‬Herb Vogel, the postman who, along with his librarian wife, amassed a collection of over 5,000 important minimalist artworks, has died at age 89 in New York.

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‬The New York Times Magazine compares paintings of Edward Hopper, on what would have been his 130th Birthday, to photos of the original houses that inspired the works. “We know it’s time to put up the awnings each year when we’re eating on the porch and we turn around and see a big tour group watching us eat dinner.” Greta Bagshaw, an owner of the “Mansard Roof” home says.

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‬Larry Gagosian is set to host a major sculture exhibition in Rio de Janiero to coincide with the ArtRio Fair. Gagosian’s eponymous gallery will have a separate booth at the fair. Both sites will be designed by Claudia Moreira Salles, the Brazilian designer. The fair will run from September 12-16.

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‬In a new interview with The Independent, Sarah Lucas does little to restrict her opinion of the art of fellow Young British Artists including that of Tracey Emin “[her work is] a bit second-rate, really, to exploit all that personal stuff”. “Tracey likes a lot of drama, which I don’t really.”

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‬In the midst of a major mid-career retrospective at Tate Modern, Damien Hirst is profiled by Forbes magazine. Considering the boundaries of a contemporary art market, the article suggests “nobody seems to misunderstand his genius more than Damien Hirst himself.”

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Amidst the resignation of chief curator Paul Schimmel and artist-trustees Catherine Opie, Barbara Kruger, John Baldessari and Ed Ruscha,MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch responds to recent criticisms in an open letter and also an interview in which he rejects the notion of a more “celebrity-driven” exhibition program. “I believe that an art exhibition can be engaging, fun and deeply intellectually satisfying and serious,” Deitch said. “These are not contradictory concepts in art.”

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Princeton University to display a yearlong installation of Ai Weiwei‘s 12 sculpture ‘Circle of Animals/ Zodiac Heads’.  The school has also invited the Chinese artist and activist to campus this Fall.

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Doug Aitken awarded this year’s Nam June Paik Art Center Prize, which recognizes artists who have made creative impacts in their artistic field with their experimentation and innovation. The American artist is the sole 2012 recipient and is invited to have a featured solo exhibition.

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All photographs taken by Zoe Zabor for Art Observed

Coinciding with the recent unveiling of her newly designed Louis Vuitton displays and last week’s opening of her Retrospective at the Whitney, Yayoi Kusama has spread her signature red and white dots to the lawn of Hudson River Park. Presented by the Gagosian Gallery and the Hudson River Park Trust,  “Guidepost to the New Space” (2004) features unique, amoeba-shaped forms at Pier 45 on West 10th Street, close to the Whitney’s future location in the Meatpacking District.

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A Matisse painting was recovered in an undercover sting operation in Miami. The two individuals, attempting to sell “Odalisque in Red Pants” for $740,000, unknowingly admitted that they knew the piece was stolen to FBI agents, and could face up to 10 years in prison.

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Tracey Emin to carry the Olympic Torch today, completing her 400 meter leg at the Turner Contemporary in her hometown of Margate.

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The New York Times explores the changes and trends currently facing curators by looking into Independent Curators International’s popular 10-day training program in New York City. Addressing the mechanics of this fast-growing professional phenomenon, the program boasts a faculty of notables in New York’s museum and nonprofit organization sector, and facilitates networking among its participants.

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The Tate Modern‘s Tanks, designed to hold commissions, acquisitions, and live performances, opened yesterday. “We are the first in the world with the ambition, the scale, and with the consistency to meet that increasing demand. The Tanks are a new instrument for the orchestra that is the Tate,” claims Sir Nicholas Serota, head of the Tate museums in the U.K.

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Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2002) – Whitney Museum

Multi-media artist Yayoi Kusama has been creating immersive, otherworldly paintings, video, sculpture and large-scale installation environments for over 50 years, both in the United States and her home country of Japan.  Now, the Whitney Museum in New York is exhibiting a retrospective selection of works spanning her career as a preeminent voice in Japanese contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama, A Flower (1952)- Whitney Museum

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In further auction news, China Guardian emerges as a player in the mainstream contemporary game and will hold auctions in Hong Kong this fall, joining Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The oldest auction house in mainland China is now the fourth largest house in the world, and maintains plans to expand internationally.

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In other auction news, The Wall Street Journal analyzes Christie’s and Sotheby’s most recent auction performances and current buyer trends. “The combination reflects the increasingly unsettled state of the art market lately, as billionaire collectors chase after the world’s priciest masterpieces while collectors further down the food chain sneer at second-tier material that suddenly looks overpriced.”

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In auction news, Bloomberg reports on Christie’s 13% sales boost for this past half-year, aided by the sizable profit from various Rothko and Renoir sales. Chief executive officer, Steven P. Murphy says, “clients are driving this, the trend will continue.”

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Disbelief over the authenticity of the recovered ‘Caravaggio‘ drawings is further expressed by Italian scholars with a negation from Maria Teresa Fiorio, the former director of Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, stating “how can you attribute [so many of] Peterzano’s drawings to his young apprentice and how can you trash all previous research? That archive has been studied by many academics before me, and none of them ever detected Caravaggio’s hand.”

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Installation View, Taken by Zoe Zabor for Art Observed

Mark Fletcher has opened his doors to The Still House Group, a mixed media Brooklyn collective exhibiting their first group show since 2010. The installation features paintings and sculptures by Isaac Brest, Nick Darmstaedter, Alex Da Corte, Louis Eisner, Jack Greer, Brendan Lynch, Dylan Lynch, Alex Perweiler, and Zachary Susskind and runs through July 27 at 24 Washington Square North.

Installation View, Courtesy of The Still House Group

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Ed Ruscha has resigned from the Board of Trustees at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Following Joh Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger’s departure over the dismissal of long time curator Paul Schimmel, the board is now with no artist representation. In a letter to museum director Jeffrey Deitch, Ruscha was candid; “My defection may look obvious, but it will be all the better for the museum, which is on a course different than I imagined, but one I hope to support in the future.”

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A missing supposed Gustav Klimt fresco was discovered in an Austrian garage. The ceiling piece ‘Trumpeting Putto’ is in good condition, but is highly believed to have been painted by Gustav’s brother, Ernst Klimt.

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Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija releases his first film ‘Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors’, which follows a 60 year-old retired rice farmer based in Chiang Mai, a rural province of Thailand. The film, released today in Manhattan, maintains no story line or screenplay in its minimalist progression.

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Nowness highlights Paris based photographer Alessandra d’Urso’s latest shift from profiling musicians to leading artists like Kiki Smith, Terence Koh and Tom Sachs. “It began while I was in New York for a month. I made a portrait of my old friend Francesco Clemente and he liked it so much that he encouraged me to begin a series. I didn’t know very many artists so he made the introductions,” explains d’Urso.

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In keeping with their aspirations to “invest the experience of public space with wonder,” The Bruce High Quality Foundation is currently exhibiting Art History With Labor in New York’s Lever House Art Collection through September 28^th. The exhibit consists of three pieces on display in the open-air courtyard and the glass-walled lobby of the Lever House.

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