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- The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Picasso Museum and the Grand Palais’ exhibition spaces will all close on Saturday in anticipation of planned protests in the French capital.
- Artist duo Brognon Rollin (David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin) just won the Marcel Duchamp Prize.
- Nearly 1,000 objects from the family of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco have seen their value explode ahead of a sale at Magna Art Auctions, but historic preservationist groups want to stop the sale.
The Headlines
PARIS MUSEUMS GO MUM. The Louvre, Musée d’Orsay, Picasso Museum and the Grand Palais’ exhibition spaces will all close on Saturday in anticipation of planned protests in the French capital, reports Le Figaro. The French Ministry of Culture urged all national and public museums to do everything necessary to ensure the safety and security of visitors, workers, and artworks. Many shops have started boarding up their windows in case of a second round of looting, following last weekend’s civil unrest in the wake of mostly peaceful protests about social and economic inequality amid a rising cost of living, held across France. In an attempt to maintain order, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that only protests organized by unions are authorized on Saturday, and partial curfews will be put in place in several cities. He blamed last weekend’s violence on “political and seditious acts by the ultra-far-left groups who aimed to bring down the republic.”
DUCHAMP PRIZE IS (AL)READYMADE. Artist duo Brognon Rollin (David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin) just won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in Paris for their project “5,376 years, 1892 months, 1110 days, 1201 hours,” announced the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (MAM). For their winning project, the duo, who live and work between Paris and Luxembourg, collected sobriety tokens from members of abstinence groups, which represent the amount of time a person has been sober. They then added up the time they collectively represented and displayed them in an installation evocative of arcade or fairground games. “With Brognon Rollin, the Marcel Duchamp Prize recognizes a demanding body of work that is committed to materializing what usually escapes the eye: the time of waiting, of addiction, and of intimate resistance,” said Fabrice Hergott, director of MAM.
The Digest
Everyday items and mementos from the family of former Spanish dictator Francisco Franco have seen their value explode ahead of a sale at Magna Art Auctions later this month, but historic preservationist groups claim many of the lots include items of national heritage, and they want to suspend the sale. [El Pais]
A man was arrested for using a sledgehammer to behead the figure of a Marine depicted in the Iwo Jima statue, in Quantico, Virginia, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. [NBC Washington]
A March-introduced legislative bill could significantly expand the French government’s definition of art considered a “national treasure,” which requires export certificates that may be refused. [The Art Newspaper]
Los Angeles architects Johnston Marklee have released design plans for the expansion of the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. [Artforum]
The forthcoming Róng Museum of Art (RMoA) in Shenzhen has appointed three new members to its curatorial team ahead of its 2027 opening: Freya Chou, Li Jia, and Susanna Zhu. [ArtAsiaPacific]
The Kicker
FIRST STAR I SEE TONIGHT, WISH I MAY… Researchers believe they have cracked the science behind Vincent van Gogh’s iconic painting, The Starry Night (1889), reports the Times of London. They think those famous swirls he depicted in the star-lit sky actually show the Taurus constellation, marked by a waning crescent moon, the planet Venus, and the Hyades star cluster. Given that the Dutch artist was known to look out the east window of his room in an asylum in the village of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and using a technique for superimposing images of the stars at that moment on top of the painting, scientists believe he was inspired by the landscape and sky he saw on July 22, 1889, to be exact. That date is a month later than previously estimated, and it also shows Van Gogh’s method of painting from observation. “It has been debated whether the night sky in question was the painter’s fantasy, a symbolic representation, or a realistic astronomical observation,” said the Springer Nature group, which publishes the Scientific Reports journal.