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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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      Amid a Fraught Process, Penn Museum Entombs Remains of 19 Black People

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      Skulls from a collection used to further racist science have been laid to rest. Questions surrounding the interment have not.There was very little that could be said about the 19 people who were eulogized on Saturday morning in a service at the University of Pennsylvania. Their names were lost, and not much about their lives was known beyond the barest facts: an old age spent in the poorhouse, a problem with cavities. They were Black people who had died in obscurity over a century ago, now known almost entirely by the skulls they left behind. Even some of these scant facts have been contested.Much more could be said about what led to the service. “This moment,” said the Rev. Jesse Wendell Mapson, a local pastor involved in planning the commemoration and interment of the 19, “has not come without some pain, discomfort and tension.”On this everyone could agree.The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, like cultural and research institutions worldwide, has been grappling with a legacy of plunder, trying to decide what to do about artifacts and even human bones that were collected from people and communities against their will and often without their knowledge.Human remains, which are in the repositories of institutions all across the country, present a particularly delicate challenge. The Samuel G. Morton Cranial Collection, which has been at the Penn Museum since 1966, is an especially notorious example, with more than a thousand skulls gathered in furtherance of vile ideas about race.Drummers at the start of the commemoration service at the Penn Museum on Saturday.Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York TimesThe museum plans to repatriate hundreds of craniums from all over the world, but the process has been fraught from the beginning. Its first step — the entombment at a nearby cemetery of the skulls of Black Philadelphians found in the collection — has drawn heavy criticism, charged by activists and some experts with being rushed and opaque.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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      Protesters at the Louvre Hurl Soup at the Mona Lisa

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      Two women from an environmental group threw pumpkin-colored soup at the artwork, which is behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre and did not appear to sustain damage.Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists said, speaking in French. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They were led away by Louvre security guards.It was not immediately clear how the women got the soup through the elaborate security system at the museum, which borders the Seine and contains a vast art and archaeological collection spanning civilizations and centuries.One of the women removed her jacket to reveal the words Riposte Alimentaire, or Food Response, on a white T-shirt. Riposte Alimentaire is part of a coalition of protest groups known as the A22 movement. They include Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the group that poured tomato soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022.The attack on the Mona Lisa came as French farmers have blocked roads, including approaches to Paris, in recent days to protest low wages and what they see as excessive regulation. Many new regulations in France reflect the attempt to forge a green, carbon-free European economy, an objective that the farmers consider too expensive and burdensome in the near term.The protests by the two young women and the farmers appeared to reflect two starkly different views of agriculture and the appropriate priorities for European society.Staff at the Louvre on Sunday tried to erect cloth screens to conceal the soup-splashed Mona Lisa, but the screens were not effective. Images of the attack quickly went viral on social media.The Mona Lisa has been behind glass since the 1950s, when a visitor poured acid on it. In 2019, the museum installed glass of what it said was superior transparency. Three years later, another environmental activist threw cake and cream at the painting. It was undamaged.The latest attack will heighten security concerns ahead of the Paris Olympics.The opening ceremony is just six months away and will take place on the Seine. A flotilla of boats will carry about 10,000 athletes to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, as nearly a half-million spectators, including many heads of state, line the four-mile route. The boats will sail past the Louvre as part of a ceremony conceived to showcase the beauty of Paris, but which has raised serious security issues that are still under review. More

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      Leading Museums Remove Native Displays Amid New Federal Rules

