The Guardian takes a tour of the soon to open Tate Modern expansion, with high praise for its spacious design, management of exhibition areas, and views.  “We realized we were getting vulnerable in terms of what we could do on this site,” says director Nicholas Serota, explaining the £260m expansion, which has been in the works since the mid-2000s. “There were some substantial buildings arriving, so we would soon have a lot of neighbors who would oppose us doing anything of any scale.” (more…)

The Marciano Art Foundation has announced that its private Los Angeles museum is set to open its doors sometime early next year, housed in a converted masonic temple.  Philipp Kaiser, who curated the Swiss Pavilion at next year’s Biennale, will organize the first show in the space. (more…)

Protesters occupied Brazilian government buildings this week, rallying against Acting President Michel Temer’s decision to ax the nation’s culture ministry.  Temer took power this past week after previous president Dilma Rousseff was forced out of office. (more…)

Dozens of protesters have been appearing at Creative Time’s current Fly by Night project, asserting that the pigeons used to perform artist Duke Riley’s piece are unwilling participants, even though experts have inspected the piece and approved.  Mixing art and animals is a very risky business,” says Rita McMahon of Upper West Side’s Wild Bird Fund, “but I was very impressed.”  (more…)

Joan Punyet Miró, the grandson of Joan Miró, is auctioning off a seleciton of the painter’s work to help the Red Cross address the current refugee crisis in Europe.  “I consider myself as the torch-bearer for his wishes and try to do what he would do if he was still alive,” he says.  “Miró was a man who endured many hardships throughout his life. He went hungry, and lived in exile through the Spanish Civil War.”    (more…)

Olafur Eliasson is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as he prepares his summer installation at the Palace of Versailles.  “At Versailles, people tend to think only about King Louis XIV, but it is actually the ground from which our modern idea of democracy grew — ideas of unity, freedom of speech, freedom of thinking,” he says. (more…)

Artist Grayson Perry has created new work inspired by his interactions with the world of high finance, an immense phallus decorated with bank notes and the picture of George Osborne.  “It is stating the bleeding obvious but that’s kind of what needs stating,” he says.  “For all the obfuscating around it – the claims that their behavior is just rational thinking – the bleeding obvious is that most of the bankers, particularly at the top, are men and they are just as subject to the animal spirit as anybody else.” (more…)

Malaysian businessman Jho Low, currently under FBI investigation for business dealings related to the controversial 1Malaysia Development Bhd. fund, has sold one of his trophy artworks, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Dustheads. The purchase set the sales record for the artist’s work several years ago, but was sold for a loss at $35 million in what some believe is an effort to liquidate purchases made with the funds in question. (more…)

David Zwirner will represent the estate of Josef Albers, the New York Times reports.  “He’s really one of the few artists of the 20th century whose life and work span both halves of the century, connecting the idealism of the German Bauhaus in Europe with postwar America,” said David Leiber, one of the gallery’s directors. (more…)

Phillips is claiming to have set a record for the highest price paid for a Latin American artist’s work, after selling a Diego Rivera piece for $15.7 million in a private transaction.  “This is, by my estimation, the best easel painting in private hands outside of Mexico, a celebration of indigenous culture,” said August Uribe, Phillips’s deputy chairman of the Americas. “Rivera made a purposeful break from European modernism to create a national identity through the visual arts.” (more…)

Ai Weiwei has spoken out on the current refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, calling out the UN Decision to return refugees to Turkey instead of providing them homes.  “It is not legal or moral, it is shameful and it is not a solution. It will cause problems later,” he says. (more…)

A group of 59 Renaissance sculptures, originally thought lost in a Berlin fire, have been rediscovered in the archive of Moscow’s Pushkin Museum.  “Most of the sculptures were damaged, some are even in fragments,” says Neville Rowley, curator of Italian Renaissance art at the Bode Museum. “They can’t currently be shown because of the state they are in. But there are plans to exhibit the sculptures at the Pushkin Museum after they’ve been restored.” (more…)

