Happy Friday, listeners! It’s Jennifer, ArtCurious host, back at you this week with our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. Today is Friday, December 16, 2022.

This week’s stories:

ArtNews: Hamas Says 63 Roman-Era Tombs Found in the Gaza Strip

ArtNews: Roman Treasure Stolen from British Museum After Metal Detectorists Forfeited it by Law For Safekeeping

New York Times: For U.S. Museums With Looted Art, the Indiana Jones Era Is Over

ArtNews: London Police Barge Into Gallery After Provocative Sculpture Is Mistaken for Person in Need of Help 

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Episode Transcript

Welcome back, listeners, to our short-form Friday roundup of my favorite art history updates and interesting news tidbits. This is ArtCurious News this Week, and this gets you up to date on some of the latest goings-on in the realm of art history. I’m your host, Jennifer Dasal.

Today is Friday, December 16, 2022. And this week, which will be my final news roundup of the year, it’s been a big week for ancient Rome. Really. To start us off, it was announced that over 60 Roman-era tombs have been uncovered in Gaza City, according to Hamas, the militant nationalist Palestinian group. Not that they were discovered this week, of course—they were actually found last January, but Hamas is only now noting the findings to the international press. We don’t yet know a whole lot about the archaeological site, but Hiyam al-Bitar, a researcher for Hamas’s Ministry of Antiquities and Tourism, told the Associated Press that they most likely date to the 2nd century C.E., based on the dating of both bones and artifacts found therein. The tombs, 63 in all, were discovered when the site was in preparations for an Egyptian-funded housing project, but unfortunately will not be open to the public anytime soon—not just because the site is still being excavated, but because looting has already been rampant, an outcome that is altogether too common in sites like this. According to an article in ArtNews this week, almost immediately after the initial discovery of the site, people began making off with inscribed bricks, covered caskets, and more. The disappearance of these items leaves a gap, then, in records not only about the site proper, but also about the Roman Empire’s hold during this period in what is the modern-day Gaza Strip. Overall, though, it is still good news, and it caps off what has otherwise been a bonkers-great year for Gaza-based archeology. Most notably, another important site, a graveyard of high-ranking Roman officials dating from the 1st century C.E, was announced earlier.

But let’s balance out the good news regarding the Roman era with a little bit of not-so-good news. It’s yin and yang, right? At the end of last week, the U.K.’s The Daily Mail reported that a treasure trove of Roman coins has purportedly been stolen. The cache of Roman-era goodies, which include 28 silver coins and ingots,  had been unearthed by folks who had discovered them via the use of metal detectors and, per British law, handed their find over authorities. The British Museum was scheduled to take possession of the coins for examination, requesting their exchange from a secure facility in England’s Lancashire County and onward to London. However, it was discovered that some of the objects had gone missing in the meantime—their security hadn’t been all that secure, after all. The police were called in to investigate a couple of months back, but as of this recording, the potential theft is still being blamed on a person or persons unknown.

Why does this matter? Well, in brief: if any of the reporting we’ve done here on ArtCurious News This Week shows anything, it’s that provenance—where a work comes from, its location history, and so forth- matters. Just look at all the arguments that have been growing in recent years about restitution of artworks across the globe. When items are displaced, they are separated from their history; their place of origin suffers, then, from its lack of proximity. As an art historian, this is hard for me, and of course it’s a loaded issue. Do I love going to the Metropolitan Museum when I visit New York? Oh, absolutely. It allows me the chance to see some of my favorite French portraits, Chinese scrolls, and Dutch still lives without pulling out my passport. Showing these works in museums across the globe do arguably allow others to be exposed to our world’s treasures. But I can see the argument on both sides. And no matter what, there are winners and losers in these debates. But I do want to call your attention to a recent article in the New York Times on this very issue, which I’ll link in the show notes and on my website for today’s episode. In it, Donna Yates, an associate professor of criminal law and criminology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands, makes what I believe to be a timely and critical statement, and I quote: “Museums don’t need to OWN objects to share them with the public.”

Alright, folks, this is a good moment to take a little break. More stories are coming to you from ArtCurious News This Week. So please support me and the show by listening to a couple of ads or join me over at Patreon and support this show ad-free for the price of a latte. We’ll be right back. Thanks for listening!

Welcome back to ArtCurious, and our News this Week. For our last story today,  I wanted to bring you a little dose of lightheartedness. Early this week, police in London were alerted to a woman seemingly in distress, slouching forward and face-down in a bowl of soup. Wearing a yellow hoodie and with her blond hair pulled back, bystanders noted that the woman had not moved in hours—but when the police broke open the locked doors to assist the woman, they found themselves face-to-face not with a flesh-and-blood woman, but with a sculpture by the American artist Mark Jenkins. They had broken into the Laz Emporium, an art gallery, and attempted to rescue this work, a 2022 piece titled Kristina, named after the sister of Laz gallerist Steve Lazarides, who commissioned the piece.  Apparently, this kerfuffle wasn’t the first—according to ArtNews, the same thing occurred in October, also in London, at the art and design fair Decorex, where paramedics were called to the site to investigate. Naturally I applaud the passersby who cared enough about a fellow human to do the right thing—absolutely. But I also want to applaud the artist for creating something so convincing that it now routinely fools us. And isn’t that one of the great things about art, that it allows us to experience the wave of human emotions? Even foolishness, or naivete, or gullibility- all the above—can be produced when we come into proximity to a work of art. That’s cool—even if it might make me frustrate in the moment to admit that I had been fooled.

That’s all I have for you today, everyone--thanks for listening to ArtCurious News this Week. ArtCurious News This Week is going on a hiatus for the next couple of weeks as I take a much-needed holiday break, but I will be back with you in the new year, and I have LOTS of great stuff coming down the pike for 2023, including an awesome trip to the Netherlands with Like Minds Travel in celebration of the largest Vermeer exhibition in history. You wanna come with me? You totally should. Check out all the details on my website: artcuriouspodcast.com. In the meantime, thank you all for your support and for listening today—until next year, stay curious.