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    The Met’s Next Costume Fashion Blockbuster Take On the Politics of Race

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    With support from LeBron James, ASAP Rocky, Pharrell Williams and more.The Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is wading into the politics of race relations.On Wednesday, the museum announced that its spring 2025 blockbuster fashion show will be “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” focusing on the history of the Black dandy and the way peacocking goes beyond aesthetics to empowerment. ASAP Rocky, Colman Domingo, Lewis Hamilton, Pharrell Williams and Anna Wintour will be co-chairs of the gala that opens the show; LeBron James will be the honorary chair.The Met’s first fashion exhibition to focus solely on the work of designers of color, as well as the first in more than two decades to focus explicitly on men’s wear, the show is another step in the Costume Institute’s efforts to rectify its own historic failures in diversity and inclusion, said Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge.“I wanted to stage a show on race that could use our collection to tell a story that had been absent from the conversation both within the museum and outside,” Mr. Bolton said. “This is a first of its kind.”LeBron James will be the honorary chair of the event. Mario Anzuoni/ReutersThe goal, he said, is to demonstrate what happens to the concept of the “dandy,” as defined by Beau Brummell in Regency England, when it is racialized. When, for example, an enslaved person is treated as a luxury object to be dressed up and displayed — and how those clothes in turn were appropriated by the enslaved and used to subvert existing systems and create new identities. Additionally, it will illustrate how contemporary Black men’s wear designers use their work to connect to this tradition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé Missed the 2024 Met Gala

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      In the week leading up to the Met Gala, tabloids volleyed predictions about Taylor Swift’s possible attendance: She would be there with her football player boyfriend, Travis Kelce! Actually, she wouldn’t! She might go but leave Mr. Kelce at home!On Monday night, fans finally got their answer. The party of the year would have to go on without Ms. Swift.Other notable absences from the red carpet: Beyoncé, who had not been expected to attend, and Rihanna, who seemed poised to be the closing act of fashion’s annual parade of one-upmanship.Last year, every other guest had walked the carpet — as had one uninvited cockroach — before Rihanna arrived at 10:15 p.m., wrapped in Valentino camellias that she said made her feel “expensive.”Rihanna, 36, who swung from pop stardom into a prosperous second act as a lingerie and makeup mogul, told Extra TV earlier in the week that she had planned on attending the gala. People magazine reported on Monday that the singer had come down with the flu.The singer had become one of the most hotly anticipated presences on the Met’s steps. Her turn as a miniskirted pope in 2018 touched off an internet frenzy, and the 55-pound, daffodil yellow gown she wore in 2015 helped earn its designer a slot on the haute couture schedule in Paris.The gala’s influence as a joint advertising opportunity for brands, sponsors and celebrities depends in part on the level of star power that is willing to show up. The gala still attracted boldface names this year, including Zendaya and Jennifer Lopez, but many fans online said that the lack of Rihanna had been a blow. (Some even circulated images of the singer hitting the carpet that appeared to have been created by artificial intelligence.)Rihanna has been a frequent presence at the gala in recent years, but Taylor Swift and Beyoncé have not attended since 2016.Ms. Swift began attending the gala in 2008 and was a co-chair in 2016. In the past year she has not exactly been hurting for the Met’s spotlight: Her Eras Tour stimulated both economic and seismic activity on its yearlong (and counting) romp around the world, and her recent album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” overcame mixed reviews to become her 14th release to hit reach No. 1 on the Billboard album chart.Beyoncé attended the gala seven times from 2008 to 2016, toying with silhouette in strapless Armani and mermaid-style Emilio Pucci gowns. She has lately been leading a high-fashion rodeo in wide-brimmed hats and western boots while promoting her album “Cowboy Carter.”Even without showing up to the Met on the first Monday in May, Beyoncé wields immense power in the fashion sphere, Vanessa Friedman, the chief fashion critic of The New York Times, recently wrote: “She is practically a Met Gala unto herself.” More

