, impeding any effort to sell them through reputable channels.

“Stealing an Antonello may be far easier than selling one. If these are ordinary thieves, they will soon discover that – to their cost,” Albertson, who is the chief executive of the ARCA art crimes research association, told the Italian daily La Repubblica. She said such famous artworks often pass from one criminal to another, serving as collateral for other illicit activity.

The museum was closed Sunday while investigators gathered evidence. Neither museum officials nor the Carabinieri could immediately be reached for comment.

The Ferragosto holiday, which marks the feast of the Assumption of Mary, marks the height of the Italian summer holiday season.

The theft comes just days after police in the northern Italian city of Parma announced that they had recovered three stolen artworks by Renoir, Cézanne and Matisse worth about 10 million euros ($11.5 million). Five people have been detained in the March 22-23 theft from the Magnani Rocca Foundation located in the Parma province.

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Valuable Stolen Picasso Found Hanging on Milwaukee Apartment Wall After Tenant Was Evicted

A stolen Pablo Picasso print worth $50,000 has been claimed by its rightful owner after it was discovered by a landlord in Wisconsin while cleaning out a vacant apartment.

Gallery owner Bill DeLind thought the print by the iconic Spanish artist was gone for good after it was stolen in 2018 from his Milwaukee showroom.

Then, last week, he got a call from police. They wanted him to took at the reduction-style image that a Milwaukee landlord had discovered while turning around one of his apartments.

DeLind knew immediately what he was looking at. It was his stolen “Torero” print, one of 30 known to exist signed by Picasso, the New York Post and other outlets reported.

“I was overwhelmed,” DeLind said Friday. “I was at a loss for words. It was an overwhelming moment for me.”

“It was indeed mine,” he added. “It came back full circle.”

The landlord, Tim Dertz, told WISN-TV that he found the print while cleaning out an apartment of a tenant he had to evict.

“It was kind of in a weird spot hanging on a wall,” Tim Dertz told the station, per the Post’s report. “It looked like it had been there for a long, long time because it had tons of dust across the top of it.”

The landlord said he showed it to an antique dealer friend who recognized it as an authentic Picasso.

Dertz handed it over to police, who then contacted DeLind.

The Milwaukee Police Department told the Post Friday that the statute of limitations for theft and property crimes is generally six years. Still, the case remains under investigation, the department said.

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‘Citizen Vigilante’ broadcast on X to combat censorship

The controversial new film “Citizen Vigilante” received a free-to-stream debut on X in the wake of reports that some European nations would not approve the action flick for distribution.

German Director Uwe Boll spoke about the film’s journey in an interview with The Telegraph, noting that “Citizen Vigilante” was banned by his home country due to its violence and “anti-migrant” content, which displays the struggles of current culture clashes between peaceful European natives and the violence brought through mass migration from incompatible cultures like Islam.

He detailed how distribution rights have been delayed in Britain, blocking a film release there as well. Boll explained that the film was based on a true case of migrant violence, which entailed the gang-rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old girl by migrants in Hamburg ten years ago, and flips the script, where a vigilante punishes the perpetrators, after the legal system allowed them to walk free (as it did in real life).

“It’s as if we’re living in a completely insane and absurd political environment, especially in Europe, where people have completely lost track,” Boll stated during his interview. “There is a huge difference between so-called ‘hate speech’ and stabbing people in the neck. But facts don’t matter any more.”

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After Months of Fighting, Leftists in Providence, Rhode Island Succeed in Removing Mural of Murdered Legal Immigrant Iryna Zarutska

In March, a mural of legal immigrant and murder victim Iryna Zarutska was painted on an outdoor brick wall in Providence, Rhode Island and immediately came under fire from hateful leftists who wanted it removed.

The Democrat Mayor and other liberal officials sided with the leftist activists, but the mural remained up on the wall. Now they are taking it down.

They have finally succeeded in erasing this innocent young woman from their sight.

FOX News reports:

Mural honoring murdered Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska taken down in Providence after local outrage

A mural painted to honor Iryna Zarutska — the Ukrainian refugee who was murdered while riding a North Carolina train — is being taken down after outrage in Providence, Rhode Island.

On Tuesday, a construction crew was seen near the exterior of The Dark Lady, an LGBTQ+ club in downtown Providence, working to remove the partly finished mural. The mural, which was painted on canvas, was lowered to the ground, folded up and taken away, WJAR-TV reported.

Artist Ian Gaudreau confirmed the news that the artwork was going to be removed after local outrage.

“A lot of people voiced their frustrations, and voices were heard, and the work is coming down as a reaction to that,” Gaudreau told WJAR-TV Monday.

The mural’s removal came as residents and elected officials complained about the artwork. The office of Mayor Brett Smiley told Fox News that he wanted the artwork taken down, saying that the art is “divisive and does not represent Providence.”

“The murder of the individual depicted in this mural was a devastating tragedy, but the misguided, isolating intent of those funding murals like the one across the county is divisive and does not represent Providence,” Smiley said in a statement.

The left’s opposition to this mural is very easy to explain. They do not want to be reminded that the policies they support are responsible for her death. It’s that simple. Her memory is an ugly inconvenience to them.

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Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made. Recently, I ran into an acquaintance of mine, who began talking my ear off about an amazing discovery he’d made with LLMs. Knowledge, it turns out, is structured into language! You could put one word into ChatGPT and it might understand what you wanted, or make up a word and see if it understood what you meant! These amazing new tools have revealed that the English corpus contains so much about its speakers!

He concluded that LLMs are a discovery on par with writing.

