Critic and Educator Nicolas Bourriaud has been dismissed from his post as the director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts by Fleur Pellerin, French minister of culture, following a lengthy exchange over the direction of the school.  “Dear friends, the Minister [of Culture] has just fired me ‘for reasons related to a change of direction’ of her politics,” Bourriaud wrote on Facebook.  “Not a single factual argument in the course of a forty-five-minute discussion.” (more…)

London’s Royal Academy of Art has unveiled a £50 million expansion plan that will link the institution’s two buildings in the British capital’s Mayfair district.  “You will be able to go from an exhibition in Burlington House to a lecture in Burlington Gardens through the vaults of the building,” says Sir David Chipperfield, who designed the project.  “You will see the cast corridors, you will see where the schools have been all this time. It’s a small amount of architecture for a profound result.” (more…)

A recent discovery by Dr. Ricardo De Mambro Santos, associate professor of art history at Willamette University in Salem, OR, has resulted in the authentication of an early Peter Paul Rubens portrait to the The Hallie Ford Museum of Art.  “We did know Rubens’ early work between 1596 and 1599, but we didn’t know any works from the very beginning of his career in Rome,” says De Mambro Santos. “The Rubens we know today started in this portrait that we’re bringing to the Hallie Ford. This particular portrait could be considered the preliminary workshop for his future baroque style.” (more…)

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Con te Partiro (2009), via Brooklyn Museum

Shrouded in anonymity, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has made a career for themselves out of playful irreverence.  Rising out of the post-9/11 New York art scene, the anonymous collective has launched a campaign of physical aggression against public installations (Public Art Tackle), initiated their own free education classes, staged socio-politically charged morality plays on gentrification, all under the guise of a production of the Broadway musical Cats, all alongside a number of pieces and installations that embrace the juxtaposition of art history, pop culture and contemporary society to “invest the experience of public space with wonder.”

The Bruce High Quality Foundation, Ode to Joy (2001–2013) (Installation View), via Brooklyn Museum (more…)