Firefighters isolated the blaze on the cathedral, formally titled Notre-Dame de Rouen, to its spire. They quelled the situation in just over an hour, though the sight of smoke billowing from the beloved structure drew comparisons to the infamous 2019 inferno of Notre-Dame Cathedral, which is set to reopen in December. 

According to city officials, the fire was caused by a tarp covering the Notre-Dame de Rouen’s spire, which has been under renovation since 2017 restoration. The spire, named after Jean-Antoine Alavoine, a 19th-century architect, has been surrounded by scaffolding for several weeks.

The cathedral, located about 70 miles northwest of Paris, was evacuated, and no significant damage was caused to the structure. The Ministry of Culture said the fire was caused by “mishandling by workers,” Le Figaro reported.

No casualties were reported and the structure did not sustain significant damage. 

Jean-Benoît Albertini, prefect of Seine-Maritime, said in a statement: “We are dealing with a very high-value heritage asset. An inventory is under way of the works that could be affected by secondary water run-off. We may have to protect some works.”

Rising some 495 feet into the air, the cast iron spire is the tallest of its kind in France. The cathedral was a frequent source of inspiration for Claude Monet, who painted it several times under shifting light, making Rouen a popular destination for fans of Impressionism. This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of the movement in Paris, with several tours stopping in Rouen for a look at the cathedral. 

The data is detailed in an online interactive chart that compares unemployment and underemployment rates, as well as the early- to late-career median wages across popular college majors. Also added for comparison is commiserate data of people without college degrees. As of February 2024, art history majors faced an 8 percent unemployment rate and a 62.3 percent underemployment rate, despite having the highest level of education among the creative majors featured in the report, with 43.8 percent also earning graduate degrees. 

Fine arts majors finish in close second place with a 7.9 percent unemployment rate, but enjoy marginally brighter field placement with a 55.5 percent underemployment rate. 

On the other hand, performing arts majors come through at a 5.5 percent unemployment rate, but lead in underemployment out of the included creative studies fields, at 65.3 percent. Graphic designers, while primarily only holding bachelor’s degrees, according to NYFED, had the lowest underemployment rate in the creative sector at 33.7 percent.

Industrial engineering, construction services, and medical technician majors, and various engineering tracks, meanwhile, enjoy the highest job placements, and minimum six-figure median salaries by mid-career (ages 35 to 45, per the NYFED).

Data-wise, it’s been a dispiriting few months for aspiring creatives: The NYFED report follows a survey published in May by Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) that found the majority of artists in New York state experience financial insecurity, despite the arts and culture sectors accounting for 7.4 percent of New York’s economy. CRNY launched its program in 2021 to provide a monthly guaranteed income and jobs for New York state artists, more than half (57.3 percent) of whom participated in its study self-reported earning less than $25,000 the previous year. (Nearly 86 percent earned under $50,000.) Additionally, 45.5 percent of respondents said they relied on gig work and temporary employment.

“Fundamentally, our economy doesn’t view artists as workers,” CRNY executive director Sarah Calderón told Hyperallergic upon the publication of the study. “For this reason among others, there is no wage protection, paid—or even affordable—healthcare options, or any other elements of the social safety net that are afforded to other classes of workers.

“We need to establish that art is labor, and we need artist-centric solutions to improve the lives and livelihoods of artists,” Calderón added.

Per the report, the bill introduced by Israeli politician Amit Halevi seeks to redistribute power over the West Bank archaeology’s sector, which currently resides with a unit in the Civil Administration, an Israeli governing body managed by the military. The bill states, according to the Times of Israel, that it is based on the premise that historical artifacts discovered there “have no historical or other connection to the Palestinian Authority.” The Palestinian Authority (PA) maintains civilian control in the West Bank.

“The discussion of the political status of the regions of Judea and Samaria has no relevance to Israel’s responsibility for the archaeological findings belonging to its people,” states the bill, referring to the West Bank by its biblical names. 

In July 2023, the Palestinian Authority (PA) accused Israel of plans to expand its powers over archaeological sites in Palestinian territory, citing multiple raids by Israeli military and settler militias on the Roman-era archaeological village of Sebastia in the northern city of Nablus. The PA called on UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, to intervene, given the UNESCO-supervised renovation project underway in Sebastia’s public plaza.