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      Kim Kardashian Stuns Met Gala in Corset That Leaves Little Room to Breathe

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      Kim Kardashian created a hoo-ha at the 2022 Met Gala when she admitted to going on a crash diet to fit into the Marilyn Monroe “Happy Birthday Mr. President” dress she wore to pose on the museum steps.This year, however, she engaged in a different kind of body modification via the extreme corseting of the Maison Margiela by John Galliano couture dress she wore, cinched so tight at the waist it turned her figure into an hourglass version of the X Games. It was to tight, it was hard to imagine how she could breathe — let alone eat once inside the museum.Viewers on social media immediately took notice. “Kim Kardashian honestly looks so uncomfortable and like she can barely move or even breathe,” posted one observer. “Fashion shouldn’t be like that.”“Everyone is snatching their waist,” another wrote on X. “They said the one rule in the garden of time is no breathing, from Bad Bunny to Kim Kardashian.”The corseting had been a feature of Mr. Galliano’s much ballyhooed January Margiela couture show, where it had been worn by both men and women, and where “making of” photographs on Mr. Galliano’s mood boards displayed the bruises left on the models’ flesh by the lacing. (Ms. Kardashian had been in the front row of that show.)In the incarnation worn this time around by Ms. Kardashian, the corset was re-imagined in an antique silver brocade, and paired with a sheer silver metal skirt covered in lacy flowers, twigs, and mirror shards, to reflect the evening’s dress code, “The Garden of Time.” The idea of suffering for fashion, it turns out, is everlasting.Gina Cherelus More

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      Petrit Halilaj Takes Flight

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      When the Kosovar artist Petrit Halilaj received an invitation for his biggest project ever in the United States, he knew just where to go: back to school.For “Abetare,” his spare, smart, absolutely delightful sculptural installation on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Halilaj, who is 38, traveled to elementary schools across southeastern Europe, documenting the doodles that generations of schoolchildren left on their desks and walls. (The project’s title refers to the Albanian-language ABC book from which Halilaj learned the alphabet.) Those children’s drawings from the Balkans formed the templates for the sprightly, sometimes bawdy metal sculptures that now garland the skyline of New York — large ones, but also flowers, birds and graffiti that nestle in the topiaries, and hide behind the cocktail bar.Halilaj was born in 1986 in Kosterrc, a small village outside the town of Runik. (At Art Basel one year he answered that perpetual question, Where are you from?, by dumping 60 tons of Kosterrc soil in the white cube of the art fair.) His own school days took place amid the most horrific fighting in Europe between World War II and the present war in Ukraine. Serbian forces burned down the Halilaj family home in 1999, at the height of the Kosovo war, one of the most brutal chapters of a decade-long nightmare of ethnic and religious conflicts in the Balkans. The family fled to Albania, where psychologists in a refugee camp encouraged the boy to draw. War reporters at the time chronicled an ambidextrous child prodigy, drawing chickens and peacocks with both hands.Petrit Halilaj’s “Abetare (Spider)” seems to be smiling mischievously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Roof Garden.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesHalilaj now lives in Berlin, but in both art and life he remains deeply engaged with Kosovo, which became independent in 2008 and where Halilaj is advising the culture ministry on the creation of a museum of contemporary art. (He figures among an exciting generation of artists from Europe’s youngest country, including Flaka Haliti, Alban Muja, and Doruntina Kastrati, the last of whom just won a prize at the Venice Biennale.) And for a decade now I’ve been captivated by Halilaj’s art, which pirouettes around questions of nationality, family and sexuality through a dense register of symbols — especially birds, whose wings and claws appear everywhere from the surface of Balkan antiquities to the fuselage of a Boeing 737.In two conversations, which have been condensed and edited, he and I spoke about the trauma of displacement, the magic of flight, and the universal language of schoolchildren’s scribbling. While we were on the Met roof one morning he pointed out his little sculpture of a dove, high up in the sky. A pigeon — an echt New Yorker — had touched down next to Halilaj’s bronze bird, and was making friends with its Balkan counterpart.At left, “Abetare (Wall of Symbols),” and at right, “Abetare (Flower, Toshe, Messi).”Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesThe project you’ve done for the Met roof continues one that began more than a decade ago, when you went back to your elementary school in Kosovo. What was it like, returning to the village you had to flee as a child?In 2010 I went back to Runik for a holiday. My old school — which had actually survived the war — was being torn down to build a new one. [The Serbian army] had burned 99 percent of the town, this was one of the few buildings that remained, and still it was going to be replaced by new, cheap construction! And while I was at the school all these kids showed up. Some were teenagers, but others were very little, maybe 8, 9: little devils. A classic small-town crowd of naughty kids. I loved them.Some of them knew me, that I’m an artist, and they were like, “You have to go in. ”We entered, and I started filming. They started doing everything you are not supposed to do in a school — just out-of-control fun.These kids would have been born after 2000, after the war.Exactly. They started painting on top of pictures of national heroes and poets, which, honestly, I would have never had the courage to do when I was a kid.Then one of the kids took me into a classroom. And then I see the pile of these green school desks there since before the war. The desks were older than me. And this kid says to me, ‘‘Come see the drawings,’’ because there is everything there. These desks contain 40 years of unconscious, crazy secrets. There’s this encyclopedic aspect, these layers of generations. But you also see how local and global these things are, and also how funny.I was just so touched by the language of drawing, and in a moment I saw another loss — this time not from the war, but from the postwar craziness, wanting everything new. I asked the principal if I could save at least one classroom of desks. He said, “Yes, if you finance new desks.” We made a deal. I hope he used the money to really buy them …“Abetare (Big Flower),” one of the bronze sculptures that ring the walls of the Met roof.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesFrom left, a tiny bird perched on the giant spider; the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo; and a star atop the artist’s “Abetare (House).”You exhibited the desks from your hometown in a show in Cologne in 2015. Why did you go further, all around the Balkans, for the Met project?It was a personal journey. I started three years ago, going to Kukes, in Albania, where I was a refugee. Then to Rozaje, in Montenegro, where we used to go on holidays before the war. Very, very, very small towns. I actually went to all the countries of ex-Yugoslavia, except Serbia, where I had friends send me images.What I was amazed by, as I was going to the schools, was to feel so connected everywhere. For me, these drawings are a language that I just get. I had experts in education, or from museums, or even local artists, who accompanied me everywhere. Because otherwise it’s hard to convince a school superintendent that you aren’t a maniac. “Can I enter your classrooms to see the drawings of kids?” [Laughs] You have to really take time and build trust.Some sculptures on the Met roof clearly refer to the Balkans. There’s one with the letters “KFOR,” a reference to the NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. But there are also birds and stars, and Lionel Messi, and the Chanel logo, and then the same naughty drawings of body parts you could find on a school desk in America.It’s a really funny way of seeing history, through all these politically incorrect drawings. But I love the queerness in them, these secrets. They are codes. You can see the euro symbol screwing Yugoslavia …One little queer joke I caught up here on the roof is the sculpture that spells out “IDGAF” — which stands for “I don’t give a [expletive],” but is also a song by the unofficial president of Kosovo, Dua Lipa.[Laughs] It’s kind of a tribute to her, but it’s also a little celebration of new possibilities. Both locally in Kosovo, or regionally, there is a chance for new generations to really question all these static historical, nationalist narratives that are so hard to move.Petrit Halilaj in the 2020 exhibition “To a raven and hurricanes that from unknown places bring back smells of humans in love,” at the Crystal Palace in Madrid.Oscar Gonzalez/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesInstallation view of “Petrit Halilaj: Runik” at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, in 2023.via Petrit Halilaj and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Photo by GLR EstudioTell me about why birds have such a notable place in your work. For your 2017-18 New Museum show, you translated antiquities from your hometown, many of which are now in museums in Serbia, into birdlike figures with spindly claws. There were