The Met’s new website launch is profiled in Fast Company this week, noting its approach towards the digital landscape of modernity. “People ask me: What is your biggest competition?,” says Sree Sreenivasan, the Met’s chief digital officer. “Is it MoMA? Guggenheim? Our competition is Netflix. Candy Crush. It’s life in 2016.” (more…)
Jake and Dinos Chapman have opened a pop-up store, titled “Fucking Hell,” in the heart of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. The store contains a number of interesting art works and projects. In one corner, a visitor can buy an original drawing by Jake Chapman, tattooed on their skin. (more…)
John Baldessari is interviewed in the New York Times this week, as the artist opens his new show at Sprüth Magers in LA, and reflects on his career. “I was going to be an art historian once,” he says. “That was early on, in the early ’70s, when I thought being an artist wasn’t very dignified. I thought being an art historian, I could be called Dr. Baldessari, and that would be better.” (more…)
Bonhams has laid off eight employees in its Hong Kong offices, including deputy chairman Magnus Renfrew. The decision was cited as part of a “restructuring,” with Renfrew noting that he was “surprised and disappointed” by his layoff. (more…)
Maya Widmaier-Picasso has been ordered to pay legal fees of 25,000 euros, about $28,000, in her case with representatives of the Qatari royal family. The court also rejected a plea to void a seizure order for the bust at the center of the ongoing cases over her father’s sculpture. (more…)
Performa has announced a new Board of Directors, including artists Rashid Johnson as Vice Chair and Shirin Neshat as a newly appointed Director. “My first experience with Performa was during the Performa 13 Biennial, when I worked with Performa to restage LeRoi Jones and Amiri Baraka’s 1964 play Dutchman in the 10th Street Russian-Turkish Bath House. I was impressed by Performa’s artist-first approach and their hands on involvement in helping realize my vision,” Johnson said. “I look forward to helping continue the great legacy Performa has earned and helping it to grow as a resource for artists and a vehicle for producing and showcasing innovative performance-based works.” (more…)
The 9th Berlin Biennale has announced its locations for this summer, including the Akademie der Künste, the European School of Management and Technology, the Feuerle Collection, the Blue-Star sightseeing boat by Reederei Riedel, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art. The Biennale will be curated by DIS, and focuses on “the virtual as the real, nations as brands, people as data, culture as capital, wellness as politics, and happiness as GDP.” (more…)
Paris’s FIAC satellite Officielle has been placed on hold by organizers Reed Exhibitions, following complaints over low sales figures and a difficult location at last year’s event. “We were not unhappy with our sales at the 2015 edition, we sold rather well and cleared a small profit. But it’s true that we did not feel like we were [in the majority],” says Gallerist Bernard Ceysson. (more…)
Continuing its efforts in Silicon Valley, Pace Gallery has left its temporary space in favor of a more permanent outpost in downtown Palo Alto. “It was time to fish or cut bait,” says President Marc Glimcher. “You can’t do a pop-up forever.” (more…)
The Public Catalogue Foundation has been renamed Art UK, and is launching an initiative to digitize the full collection of works in the British public collections. The project continues the organization’s already completed efforts at digitizing the nation’s oil paintings, a 10 year, £6 million venture. (more…)
The University of Oklahoma has agreed to return a Pissarro painting, La Bergère, that was looted by Nazis from collector Raoul Meyer. The work will go to Meyer’s daughter Léone, who has agreed to show the painting on a rotating basis in Oklahoma and France. “Léone Meyer has agreed that, rather than getting the painting back for her own living room, to continue the public display of the painting for the public,” her lawyer said.
