The New York Times interviews Adam Lindemann after the past week’s auctions, where he sold the record-setting Jean-Michel Basquiat lot at Christie’s, and explores the collector’s perspectives on bidding and winning lots.  “The question is, do you want to be the lead in a smaller movie,” he says, likening sales to acting, “or do you want to be in a film with Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio?  If you know that you can deliver, you do the smaller movie, where you’re the lead and the movie is about you.” (more…)

Collector Steve Tisch is the subject of a New York Times profile, as the movie producer and Loews stakeholder offers the paper a tour of the small-scale museum he built to show his collection.  “The building is dramatic,” he says, “but it’s not pretentious and it’s not overwhelming.  I’m not Charles Foster Kane, and this isn’t Xanadu. Nobody took away my sled.” (more…)

The New Yorker looks at the recent wave of major museum expansions and construction, and notes the trend towards decreasing space for physical art, while spaces for performance, film screenings and talks have expanded.  The article notes Tate Modern director Frances Morris’s vision of the modern museum moving “from being a museum that people come to and look at, spend time in, to a museum that opens its doors to collaboration, conversation, and participation.” (more…)

Cheyenne Westphal, one of Sotheby’s top sellers and a “secret weapon” according to Harper’s Bazaar, will leave the auction house to chair Phillips.  “We are delighted that Cheyenne has agreed to join Phillips,” says current chair and CEO Edward Dolman. (more…)

Daniel Buren has installed a massive striped work on the outer facade of Paris’s Fondation Luis Vuitton, using his signature style to emphasize Frank Gehry’s unique architecture.  (more…)

Online auction houses Paddle 8 and Auctionata are merging to form a single online auction company, the New York Times reports.  “We will be able to pick up an object and sell it quicker than anyone else in the world,” says Auctionata exec Alexander Zacke. (more…)

The Guardian reports on Yves Klein’s years working as a picture framer in London, and the formative influence this work had on his practice, particularly in his work with pure pigments, gesso and gold leaf.  “To earn my living, I worked illegally for about a year in the Old Brompton Road frame shop of Robert Savage, a friend of my father,” Klein wrote of his time in the shop.  “It was there, assisting in the preparation of size, colors, varnish, of gilt bases, that I became familiar with the material, with handling it ‘in bulk’.” (more…)

The art collection of the former Shah of Iran will travel to Berlin, the first time the collection, which includes masterworks by Joan Miró, Andy Warhol, and Jackson Pollock, among others, is shown outside the country since 1979.  “A collection unique for its composition and history will be shown for says Hermann Parzinger, president of The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which manages most of Berlin’s state museums.

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The Warhol Museum has purchased one of Andy Warhol’s rare Paint by Numbers works, a piece that has long eluded the museum’s collection.  “That was in my top three list, along with a 40 by 40 ‘Marilyn’ and an early comic book painting,” Eric Shiner, the museum’s director, told the NYT. (more…)

An engineer who plummeted through a ceiling at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has won a $7.25 million settlement from the institution.  “It was the most terrifying moment of his life,” attorney Larry Bendesky told CBS Philadelphia. “It’s a more terrifying moment than most of us would ever be able to come to grips with.”  (more…)

The Turner Prize shortlist has been announced for 2016, The Guardian reports, counting Anthea Hamilton, Michael Dean, Helen Marten and Josephine Pryde among those who will show at the annual Turner Prize exhibition in competition for the £25,000 prize. (more…)

UCLA is in the late stages of planning for a $31 million expansion to its arts school, funded in large part by dealer Margo Leavin.  “Artists are the backbone of the community, so I wanted it to be something that would have a real impact on that,” Leavin said of her donation. (more…)