“This is an attack that falls within a plan to take over Palestinian archaeological sites throughout the West Bank and to impose Israeli control over them and annex them,” the PA’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement to the Middle East Monitor.

Archaeology in the occupied West Bank is frequently politicized as part of territorial disputes between Palestinians and Israeli settlers. In September of 2023, UNESCO added Tell es-Sultan—a prehistoric site in Jericho—to its World Heritage List, drawing ire from some right-wing Israeli politicians and organizations. The two parties protested the designation at a meeting at Hasmonean Palaces, one of several archaeological sites near Jericho under Israeli control and a new “touristic settlement” formed for the purported defense of world history.

ARTnews has reached out to the Palestinian Authority and the Israel Antiquities Authority for comment.

The news was confirmed by her family, who said in the statement: “To us, and a great many others, Dorothy was a powerful model of how to be in the world. She was kind and deeply empathic, always doing ‘the next right thing’ and treating others with patience, love and tolerance.

“Maximally generous and well informed about the many causes she supported, she extended her benevolence to family, friends, colleagues and employees, sharing her good fortune with all,” the statement added. 

As president and chief patron of the foundation, Lichtenstein was lauded for her commitment to her late husband’s legacy. Beginning around 2018, the foundation’s prized collection was dismantled and distributed to cultural institutions in the United States.

The Whitney Museum in New York received 400 artworks across several mediums by Roy—around half of its collection. The Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection, created by the museum shortly thereafter, now represents the world’s largest collection of Roy’s work. The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, meanwhile, was bolstered by around a million documents and historical materials.  

“I like the idea of handing it off, and seeing what the future brings,” Dorothy, who was married to Roy from 1968 through his death in 1997, told the New York Times in 2018. “Every 10 years I say, ‘How about winding it up in the next 10 years?’ I don’t want to leave things up in the air.”

Dorothy Herzka, a self-described “Brooklyn girl,” was born in 1939, and attended high school in the borough before enrolling in Pennsylvania’s Beaver College (since renamed Arcadia University) to study political science with a minor in art history. Her father was a judge in New York, and after graduation in 1963, she moved to Manhattan to work at Bianchini Gallery, on the Upper East Side.

The following year, the gallery staged the exhibition “The American Supermarket,” through which she met Roy. 

“We asked Roy and Andy [Warhol] if they’d put an image on a shopping bag. I met Roy when he came in to sign the shopping bags,” she told Gagosian Quarterly in 2018. 

“Back then, no one could have known what was going to come of this moment. When I met Roy, I had a broken leg and I was in a cast. A few people like George Segal and Claes Oldenburg signed it,” she said, adding that she hadn’t had the foresight to preserve the cast, because “no one actually thought that anyone was going to make it really big.”

Even when art stardom did arrive, the couple met it with amusement: “The first time a painting was sold in the double-digit thousands he got a check from Leo [Castelli] and said, “We’re thousandaires!” By the 70s, most of their friends—Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg among them—had left New York City, and the Lichtensteins made their exit to Southampton, on Long Island, where they lived for the remainder of their lives.

Dorothy became a trustee of the Parrish Art Museum in 2000, and was honored at its annual Midsummer Party in 2009. Per her and Roy’s wishes, the foundation does not award individual grants (“Roy and I always felt that we could never see all the worthy young artists,” she told Vogue), so she became a key benefactor to organizations, including Artists Space and Exit Art. In 2001, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication deemed her an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

In 2018, Dorothy announced that the Lichtenstein Foundation was “winding down,” and that the majority of its collection would be headed to museums. The foundation’s director, Jack Cowart, told the Times that the organization “wanted to get out of the art-holding business.”

Dorothy said perpetuity was never the point, and that she and Roy—who, in her words, never liked to leave a mess behind—had imagined the foundation’s end “practically since it started.” 

“I would wonder,” she said, “when is this going to be over?”

“Client behavior has changed,” Wei told the FT. “When I started, people wanted to see the specialists and works in person. Since the pandemic, they have got used to long-distance purchasing and now want you to go to them.”

Wei, the former Asia chairman of Christie’s, joined LGD as a partner in 2020. At the time, Covid restrictions were still in effect, and the gallery had scaled back its European operation, seemingly re-channeling its energies to meet the needs of the Asian art market. Per the FT, Wei will remain based in Hong Kong and will work closely with the gallery, however the details of her position have not been finalized. 