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      The American Museum of Natural History is closing two major halls as museums around the nation respond to updated policies from the Biden administration.The American Museum of Natural History will close two major halls exhibiting Native American objects, its leaders said on Friday, in a dramatic response to new federal regulations that require museums to obtain consent from tribes before displaying or performing research on cultural items.“The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples,” Sean Decatur, the museum’s president, wrote in a letter to the museum’s staff on Friday morning. “Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others.”The museum is closing galleries dedicated to the Eastern Woodlands and the Great Plains this weekend, and covering a number of other display cases featuring Native American cultural items as it goes through its enormous collection to make sure it is in compliance with the new federal rules, which took effect this month.Museums around the country have been covering up displays as curators scramble to determine whether they can be shown under the new regulations. The Field Museum in Chicago covered some display cases, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University said it would remove all funerary belongings from exhibition and the Cleveland Museum of Art has covered up some cases.But the action by the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which draws 4.5 million visitors a year, making it one of the most visited museums in the world, sends a powerful message to the field. The museum’s anthropology department is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the United States, known for doing pioneering work under a long line of curators including Franz Boas and Margaret Mead. The closures will leave nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space off-limits to visitors; the museum said it could not provide an exact timeline for when the reconsidered exhibits would reopen.“Some objects may never come back on display as a result of the consultation process,” Decatur said in an interview. “But we are looking to create smaller-scale programs throughout the museum that can explain what kind of process is 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?  More

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      Former Uffizi Director Eike Schmidt Toys With Running for Mayor of Florence

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      The museum’s former director, Eike Schmidt, is toying — somewhat mischievously — with entering the race to become Florence’s mayor.Will he? Or won’t he?It’s a question that’s been buzzing at dinner parties and on street corners in Florence, and throughout the Italian art world. The “he” in question is Eike Schmidt, who until last month was the director of the Uffizi museum, and who has hinted that he might run for mayor of Florence in upcoming municipal elections.Since the summer, Schmidt has been toying — somewhat mischievously — with the idea of running with the Brothers of Italy, the hard-right majority party in the coalition that governs the country.Even after he was appointed last month as the new director of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, a four-year posting set to begin this month, Schmidt has not clarified his intentions, except to say in an interview in an Italian newspaper that he would be unable to do both jobs at once.On Wednesday, Italy’s culture minister, Gennaro Sangiuliano, posted a photo on social media with Schmidt, and wrote in an accompanying post that there were “great plans and ideas” for the Capodimonte that he had discussed with the new director.But many still believe that Schmidt has larger aspirations and that his candidacy in Florence remains possible. The former director of the Uffizi — considered one of the world’s great museums, with instantly recognizable works by Renaissance masters like Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo — has said he would make a decision this month. He declined to be interviewed for this article.“He’s a person who likes challenges,” said Giorgio Bernardini, who writes about local politics for Corriere Fiorentino, the local edition of the national daily Corriere della Sera. “And he’s a strong personality,” Bernadini added.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?  More

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      The Disappearing World of Wolfgang Tillmans

