The Water Tank Project to collaborate with a team of artists including Jeff Koons, Ed Ruscha, and Jay-Z in designing 100 New York City water tanks for next Spring.

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Also in museum news, Kunsthalle Zürich renovation complete which adds an intermediate floor with a public library, offices, meeting rooms, an archive and workshops. “It promises to give the Kunsthalle Zürich an exciting future and will enable us to extend our programme and improve our facilities for the benefit of our visitors,” says the director, Beatrix Ruf.

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Swiss art collector Uli Sigg donates $167 million of art to Hong Kong. The majority of his Chinese art collection to be displayed in the now unbuilt Museum Plus (M+) “To me it’s very important that a Chinese public can ultimately get access to these works. (There are) still limitations that exist in mainland China for that.”

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Aaron Young discusses his work in Matt Black’s “Reflections” series. The New York artist explains his development and use of minimalism in the short film: “I always feel like it can pull one step back and strip it down a little bit more… you can talk about the process as erasure, but what it really breaks down to is a kind of loss.”

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Art Basel via The Telegraph

In it’s 43rd conception, Art Basel is continuing its legacy as the leader among the contemporary art world’s fairs.  Last year, 65,000 people flocked to the cultural capital, situated at the border of Switzerland, France, and Germany.  For this year, Basel will no doubt draw a similar, if not greater audience throughout its four-day duration.  Art Observed will be on site to cover and photograph throughout this fair.

Founded in 1970, Art Basel quickly surpassed Germany’s Art Cologne and similar fairs in scale and remains today as the world’s largest.  Almost 300 galleries from around the globe participate, spanning five continents.  This international representation results in a large and diverse assortment of exhibitions, video works, performances, and public installations.  This year specifically there will be more than 2,500 artists exhibiting $2 billion worth of art, nearly 300 gallery booths, and many more single stands present.

Perhaps the star feature of this year’s Basel will be Marlborough Fine Art’s Mark Rothko canvas, dated 1954.  The painting, for which there is already buyer interest, is priced from $78 to $84 million.

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‬First official trailer released for Alison Klayman’s film on Ai Weiwei “Never Sorry” to debut in theaters on July 27.

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Fridericianum in Kassel via dOCUMENTA

Every five years, the city of Kassel in Germany plays host to dOCUMENTA, a colossal, 100-day long exhibition of contemporary art from all over the world.  Participating artists are provided at least two years to complete their work and the results are thus consistently thorough and complex.  This year is dOCUMENTA’s thirteenth edition and is expected to attract more than 750,000 visitors, nearly twice that of last year’s Venice Biennale.

Yan Lei‘s  “Limited Art Project”, a room of works completed daily over the past year.  The room and the art hung on its walls will be sprayed over with car paint, retransforming every piece into a blank canvas.  This image is featured on BBC News’ Big Picture series.

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Barrons examines the growing trend for auction houses to facilitate private art sales, which is said to be faster than other art acquisition processes.

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The Guardian UK, claiming that East London’s art scene was “dying” less than a week ago, now reports that the East End will stay ‘vibrant’ positing that although galleries have moved out of the East End, the area holds many advantages over the tourist-centered Fitzrovia.

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Hennessy Youngman interviewed regarding his Art Thoughtz videos, preferences, and current projects: “The Art World and the World of Hip-Hop… are pretty similar actually. They’re both filled with delusional people who truly believe the things written about them in their press releases.”

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Two Yves Klein pieces to be presented at Christie’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Auction in London on June 27.  Christie’s New York last May sold Klein’s FC 1 (Fire-Color 1), for $36,482,500 (£22,619,150), setting a new world record for the artist at auction.

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Fashion brand Band of Outsiders to present a Marina Abramović-esque performance in an unannounced Paris gallery. A male model will spend 60 hours in a “small compartment built from cardboard boxes and wood planks.”

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Vincent Gallo, against releasing his film, “Promises Written in Water,” leaves the Whitney Biennial without response.

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Harmony Korine, Still from Caput (2011). All images courtesy of Megan Hoetger for Art Observed.

Hosted by the Museum of Contemporary Art but housed at an off-site location, James Franco’s current exhibition, Rebel, has garnered a lot of attention in Los Angeles for its play on the artist/actor’s own celebrity status. Bringing together Franco’s contemporary fame with Nicholas Ray’s masterpiece Rebel Without A Cause (1955), the exhibition explores the contours of a life lived in Hollywood.

James Franco, “Rebel” Installation View (2012) featuring Ed Ruscha’s Rebel (2011).