The Tate Modern is planning a landmark retrospective for David Hockney in 2017, one of the largest exhibitions the museum has ever opened. “We’ve shaped the show and made a selection and then he’s made suggestions and we’ve shifted the emphasis a bit and there are some works he’s asked us to think about,” says co-curator Chris Stephens. (more…)
W Magazine Profiles Xin Li, the Deputy Chair of Christie’s Asia, and her unique career path as both a basketball player and model. “I’ve always played better during the real game than in practice,” Li says of her focus in the auction room. “It’s something I learned from being an athlete and model. I feel the lights and the camera, and I know how to stay focused. But when you are working as a model, it’s all about you. Working in an auction house, nothing is about you. I learned how to switch off my past and become a different person.” (more…)
The Art Newspaper has interviewed a group of artists, T.J. Wilcox and Deborah Kass among them, to offer their perspectives and suggestions for the opening of the Met’s Breuer Building for exhibitions. “There is some of that overdue revisionism going on and I will be thrilled to see Kerry James Marshall’s retrospective [at the Met Breuer this autumn], one of the most important painters of my generation,” Kass writes. “But until this re-evaluation includes women, incredibly important pieces of art history continue to be willfully, almost petulantly omitted.” (more…)
Robert Ryman, Untitled (1960), via Art Observed
Walking through the doors of Dia: Chelsea, one is immediately struck by a lack of lighting, with the halls and open floor plans of the building lit only by dull sunbeams streaming down from the open skylight and onto the works of painter and conceptualist Robert Ryman. The show is a notable fusion of history in both the immediate and the general for the artist, a point that makes considerable sense giving his subject matter, presented here in a span of works focusing primarily on his career in the 1960’s through the 1980’s. (more…)
MoMA has announced plans for the U.S.’s first major retrospective on the work of Francis Picabia, set to open in November of this year. The show is presented in collaboration with the Kunsthaus Zürich, which will show the exhibition this summer before it travels across the Atlantic. (more…)
The Financial Times profiles the founders of Sprüth Magers this week, as the gallery prepares to open its Los Angeles exhibition space in West Los Angeles. “Our gallery is a very traditional one,” says Monika Sprüth, discussing their focus on artist development over sales. “We think our job is to serve the artists. We do sometimes disturb one or other of our male colleagues. They don’t understand how it can work the way we are. They are irritated. Which is nice, to irritate them a little bit.” (more…)
The Met has announced a new logo in the run-up to the opening of its exhibition space in the former home of the Whitney Museum, part of an attempt to convey a more open, welcoming institution. “It’s the right direction,” Daniel Brodsky, the museum’s chairman, said. “It’s a changing institution; the world is changing around us, and I think it’s time for the Met to move forward.” (more…)
Artist Tania Bruguera will stage her work Referendum in Union Square this coming March, offering New Yorkers a public forum to voice their opinion on U.S. immigration policy. “It’s a very personal interaction,” says Sara Reisman, artistic director at the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation “She’s trying to gauge people’s opinions… she’ll probably do some advocating.” (more…)
Art Info takes a cursory look at the immigration process for artists applying to live and work in the United States, and the varying issues that U.S. immigration officials take into account when reading applications. “The problem is the interpretation of that regulation. The people who are actually looking are not in the arts industry,” notes BoBi Ahn of Warshaw Burstein, LLP. “So they might apply arbitrary standards.” (more…)
The recently completed Düsseldorf U-Bahn line is set to open this month, featuring intuitively designed installations and design concepts spearheaded by artists and completely devoid of advertisements. “Normally the construction part happens first and then the artists are commissioned. Here the architects, artists and engineers worked together from the beginning,” says artist Heike Klussmann. (more…)
Initial reports are circulating about a major sale of American Post-War expressionism, after Josh Baer broke news that Willem de Kooning’s Interchange and another work by Jackson Pollock sold to a Midwest Hedge Fund manager (assumed to be Chicago-based Citadel head Kenneth Griffin) in a private transaction for $500 million. (more…)
The Cabaret Voltaire, birthplace of Swiss Dada, is currently seeking financial support to the tune of $13.1 million to remain open and independent.” It would be good to transform the Cabaret Voltaire into a centre for artists to manage the place and give it a more international dimension,” says director Adrian Notz. (more…)
