Eiffel Tower Temporarily Evacuated, 266 Looted Antiquities Return to Italy, and More: Morning Links for August 14, 2023

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The Headlines

THE RENAISSANCE MAN. Collector T. Kimball Brooker, the president of the Barbara Oil Company and a former Morgan Stanley manager director, is sending a trove of more than 1,300 Renaissance texts from the 16th century to auction at Sotheby’s, the Guardian reports. It is estimated to haul in more than $25 million. The action kicks off in New York on October 11, when the first of—count them!—eight sales of Brooker’s holdings will occur. One highlight is an early manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci‘s writing on painting, which is tagged to go for at least $120,000. That’s a large number . . . but also a lot less than what some are paying for paintings by young artists these days.

THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE. For his radiant sculpture of a milkwood tree, artist Keith Wikmunea took home the AU$100,000 (US$64,700) top prize at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory. It is the first art award for the artist, a member of the Apalech and Winchanam clans, the Guardian reports. ● Rodney McMillian received a key to the city of Columbia, South Carolina, where he was born in 1969, ArtDaily notes. Two works by McMillian were recently acquired by the Columbia Museum of Art, which is showing them through October. ● And in ARTnews, Francesca Aton has a rundown of more artist-award news, including Dakota Mace winning the $45,000 Ellsworth Kelly Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

The Digest

The Art Gallery of NSW’s AU$344 million (about US$222.6 million) SANAA-designed expansion has been open for eight months, but still does not have a name, “with political intervention and conflicting advice over language behind the deadlock,” Kelly Burke reports. For now, it’s being referred to as Sydney Modern. [The Guardian]

Following a bomb threat, the Eiffel Tower in Paris was evacuated on Saturday afternoon and closed for about two hours, before being reopened to the public. [Bloomberg and CNN]

On Friday, Italy toasted the return of 266 antiquities that it identified as having been looted from the country. Some had been seized from a New York storage unit used by dealer Robin Symes, while others were returned by a collector who had offered them to Houston’s Menil Collection, which turned down the gift. [The Associated Press]

Examiners in Hong Kong who review arts projects for funding will be required “to shoulder the responsibility of safeguarding national security,” the special administrative region’s culture minister said. Some have criticized that decision as vague and argued that it could cause some to choose not to take on that job. [South China Morning Post]

Banksy has a show up at the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Scotland, and got the profile treatment from CBS News Sunday Morning. [CBS]

Tennis legend Venus Williams shared a photo to Instagram of herself posing with artist Anna Weyant’s (double) portrait of her. “Now I will live forever,” Williams wrote. [@venuswilliams/Instagram]

The Kicker

A QUASQUICENTENNIAL CELEBRATION. Artist René Magritte’s 125th birthday is in November, and in Brussels, which he long called home, the biennial Flowertime floral festival is honoring the artist by taking Surrealism as its theme, the Brussels Times reports. Nearly two-dozen florists have created pieces in and around its City Hall, which, the Associated Press notes, has temporarily been renamed, “This is not a city hall,” in a nod to one of Magritte’s most famous paintings. [BT and AP]