giant brass bird claws in your show in Madrid, and a performer dressed as a white raven.The birds and the chickens always bring me back to the Albanian ABC book, the Abetare. In the lesson for the letter P, there is a boy named Petrit. “Pulat e Petritit.” Petrit and the chickens. So imagine, when you are little, and people ask you, “What’s your name?” I would say “Petrit,” and they would say, “Ah, Petrit with the chickens!” I didn’t get it for years. Why am I Petrit with the chickens?! I just knew we had chickens in our garden …Later on, I understood that all these adults went through this Abetare and learned this lesson.Language politics were such a flashpoint in the wars of the 1990s.Students were allowed to learn in Albanian until 1989, with the ending of autonomy. After that it’s this story of hidden classrooms, hidden universities. The school became a place of discussion, where we could see what was going to happen. My Abetare was burned when they burned the house in ’99.In shows before this one you’ve incorporated your own childhood drawings of birds, and also flowers. Is there something that links those redeployments of your drawings as a refugee with the doodles you found for the Met project?Questioning adulthood, or questioning established canons by going back to a part of childhood is the way to understand the world around me that scares me the least. Going through the schools and the desks, there was a way to build a counternarrative: a network of symbols and alphabets and drawings that come to the Metropolitan Museum and form a kind of joint landscape.A view of “Petrit Halilaj: RU,” 2018, at the New Museum, featuring an imagined landscape populated by whimsical creatures fashioned from pottery fragments, found objects and other detritus.via Petrit Halilaj and The New Museum, New York; Photo by Dario LasagniTwo years ago you did a wonderful project on the roof of the Grand Hotel in Pristina, Kosovo’s capital. Once it was a five-star hotel; and as it declined through the war years, the stars on its roof sign were taken down one by one. You restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”This is a work that I ended up donating to the city, to the people of Pristina. We’re talking about, literally, the hotel where Tito was coming to sleep. You can still sense this glamour that was once there. I mean, you had this fantastic article in The New York Times about it …The then-president of Kosovo told our reporter, “I don’t think it is the worst hotel in the world, but that is because the world is very big.”And I had this idea of coming back to Kosovo and lighting it back up. Making something that is rotten into a 28-star hotel. Poetically, you can dream of something bigger than the hotels in Dubai, you know?But to me the stars against the blue Pristina sky were also the stars of the flag of the European Union. The installation is just as much about Kosovo’s still incomplete recognition as an independent European state.It was about bringing in a different language that we hardly see in public spaces. And also about seeing sculpturally a fallen ideology in these fallen stars. In Yugoslavian times, there was a whole generation of people who were so proud of this hotel, and they had no money to enter.An artistic project by Petrit Halilaj at Grand Hotel Pristina, 2022. Halilaj restored the stars, added dozens of new ones, and replaced the sign “Grand Hotel” with a phrase from a Kosovar child: “When the sun goes away we paint the sky.”Armend Nimani For The New York TimesYou have these two rooftop projects, in Pristina and in New York, both rooted in the voices of children. And what interests me most is how these children’s voices, even as they cement a claim to Kosovo’s independence, also escape the nationalist traps of so much artistic advocacy.At the Met there is an equilibrium. Maybe there are some nationalist symbols. But then you have a big heart. You have “Michael Jackson” written on the walls in Albania. You have group agendas, but also personal things. I felt like an archaeologist, discovering how people are so much more interconnected, more global, more human, than the national politics that dominate this area of Europe. And to me, that is really good news. More

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      Review: Renaissance Portraits Undercover in Met’s ‘Hidden Faces’