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      It doesn’t seem like a titillating photograph: an orderly queue of Germans, waiting to enter a nondescript industrial site. It is dark. Just a single light illuminates the door. What does it look like? Like a color remake of Depression-era imagery: the factory entrance, the bread line.But the men in single file — they are all men — are at this factory not to work but to play. This old train shed in the former East Berlin has been reborn as Snax, a raunchy gay nightclub, and that light in the darkness is the gateway to pleasure. It’s 2001 now, the wall is a memory. The world is flat, we are young and proud. We got here on a train, there are no more border controls, or maybe we got here on a cheap new airline called easyJet.We are ready to dance, and to do other things in the dark. The party will go on well past sunrise. It feels like it might go on forever.Wolfgang Tillmans, “Outside Snax Club,” 2001.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Outside Snax Club” (2001) is one little star in a constellation of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Museum of Modern Art: one node in a life’s network of tender portraits, straightforward still lifes and streaky abstractions. The sky from a window seat. A boy’s feet in tube socks. An apple tree in the London morning, a kiss stolen in the London night. The German photographer has been taking these deceptively natural pictures since 1986, and linking them in exhibitions and books that absorb different modes of photography into idiosyncratic associations. These have made Tillmans (especially to gay audiences) not just a renowned artist, but someone we feel we know personally. He is just “Wolfgang,” even to many who have never met him; his photos are intimacy enough.“Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without Fear,” which opens to museum members this weekend and to the public Monday, is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year; actually, it’s been anticipated longer than that. Roxana Marcoci, a MoMA senior curator, has been working since 2014 on this tremendous, pandemic-detained overview, the largest of Tillmans’s career. It rambles across the museum’s sixth floor, vacant for more than a year and a half. It includes 417 works (mostly photographs, though there are a few minor videos) displayed, as always with Tillmans, in asymmetric arrays of large and small prints. He affixes the majority to the wall with Scotch tape or bulldog clips — although, as with the soft lighting and easy cropping of his photography, the ostensibly “informal” hang is actually calculated to the quarter-inch.Tillmans presents his photographs taped to or clipped to the wall, and prints them anew for each exhibition. Left, “Deer Hirsch” (1995). Right, “Smokin’ Jo” (1995). Emile Askey/The Museum of Modern Art, New York“Omen” (1991), printed at small scale and taped to the side of a free-standing gallery wall of the Museum of Modern Art.Lila Barth for The New York TimesThe show is candid, unaffected, breezily intelligent; moralistic, too, in the later galleries. It is required viewing for both photography scholars and sportswear fetishists, and a worthy retrospective of one of the most significant artists to emerge at the end of the last century. (The show will tour next year to Toronto and San Francisco.)It is also — in a way I was not prepared for — one of the saddest museum exhibitions I have ever attended. It is a show of friends lost, of technologies abandoned, of cities grown insular, of principles forsaken. It maps, over 35 years, the ascent of a photographer to the height of his profession, and then the disintegration of almost everything he loved, the art form of photography not least among them.We follow the fragile peace of the ’90s into a century of war, extremism, post-truth and privation. We follow the artist through the last days of the darkroom and the rise of digital cameras, which he adopted with only moderate success. A sunset in Puerto Rico, a club night in Hackney, the transit of Venus, liquid concrete before it hardens: “To Look Without Fear” confirms that Tillmans has always been a photographer of transience, of things here today and gone tomorrow. Now his two hometowns, Berlin and London, are both facing frigid winters with life-threatening power shortages, and his whole world feels on the cusp of vanishing.Tillmans was born in 1968 in the industrial heartland of West Germany. He had a childhood love of astronomy, acquiring his first telescope at age 12, and of British pop groups like New Order and Culture Club that inspired a lifelong passion for London. (In 1983, on an exchange program in the British capital, the 14-year-old Tillmans somehow got past the bouncer at the gay nightclub Heaven, but left early to get the last Tube home.)The artist considers “Lacanau (self),” from 1986, to be his first self-portrait. Lila Barth for The New York Times“Selbstportrait (Self-portrait),” from 1988, when Tillmans was 20.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Faltenwurf (Keithstrasse),” a 2021 example of Tillmans’s drapery studies.