Regular humans hit on this idea about a century ago; my most generous interpretation of what he was telling me was that he’d hit on a kind of naive, confused version of Structuralism; Saussure via a game of telephone. (There has been recent work on a similar point, which argues that one needs to understand LLMs via literary theory, but it starts with Saussure.) I tried to get out of the conversation as quickly as I could, not least because he seemed frustrated that I didn’t see things exactly as he did — a new behavior and likely a symptom of LLM overuse.

Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.

At its most absurd nadir, one is reminded of Juicero, a company that sold a $400 juicer that did the same work as squeezing its proprietary juice packs with one’s bare hands.

Look, discovering something that’s new to you is exciting — ask anyone who listened to me yell about the joys of European (higher-fat) butter — but you can’t take for granted that something that’s new to you is new to everyone. These things have in common a certain incuriosity that I have found endemic among a certain kind of tech enthusiast, particularly the ones who are most interested in startups and entrepreneurship. Perhaps they have been so siloed that they did not realize their “discovery” was well -known elsewhere, or perhaps their self-conception is that they are the smartest, and if they don’t know something, no one knows it.

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Uglification As Control: The Assault on Beauty

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep. 

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy. It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty. 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity. Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay sated but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

Power follows quickly. Bureaucracies centralize decision-making in government and industry. HR departments make cold decisions about employee relations. Grant bodies and cultural gatekeepers decide what projects are funded. The independent powers — families, churches, businesses, local private organizations, local communities — are crowded out or regulated into irrelevance. Eventually, only the central powers are granting permission for things that were once free.

Beauty is different. Beauty affirms the spirit and soothes the soul, affirms dignity and self-worth, and makes people hard to rule. 

The Uglification of the Shire

Tolkien shows us exactly how it works. The ruffians and “gatherers and sharers” that took over the peaceful Shire don’t just loot; they uglify. They close the old inns, fell beloved trees, replace hobbit-holes with ugly, mean brick houses, pollute the water, and craft and post ugly rules and propaganda. But why bother making things hideous? Why is it important to destroy beauty? 

Because beauty is quietly powerful. The ordinary hobbit could go outside in the evening and smoke his pipe, gazing out across the lovely green hills of the Shire. Daily, they saw that life could be ordered, delightful, and worth defending. Once beauty is ruined, there is less to care about, less to fight for. Compliance becomes normal — after all, the Party Tree has already been cut down and left to rot, so there’s nothing to fight for. Quaint Bagshot Row is an open quarry. Gatherers take surplus and more, despoiling what they don’t take. The hobbits grumble, of course, but they are demoralized, hungry but not starving, and much easier to control because they just don’t care anymore.

We saw the same things in the old Soviet Union. Socialist realism, with its austere lines and solid colors, replaced real art with propaganda posters praising the USSR and the worker. Beautiful, graceful cathedrals and exotic Russian onion domes were replaced by brutalist concrete blocks. Fashion and music and gathering places, things of delight, were flattened into drabness, functional but not fun. Because the state could not redistribute beauty, and because beauty gives people joy and hope, beauty was pathologized, called bourgeois, and replaced with an antiseptic, dark aesthetic. The common man was given enough “culture” to be sated, but never enough to satisfy the hunger of his soul for beauty. Other, darker things filled that void.

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School librarians told to remove art books with ‘historic paintings of nudes’ in latest censorship row

School librarians are being told to remove art books with ‘historic paintings of nudes’ in the latest censorship controversy revealed today.

The ‘insane’ trend was revealed by a delegate at the annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU), saying she had heard ‘many accounts’ of art books being cut.

It comes after a school librarian at Lowry Academy in Salford, Greater Manchester, revealed last week she had been forced to remove books deemed ‘inappropriate’ by management.

Bosses used artificial intelligence to earmark almost 200 books for removal, including George Orwell’s 1984 and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

The school later admitted it had removed ‘a small number of books’ but said it had put most of them back, into ‘age-appropriate categories’.

The Lowry Academy case prompted the NEU to pass an urgent motion yesterday to ‘fight censorship and defend librarians’.

The union said that although the woman in the original controversy is not part of the union, it wanted to protect its own librarian members from suffering a similar fate.

Proposing the motion, Kristabelle Williams, a member from Lewisham, said: ‘We cannot ignore the issues that this case has brought up.

‘We can take action as a union now to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

She said the support of the union would give librarians the ‘confidence to not self-censor and resist the chilling effect that this case will cultivate’.

She added members fear there is now an ‘increased risk of external complaints’ and ‘hate campaigns’ about books in their libraries.

Also speaking during the debate was Laura Butterworth, a member from Tameside Greater Manchester, which is near Lowry Academy.

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AI-Generated Art Can’t Receive Copyright Protection After Supreme Court Declines Case

The advancement of AI-generated art suffered a crucial blow this week when the Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling that such works cannot be protected under U.S. copyright law.

The original plaintiff, a computer scientist from Missouri named Stephen Thaler, appealed to the Supreme Court after “lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office ​decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ​because it did not have a human creator,” per Reuters.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for ⁠a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI ​technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and ​purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright.

According to The Verge, the U.S. Copyright Office issued new guidance last year saying that AI-generated could not enjoy copyright protection, potentially destroying the profitability of text prompts with no original source material. Thaler had also tried to patent his AI-generative works, which has also faced several legal challenges.

“The US federal circuit court similarly determined that AI systems can’t patent inventions because they aren’t human, which the US Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance, stating that while AI systems can’t be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them,” noted The Verge.

Thaler’s lawyers argued admitted that the Supreme Court’s rejection could likely hurt the advancement of AI-generated artworks.

“Even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late,” Thaler’s lawyers claimed. “The Copyright Office ​will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative ​industry during ⁠critically important years.”

Without copyright protection, AI-generated works would fall under public domain, allowing anyone to copy, sell, or use, essentially destroying the potential to create commercial intellectual property.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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