“We are being realistic about how I should spend my time—which is face to face with clients,” Wei said.

In a statement to ARTnews, Cofounder Dominique Lévy was optimistic about the gallery’s future in Asia: “We are not closing our presence in Hong Kong; we are closing our current space and adjusting to the shifts in needs of our artists and clients. We will continue our dynamic partnership with Rebecca Wei and reaffirm our commitment to artists including Tu Hongtao, but in an agile and nimble manner that better responds to our artist and client needs.”

The Hong Kong branch of LGD, which also has spaces in New York and London, included private viewing rooms, a library, a research center, offices, and public exhibition space.

The gallery’s Hong Kong programming included “Portraits Go Pop!,” a group show about the connection between contemporary portraiture and Pop art that closed this past March 8, and a presentation of seven new paintings by Derrick Adams in 2022.

LGD was founded in 2021 under the joint leadership of Dominique Lévy, Brett Gorvy, Amalia Dayan, and Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, the latter of whom exited the operation in 2023.

This newly discovered artwork is now heralded as the oldest known cave painting, surpassing the previous record-holder by some 10,000 years, per a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The method is a significant improvement over other methods and should revolutionize rock art dating worldwide,” Maxime Aubert, archaeologist at Griffith University in Australia and one of the lead authors of the study, told Reuters. 

According to the study, the scene in the Leang Karampuang cave in the Maros-Pangkep region of South Sulawesi province features a pig measuring 36 inches by 15 inches. The pig depicted standing upright by the group of people. Several smaller images of pigs were also found in the cave, and were similarly dated using a laser to assess a crystal called calcium carbonate that develops organically on the pigment. Barring any future discoveries, the paintings represent the earliest example of narrative storytelling in visual art. 

“The three human-like figures and the pig figure were clearly not depicted in isolation in separate parts of the rock art panel,” Griffith University archaeologist Adam Brumm, a fellow study leader, said in a statement. The relationship between the humanoids and the pig, however, is still unknown. 

“Two of these figures are holding objects of some kind, and at least one figure seems to be reaching towards the pig’s face. Another figure is positioned directly above the pig’s head in an upside down position,” Brumm said. 

The mystery only deepens, as scarce information is known about the people who painted the Sulawesi cave, though the study leaders have guessed carbon dating could reveal them as the first Homo sapiens to ever pass through the region during their migration from Africa to Australia, some 65,000 years ago. 

The Leang Karampuang painting, the study added, predates famous cave paintings of Europe, the oldest of which was found at El Castillo in Spain and created around 40,800 years ago.

“This discovery of very old cave art in Indonesia drives home the point that Europe was not the birthplace of cave art, as had long been assumed. It also suggests that storytelling was a much older part of human history, and the history of art in particular, than previously recognized,” Brumm said.

Christie’s and the estate of Allen, who died in 2018, will offer the archaic tech in “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection,” a three-part auction series. There will be two online sales, “Firsts: The History of Computing” and “Over the Horizon: Art of the Future,” both taking bids through September 12, and a live sale on September 10 titled “Pushing Boundaries: Ingenuity.”

Tech heads with a passion for history, take note: the top lot, appearing in “Pushing Boundaries,” is a signed 1932 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It has been assigned a high estimate of $6 million. 

The sales’ contents include a notice of uranium’s potential as a “new and important” source of energy, as well as a warning of its possible use in the creation of “extremely powerful bombs”—a reality realized by the Manhattan Project. Only two identical versions of the gravely consequential letter exist; the other is currently preserved in Roosevelt’s presidential library.  

Also set to appear in “Pushing Boundaries” is the space suit used by astronaut Ed White, a member of the Gemini 4 and Apollo 1 crews who became the first American to take a spacewalk on June 3, 1965. It carries a high estimate of $120,000. Visual art will hit the block too: Chesley Bonestell’s painting Saturn as Seen from Titan (ca. 1952) has a high estimate of $50,000. The same work was previously sold at Heritage Auctions in 2010 for $77,675.

“Never before has the market seen a collection of this diversity that so beautifully chronicles the history of human science and technological ingenuity—much less one assembled by a founding father of modern computing,” Marc Porter, chairman of Christie’s Americas, said in a statement. “It is a testament to the uniqueness and importance of these objects that one of the greatest innovators of our day collected, preserved, and in dozens of cases, restored them, while both drawing his own inspiration from them and sharing many of them publicly.”

