A lot went down this week in the weird and wild world of Art. Some things were more scandalous than others, some were just plain wacky—but all of them are worth knowing about. Without further ado:+ The original Winnie the Pooh dolls have been restored to their former glory thanks to the New York Public Library. [Hyperallergic]+ An Islamic extremist by the name of Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, pleaded guilty to war crimes involving the destruction of historic monuments in the city of Timbuktu in northern Mali. He was charged with ordering the demolishment of nine mausoleums and the 15th-century Sidi Yahia mosque. [The Art Newspaper]
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+ A new affordable-art website called Collectionair is making waves in the art world, recently gaining support from curatorial elites like former director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, Jean-Hubert Martin. [The Art Newspaper]
+ Italian art dealer Fabrizio Moretti filed a $6 million lawsuit against David Zwirner and his gallery for failing to deliver Jeff Koons’s Gazing Ball sculpture that Moratti claims he purchased for $2 million. [The Art Newspaper]+ Famed glass artist Dale Chihuly recently came under scrutiny regarding his piece titled Persian Ceiling in an exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. In the show's accompanying wall text the artist is quoted, "It was an exotic name to me, so I just called them Persians.” The artist and the museum received a wave of public backlash for the name of the piece and the artist’s designation of Persians as “exotic.” [Artnet News
+ A self-proclaimed anarchist art collective placed five micro penis Trump sculptures in Union Square Park this week. [The Guardian]+ Harvard University launched an online public database cataloging 32,000 works connected to the Bauhaus. [The Art Newspaper]+ The Ukraine’s ministry of culture is calling for a boycott of Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery in protest of a new exhibition of paintings by Ivan Aivazovsky. The Ukraine claims that the art was stolen from the Russian annexed region of Crimea. [The Art Newspaper]
+ A Banksy mural has gone missing in Gloucestershire and fans are beginning to fear it's destruction. Pictures surfaced on social media this week of tarps and scaffolding covering the area of the wall the mural was painted. [The Guardian]+ Colombian-American artist named Yazmany Arboleda has been painting the churches and mosques in the Kenyan city of Nairobi, yellow, as a part of a public art project supporting peace and unity across the world’s religions. [The Guardian]+ Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrored Room is hitting the road in 2017. The installation by the famed Japanese artist will debut at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC through Feb. 23rd, before heading to Seattle and Los Angeles as well as Ontario and Cleveland. [The Los Angeles Times]
+ Madonna just announced a new fundraising campaign where lottery winners will get a fully comped trip to Miami Art Basel with the recording artist. [ArtNet News]+ An expensive street art portrait of Diana Vreeland was stolen from a hotel in Chelsea on Tuesday, but was safely returned by the thief a few hours later. [NY Daily News]
+ Sculptor, and founder of the Hunters Point artist colony, Jacques Terzian, dies in San Francisco at 94. Founded in 1984, the Point grew to become what was considered to be the largest artist colony operating in the United States. It is still one of the largest, with 250 artists in residence. [SF Gate]
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