Arts Council England Head Darren Henley has made a statement in The Guardian this week, pledging more attention and funding to the regions outside of London, and increasing funding for areas outside the city to 75% of total funding. “With nine offices around the country, the biggest of which is not in London, but in Manchester, we understand very clearly the many beneficial dividends that investment in arts and culture pays back to communities in all parts of England,” he writes. (more…)

The WSJ looks at a growing group of artists dealing with the fluid movements of immigrants and refugees internationally, and the increased focus on notions of identity and global politics that often underscore their work.  It’s one of the themes that are going to define the latter half of this century,” says London-based artist John Akomfrah. (more…)

An article in The Guardian this week makes the argument that the art market bubble so often discussed in 2015 has already burst, pointing to the considerably diminished sales totals in late 2015, often failing to meet their estimate despite several major record-setters, and a drop-off in new buyers.  “It feels like we hit the top in the first half of 2015,” says Todd Levin, director of art advisory the Levin Art Group. “We rang that bell and things have softened ever so slightly since. My guess is that we will see further tightening over 2016.” (more…)

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed

Agathe Snow’s current exhibition at The Journal in Williamsburg is a flurry of touchstones, compiling fragments of art history, domestic objects, knitted material, paint, and any number of accompanying materials to explore what the artist deems the full-length of human existence, an attempt at a totemic retelling of man’s relationship to the world around him.  Objects cluster and clump together, or are cast into heaps and piles spread across the spacious confines of the gallery.  The show, which continues the artist’s enigmatic approach towards sculpture, identity and its related historical contexts, is at times comic, and at others sobering, interrelating the artist’s personal life, themes of death and rebirth, and the always present backdrop of human culture.

Agathe Snow at The Journal, via Rae Wang for Art Observed (more…)