B-SIDE-ART

  Walk into Roberts Projects on South La Brea Avenue this month and the space feels less like a gallery than a costume shop caught mid-shift. Mannequins wear Renaissance Faire bodices and 1969 stage garments; sketches for a production of "West Side Story" hang beside contact sheets of actors mid-rehearsal. "Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar" opened May 30 as a survey of a part of her career almost nobody had seen, and it closes August 22. In between, on July 26, Saar died in her sleep at her Los Angeles home, four days short of her 100th birthday. Portrait of Betye Saar The premise sounds like a footnote: more than two hundred garments, sketches, and photographs from a fine artist's day job as a costumer. But it reframes two of the most anthologized works in postwar American art. "Black Girl's Window" (1969) and "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972), both built from staged tableaux of found objects, look less like spont...

  In July 2026, Dutch antiquarian bookseller Pieter de Vries opened an email requesting 3,001 specific titles, mostly academic-press editions from 2020 and 2021, from publishers like Elsevier, Wiley, and Routledge. He assumed it was spam and deleted it. Booksellers in Germany and Switzerland soon reported nearly identical bulk orders, all traced to a little-known outfit called 2077AI. Nobody explained why anyone would want thousands of unremarkable scholarly volumes, and de Vries only later arrived at the likely answer: somewhere downstream, the books would be scanned, stripped of their bindings, and thrown away. That scan-then-discard pattern is exactly what a Hyperallergic newsletter invoked on August 4, 2026, under the headline "AI Is the New Book Burning." Its target was Anthropic, accused of buying out-of-print books, digitizing them, and destroying the originals to train its Claude models — an act the newsletter called "artistic plunder aimed at gutting our humanit...

  In April, at a Barcelona auction house preparing a routine sale, officers from Spain's National Police and Catalonia's Mossos d'Esquadra approached a modest wooden relief on display among the lots. Carved from wood, gilded, and painted in the polychrome technique typical of Spanish Renaissance workshops, the panel measured barely 81 by 45 centimeters — small enough to have moved through a flea market stall and at least one antiques dealer without anyone asking where it had come from. The relief depicts Saint Bonaventure, the 13th-century Franciscan theologian, and once occupied a niche in the altarpiece dedicated to the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception on the main altar of the Monastery of Santa Clara in Fitero, a Poor Clares convent in southern Navarre. It had been missing since around 2010, one of an unrecorded number of works lifted from religious buildings across the region in years when parish inventories were thin and security thinner. Investigators matched it to...

  The Draken Harald Hårfagre has done something no movie prop ever needs to do: it has actually crossed the Atlantic Ocean, under its own sail, with a real crew rowing real oars through real North Atlantic swells. Built in Norway using traditional Viking shipbuilding techniques, it is the largest longship constructed in modern times. This summer, it sailed toward Oslo for the July 17 premiere of a film in which it plays a ship that, historically speaking, could not have existed for another two thousand years. In Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," the Draken stands in for an ancient Greek warship from the Late Bronze Age — the world of Homer, roughly 1600 to 1100 BCE. The Draken is a Viking vessel, a design that would not exist until the ninth century CE. Nolan built his film around practical effects rather than digital fabrication, and reportedly told the Los Angeles Times he needed something wooden-hulled, built with ancient technology, that could survive open ocean in g...

  For years, anyone could walk into the Kunsthaus Zurich and stand in front of paintings by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, and Max Beckmann without paying a private collector a cent to see them. The works belonged to Werner Merzbacher, a Swiss businessman who built his fortune in fur trading and currency exchange, and who had quietly placed much of his collection on long-term loan to the museum since 2018 — an arrangement that asked nothing of the public and depended entirely on his own continued goodwill. Merzbacher died in 2024. The goodwill, according to Swiss reporting, may not have survived him. Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain — Vincent van Gogh, "Wheatfield with Crows" (1890). Reference image only. Much of what Merzbacher owned had come to him through his wife's family — inherited by way of his grandfather-in-law, Bernhard Mayer, a name that appears nowhere on museum wall labels but sits quietly behind an Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, Fauvist, and German Expressi...

  On July 15, 2026, plainclothes officers moved through Mong Kok's narrow shopfronts and into two bookstores that had spent years selling what larger chains would not. At Have A Nice Stay, opened by a group of former journalists, and at nearby Greenfield Book Store, police arrested five people connected to the two shops — two men, three women — citing Hong Kong's national security law. All five were later granted bail. Behind the counters, shelves still held whatever inventory hadn't yet been flagged as "seditious," a designation no bookseller in the city can fully predict in advance. This is not an isolated incident. It's the third such raid in four months. In March, police detained Book Punch founder Pong Yat-ming and three staff members, reportedly seizing a biography of Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy publisher now serving a 20-year sentence. In June, two other booksellers were arrested on charges of selling seditious material and receiving funds from foreign...