Living Computers: Museum + Labs opened in October 2012, with the unique hook that visitors were encouraged to interact with artifacts of the nascent internet age, like the DEC PDP-10: KI-10 computer, from 1971, on which Allen and Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates polished their programming. The museum added a second floor in 2016 centered on more recent technology, such as self-driving cars, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.

The museum closed due to the Covid pandemic in 2020 with plans to reopen on a later date, but according to the Seattle Times, in June of that year, layoffs began, spelling the end.

“LCM remains the only museum client I’ve worked for that not only allowed but encouraged visitors to use the collection objects, a real show of trust in museum visitors that communicated that the collection really was for them,” Margaret Middleton, an exhibit designer who worked with the museum in 2017, told the newspaper. “I’m sad to see the museum close—it was such an inspiring model.”

26 workers, or about half of the museum’s staff, walked out of the institution, which centers Asian Pacific American art history, in response to “Confronting Hate Together,” a show staged in collaboration with the Black Heritage Society of Washington State and the Washington State Jewish Historical Society. The show focused on the intersection of violence against local Black, Jewish, and Asian communities. Museum text described its intentions as “as a unified response and community call to action against the bias and bigotry that sow seeds of division and hate across communities.”

Most of the staff’s ire was directed at a picture of wall texts that appeared in a KUOW profile of the exhibition published ahead of the show’s opening on May 22. That text opened with, “Today antisemitism is often disguised as anti-Zionism,” and later referred to a phrase graffitied in November onto the Herzl-Ner Tamid temple in Mercer Island, Washington: “Stop Killing”—however, the museum text misquoted it as “Stop the killing” and said it was graffitied “as if the Jews of Mercer Island could control the actions of the Israeli government.”

The text also read, “On university campuses, pro-Palestinian groups have voiced support for Hamas (which is classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. government) and a Palestinian state stretching ‘from the river to the sea,’ a phrase defined by the erasure of Israel.”

In a letter sent to museum leadership on May 19, the workers demanded the museum to divest itself of language and partnerships that “attempt to frame Palestinian liberation and anti-Zionism as antisemitism,” and that the institution “acknowledge limited perspectives” within the exhibition, which the workers claimed had excluded Palestinians, as well as the larger Arab and Muslim world community. The staff walked out upon the opening of the show and did not return until May 29. The museum remained closed for most of June.

“While we acknowledge the damage recent events have caused, our goal is to move forward, share this essential and timely exhibit with our communities, and begin to heal together,” the June 28 museum statement said.

“We will relaunch Confronting Hate Together in solidarity. As always, we are unwaveringly committed to an exhibit that holds to its core message of confronting hate. We acknowledge the complexity of this deeply challenging work as we learn from each other. We ask for your continued grace and understanding as we navigate this process and express our deepest gratitude to our communities.”

Museum spokesperson Steve McLean, speaking to the South Seattle Emerald, said there continue to be conversations between staff and the exhibition partners about its iteration in the new venue. 

“We have spent the time since the closure of the exhibit, or rather the postponement, doing some revision work, a lot of learning, a lot of education, working with the staff who had challenges and concerns,” McLean said. “And really, really working with our partners to not only revise and make additions to the panels, but also explain and put some framing around what exactly happened and why it happened. We’re making a bigger exhibit out of it, essentially.”

The works were by artists Dani Collette and Allora McCullough, who were selected by the Craft Alliance, an exhibition and gallery space, for an 11 month artists-in-residence in July 2023. The residency provided the artists with shared studio space, a stipend, a tuition waiver, and the opportunity to organize an exhibition.

The exhibition, titled  “Planting Seeds, Sprouting Hope”, opened on June 21 and was planned to run through July 20, however shortly before its debut, two pieces by Collette were pulled from display allegedly without the artists’ knowledge: a glass bowl adorned with a keffiyeh print, titled Symbol of Solidarity, and several watermelon-shaped pieces carved with the phrase “Land Back”, a phrase broadly used by Indigenous, decolonization movements to demand the return of settler-occupied land. 

Additionally, several title cards for Collette’s works were removed, including those for the artworks Indigenous to Palestine and From the River to the Sea, the latter being a slogan historically used by supporters of Palestinian statehood. 