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The Telegraph interviews Turner Prize Winner, Grayson Perry, now showcasing his series for Channel 4. “I wanted the programme to be non-judgmental because I didn’t want my taste to dominate. It’s not about what is good and bad,” says Perry on the role of ‘taste’ in his new work.

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Kiki Smith, “Catching Shadows” Installation view, Galerie Lelong, Paris. Photos for Art Observed by Thisbe Gensler.

“Kiki Smith: Chasing Shadows,” now on view at the Galerie Lelong in Paris through June 30, showcases Smith’s recent work addressing themes of vision and sight across a diverse range of media. Featuring prints, photography and sculpture, this group of works continues her ongoing examination of the human body and experience—prominent throughout her vast oeuvre. Her long engagement with anatomical systems, as metaphors for social and cultural orders, extends to this salient organ—the eye, conjuring both biological and metaphysical associations though graphic and sculptural representation. Smith celebrates the body as our fundamental means of experiencing the world through her clinical descriptions of the corporeal subject. In this fourth solo show at Galerie Lelong, Smith engages natural and conceptual modes of perception through the elemental theme of vision.

Kiki Smith, Installation view (2012)

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‬CNN depicts the life and achievements of the late Clyfford Still, “The most influential artist you’ve probably never heard of”, whose work is currently on display at an eponymous Denver museum.

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(all photos courtesy of Regan Projects, Los Angeles, photography by Brian Forrest)

In his first exhibition in Los Angeles since his 2008 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Conceptual art pioneer Lawrence Weiner took over the White Cube Gallery space at Regen Projects with his well-known works in language.

“1.THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK
2.THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED
3.THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT”

From these three declarations, written in Weiner’s 1968 “Statement of Intent,” the artist not only moved from an object-based to a language-based practice, but helped to change the course of art production. A key member of the Conceptual art movement, which sought to examine the role of artistic intention in the production of meaning, Weiner eliminated the structural support of the frame in order to consider the larger contexts of the work. Since the late 1960s he has to this end triangulated language, architecture, and social-spatial orientation in an on-going exploration of how words perform meaning in space.

Lawrence Weiner, UNDER THE TOP (2012)

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André Saraiva posing with work

Starting with the opening last night, for the next two months The Hole in New York will feature two shows in its gallery space, André Saraiva‘s “Andrépolis” and  “Portrait of a Generation”.

Portrait of Rita Ackermann

Photos for Art Observed by Charles Shoener, Zoe Zabor, and Lisa Marsova

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‬Larry Gagosian plans his 12th gallery worldwide and second in the Paris area, to be designed by French architect Jean Nouvel. “All the artists I talked to are very enthusiastic about it. It’s only about 20 minutes from the heart of the city,” says Mr. Gagosian.

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Eugene Batz, “The Spatial Effects of Colors and Forms” from Kandinsky’s course (1929)

Bauhaus: Art as Life, on view at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, seeks to showcase not only the exceeding wealth of artistic production from this legendary school, but moreover to engage inspection of the cultural climate within which the foundation of modern design blossomed. The comprehensive collection of over 400 works, mined largely from the Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar, is the largest Bauhaus show in Britain in over 40 years, representing pieces from its radical founding in 1919 to its final closure in 1933, tracing the transitions in style, ideology and aesthetic through a chronological progression. The works featured include paintings, sculptures, photography, film, textiles, ceramics, theater and more—a diverse and expansive artistic output representing a period of high artistic innovation. From iconic Bauhaus master works to compositions by lesser known students, this exhibition encapsulates the notion of art as life, the inseparability of social community and artistic production, and the human experience of this artistic-social experiment. From furniture to puppetry, typography to photomontage, this diverse range of production signals the creative effluence from this beacon of modernism and avant-garde design in a show celebrating the playfulness of collaborative Bauhaus culture.

Otto Umbehr, Josef Albers and a group of students (1928)

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Dutch artist Bart Jansen transforms his own dead cat into artistic installation.

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National Portrait Gallery in London purchases portrait of famous transvestite Chevalier d’Eon. “The painting sheds fascinating light on gender in history…[D’Eon] is a positive role model for modern LGBT audiences,” says Lucy Peltz, curator of 18th-century portraits.

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Photos for Art Observed by Charles Shoener

Every year, the Whitney Contemporaries, a group of young art patrons and enthusiasts, host a night of art, fashion, food, and entertainment on behalf of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Sponsored this year by fashion frontrunners Theory and Saks Fifth Avenue, the 2012 Whitney Art Party attracted the familiar well-dressed and named gathering.  However, the true spotlight remained on the artists and live performances of the evening.

Committee Co-Chairs Bettina Prentice and Margaret Betts and Social Tom Dunn, with Mark Amadei, Owner of The Lion, one of the event’s restaurant caterers

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