Artist Tracey Moffat is profiled in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares for her new work to open at the Venice Biennale this summer.  “I’m real strict when I go to work,” she says.  “When you enter the studio, it’s like a temple and you have to respect my silence. Just because I’m not talking doesn’t mean I’m a grump. It means I’m concentrating.”  (more…)

Jonas Mekas will show a series of photographs at Documenta this summer cataloguing his experience as a refugee fleeing the aftermath of WWII.  “It was a dark, bleak postwar period,” he writes. “These are images out of darkness.”   (more…)

Anselm Kiefer will be honored this year with a J. Paul Getty Medal alongside writer Mario Vargas, honoring his exceptional contributions to the arts.  “We shall honor two of the world’s great artists,” says Maria Hummer-Tuttle, chair of the board of trustees. “Anselm Kiefer and Mario Vargas Llosa are both engaged in big ideas and historic moments, and they share with the Getty a passionate commitment to global culture.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper looks at market health in France, and the possible impacts the coming election could have on its strength in the coming months.  “Within a complicated global context, Paris is doing better than expected, and is gaining strength against other components of the international art market,”says Nicolas Orlowski of Artcurial auction house. (more…)

Stephanie D’Alessandro has been named The Met’s new Leonard A. Lauder Curator of Modern Art.  D’Alessandro previously worked in a similar position at the Art Institute of Chicago.  She will take over for Rebecca Rabinow, who left for Houston’s Menil Collection.   (more…)

The global art market has fallen to its lowest point since the financial crisis, with global sales dropping 11% this past year, Bloomberg reports.  “It was quite a challenging year for the art market,” economist Clare McAndrew said. (more…)

The Whitney Biennial is facing criticism from a group of black artists in the U.S. and abroad for the inclusion of a piece by Dana Schutz, featuring a depiction of the dead body of Emmett Till, the young boy brutally murdered after a white woman claimed he whistled at her.  “The subject matter is not Schutz’s,” artist Hannah Black writes of the work. “White free speech and white creative freedom have been founded on the constraint of others, and are not natural rights. The painting must go.”  (more…)

Pace Gallery has announced that it will open its second gallery in Hong Kong, located at 80 Queen’s Road in the Central district.  “We hope to create more connection between the contemporary art scene in Asia and the West,” says Pace president Marc Glimcher. (more…)

Whitney Museum Director Adam D. Weinberg has issued a statement on Donald Trump’s proposed de-funding of the NEA, calling for its preservation and a recognition of its vital role in the continuation of the country’s health.  “As an institution specifically dedicated to presenting and discussing contemporary American culture, the Whitney Museum of American Art feels a special responsibility to speak as an advocate for the continuing importance of the NEA and NEH,” he writes. “For institutions large and small, historic and contemporary, throughout the fifty states, and for the public they serve, the NEA and NEH are irreplaceable and must be preserved.” (more…)

London’s Fourth Plinth Commission project has announced works for both 2018 and 2020, the BBC reports.  The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist by Michael Rakowitz, featuring a re-creation of a work looted from the Iraq Museum, will go on view next year, while THE END by Heather Phillipson will feature a massive heap of ice cream topped by a fly, and a hovering drone broadcasting from above the work.  “The new commissions will proudly continue the legacy of the Fourth Plinth in putting world-class contemporary sculpture at the heart of London,” says Ekow Eshun, Chair of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group. (more…)

The Centre Pompidou is planning a pop-up exhibition space in Shanghai’s West Bund cultural district, the Art Newspaper reports.  The potential opening would be part of an ongoing development project aimed at transforming a former industrial section of the city into a “cultural corridor.” (more…)

Miami Beach’s Bass Art Museum has set its opening date for October 2017, marking the latest target date after a series of delays and set-backs in the museum’s ambitious renovation.  The show’s original opening exhibition of works by Ugo Rondinone is still set to feature as its first show in the new space. (more…)

Christie’s has announced another major work for its May Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sale in New York, Cy Twombly’s Leda and the Swan, which carries an estimate of $35 million to $55 million, and could conceivably break the artist’s auction record of $70.5 million.  “Given its tremendous importance within the context of both Twombly’s oeuvre and the canon of postwar art, we are honored to have the opportunity to offer this work to the market after nearly 30 clandestine years,” says Koji Inoue, the International Director for the auction house’s contemporary department. (more…)