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London.Photography came more accidentally. On the beach in France one summer, Tillmans aimed a point-and-shoot camera at his flexed knee and silky black Adidas shorts: a first, abstracted self-portrait. That picture is in the first room at MoMA, and one of the funnier leitmotifs of “To Look Without Fear” is the three stripes of the Adidas logo, a queer sportswear fixation that endures even as cities and bodies change. At the show’s entrance we see the 20-year-old Tillmans in a skimpy red Adidas bathing suit. At its exit is a photograph from three decades later of another, crumpled pair of glistening red Adidas shorts: a drapery study, a memento mori.He moved to Britain for art school but got his break in magazines, shooting raves, festivals, and also fashion editorials. The London indie magazine i-D first published this show’s well-traveled photographs of his friends Lutz and Alex, gripping each other’s androgynous bodies. A giant portrait of the British DJ Smokin’ Jo, her silver sequined dress twinkling in the golden hour, was a commission for Interview. There were new gay magazines like Attitude, for which he photographed Tony Blair, and Butt, which printed his images of half-dressed fashion designers on pink paper, like a not-safe-for-work Financial Times.“Lutz & Alex sitting in the trees” (1992), a double portrait of Tillmans’s childhood friends.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHe was shooting on 35 mm rather than in large formats; he disdained the tripod, abjured conspicuous lighting. Nan Goldin comes to mind before some of his halcyon ’90s pictures, and she herself appears with two nudes in a 1996 Tillmans idyll: a millennial remake of Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.” But he’s far less diaristic than Goldin, and a more relevant influence may be the New Objectivity of 1920s Berlin, where painters and photographers like Christian Schad and Otto Dix made a virtue of hard surfaces and louche life.His partyers are often standing still. His nudes are almost always staged. The same cool, surface-level gaze falls upon the windows of London skyscrapers, the water of pools and oceans, and the great love of his youth, the painter Jochen Klein. Klein appears in two of this show’s largest prints: “Deer Hirsch” (1995), a rare black-and-white photograph of Klein and a young buck, staring wondrously at each other on an empty beach, and “Jochen taking a bath” (1997), shot months before his death from AIDS-related pneumonia. (The memory of that photo haunts a 2015 image of the singer Frank Ocean, another sad young man with closely cropped hair against white tiles.)Wolfgang Tillmans, “Jochen taking a bath,” 1997.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, London“Frank, in the shower” (2015), depicting the singer Frank Ocean.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonWhat mattered more than the photographer’s subjects was the photographer’s regard. It was applied equally, unobtrusively, across genres — portrait, landscape, nude, still life — and united in the taped-up arrangements he first tried out in 1993. All together, on the gallery wall, the modest photographs could express a new, politically and sexually charged way of being in the world. They were promiscuous: not (or not only) in the word’s libertine sense, but freely mixing, ready to be rearranged, most themselves when with others. They were urban, too, and came to typify a newly vibrant and international London, where the mammoth Tate Modern opened in 2000 and, in the same year, Tillmans became the first non-British laureate of the Turner Prize.Later, in the 2005 exhibition “Truth Study Center,” Tillmans introduced a new display module that mixed his photographs with newspaper clippings (about war, fundamentalism, and also scientific breakthroughs) on low wooden tables. With these didactic works he meant to resist the absolutes of Bush-Blair rhetoric, but they ended up as preachy show-and-tell displays: a first act in the 21st-century domestication of Tillmans’s youthful freedom. Anyway, by the time of “Truth Study Center,” different and more disruptive photographic arrangements were coming into view on our (desktop) screens. The tacked-up pictures and the carefully laid-out tables would give way to the image-search grid and the social feed. Tillmans’s unframed printouts were becoming atavistic. The independent magazines where he found his voice were on their last legs.“Freischwimmer 26,” 2003. The abstract work is one of a series of pictures Tillmans has made without a camera, by exposing photo paper to lasers and other light sources.Wolfgang Tillmans, via David Zwirner, New York/Hong Kong; Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne; Maureen Paley, LondonHis most powerful response to this century’s explosion of images has been the cameraless “Freischwimmer” abstractions, begun in 2003. So beautiful, these pictures: grand, streaky expanses of color, suggesting bodies or currents, made by exposing photosensitive paper to lasers and other hand-held lights. Yet something began to go sour in the Tillmans method around the time of his adoption of a digital camera in 2008. Large, colorful prints of a Shanghai street or an Argentine shantytown are too crisp, artificially alienated. Recent portraits, such as the Frank Ocean photograph, forsake the soft-focus intimacy of the ’90s for hard-candy sheen. The later party pictures are really dreadful: The black tones have lost all their mystery, the sex appeal has drained, and in a time of ubiquitous cameraphones his no-style style feels redundant.Absent at MoMA, though discussed in Marcoci’s catalog, is Tillmans’s most widely seen digital endeavor: his