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      Portraits go undercover in the new Metropolitan Museum show “Hidden Faces,” about the practice of concealing artworks behind sliding panels and reverse-side paintings.The Met’s delightful show “Hidden Faces: Covered Portraits of the Renaissance” illuminates a curious trend in 15th- and 16th-century painting: the slow reveal. The works on view, originally concealed in special cases and behind sliding or reversible panels, gamify the experience of looking at portraiture; they have to be moved, before they can move us.Of course, we can’t actually handle these artworks, many of them on loan to the Met from European museums including the Courtauld in London and the Uffizi in Florence. But we can peer at them from double-sided glass cases and watch animations of faces emerging from sliding panels. The covers are marvelous works in their own right, with elaborate emblems and allegories that are themselves a form of representation.The interactions between the different components can be quite playful, with a literary and theatrical flair. A mesmerizing portrait of a Florentine lady in a flowing sheer veil, attributed to the early-16th-century Italian painter Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, is accompanied by a decorative panel with the Latin inscription “To each his own mask” and a trompe l’oeil face covering to match.Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Attributed to Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Cover With a Mask, Grotteschi, and Inscription”; at right, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Giuliano di Piero di Simone Bugiardini, “Portrait of a Woman (La Monaca),” both circa 1510.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesAmong the show’s many examples of Netherlandish portraiture, a clever narrative unfolds through a double-sided work by Hans Süss von Kulmbach, a protégé of Albrecht Dürer. On the front is a bust-length image of a man who seems to be looking at the upper left corner of the painting — or, perhaps, he is gazing up at the woman sitting in a window who appears when the panel is flipped.The Renaissance practice of covering paintings was rooted in earlier religious traditions and liturgical rituals, a point made in the show by a work borrowed from the Cloisters: a private devotional shrine with wings that open to display images of a female donor and her husband next to Saint Catherine.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Met Museum Hires Its First Head of Provenance Research

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      Lucian Simmons is leaving Sotheby’s to lead the museum’s increased efforts to review its collection, which has recently returned looted artifacts, including dozens last year.As part of its more aggressive restitution investigation efforts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday announced that it had appointed a Sotheby’s executive to the newly created position of head of provenance research.Lucian Simmons will leave Sotheby’s, where he is vice chairman and worldwide head of the restitution department — and senior specialist for the Impressionist and Modern art department — to take on the role of coordinating research efforts across the museum, starting in May.Like museums all over the world, the Met has faced increased scrutiny from law enforcement officials, academics and the news media over the extent to which its collection of more than 1.5 million works includes looted artifacts. In recent years, for example, the Manhattan district attorney’s office has seized dozens of antiquities from the museum to return them to countries including Turkey, Egypt and Italy.In a telephone interview, Max Hollein, the museum’s director and chief executive, said the volume of materials an auction house must review gave Simmons the background necessary to take on a review of the Met’s encyclopedic collection.“He has a vast amount of experience understanding the level of research you need to apply and what timelines you need to set to get to a result,” Hollein said. “He probably had to deal with more issues at Sotheby’s than have many other institutions. You have to vet and scrutinize a huge number of objects. He’s someone who understands the theory but who also has a very practical attitude.”The Met last year announced a major new effort to review its holdings and policies with a view toward returning items it finds to have problematic histories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jeffrey Gibson Will Bring Sculptures of Ancestral Spirits to Met Facade

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      The Met named its 2025 art commissions, which include Gibson’s facade sculptures and a roof garden installation by the soundsmith Jennie C. Jones.Last summer, Jeffrey Gibson received an honor that most artists wait for their entire lives. Would he represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, the art world’s version of the Olympics? Only a few weeks after accepting, there was another auspicious ring on the telephone.It was the curator David Breslin, wondering if Gibson would become the sixth artist to alter the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade with newly commissioned sculptures.