B-SIDE-ART

In Los Angeles, a small nonprofit called Golden Dome is about to break ground on a garden. Nothing about its layout will be arbitrary: every path, every planting bed, every sightline is being arranged according to the celestial bodies as ancient alchemists once understood them — the sun, the moon, the seven classical planets, each assigned its own patch of earth, its own hour of shade. The organization's annual operating budget is under $200,000. The money for the garden is coming from the estate of a man who spent his career painting Campbell's soup cans and screen-printing Marilyn Monroe's face into rows of candy-colored repetition. This July, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts announced $5,166,000 in grants to 78 organizations across 26 states, Washington DC, Mexico City, and Berlin. Thirty-three of the recipients had never received Warhol Foundation money before. And for the first time in the foundation's history, part of that sum — $530,000 of it, sprea...

In 2015, a New York gallery sold a pair of 4,700-year-old gypsum figures as part of the "Rihani Family Collection." Prosecutors later traced looted antiquities to a smuggler named Hassan Rihani and seized them. Earlier this year, an auction house tried to sell the same two figures again — this time as "the R. Family Collection." Investigators recognized them anyway. The two objects — a male and a female worshiper, hands clasped, eyes wide, carved between 2750 and 2600 BCE — are among the earliest known sculptures of the human figure in the round. This July, Manhattan prosecutors seized both under warrant and folded them into a single week's haul: 59 antiquities, worth more than $600,000, returned to Italy, Iraq, and Indonesia. The Met, Public Domain — Standing male worshiper, Sumerian, Early Dynastic I–II (ca. 2900–2600 BCE), excavated 1933–34, Tell Asmar. Reference image only. Italy received the largest share — 48 objects, including a terracotta vessel attribut...

  The paddles rose like a held breath. Inside Sotheby's saleroom on July 14, bidders leaned forward as the number climbed past thirty million, then forty, the room's usual murmur thinning into silence. On the screen behind auctioneer Phyllis Kao, a T. rex skull loomed over the crowd — jaws parted, teeth catching the light. "Try a bigger bite," Kao said, coaxing one more raise. "It's a T. rex after all." Somewhere past forty-three million the gavel finally fell, and the room exhaled into applause for an animal that has been extinct for sixty-six million years. The line got its laugh because everyone in the room understood the joke was sitting directly on top of an extinction event — funnier, maybe, than it was comfortable Fifty million dollars, fees included, does not just buy eleven tons of reconstructed bone. It buys a claim on rarity — a skeleton whole enough and famous enough to function less like a museum specimen than a trophy. Gus is being sold as...

  Stand close enough to the glass and the grid resolves into people: feathers, glitter, a startled grin repeated across a dozen near-identical frames. This is not a single photograph but a contact sheet — 8.5 by 11 inches, thirty-six small exposures shot in sequence at 10 East 23rd Street in 1971, the Cockettes caught mid-performance, mid-breath, mid-decision. Nothing here has been chosen yet. A visitor's eye does what Peter Hujar's eye once did: hunt across the rows for the frame that stops the motion, the one worth printing. Most visitors have never been asked to do that work before. That request is the premise of "Hujar: Contact," on view at the Morgan Library & Museum through October 25, 2026. The show does not display Hujar's finished photographs so much as the discarded evidence of how he arrived at them — the picking process itself, framed as the exhibit. A contact sheet was never built to hang on a wall; it was a working document, meant to be marked up...

The wall looks empty at first — a smear of red ochre, a shadow of plaster gone soft with age. Then the enhanced image sharpens on the screen, and the shadow resolves into numbers. Dots. Bars. A sequence repeating, deliberate, laid down by a hand that knew exactly what it was doing. Somewhere in a Guatemalan jungle, inside a room the Maya themselves buried under mud and rubble twelve centuries ago, a name is about to surface for the first time. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain — Maya cylindrical vessel, 7th–8th century CE, with painted hieroglyphic text band (Accession 1983.543.3). Thematic illustration only — not from the Xultun site itself. The name reads Sak Tahn Waax — White-chested Fox. It sits beside a formula unlike anything else recovered from the Maya world, one weaving the 260-day ritual count and the 365-day solar year together with the long, wandering cycles of Venus and Mars. Scholars have found Maya artists who signed their work before. They had never found t...

  On a January afternoon in a Chicago gallery, a stainless steel colander tips off a kitchen counter and seems to keep falling past the edge of the canvas. The painting is by Ellen Lanyon, and nothing about it explains itself. A saucepan glints with unease. A vine curls too deliberately near a window. Visitors slow down without quite knowing why. This is representational painting behaving like a held breath, ordinary objects rendered patient and watchful, as if the room itself were about to change its mind. Lanyon painted this vigilance out of the everyday for five decades, until her death in 2013. Lanyon is one of five artists working across the American Midwest whose careers resist a single label or lineage. What links them is not a shared style, a shared decade, or even a shared temperament — it is geography, and not much else. As the Artnet Gallery Network piece profiling them puts it, "There is no through line of what it means to be a Midwestern artist" beyond the fact o...

  Before the dead could pass into the underworld, they needed to speak. That is the belief encoded in one of the more striking finds to emerge from a newly announced excavation at Marina el-Alamein, on Egypt's Mediterranean coast: 24 small gold amulets, each cut into the shape of a tongue and placed in the mouths of the deceased. The idea, practiced widely across Hellenistic and Roman-era Egypt, was practical in its own way — the dead needed a voice to answer the gods of the underworld and, above all, to address Osiris himself, lord of the afterlife and judge of souls. A sheet of gold, tucked between the lips, was thought to grant that voice. Egypt's Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities announced the discovery this week, crediting mission chief Eman Abdel-Khaliq and unveiled by Minister Sherif Fathy. The excavation uncovered 18 tombs at Marina el-Alamein, roughly 100 kilometers west of Alexandria — a site built on the ruins of the ancient city of Leukaspis. Eleven of the tombs a...