posters for the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Made in a season of now justified panic, these balmy images of jet-trail-crossed skies or the cliffs of Dover, overlaid with pleas for apathetic youth to vote Remain, were freely distributed online. “What is lost is lost forever,” read the caption on the most ethereal of these posters, and he wasn’t kidding. With Brexit, the imagery of borders introduced earlier that decade — the concrete walls of Gaza, the customs line at Gatwick — arrived at Tillmans’s doorstep. He thought the lack of artifice, the pictures everyone could read, might inspire people to live together; it turned out he was speaking a language narrower than he’d ever known. A 2021 photo of worn-out maroon passports (the color of all E.U. member states’ travel documents; the Johnson government replaced Britain’s with a blue one) might as well be a grave marker for Tillmans’s London. Some people really did have more freedoms when they were young.Recent works by Wolfgang Tillmans at MoMA, including, at center, “Kae Tempest” (2021).Lila Barth for The New York TimesWe all age. We all lose things. And yet I don’t blame Tillmans at all for considering, as he tells my colleague Matthew Anderson in this Sunday’s New York Times, that he might take a sabbatical and leave art for electoral politics. The democratic impulse in his photography, manifested through simple commercial lenses and unpretentious printouts, has receded into self-righteousness now, and his collisions of self-portraits, celebrity pictures, handsome sunsets and political slogans — well, how can these retain their force when a hundred million social media profiles do the same? He has reached the end of something, summed up with panache and great melancholy in this important show, and his accomplishment, not unlike E.U. membership, is easier to appreciate once it’s lost. Those late, sweaty ’90s nights: then, we were sure we had met the chronicler of a new millennium’s freedoms. What if Tillmans was instead a harbinger of the artist as entrepreneur of the self, and of how we would all go on posting pictures even as our misfortunes piled up offscreen?Wolfgang Tillmans: To Look Without FearOpens to members Sept. 9 and to the public Sept. 12 through Jan. 1, 2023, Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, (212) 708-9400, moma.org. 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

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      Your Friday Briefing: Russia’s Growing Isolation

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      Plus Imran Khan’s unsteady future and growing frustrations over Shanghai’s lockdowns.Good morning. We’re covering Russia’s departure from the U.N. human rights council, a political blow to Pakistan’s Imran Khan and Shanghai’s growing frustration with Covid restrictions.Residents surveyed the damage in Dergachi, on the outskirts of Kharkiv.Tyler Hicks/The New York TimesRussia leaves U.N. rights councilThe U.N. voted to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council on Thursday, leading Russia to withdraw. China said it opposed the measure. U.S. lawmakers also voted to strip Moscow of its preferential trade status and ban the import of Russian energy. Here’s the latest.The diplomatic pressure may continue to mount. The E.U. is weighing a ban on Russian coal, a significant step for a bloc that is heavily dependent on the country’s fossil fuels. But lengthy deliberations and the dilution of some measures indicated that the E.U.’s appetite for sanctions may be diminishing.Fighting may soon escalate, too. NATO met to discuss sending more military aid to Ukraine, in anticipation of an intensified Russian onslaught in the east. Officials there warned civilians that they faced their “last chance to leave” and urged them to evacuate.Soldiers: Body bags are returning to Russia from the front, causing some families of fallen soldiers to question the war — and leading others to harden their resolve.Diplomacy: Prospects for successful peace talks have dimmed: Russia’s foreign minister said Ukraine had proposed a new draft deal that deviated from previous versions, and President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus demanded that his country be included in the negotiations.State of the war:Ukrainian forces were holding out amid fierce fighting in Mariupol, officials said, despite a dire humanitarian situation. The mayor said 5,000 people have died there.German intelligence intercepted radio transmissions in which Russians discussed killings of civilians, officials said.Facial recognition companies are being used to identify Russian soldiers, living or dead, to verify that they are not actors and show Russians the cost of the conflict.Prime Minister Imran Khan may soon be voted out of power.Saiyna Bashir for The New York TimesKhan in jeopardy after court rulingPakistan’s Supreme Court overturned Prime Minister Imran Khan’s move to dissolve Parliament on Thursday, setting the stage for a no-confidence vote on Saturday.The vote, which Khan had tried to block, is widely expected to remove him from office. Should that