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- Germany is setting up a new panel called the Coordination Council for Returns of Cultural Property and Human Remains from Colonial Contexts.
- A rare scrap of typed lyrics from Bob Dylan’s song “I’m Not There” was found hidden in a book and will be auctioned.
- Plans for Donald Trump’s presidential library in Miami were revealed yesterday.
The Headlines
RETHINKING REDRESS. Germany is creating a new panel to oversee the restitution of colonial-era artifacts and human remains, reports the Art Newspaper. The new group, with the lengthy, acronym-unfriendly title: Coordination Council for Returns of Cultural Property and Human Remains from Colonial Contexts, will be made up of German government, states, and municipal leaders, according to an announcement made yesterday. The council is “an important step in responsibly handling” these objects, and will help “shape ongoing and future restitution processes more effectively,” explained German culture minister Wolfram Weimer. The initiative makes good on oft-repeated pledges to repatriate artifacts taken unfairly from former colonies, yet the transfer of ownership has stalled in many such pending cases.
HOW DOES IT FEEL? To come upon a rare piece of pop culture history while leafing through an old book of poems? An unnamed bookseller would know. He found a torn, typed paper draft of Bob Dylan’s nearly 60-year-old lyrics for his song, “I’m Not There,” inside a signed, first-edition Allen Ginsberg paperback, reports the Guardian . Now, the “extremely rare” scrap of lyrics that Dylan is thought to have written during the summer of 1967, just outside Woodstock, will head to music memorabilia–focused Omega Auctions in April, where it is estimated to fetch about £40,000 or nearly $53,000. The book, Ginsberg’s collection of poems titled Ankor Wat, had belonged to the late Sally Grossman, a friend of the singer and wife of Dylan’s first manager, Albert Grossman. For those keeping track, she was also Ginsberg’s friend, who gifted her the book, itself a valuable collectible, with its hand-scrawled, dated, and signed inside title page.
The Digest
Yesterday, President Trump’s son Eric revealed plans for a presidential library in Miami that appears to be about 50 stories tall, and boasts two gold statues of Trump, along with reconstructions of parts of the White House, plus military vehicles. [The Washington Post]
Ruth Asawa’s estate is opening a new permanent gallery in San Francisco’s Minnesota Street Project this spring, with a show curated by the artist’s daughters, timed to her centennial celebration. [ San Francisco Chronicle]
The Pinakotheken art museums in Munich is restituting a Nazi-looted painting by Lesser Ury (1861–1931) to the heirs of the Berlin banker Curt Goldschmidt. [ArtDependence]
Following a New York Times story highlighting basic design blunders in plans for a new White House ballroom, President Trump showed reporters updated renderings of the project that appeared to take into consideration those critiques. [ The Washington Post]
The Kicker
DUCHAMP MADE YOU LOOK. Marcel Duchamp was known to baffle audiences with his groundbreaking artworks, anda head of a major retrospective opening April 12, curators at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, say the subversive artist continues to perplex even them, reports Cultured Magazine . “The difficulty level is at a 15 out of 10, because everything he made is designed to confound the traditional systems of art as we know them,” said chief curator at large Michelle Kuo. “You would think that after over 100 years, we would know more facts about Duchamp,” added Kuo, “but there have been so many misreadings and misunderstandings and games of telephone that proliferate.” Indeed, visitors may need extra time to take in the April 12 to August 22 show, organized with “deadpan accuracy,” and some 300 artworks. After all, the notion that Duchamp stopped working early to dedicate his life to chess, was yet another fabricated myth.
