The Guardian takes another look at Grayson Perry’s recently completed home design in Essex, the fittingly-titled A House for Essex, which he calls a monument to “thwarted female intelligence,” and executed as a sacred communion with an imagined Essex woman named Julie May Cope. (more…)

The ongoing struggle for control at Sotheby’s has taken a new turn, with the auction house rejecting the board nominations proposed by Daniel Loeb’s Third Point LLC, and in turn naming Jessica Bibliowicz and Kevin Conroy for board seats. “The composition of your Board is something Sotheby’s takes very seriously, as the experience and expertise of its directors have been and will continue to be important to enabling the Company’s success,” the company said in an open letter to shareholders. (more…)

After 20 years on the podium for Sotheby’s, Chief of Contemporary Art and auctioneer Tobias Meyer  has announced that he will be leaving his position in order to pursue work as a private dealer.  Mr. Meyer has been on the stand for some of the auction house’s most significant sales, including the record sale of Andy Warhol’s Car Crash painting earlier this month. “Contemporary art has become a little too much like ‘American Idol,'” he told said. “We’re an overvisualized culture, and young artists can find themselves with a real career only six months after starting to paint.”
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Mobile Homestead, one of the last works created by American artist Mike Kelley before his suicide last year, will open at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit on May 11th.  The piece, a loyal recreation of Kelley’s childhood home in suburban Detroit, will be used as a community space of sorts, open for the people of Kelley’s home city to hold shows, art events or meetings.  “He kept saying to me, ‘This is never going to happen — it’s a joke,’ because that’s the way he was,” said Marsha Miro, founder and director of the contemporary museum. “But he also said he thought it would be one of the most important things he ever did, partly because it would keep on being a living piece.” (more…)