The BBC has a profile on Japanese collector Yusaku Maezawa, who purchased over $98 million in art this week from both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, including the record-setting Jean-Michel Basquiat.  “Regardless of its condition or sales value, I was driven by the responsibility to acknowledge great art and the need to pass on not only the artwork itself, but also the knowledge of the artist’s culture and his way of life to future generations,” he said of the purchase. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal looks at the increased focus on African Contemporary art, including the recently concluded 1:54 Art Fair in New York.  “For years we didn’t have many galleries, but artists were still making work that was brave and experimental—and now everyone can see that,” says Azu Nwagbogu, founder of LagosPhoto in Nigeria. (more…)

Jeff Koons has unveiled a collaborative technology project with Google, a smart phone case that plays excerpts from Swan Lake, and transmits new graphics to the user’s phone each day.  “I’ve always enjoyed ballet,” Koons says. “I think that dance really captures nature and culture together. You have the biological aspect between people, movement, and bodies, and at the same time you are completely referencing also the classical.” (more…)

Ugo Rondinone has installed a massive, $3.5 million sculptural work in the Nevada desert.  “Seven Magic Mountains elicits continuities and solidarities between the artificial and the natural, between human and nature. What centers this amalgam of contradictions is the spiritual aspiration; one that bruises, elevates and transcends,” said Rondinone.   (more…)

Online retailer Yusaku Maezawa has been identified as the buyer of the record-setting Basquiat last night at Christie’s, Bloomberg reports.  “The moment I first saw the painting at the auction preview, the piece overflowing with his passion and technique, I felt shivers all over my body,” Maezawa says. “Regardless of its condition or sales value, I was driven by the responsibility to acknowledge great art and the need to pass on not only the artwork itself, but also the knowledge of the artist’s culture and his way of life to future generations.” (more…)

An unemployed French mechanic has purchased a painting that may well be a lost early Renoir composition.  Ahmed Ziani bought the work for about $700, when research helped him identify the piece as Soir d’Eté, which the artist created when he was 23. (more…)

The Art Newspaper takes a second look at La Bella Principessa, the work attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci that forger Shaun Greenhalgh claims to have executed, and which continues to confound experts to this day.  “The silly season for Leonardo never closes,” argues Martin Kemp, the Oxford professor who has attributed the work to the Renaissance master.  “The story satisfies the public taste for ‘experts’ and the ‘art world elite’ being made to look ridiculous, but it is low on credibility. We are asked to believe that a self-taught 17-year-old was capable of such refined pen work and chalk drawing. His drawing has some lightweight decorative charm, but nowhere suggests that he could achieve this tautly descriptive line and subtly blended modeling.” (more…)

Thaddaeus Ropac is preparing to open his first gallery in London, the Evening Standard reports, soon to take over the home of the Mallett antiques dealership in Dover Square.  The site will be Ropac’s first in Britain. (more…)

The Tate’s attempts to keep the figures behind its BP sponsorship concealed suffered a setback today after Peter Lockley, counsel for the information commissioner, stated that the museum had not used its confidentiality clause properly, but instead was using it to avoid scrutiny.  “If this is not contracting out [responsibility] to [the Freedom of Information Act], it is only a hair’s breadth away from it,” Locksley said. (more…)

The New York Post has some fun speculating on the buyer for the Maurizio Cattelan Hitler sculpture that sold Sunday at Christie’s, listing François Pinault, Qatari Sheik Khalifa Al-Thani and Peter Brant as the most likely buyers.  “There are clues [as to who the winning bidder is] that aren’t obvious,” an unnamed consultant tells the reporter. “All three of the bidders who were taking instructions over the phone have connections to Christie’s.” (more…)

The Met has placed its $600 million expansion project on hold, following reports of a $10 million deficit in the museum budget, and its restructuring program.  The current cutbacks are in part attributed to the expenditures over the Met Breuer expansion, and its new branding campaign. (more…)

Martine Syms is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist opens her exhibition at ICA London.  “I have said it before and I will continue to say that I don’t think art is the most effective form of protest,” she says.  “I don’t think it changes policy, I think it changes discourse, and discourse can change ideas, and for me that’s what it’s about: having that space for conversation.” (more…)