LOOSE CHANGE: NOVEMBER 23, 2025

 

Authorities in Switzerland are searching for two robbers who overpowered a security guard at a Roman-era museum in Lausanne, smashed a display case and made off with dozens of gold coins that had been displayed inside.

City police said that the suspects had purchased tickets and waited until other visitors had left shortly before closing time, before assaulting and restraining the guard and then breaking the display case.

The monetary value of the coins stolen in the heist Tuesday was not immediately revealed, but police said they had "archaeological value."

The theft comes at a time when gold prices have soared in global markets and a high-profile robbery of jewels at the Louvre in Paris exposed vulnerabilities and security lapses at museums.

To read the complete article, see:
Robbers overpower guard and steal dozens of ancient gold coins from Swiss museum (https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/21/robbers-overpower-guard-and-steal-dozens-of-ancient-gold-coins-from-swiss-museum)

Mexicans Hoarding 50 Peso Axolotl Notes
For most of her life, Gorda was just an axolotl who lived in a museum in Mexico City – that is, until she became the star of the country's favourite banknote.

The note, which features a depiction of Gorda as the model for Mexico's iconic species of salamander, went into circulation in 2021, dazzling the judges of the International Bank Notes Society, who declared it the Note of the Year.

Four years later, the Bank of Mexico has released a report revealing that 12.9 million Mexicans are holding on to this note as if it were worth more than just its value of 50 pesos, or a little under $3. Indeed, millions of them are hoarding more than one.

Only a minority said they would not contemplate spending the notes. Nonetheless, the survey found that roughly $150m worth of them were at least temporarily out of circulation at the time. Some of the first to be printed are even being traded for 100 times their intended value.

To read the complete article, see:
A lot of axolotls: the amphibian-themed banknote Mexicans don't want to spend (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/21/axolotl-banknote-mexico-amphibian)

 

Dorothy Vogel, a librarian who, with her postal-clerk husband, Herbert, bought thousands of works from future art stars like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, stashing them in their cramped one-bedroom New York apartment and eventually handing over the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art without ever turning a profit, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan. She was 90.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Kathryn Obler, a cousin. Ms. Vogel left no immediate survivors.

That the Vogels, who were modest in dress and bearing, would come to take their place as benefactors alongside Rockefellers and Mellons was every bit as unlikely as it was that some of the works they collected — like the tiny snippet of frayed rope by the Post-Minimalist artist Richard Tuttle — would land in one of the world's premier art museums, alongside Vermeers and Van Goghs.

Throughout their decades as collectors, Ms. Vogel worked at the Brooklyn Public Library as a reference librarian, and Mr. Vogel, a high school dropout from Harlem, did the night shift at a post office sorting mail.

Their rent-controlled apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side functioned as a fine-art storage locker as well as an exhibition space. Stacked on the floor and crammed into closets were some 4,000 works by luminaries like the Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein; the photographers Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson; the German sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys; the Minimalist Robert Mangold; and the video art pioneer Nam June Paik.

While works by the artists the Vogels favored often sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even millions, their collection was quite literally priceless, in the sense that none of it ever went to market."I didn't make a $20 bill outright on any artist," Herbert Vogel, who died in 2012, told"60 Minutes" in 1995.

To read the complete article, see:
Dorothy Vogel, Librarian With a Vast Art Collection, Dies at 90 (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/22/arts/dorothy-vogel-dead.html)

To read the earlier E-Sylum article, see:
MODERN ART COLLECTOR HERBERT VOGEL, 1922-2012 (https://coinbooks.org/esylum_v15n32a15.html)

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