happen, a caretaker government will be formed and the country will prepare for elections in the coming months.The Supreme Court ruling is a major victory for opposition leaders, who said that Khan had attempted an “open coup.” New elections would be a test for the coalition of opposition parties, which are typically at loggerheads but have teamed up around the no-confidence vote.Learn More About France’s Presidential ElectionThe run-up to the first round of the election has been dominated by issues such as security, immigration and national identity.On the Scene: A Times reporter attended a rally held by Marine Le Pen, the far-right French presidential candidate. Here is what he saw.Challenges to Re-election: A troubled factory in President Emmanuel Macron’s hometown shows his struggle in winning the confidence of French workers.A Late Surge: After recently rising in voter surveys, Jean-Luc Mélenchon could become the first left-wing candidate since 2012 to reach the second round of the election.A Political Bellwether: Auxerre has backed the winner in the presidential race for 40 years. This time, many residents see little to vote for.Analysis: The military controls the main levers of power, and Khan’s relationship with key leaders soured after he refused to back a new chief of the country’s intelligence agency last year.Economy: The Pakistani rupee sank to a record low on Thursday. Analysts say the current crisis has further polarized the country and could lead to unrest.Workers erected barriers to seal off a Shanghai neighborhood last week.Aly Song/ReutersShanghai’s devastating outbreakThe city of 26 million is confronting its worst outbreak since the pandemic began, and Chinese authorities have deployed their usual hard-line restrictions to curb transmission.But Shanghai is different. Residents of the city — the wealthiest and most populous in China — are airing their grievances. They have signed petitions to protest a policy that separates infected children from their parents, criticized conditions at isolation facilities and defiantly confronted officials.Their grumblings could eat away at the central government’s power, as the crisis quickly becomes the most significant political test to date of the country’s zero tolerance approach — a policy on which the Chinese Communist Party has staked its legitimacy.Analysis: The city is home to a vibrant middle class and also many elites, who are accustomed to a relatively high level of political autonomy.Background: Officials had insisted that Shanghai was too important to quarantine. “The fact that Shanghai is being locked down suggests that we are pretty close to the red line, to the tolerable limit of how defensible zero Covid is,” a political scientist said.Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.In other news:Several Biden administration officials and Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, have tested positive.German lawmakers rejected a vaccine mandate for people 60 and older, a blow to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition.THE LATEST NEWSWorld NewsPresident Biden and Ketanji Brown Jackson watched the vote together.Al Drago for The New York TimesJudge Ketanji Brown Jackson will now be Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: The U.S. Senate confirmed her historic nomination to the Supreme Court in a 53-47 vote.At least two people were killed and eight wounded in a shooting in central Tel Aviv, the latest in a deadly wave of terrorism in Israel.The trial in the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi will likely end without justice: A Turkish court moved the proceedings to Saudi Arabia.The leader of Yemen abdicated after a cease-fire took effect, a sign that Saudi Arabia may be looking to end the war. The kingdom’s callous moves exacerbated seven years of bloodshed and a humanitarian crisis.The French ElectionCampaign posters of the 12 official candidates, on display in northeastern France.Andrea Mantovani for The New York TimesFrance will head to the polls on Sunday for the first round of the country’s presidential election. Here’s an explainer.Marine Le Pen, the leading right-wing candidate, has tried to sanitize her extremist image and present herself as a clearheaded choice.President Emmanuel Macron, seeking a second term, is leading in the polls. But his economic promises have yielded checkered results.What Else Is HappeningAstronomers may have found the most distant galaxy to date.Novels by Olga Tokarczuk, Mieko Kawakami and Claudia Piñeiro are in the running for the International Booker Prize, a prestigious award for translated fiction.A Morning ReadAt the Dior show at Paris Fashion Week last month.Jeremy Moeller/Getty ImagesRihanna’s bare-belly maternity outfits are both haute couture and, perhaps, transgressive political statements. As right-wing lawmakers fight to control women’s bodies, Rihanna is “connecting the right to dress how you like with all sorts of other, more constitutional rights,” our chief fashion critic writes. “It’s a pretty radical move.”Who Is Running for President of France?Card 1 of 6The campaign begins. More