The Guardian looks at the current labor struggles at London’s National Gallery, as the museum transfers staff management over to a private company, leaving little in terms of real job protection.  “I came to work at the National Gallery, but I could be transferred to a supermarket car park,” says one assistant. (more…)

The Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York has announced a new residency program, opening in conjunction with the long-running Shandaken Project Residency, which is putting its own program on hold during the partnership.  The new program will “encourage artists to engage with Storm King Art Center in new ways.” (more…)

New information released by the Tate this month has revealed that the museum accepted between £150,000 and £330,000 in annual sponsorship funds from British Petroleum over the course of 17 years, totaling over £3.8 million in funds.  The relatively minor amount of funding each year underscores claims by the activist group Platform, which accuses BP of using the donations to help “greenwash” its reputation.  “The BP sponsorship figures are even lower than we had estimated,” says Anna Galkina of Platform. For nearly a decade, Tate provided a veneer of respectability to one of the world’s most controversial companies for just £150,000 a year.” (more…)

Danh Vo, Your mother sucks cocks in Hell (2015), all images courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo and his family fled Vietnam in a homemade wooden boat a few years after the Communists’ victory, when Vo was just four. In his current exhibition, “Homosapiens,” at Marian Goodman London, as in much of his body of work, the intersection of the historical and the personal is explored through artifacts, documents, and photographs—fragments, begging for the viewer to find their context, that bring into question the nature of identity and belonging. (more…)

Famed Modigliani scholar Marc Restellini is preparing to open a new location for his Paris-based private museum, Pinacothèque, in Singapore this summer.  The $24 million site will open with a show focusing on Cleopatra, and will include a free “heritage gallery.”  “In Paris, a lot of our income comes from ticketing,” Restellini says. “We have more than one million visitors a year. In Singapore, we have to develop other processes of income.”  (more…)

The New York Times notes the growing trends at major museums towards including experimental and contemporary choreography among its programming, noting both the cultural and practical benefits for an institution.  “Live performance encourages audiences to be more frequent visitors to your building,” says Sam Miller, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. “In terms of being responsive to what artists are doing today and bringing in a more diverse audience, it makes sense.” (more…)

Abraham Cruzvillegas, the Mexican artist who fashions sculptures and situational works out of reclaimed materials, has accepted an offer from the Tate Modern to take part in its Turbine Hall commission.  “His work reflects Tate’s deep interest in showing truly ground-breaking international art,”  says director Chris Dercon. (more…)

For the first time, Italy has launched an international search for directors to some of its most important museums, among them the Uffizi in Florence, the Galleria Borghese in Rome and the Accademia in Venice.  The move is seen as an attempt for major Italian institutions to get closer in line to international counterparts like The Louvre.  “It’s a giant leap ahead,” Dario Franceschini, Italy’s culture minister.  “Italian museums should be more dynamic. They should have more bookshops, more restaurants. They should be attractive and have more multimedia.” (more…)

The New York Times profiles artist Daniel Arsham, and his legion of high-profile fans and collectors, among them Usher and Jay-Z.  “I couldn’t tell you how it happened,” Mr. Arsham says of his popularity. “I work with a lot of people who aren’t famous, too. And in some cases, it’s been the celebrities who gravitate towards me.” (more…)

The Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris is focusing on expanding its collection of photography, the Art Newspaper reports, earmarking over â‚¬100,000 a year to increase the size of its holdings in the upcoming years.   (more…)

Following a notable expansion project that boosted its gallery size from 800 square feet to 1,800, James Fuentes Gallery is opening a 400 square foot “project space” inside its space titled Allen & Eldridge.  “Because we’re starting a new chapter with the gallery, with the new space,” Fuentes says, “it just seemed like a really great juncture to try and incorporate some new voices into the program and have the ability to present these intimate exhibitions by great and interesting young artists.”  The space opens tonight with a show of work from Edward Shenk and Victor Vaughn’s ongoing series of King of the Hill inspired pieces. (more…)

In a recent discussion during the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, noted economist and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini has called for more rigid regulation of the art market.  Roubini is known for predicting the explosion of the US subprime housing market, and noted the art world’s frequent anonymity among buyers as one contributor to the ongoing use of the market to launder money.  “While art looks as if it is all about beauty, as a business it is full of shady stuff,” he said. “We should correct it or it will be undermined over time.” (more…)

