– Ai Weiwei and Eliasson Launch Digital Moon: Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has teamed up with Danish-Icelandic artist and designer Olafur Eliasson to create "Moon," an online social media artwork in which users can create digital drawings on the surface of a virtual moon. "Celebrate with us the gathering of creative powers from around the globe to mark the passage from nothing to something and from thinking into doing," the artists write on the project's site. "Savor this moment of transformation. Leave your fingerprint and see the shared moon grow as others reach out too." [Moon]
– Marcos Secretary Found Guilty: Imelda Marcos’s former longtime personal secretary, Vilma Bautista, has been convicted of conspiracy and tax fraud for selling Impressionist masterpieces, including two by Claude Monet, that went missing in the 1980s.The paintings were purchased with public money when Ferdinand Marcos was president of the Philippines and hung on the walls of Imelda’s Upper East Side townhouse until 1995, when they came into Bautista’s posession. Bautista, 75, waited more than 25 years before attempting to sell the works; she was not present in court to hear her sentence due to the flare up of a heart ailment. [NYT]
– DIA VP Blasts Emergency Manager’s Demands: Detroit Institute of Arts executive vice president and COO Annmarie Erickson recently attended a meeting with Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr and she remains skeptical of his demand that the museum somehow generate $500 million for the city. "And how is the DIA to come up with a half-billion dollars? Rent art. Ask your donors. Sell some art. The DIA has carefully explored those suggestions, and none will satisfy the city’s hunger for cash without dismantling the museum," Erickson writes. [Detroit Free Press]
– U.K.'s Holey Cultural Safety Net: Britain's so-called "cultural safety net," a 60-year-old program of export bans and fundraising campaigns overseen by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest, is no longer so effective; in the last two years fewer than one third of the works banned from export have ended up staying in the U.K. [Independent]
– China Boosts Cultural Spending: According to an audit by its Ministry of Finance, China's government has spent some 4.8 billion yuan ($783.03) on culture in 2013, a 41 percent increase from 2012. [China.org]
– Schjeldahl Slams Munich Trove: "Every journalistic account of Gurlitt’s inventory reflexively bandies the word 'masterpieces' or, for variety, 'masterworks' and cites a speculated market value of a billion dollars," New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in his appraisal of works seized from Cornelius Gurlitt's Munich apartment. "From what I’ve seen of the photographic evidence, phooey. Aside from a lovely Matisse, there appear to be only minor works, mostly by middling German Expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit painters, of a grade that museums might want but would usually keep in storage." [New Yorker]
– Twenty musicians laid on their backs and played their instruments in what appeared to be a flash mob performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but really the band, Alarm Will Sound, is having a year-long residency at the museum. [HuffPost]
– Bloomberg news is scaling back its arts coverage, discontinuing its Muse brand, and refocusing on luxury coverage. [LAT]
– The U.S. has returned more than 6,600 looted artifacts in the past 6 years. [TAN]
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