An interesting piece by Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times today. The single most important ancient work to be returned to Italy by the Metropolitan Museum during the Great War over looted antiquities was the Euphronios krater, a 6th century B.C. terra cotta vessel painted by Euphronios, for which the Met paid $1 million in 1972, notwithstanding that even at the time Tom Hoving, the museum's then-director, merrily surmised that it had been looted. He was right, and as you know, last year the Met sent it back to Italy.

It's now displayed at the Villa Giulia in Rome. But as Kimmelman reports, it doesn't appear to be getting many visitors there. This does nothing to undercut the case for returning the piece to Italy. It was stolen merchandise; it had to go back. But it's reminder that Italy has such a superabundance of treasures that it would do everybody a world of good if the Italians made it easier for foreign museums to borrow work from Italy — and not just museums, like the Getty or the Boston MFA, that have returned disputed works to Italy and so now have a sort of special relationship with the Italian cultural authorities.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (America), Yinka Shonibare, 2008/courtesy the artist

Let's continue that conversation with the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, whose retrospective just opened at the Brooklyn Museum.

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Back Monday.

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I hadn't heard much recently about the plan Sarah Jessica Parker announced last year to co-produce a Top Chef-style artists' competition show for cable TV. I thought the slump in the art market, and the attendant downward plummet of the Artworld Glamor Index, might mean that the whole idea had gone away. But it turns out that things have advanced to the stage of July "casting calls" in New York, Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles.

The Bravo channel issued an announcement Tuesday about what it's still calling "the untitled art project". Unless that's the title, which is probably a bit too Dada for this show.

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Yinka Shonibare is the London-based artist of Nigerian descent best known for those headless mannequins dressed in 18th and 19th century costumes made from very neo-colonial cloth. "Neo-colonial" is this instance means that what we tend to think of as "traditional" African textiles turn out to be manufactured by the Dutch, who borrowed them from the Batik patterns of Indonesia — from Java, to be precise — when it was their colony. Then the Dutch marketed these Javanese textiles to Africans, who adopted them as "their own", more or less. Got that?

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It's often the case that when a museum director sees a big expansion to completion he or she steps down within a year or so after the project is completed. That's what Mimi Gates did at the Seattle Art Museum and Marc Wilson at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City. But things have happened a little differently at the Cleveland Museum of Art. On Saturday the Cleveland opened the first of three new wings that are part of a still incomplete multi-stage renovation and expansion designed by Rafael Viñoly. And on Sunday the news was out that after just three years on the job, the Cleveland's director, Timothy Rub, would be leaving in the fall to succeed the late Anne d'Harnoncourt as director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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Michael Govan, director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is well known in the museum world for his fund raising skills. He seems to have scored a coup this week by attracting some very affluent names to the LACMA board of directors. One is Gabriel Brener, CEO of Brener Interenational Group. The other two are higher profile names — Brian Grazer, who produces all of Ron Howard's films — and a man who has always seemed to me to have gotten all his hairstyling ideas from Edward Scissorhands — and Dasha Zhukova, the Russian fashion designer and founder of a contemporary art center in Moscow who also just happens to be the girlfriend of Russian zillionaire and collector Roman Abramovich — thus giving Govan a pipeline to a man who may actually have more money even than Govan's go-his-own-way board member Eli Broad.

Last year Abramovich casually set two auction house records when he paid $33.6 million for Lucian Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping — the record for a living artist — and $86.3 million for Francis Bacon's Triptych, the record for a work of postwar art. Zhukova has longtime connections to southern California, where she grew up and graduated from UC at Santa Barbara.

LACMA also announced today that it was naming as board co-chairman Terry Semel, the lavishly compensated former CEO of Yahoo and before that the longtime — and lavishly compensated — co-CEO of Warner Brothers, the film studio owned by Time-Warner, which of course also owns Time and therefore in some mysterious way owns this blog too.