Artist Robert Morris is profiled in the New York Times this month, as the artist prepares a show of new work at Castelli Gallery in New York.  The artist reflects on the course of his career, and what might constitute his “late style.”  “Edward Said thought he saw some old artists letting go and daring to do what they would not have when younger,” he says.  “Who can say? But I don’t think I see art differently now than I did years ago. As for insights into the human condition, I think I am the same pessimist I always was.” (more…)

Danish collective Superflex has been tapped for as the next artist for the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commission project, set to be unveiled in October.  The collective has worked at a unique juncture of modern culture, politics and surrealist interruptions of spatial logic.   (more…)

London’s National Gallery was evacuated this past week, after the a man attacked a Thomas Gainsborough painting with a screwdriver.  “The damage is limited to two long scratches which have penetrated the paint layers but not the supporting canvas,” a spokeswoman for the gallery said. “The painting was removed from display and examined by the gallery’s conservators, who are now assessing next steps.” (more…)

Vanity Fair has a lengthy piece on the story behind the departure of Thomas Campbell from The Met, documenting the frequent internal conflicts and changes in focus that ultimately compounded the struggles the museum has faced in recent years, and ultimately contributed to Campbell’s departure.  Of particular note is the case of the Leonard Lauder collection, and the agreements made between the museum and Lauder in order to secure the works.  “It’s one thing to accept such a collection. It’s another thing to accept that you’re going to have to increase the space of exhibition, given such treasures,” says Robert Storr, a professor at the Yale School of Art and former MoMA Curator.  “What makes a vital collection over long periods of time is not to have chapels to particular art, much less particular collections.” (more…)

The Financial Times has a piece on Chinese collector Yan Lugen, documenting his ongoing support of Chinese contemporary art, including funds for the country’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, and his occasionally controversial position among the country’s arts communities.  “He’s very charming, engaging — but frankly, he doesn’t really seem to know what he’s doing,” the article quotes from one Hong Kong adviser. (more…)

Commemorating the anniversary of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft, the institution has partnered with Google to create a three-dimensional tour of the museum that presents information on the works stolen and the history of the theft.   (more…)

Hilton Als is featured in Interview Magazine this month, discussing the Alice Neel survey exhibition he organized at David Zwirner.  “It’s very hard to find artists in the history of western art who don’t make portraiture ideological in some way,” he says.  “I really felt that she worked with people, collaborated with them in ways that I feel I understand. I wanted to talk to her through her work at some point in my life. I didn’t know when that would happen, and I’m grateful to David [Zwirner] for making it possible.” (more…)

President Trump has issued a proposed budget this week which would eliminate funding for the N.E.A. and N.E.H., stoking fears over his administrations attempts to end funding for the arts.  “We are greatly saddened to learn of this proposal for elimination, as N.E.H. has made significant contributions to the public good,” says William D. Adams, chairman of the humanities endowment, in a statement. (more…)

The Art Newspaper puts a spotlight on The Mastaba this week, Christo’s over 40-year ongoing project seeking to build a massive structure made from 410,000 multi-colored aluminum barrels in the desert of the U.A.E.  “My projects are about the real things,” he says, “The real wind. The real wet. The real dry. The real things. Not photographs. I don’t know how to use a computer. Not flat surface. Not propaganda. But the real things.” (more…)

W Magazine interviews Scott Rothkopf, Christopher Y. Lew and Mia Locks this week, as the curators finally open their iteration of the Whitney Biennial, a show that has earned almost universal praise for its confrontation of social and political conflicts around the nation.  “For those people who expect that this show will be political at the expense of moments of great beauty, they’re going to be surprised,” Rothkopf says. (more…)

Rhizome has announced the artist list for the 2017 edition of its annual Seven on Seven conference, which pairs artists alongside developers and tech innovators to create new projects and programs.  This year, the event will feature net art pioneer Olia Lialina, alongside Constant Dullaart, DIS, and more.  “Every year with Seven on Seven, there’s this tension between having a grouping that stands together as a coherent whole and making sure each pair is right unto itself,” Rhizome artistic director Michael Connor says. (more…)