Italians want the Mona Lisa back
Arts & Culture News for the week starting 01/27/2025
Welcome to La Miccia! Arts & Culture News is a weekly roundup of what’s happening in the world, through the lens of art. Thanks for reading!
This week’s roundup is coming to your inbox a day late. I almost considered not publishing this week because 1) there was not much new stuff to cover and 2) I procrastinated writing all week. However, in the spirit of making this a weekly practice, I decided it would be better to send out a newsletter a day late than no newsletter at all. I can’t commit to perfection, but I can commit to consistency.
Thanks to your suggestions, the Masterlist of arts and culture publications accepting pitches/submissions is growing! I need to spend time in the coming weeks to add more international publications in there. If there’s any I’m missing, drop me a note.
Last week I wrote about the Louvre’s eroding interior. This week Milan raised its hand to display the Mona Lisa. The painting was sold to France in the early 1500s, and Italy has been trying to get its hands on again it ever since. Truly, they can’t get over it. When Italy won the 2006 Football Cup, defeating France in the final on penalties, the whole country erupted in the chant: “Now give us back our Gioconda, because we are the champions of the world”. Anyway, France isn’t giving it up, and Mona Lisa is getting its own room in the Louvre instead.
The Smithsonian shut down it’s DEI program. For a hot second I thought it wouldn’t. The Smithsonian is a ‘hybrid’ institution - it hires both federal and private employees and receives a majority of its budget from the federal government. Following Trump’s executive order to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions”, multiple institutions complied, the Smithsonian now being one of them. If you missed it, I wrote about the others last week.
Is anybody else attending New York Magazine’s writing course Night School? The first lesson came out last week and talked about finding, refining, and sharing ideas. It got to my inbox a few days after I posted this note:
I am a firm believer that while writing can be done in isolation, idea creation is a communal process. Night School specifically mentioned New York’s pitch meetings, and how having a space to shout out ideas can be the catalyst for an embryonic thought to develop into something concrete. It also talked about how you can’t expect to come up with great ideas and create something great if you never leave your house. You need to talk to others. This is something I am trying to do more of. Here’s an excerpt from the conversation between New York’s executive director Genevieve Smith, writer Lane Brown, and editor editor Joy Shan.
On that, New York Magazine’s Unionized Workers told leadership that they are prepared to walk off the job unless they get a fair contract, including strong AI protections.
from Gift Guide published a wonderful and comprehensive article featuring a message about union efforts from Madeline Leung Coleman. There’s also a reader’s pledge in which the union asks “the readers, subscribers, and friends of New York Magazine — to show your support for our efforts by pledging to not cross the digital picket line if the New York staff is left with no choice but to walkout from the jobs that we love.”Deepseek won’t talk about historically censored topics, including artists. When asked about Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei, famous for his criticism of the Chinese government, this was its response:
A new arts center just opened in Brooklyn. Have any of you been yet?
The U.S. Copyright Office has clarified that purely AI-generated works cannot be copyrighted, as they do not meet the legal standards for human authorship. The key issue highlighted in the report is the degree of human control - users of AI tools like text-to-image generators don’t exert enough creative control to be considered authors. AI-assisted works can still be copyrighted if there’s a clear human contribution. For example, an artist modifying AI-generated images in a meaningful way may be eligible for copyright protection.
Artwork of the week
