A Californian auctioneer has admitted to his involvement in forging up to 30 Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) paintings after initially denying all charges. The FBI’s art crime investigators exposed the fraud last year after suspicions were raised during a special exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art.
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Nearly 1,500 years after it was first written, a “hidden chapter” of a Christian Bible at the Vatican Library has been rediscovered by scientists. The never-before-seen translation was concealed under three layers of text and only became visible after using ultraviolet imaging.
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A 26-year-old Canadian man has been charged with one count of mischief after falling into the Talus Dome, a monumental public sculpture in Edmonton, Canada. Rescue teams spent an hour and a half trying to free the man from the sculpture.
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Italy’s culture minister has announced plans for a new high-speed train linking the country’s capital to the archaeological site of Pompeii in an attempt to increase tourism to the UNESCO World Heritage Site which is located 14 miles southeast of Naples. The project is costing €35 million and will include the construction of a new train station next to the archaeological site, allowing visitors to reach the site easily from Rome and Rome’s Fiumicino Airport.
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An exceptionally rare painting by Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564-1638), which had been hanging in a French home since 1900, has sold for €780,000 (£680,000) in Paris. It is one of the 17th-century Flemish artist’s largest known works, measuring 112cm high and 184cm wide.
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A team of archaeologists from Oxford Archaeology have uncovered an “intricate” Roman mosaic at the site of a new supermarket in Olney near Milton Keynes. The archaeology team has deemed the mosaic “archaeological remains of high significance“.
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A US school recently caused international uproar for pressuring its principal to resign after Michelangelo’s (1475-1564) David was shown in a sixth-grade art lesson. The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence and mayor of the city have now invited the school to visit the iconic statue in person to try to resolve the puzzling issue.
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Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic ukiyo-e woodblock print, Under the Great Well of the Great Wave off Kanagawa, far surpassed its estimate of $500,000-700,000 in a sale at Christie’s New York last week, selling for $2.8 million. The sale marks a new high record for the print.
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A recent investigation has found that more than 1,000 objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York could have ties to alleged antique traffickers and looters. Many of the artefacts were acquired in the 1960s when museum staff often overlooked evidence of smuggling in an effort to source more major acquisitions than London and Paris.
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A New York court has dismissed a case over an artist’s right to “the world’s first NFT” (non-fungible token), which sold for $1.5 million (£1.2 million) at Sotheby’s in 2021. It represents the first legal case in the US to examine how blockchain technology affects the ownership of digital art.
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