Jayson Musson is laughing at us.  Since his first three-minute video was recorded over two years ago, Musson has been offering well-founded criticism of artists and the art world through the caricature of Hennessy Youngman on his Youtube channel. In an explanation of “How to be an Artist”, his alter ego Hennessy Youngman explains the fool-proof formula for artistic success: “be white and be ambiguous”.

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Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie resign from MOCA board, following John Baldessari’s leave last Thursday after curator Paul Schimmel’s departure following reported conflicts with new Director  Jeffrey Deitch.  Opie stated that: “I love and respect MOCA. It’s the first place I’ve ever had a solo museum show, and it’s had a profound influence on artists in Los Angeles, but the museum is taking such a different direction now… What concerns me is seeing the museum embracing more celebrity and fashion.”

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The Financial Times sits down with Tate Modern director, Nicholas Serota, to discuss his perspective and vision for the most popular modern art museum in the world. “Only recently have I begun to understand what it felt like to be Picasso and Braque in 1907- absolutely determined to bury the previous century.”

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Google honors the 150th birthday of Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt with a Google Doodle of Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’.

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Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Olympic Rings (1985)

During the 1980’s, the personnages of both Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat loomed large in the New York art world.  Warhol as one of its most visible older guard, and Basquiat as one of its prominent, up-and-coming stars.  But the two were also friends, and it was in this context that Basquiat and Warhol collaborated on a number of paintings that would end up being some of the last of their lives.  Blending Basquiat’s striking, often visceral approach with Warhol’s measured explorations of pop culture iconography, these pieces offered a marked commentary on both the style and subjects exhibited.

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Plans to replace 3,000 old masters with modern art in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie have left many local fans of classical art, and art historians, incensed. The galleries will be filled with an extensive collection of surrealist and expressionist art donated by a billionaire industrialist named Heiner Pietzsch, who gave his collection under the condition that it be displayed in its entirety. The old masters collection–including works by Brueghel, Raphael, and Caravaggio–will be temporarily housed in the Bode Museum, with no plans announced for a permanent home.

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Faced with rising rents, galleries in Chelsea are slowly moving to areas such as the Lower East Side. Multi-tenant buildings have been affected the most, with small dealers suffering a lack of foot traffic, while large galleries have opened up mega-spaces that also steal viewers. With the High Line‘s popularity and increasing gentrification, rents are only slated to continue increasing.

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A sculpture by the British artist Henry Moore has been stolen from the grounds of his former home, now the Henry Moore Foundation, in Much Hadham, England. Valued at £500,000, Sundial was stolen in between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Investigators are leading a search for the bronze work, fearing that it may be melted down as scrap metal, a fate that awaited Moore’s Reclining Figure, which was stolen and melted down in 2005.

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John Baldessari resigns from the board of MOCA, Los Angeles after the museum’s ousting of chief curator Paul Schimmel, who came into philosophical disputes about the museum’s direction with major benefactor Eli Broad and director Jeffrey Deitch.  Baldessari is the fifth trustee to resign since February.

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A Sandro Botticelli painting, estimated at $9.5 million, may alleviate a portion of the losses suffered by the victims of Lawrence Salander‘s art fraud, the largest in New York to date.

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Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view. All photography courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Ellsworth Kelly‘s installation of four 2-panel paintings executed this year is on view at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris until July 13, 2012. The show, as the gallery’s press release relates, is his first in Paris in 20 years, when his formative paintings made in his youthful residence in the city were exhibited at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume. This new work comprises four paintings, each consisting of a curved geometrical relief on a white panel, progressing on the ordered spectrum from red, yellow, blue, to green. Laconically hung a single panel to each of the four walls in the gallery, the paintings seem a further distillation of Kelly’s painterly system, a continuation of the experiments he first executed in Paris in his early years.

Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view

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Olafur Eliasson‘s ‘Little Sun’ newly installed at the Tate Modern uses solar powered, sunflower-shaped lamps and blackouts, and additionally address the social issues of energy use and expense. “Little Sun is a small work of art with a large reach,” says the Danish artist about his vision.

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Jenny Saville, Red Stare Head (2007-2011)

Striking and visceral, the paintings of Jenny Saville capture a fierce movement within their canvas boundaries, blending detailed rendering with sharp auxiliary strokes of paint to suggest a violent, decaying nature.  Now, the Young British Artist who rose to prominence in the early 2000’s alongside contemporaries Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, is having her first solo exhibition on British soil, at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford.

Jenny Saville, Trace (1993)

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Trevor Paglen‘s ‘The Last Pictures’ to launch into outer space attached to a television satellite in September 2012 as part of a Creative Time project. Paglen, in collaboration with MIT and various scientific specialists, designed an ultra-archival disc of images, capable of surviving billions of years in space.

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New York financier Leon Black is the record breaking buyer of Edvard Munch‘s $120 million ‘The Scream’ at Sotheby’s last Spring.

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Ai Weiwei, involved in a confrontation between conflicting online bloggers in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park, denies physically harming Wu Danhong, an alleged government-paid blogger. “It makes no sense to lie. I did not beat him. The crowd called my name when I approached and Wu panicked a little bit when he saw me.”

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Chris Martin, Untitled (2012), via The Journal Gallery, New York

The Journal Gallery has organized a summer group show whose impact exceeds the expectations of such a reference. Home Again, Again features nine distinctive contemporary works which, crowded together in the tiny Williamsburg space, form another, unique whole. In a lovingly critical homage to art after 1950 – from the Greenbergian picture plane to the strigency of minimalism – the works on view here are flat, angular, and imposing. Yet, their initial starkness is deliberately thwarted by their use of material and content, offering a lively contemporary perspective on the legacy of postwar American art. (more…)

Jenny Holzer, Sophisticated Devices (Gallery View)

On view currently at Sprüeth Magers’s London gallery is a collection of solo works from multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, exhibiting Holzer’s unique interplay of semiotics and text used to create the art object.

Jenny Holzer, WITH BLEEDING INSIDE THE HEAD … TEXT: LIVING SERIES (1980-1982), 1981

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The Guardian explores Rachel Whiteread‘s perspectives on the changes in East London, the attention and criticism her art receives, and her newly commissioned, frieze at the Whitechapel art gallery, which is one of the key pieces of the London 2012 festival.

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The New York Magazine examines Yayoi Kusama‘s position in the art world after a 40 year stint in a mental hospital. The Japanese artist voices her opinions on her mental illness, her youth, and her old contemporaries, including Andy Warhol, stating that “he lived near me and appropriated my ideas, only he was too late because I have already realized them. We don’t hear his name now so much in Japan.”

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The MET to open a major exhibition surveying Andy Warhol‘s influence on contemporary art, featuring work by Robert Gober, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, and others, in September 2012.

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Protesters, outraged by BP’s sponsorship of the Tate Modern, carried a one and a half tonne wind turbine blade across London’s Millennium bridge to the gallery last Saturday morning. A speaker of the activist group, Sharon Palmer, stated that “in a time of climate crisis [visitors to the gallery] should not be made to feel that they’re legitimizing [oil firms].”

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‬Police in Spain arrested four people involved in the sale of a counterfeit copy of Picasso‘s “Buste de Jeune Garçon”, which would have potentially fetched up to $2 million.

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Souren Melikian explores the mind of an art collector by looking at Dutch dealer Bob Haboldt and his new volume. “With the store of knowledge, visual and art historical, that they accumulate in their chosen field of competence they [dealers] will always be ahead of auction house experts who must handle thousands of artists.”

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