“I showed up and my artwork was gone, and my titles were gone, which I think is an incredibly disrespectful and aggressive stance to take without any sort of discourse or effort at discourse,” Collette, an artist of Indigenous descent, told St Louis Public Radio. She added that her intention with the phrase was to “have a discourse about the positive way in which Palestinians/Gazans are using it. I have a firsthand account from a Palestinian person who informed me that when they use it, it’s a call for freedom, equality and peace for all inhabitants ‘From the River to the Sea’, including Jews and Israelis.”

Craft Alliance did not respond to ARTnews‘s request for comment at press time.

On June 24, Craft Alliance wrote on Facebook and Instagram that it had decided to remove the show as artworks and titles contained “antisemitic slogan[s] and imagery” that called for “violence and the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel.”  Speaking to St Louis Magazine, Bryan Knicely, executive director of the Craft Alliance, said he knew the show’s “broad themes” but not its “specifics” until 45 minutes before the opening, when a Jewish volunteer described its contents as offensive.

“While we are saddened by this situation, and for the artists, we are following policies and procedures for the concern and safety of our staff, volunteers, members, donors, students and patrons,” Knicely said. “Most organizations who work with artists to display political work conduct significant pre-work to educate staff, patrons and children—especially children and their parents. These artists did not provide us with an opportunity to provide education to the community in any meaningful way. Finalizing a political exhibition hours before it opens is careless and these artists left the burden of public interpretation up to our staff and volunteers.”

The artists, however, claim that while they may have delayed finalizing the details of the show, the alliance team was informed of its anti-genocidal conceit two months ago, and they had shared the titles of the artworks a day prior to its opening. 

“I wish that more people were open to the idea of art spaces being a safe space for discourse, and that sometimes discourse is a little uncomfortable, but it should never be violent,” said McCullough. “I think that the reaction of removing my livelihood and removing Dani’s work, specifically her Indigenous work, are violent actions.”

St. Louis’ Fifteen Windows Gallery, meanwhile, has offered to host the exhibition starting on July 13, with a talk by the artists planned for August 10. 

Accusations of artists or cultural workers being censored after speaking out on Palestine and Israel have spiked dramatically in the United States and Europe since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 and subsequent ground and aerial assault of Gaza by Israel.  In May, a new online database, the Art Censorship Index, was released to track and map such incidents in the United States.

Fragahdani was arrested by intelligence agents from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard armed forces after she attempted to hang one of her works on Tehran’s Pasteur Avenue wall, near the presidential palace. Her sentence was confirmed by her lawyer,  Mohammad Moghimi, who wrote on X on June 10: “My client was sentenced to six years in prison by Branch 26 [of the court] on the charges of insulting holy [elements] and preaching against the regime. Under the pretext of multiple crimes, this show court has delivered the harshest punishment in [relation to] the two mentioned charges.”

Shortly after the sentencing, the Index on Censorship organization said in an online statement: “We are dismayed to learn that the Iranian activist, artist and cartoonist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to a total of six years in prison… the maximum penalties are indicative of the Iranian regime’s long-standing determination to persecute and silence this courageous rights defender.”

The Index on Censorship has joined other human rights groups, including Freemuse and Cartooning for Peace, in calling for Farghadani’s immediate release. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, Farghadani was arrested on April 13 and taken to a residence controlled by the Revolutionary Guard, where she was beaten. On April 14, she was tried at Tehran’s Evin court on charges of “blasphemy,” “disturbing public order,” and “propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” 

Moghimi said that in May, Farghadani refused to “attend her trial at Branch 26 of the Revolutionary Court, citing the court’s illegality and the lack of observance of justice and fair trial principles in the prosecution of political defendants.” He told the Art Newspaper that the human rights group Artists at Risk Connection is “concerned about her safety while in detention, given the abuse she has already suffered.”

Farghadani was previously arrested in June 2023 on charges of “disturbing public order.” She was held in Qarchak Prison, a women’s prison that has been condemned by human rights groups for its inhumane treatment of inmates. She was later released on bail.

In 2015, Farghadani was sentenced to 12 years and nine months in prison for criticism of the Iranian government and “spreading propaganda against the system.” Farghadani had created satirical drawings in which the Iranian parliament members were depicted as monkeys and goats in protest of two planned bills aimed at restricting access to contraception. She was released in May 2016 after a successful appeal.