Man Stabbed Outside the British Museum, Architectural Historian Jean-Louis Cohen Dies at 74, and More: Morning Links for August 9, 2023

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The Headlines

POLICE BLOTTER. A man was stabbed in the arm outside the British Museum’s front entrance in London on Tuesday morning and taken to a hospital for treatment, the Independent reports. The institution was shuttered to the public for around two hours, according to the New York Times, and reopened in the afternoon. The institution’s chair, George Osborne, said in a statement, “Everyone’s thoughts at the BM are with the victim and we wish him the best recovery.” A man was arrested in connection with the incident, and police officials said that the attack was not connected to terrorism. Meanwhile, the Indian government said that 31 antiquities have been stolen from protected sites over the past decade, and that 27 of those remain at large, the Indian Express reports.

ARCHITECT AND HISTORIAN JEAN-LOUIS COHEN, “one of the world’s foremost experts on twentieth-century architecture,” died on Monday at the age of 74 in France’s Ardennes region, Artforum writes. The cause was an allergic reaction to a bee sting. Cohen published and curated widely, and he was a Le Corbusier expert, but his passions extended to more quotidian subjects. “It’s a pity, in my view, to see architecture flattened out or understood only as dealing with the big monuments of states and corporations,” he said in a 2019 Brooklyn Rail interview quoted by Artforum. “Architecture is a practice that can, and in many cases does, produce our living environment.”

The Digest

The Slade School of Fine Art in London has tapped artist Mary Evans to be its director. Evans, who now runs the B.A. fine art course at Chelsea College of Arts at University Arts London, succeeds Kieren Reed. She will the first Black leader of Slade. [ArtReview]

Chinese artist Yue Minjun—famed for his “Laughing Man” self-portraits—has created a line of NFTs featuring that iconic figure. He is sanguine about using AI to create digital works on the blockchain, a technology he termed “a pure utopian world where my creativity can be boundless.” [South China Morning Post]

Using laser scanning and other tools, archaeologists with the University of Exeter have identified an ancient Roman road network in southwest Great Britain, revealing how the empire operated on the island. [NationalWorld/Yahoo! News]

Legendary German dealer Rudolf Zwirner just toasted his 90th birthday, and an exhibition about his legacy is now on view at Deutsche Bank’s PalaisPopulaire in Berlin. [Artnet News]

At a charity event for Southampton Hospital out on Long Island this past weekend, former Commerce Secretary and noted René Magritte collector Wilbur Ross offered his views on how things are going in nearby New York City: “New York needs new management,” he said. [Bloomberg]

ARTISTS SPACE. Vanity Fair has an interview with Carmen Winant, who has a new installation about abortion at Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Datebooklooked at the work of the late Yolanda López, whose heartening and incisive work is now on view at the San José Museum of Art.

The Kicker

THE CULTURAL AMBASSADOR. Former Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti is now serving as the US ambassador to India, and he recently stopped by the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre in Mumbai to see a show by Toiletpaper, the freewheeling creative studio created by artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari and known for its outrageous imagery. Garcetti seems to have enjoyed himself. “Walking through the labyrinth of hyperrealist installations was truly a treat for the senses!” he said on X. [@USAmbIndia/X]