The New York Times reports on the criminal case in Spain between the city of Barcelona and the daughters of wealthy industrialist Julio Muñoz Ramonet, who stand accused of stealing over 352 paintings and drawings, as well as tapestries and other works from the collector’s home when he donated them to the city.  “We’re talking about a quantity and a quality of missing works of art that could probably fill a first-class museum,” says Marc Molins, a criminal lawyer representing the city. (more…)

Artist Luc Tuymans has been convicted of copyright infringement in Belgium for his 2011 work A Belgian Politician, featuring a cropped image of politician Jean-Marie Dedecker.  Tuymans plans to appeal the case.  “Like many contemporary artists, the work of Luc Tuymans is based on existing images,” says Tuymans’s lawyer, Michaël De Vroey.  “How can an artist challenge the world with his works if he cannot use images of this world?” (more…)

The Wildenstein & Company art gallery is suing the nation of Qatar, after the nation reneged on its agreement to purchase the gallery’s Upper East Side location for the record price of $90 million.  “The purchase of the property, and its record price, came under review in Doha, where there was a reluctance to be seen as profligate,” the lawsuit states. (more…)

The Art Newspaper recaps the previous year of art auctions, citing Christie’s auction total at $6.8 billion, maintaining at $800 million lead over Sotheby’s, which wrapped the year with a $6 billion tally, both of which are records for the auction houses.  However, the article also notes that Christie’s is likely to appear much further ahead when the figures for private sales are announced for both houses.  “We’ve doubled our eCommerce sales, nearly 20% of our business was private sales. We are not an auction house anymore,” says Christie’s President Jussi Pylkkänen. (more…)

Sara Raza has been appointed the new Guggenheim curator for the Middle East and North Africa, and will continue the museum’s UBS Map initiative, the museum announced this week.  “Her work will complement and extend the research that the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi curatorial team is undertaking,” says Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong. (more…)

The Tate Britain has announced plans for a major retrospective focused on the work of Barbara Hepworth, which will feature a set of photograms from the artist’s archives, made by silhouetting the artist’s head against photo-reactive paper.  “It is a very beautiful thing in the flesh,” says Sophie Bowness, the artist’s granddaughter. (more…)

Gillian Wearing, Me As an Artist in 1984 (2014), all Photos Courtesy of Regen Projects Los Angeles.

One of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists, Gillian Wearing, who in the past few decades has established a unique and enduring voice in the contemporary discourse, is presenting her new body of work at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects. The artist’s fourth collaboration with the gallery, everyone, features two new video pieces as well as various multimedia works that juxtapose Wearing’s investigations on personal memory, confrontation with past and unfolding of angst as a direct result. (more…)

Diana Thater, Science, Fiction (2014), via Art Observed

Diana Thater’s new exhibition on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street Exhibition is an exercise in restraint.  Consisting of a pair of video compositions and a monumental structure in a light-saturated installation piece, the artist moves towards an experience of space, both in an immediate and more figurative sense, that engages the magnitude of human experience on both macro and micro scales. (more…)

Egon Schiele, Death and Maiden (1915), via Kunsthaus Zurich

The Kunsthaus Zürich is currently presenting a historical study in portraiture and figuration over the course of a century, comparing the output of Austrian painter Egon Schiele with YBA-affiliated painter Jenny Saville, and tying together the pair’s varying approaches to powerful and, at times, visceral depictions of the human body.  Culling works from across the expanse of both artist’s careers, the exhibition seems to function both as a pair of parallel historical studies in each artist’s inspirations and development, while allowing a certain degree of overlap and cross-referencing into the various techniques each artist employed. (more…)

Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.  (more…)

Artist Loris Gréaud, who is represented by Pace Gallery and Yvon Lambert opened an exhibition at Dallas Contemporary this weekend, which was attacked by a group of vandals some speculate were sent by the artist himself.  “About 90 minutes in, it was stormed by 25 individuals who proceeded to destroy the exhibition,” one witness told the New York Post. (more…)

Henri Matisse, The Snail (1953), via Art Observed

There’s a moment at the end of Henri Matisse’s landmark exhibition of his late “cut-out” works, currently on view at MoMA in New York, when the viewer emerges into the last room to view Matisse’s final canvases, immense explosions of color and form that immediately arrest the viewer with their dynamic, minimal surfaces. (more…)