Art Outlook

Some of the news and comment we’ve spotted online this week

Ancient Egyptian temple targeted by terrorists

A suicide bomber blew himself up outside the temple of Karnak in Luxor on Wednesday, during an attempted terrorist attack that wounded four Egyptians. Police had stopped the man, along with two other assailants, at the entrance to the popular tourist site. The other attackers were shot (one fatally).

Cooper Union loses its president and five board members in one week

Bitter in-fighting among the board of the Cooper Union – a privately funded college in New York specialising in art, architecture and design – has ended in drama this week. On Tuesday, five board members who had supported the college’s controversial decision to introduce tuition fees made their exit, swiftly followed by the president Jamshed Bharucha on Wednesday.

Canadian journalist fired after secretly brokering art deals

Evan Solomon, a political journalist and host of CBC’s The House and Power and Politics, reportedly got a secret commission from the collector Bruce Bailey for introducing him to wealthy buyers – including the ‘the Guv’, better known as current governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney.

‘Sleeping Beauty’ tomb in Ethiopia points to early links with Rome

Extraordinary jewels and artefacts discovered in graves in the ancient city of Aksum, Ethiopia, suggest that the Romans were trading with the Aksumite kingdom centuries earlier than previously thought. One of the excavated tombs contained the body of a woman reclining on her side with a mirror, cosmetics and beautiful jewellery, who’s been nicknamed the ‘Sleeping Beauty’.

Dasha Zhukova’s Garage opens in Gorky Park

The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art opened on Wednesday in its new building, a Soviet-era Brutalist edifice carefully redeveloped by the architect Rem Koolhaas. Inside, guests can indulge in a spot of ping-pong courtesy of Rirkrit Tiravanija (whose work is also a set to be a highlight at Art Basel), get lost in Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Rooms, and explore the museum’s archive collection of Russian non-conformist art.

Lead image: used under Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA 3.0)