“He called me from the beach,” recalled Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist known for infusing abstract works with queer and native themes.For the commission, Gibson will return to the ancestral spirit figures he started assembling in 2015. The challenge will be translating these delicate structures of beadwork, textiles and paint into four weatherproof sculptures that will gaze upon museum visitors from their plinths above Fifth Avenue. They will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.Breslin, who leads the Met’s modern and contemporary art department, described Gibson as “one of the most incredible artists of his generation.”Gibson’s 2015 sculpture, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” an ancestral spirit figure made from glazed ceramic and repurposed tipi pole, artificial sinew and copper jingles. Gibson will explore his Indigenous heritage, abstraction and popular cultures on the Met facade.Jeffrey GibsonWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan

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      “What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Your Friday Briefing: Heat Shakes China’s Economy

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      Plus the U.S. and Taiwan will begin formal trade talks and Cambodia spars with the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Good morning. We’re covering overlapping global heat waves and coming formal trade talks between the U.S. and Taiwan.Tea farmers have covered their crops with nets in an effort to shield them from the scorching heat.CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty ImagesHeat wave strains China’s economyFor more than two months, China has faced its most severe heat wave in six decades. The economy is suffering, and the heat wave is forecast to persist for at least another week. The southwest is particularly hard hit.A drought has shrunk rivers and disrupted the region’s supply of water and hydropower. Factories have been forced to close and the region is suffering from rolling blackouts. In two cities, office buildings were ordered to shut off their air conditioning to spare an overextended electrical grid.The intense heat is also expected to affect agriculture and significantly reduce the size of China’s rice harvest, because it has caused long periods of drought.Context: The economy has been headed toward its slowest pace of growth in years, dragged down by the country’s stringent Covid policies. Youth unemployment has reached a record high, while trouble in the real estate sector has set off an unusual surge of public discontentment.Europe: The dry summer has strained Europe’s energy supply, reducing hydropower, threatening nuclear reactors and crimping coal transport. Russian gas cuts could cause further complications.Despite Taiwan’s small size, it is the U.S.’s eighth-largest trading partner.Lam Yik Fei for The New York TimesU.S. and Taiwan to begin trade talksThe Biden administration will begin formal trade negotiations with Taiwan in the fall, deepening economic and technological ties.The talks, which were announced in June, will focus on 11 trade areas, U.S. officials said, including agriculture and digital industries. In an apparent nod to China, the governments said they would combat market distortions caused by state-owned enterprises.China, which claims the self-governed island as its own, responded to the news with displeasure. An official said that Beijing opposed “any form of official exchanges between any country and the Taiwan region of China.”Background: Relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated this summer. After top U.S. lawmakers visited Taiwan this month, China responded by ramping up military drills and firing missiles into the waters around the island. Yesterday, Taiwan held a drill simulating a response to a Chinese missile attack, The Associated Press reported.Region: The U.S. is conducting a separate trade negotiation with 13 Asian nations to form a pact known as the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework. Taiwan expressed interest in joining those talks, but given its contested status, it has not been invited.via The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkDoes the Met have stolen Cambodian artifacts?The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City, worked hard to build up its South and Southeast Asian collection. But 13 items came from a dealer who was later indicted as an illegal trafficker of Cambodian artifacts.Cambodian officials now say they believe many of those items were stolen. They also suspect that dozens of other artifacts were looted, and they believe the dealer, Douglas A.J. Latchford, who died in 2020, often sold stolen items to other dealers and donors before they ended up at the museum.They are now in a standoff with the Met. The Cambodians — who base their claim in part on the account of a reformed looter — have enlisted the U.S. Justice Department.But the Met has not seen the evidence, including the looter’s accounts, which it says it had “repeatedly requested.” The museum, which said it has a track record of returning looted items, has refused to show Cambodia internal documents that might buttress, or undermine, its title to the objects.Context: U.S. officials who regard the looter, Toek Tik, as credible have cited his testimony in three cases. Earlier this month, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced the return of 30 looted artifacts that had been sold by Latchford.THE LATEST NEWSAsia PacificMourners carrying the body of a victim of a mosque bombing in Kabul yesterday.Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated PressA bombing at a crowded mosque in Kabul killed at least 21 people during evening prayers, the BBC reports.Flash floods killed at least 40 people in Afghanistan, adding to overlapping crises.Vanuatu’s president dissolved Parliament yesterday after an attempt to oust the prime minister, Reuters reports.Hundreds of people evacuated their homes as days of torrential rains slammed parts of New Zealand, Reuters reports.The New Zealand police said human remains found in suitcases bought in a storage unit auction belonged to children, The Associated Press reports.The War in UkraineHere are live updates.António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, is visiting Ukraine. Yesterday, he urged Moscow and Kyiv to continue to show the “spirit of compromise” that led to the grain deal. Today, he plans to visit Odesa, where grain is again flowing. Russia’s shelling of Kharkiv killed at least 15 people and destroyed a dormitory for deaf people. Local officials say more than 1,000 civilians have been killed in the war.The U.S. and Russia are competing for control of a sleepy Greek port, which the U.S. is using to send weapons to Ukraine. Turkey also senses a threat.Around the WorldA federal judge ordered the U.S. government to propose redactions to the affidavit the F.B.I. used to search Donald Trump’s home.A judge ruled that the body of José Eduardo dos Santos, Angola’s longtime ruler, can be returned from Spain. He died last month in Barcelona, setting off a dispute over where to bury him.Soldiers raided seven Palestinian human rights organizations that Israel has accused of having links to terrorism. The U.N. and rights groups criticized the move, saying it was meant to silence criticism of Israel.A Morning Read“As long as we have blood in our body we will fight,” a 70-year-old fighter said.In northern Afghanistan, hundreds of Shiite Muslims joined an uprising led by a former Taliban commander. Times journalists spent time with the rebels.Lives lived: Hanae Mori, a Japanese couturier, was the first Asian woman to join the ranks of French high fashion. She died at 96.ARTS AND IDEASA feud over the Zulu throneThe Zulus have a new king. But it’s not clear exactly who he is.South Africa’s largest nation has been gripped by a battle over the royal succession since King Goodwill Zwelithini’s death last year. This Saturday, Misuzulu Sinqobile Zulu is expected to perform a ritual that will be a precursor to his formal coronation. Last weekend, his brother Simakade ka Zwelithini carried out the same ritual.Misuzulu has already been recognized by the South African government and senior members of the royal family. But his right to the throne is being challenged by Simakade, King Zwelithini’s oldest living son. There has been a scuffle at the royal palace. At least one news outlet ran a poll asking readers to pick a king.During a televised court hearing that weighed custom and constitutional law, a judge ruled in favor of Misuzulu. But his detractors have refused to accept the decision. There’s more at stake than a royal title. The head of the Zulus will control a $3.9 million annual budget provided by the South African government.As the traditional leader of 14 million people, the Zulu king also has a politically influential position. — Lynsey Chutel, Briefings writer based in Johannesburg.PLAY, WATCH, EATWhat to CookJoe Lingeman for The New York TimesFor an easy weeknight pasta, try smoked almond pesto spaghetti.What to WatchHere are some unexpected streaming suggestions.What to ReadIn “Elizabeth Finch,” a rigorous new novel from Julian Barnes, an adult student nurses an obsession with his teacher.Now Time to PlayPlay today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: “Ginormous” (four letters).Here are today’s Wordle and today’s Spelling Bee.You can find all our puzzles here.That’s it for today’s briefing. See you next time. — AmeliaP.S. The Times’s Video team won an Edward R. Murrow Award for its documentary about Jan. 6.The latest episode of “The Daily” is on documents at Mar-a-Lago.Lynsey Chutel wrote today’s Arts and Ideas. You can reach Amelia and the team at briefing@nytimes.com. More