Following in the footsteps of MoMA and the Met, The Brooklyn Museum has announced a round of employee buyouts to address possible budget issues.  “The cost of running the museum has substantially grown over the past few years,” says Anne Pasternak. “The museum is therefore being proactive.” (more…)

Martin Creed is profiled in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares for his major exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, and another at Hauser and Wirth Somerset.  “I don’t throw anything away. One of the ideas of the show was to try to make work out of things that I have kept over the years,” he says.
“What you think you are creating or making is not necessarily what you’re really doing. It’s like body language – it’s for other people to say what you are expressing or doing. It’s not a matter of being in control, really, but more like recognizing that that’s the way you are.” (more…)

Google has developed an extreme hi-definition camera designed to archive and digitize images of renowned artworks around the globe.  The camera’s gigapixel resolution is designed to explore art works’ surfaces in far more depth than the human eye, and is being taken around the globe to photograph important works. (more…)

The Telegraph notes the recent critical and market re-appreciation of the work of Jean Dubuffet, as a number of high-profile museum exhibitions and a moderately valued market see the artist gaining impressive exposure as of late.  Of particular note is a recent show at Timothy Taylor Gallery, which expands on the artist’s legacy beyond easy historical touchstones.  “It doesn’t have much to do with ‘art brut’,” Taylor says. (more…)

The Art Newspaper reports on the opening of The Palestinian Museum in the town of Birzeit, which has opened its doors without a collection to show.  The space has had a long struggle to open, and is currently showing works at a satellite show in Beirut, while the main space consists currently of “only the beautiful building and gardens,” according to acting director Omar Al-Qattan. (more…)

A profile piece in the New Yorker this week focuses on artist Kader Attia, and his recent project at the Guggenheim, in which he recreated the  M’zab hilltop fortress in the Algerian city of Ghardaïa from over 700 pounds of couscous.  “Everyone knows that Braque and Picasso were strongly influenced by the tribal, primitive art of Africa,” he says. “This never happened in architecture. We don’t know the influence of traditional architecture on architects like Le Corbusier.” (more…)

Continuing their ongoing efforts against the BP sponsorship of British arts institutions, a group of protesters gate-crashed an exhibition at the British Museum this week focused on Egyptian artifacts.  “BP’s sponsorship is a story of gaining favor with repressive regimes, extracting fossil fuels and driving the rising sea levels that will cause people to flee sinking cities in the future,” says protester Jess Worth.  “That story is already unfolding in Egypt. Meanwhile, the British Museum peddles the myth that BP is generous and ethical when it displays the company’s logos.” (more…)

Artist Pyotr Pavlensky, held for setting the doors to Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation ablaze, has reportedly had his ribs broken by a guard at the prison where he is being kept.  “Every breath gives me pain,” Pavlensky wrote in a letter.  (more…)

MoMA PS1 has announced its selection of performers for its annual Warm-Up Concerts, with highlights this year including a show featuring Detroit techno and house mainstays Theo Parrish and DJ Stingray, and a set early in the summer by New York Hip-hop legend DJ Premier. (more…)

Sculptor Mark di Suvero is the subject of a thorough profile in the Paris Review this week, which explores his evolving aesthetic sensibility, and his realization of systemic relations between his works when shown together.  “They had resonance between them,” he says of seeing a large selection of his works at the Storm King Sculpture Center.  “Suddenly, there was this kind of family grouping.” (more…)

Christie’s is still facing over $23 million in lawsuits from damages to its storage facilities after Superstorm Sandy, the Art Newspaper reports.  The lawsuits range from collectors seeking to recover damages to their works, to insurance companies seeking to reclaim their own funds from damages to clients’ works. (more…)

The uptown studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, where the Whitney Museum was born, are set to open its doors to visitors next month.  “We think this place is a treasure,” says Stephanie K. Meeks, president and chief executive of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, “and one that deserves more recognition for its history and more of an opportunity for the public to engage with it.” (more…)