Paul Gauguin’s Nafea Faa Ipoipo (When will you Marry?) seems to have had its massive $300 million price tag confirmed by the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, which has currently taken the work on loan for a new exhibition.  “Nafea Faa Ipoipo was recently purchased by the Qatar Museums Authority from the Swiss collection of Rudolf Staechelin for more than $300m,” reads text released by the museum, further supporting its new place as the world’s most expensive piece of art. (more…)

Anish Kapoor has opened his new installation of works at Versailles to controversy this week, after the artist noted his new work Dirty Corner, as a reference to the sexual organs of Queen Marie Antoinette as she rose to power.  “I know it is a composition, but let’s say that this is ruining the perspective that visitors of the castle may have,” says retired professor Pierre Dhainaut. (more…)

MoMA has acquired several hundred photographs by artist August Sander from his series “People of the Twentieth Century,” the New York Times reports.  “His ambition is nothing less than to use photography to describe the people of the 20th century,” says Sarah Hermanson Meister, a MoMA photography curator.  “He is doing this through the German people, but it’s not limited in its intention to that.” (more…)

A former employee of sculptor Dale Chihuly has been accused of stealing over $3 million in works from the artist’s Tacoma, Washington warehouse.  The accused assistant, Christopher Kaul, had been dealing with drug addiction, and began stealing works after leaving rehab.  “We’ve seen this story before — an employee is hooked on drugs and steals from his boss,” said Prosecutor Mark Lindquist. “The twist here is the boss is a world famous artist.” (more…)

Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Cyber Iconic Man sculpture, an inverted and gorily wounded subject dripping blood, is set to be installed at Sheffield Cathedral’s Chapel of the Holy Spirit this summer.  “The congregation is up for it,” says The Very Reverend Peter Bradley, Dean of the Cathedral. (more…)

Maja Hoffmann, founder of the LUMA Foundation, a board member at Palais de Tokyo and Fotomuseum Winterthur, and a trustee at the Tate, has been named board chair at the Swiss Institute.  “Swiss Institute has a unique voice with a long tradition of championing innovative perspectives in contemporary art,” she said in a statement accepting the position. (more…)

Crystal Bridges Art Museum in Arkansas is soon to announce a major series of acquisitions filling major holes in its collection of American art, the New York Times reports.  Pieces recently acquired include Jasper Johns’s Flag, which was purchased last fall for $36 million, the record-setting Georgia O’Keefe work Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1, as well as four works by Louise Bourgeois, estimated at a combined $35 million to $40 million.  “Bourgeois is really important to 20th century art and yet she has not received the entire due that she deserves,” says Margaret C. Conrads, museum director of curatorial affairs. (more…)

Following widespread protests, the Frick is expected to cancel a planned expansion that would have eliminated a rare piece of landscape architecture.  “It just became clear to us that it wasn’t going to work,” says an anonymous museum official.  “It won’t be the best plan, but we will go back and prioritize.  There was just a number of voices out there and we heard them.” (more…)

Bloomberg profiles a pair of former Sotheby’s employees, Marlies Verhoeven and Daisy Peat, who are launching a start-up “offering uniquely privileged access to every aspect of the art world.”  The company, called The Cultivist, already boasts Marina Abramovic and Rashid Johnson as founding members, and includes an impressive list of museum memberships and VIP access to major art events as part of its annual $2,500 fee.  Offering counterpoint, the publication notes the dissonance between providing “access” and catering to collectors, a distinction that overshadows much of the “privilege” the art world is so often critiqued for. (more…)

Iranian artist Atena Farghadani has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for her works depicting national politicians as monkeys and goats as protest over plans to outlaw voluntary sterilisation and restrict access to contraception.  “Atena Farghadani has effectively been punished for her cartoons with a sentence that is itself a gross caricature of justice,” says Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, deputy director for  Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa. (more…)

The Art Loss Register, widely considered the authoritative body on looted and missing artworks, is currently involved in a trio of cases involving disputes on works’ provenance claimed by the register to be authentic which were actually contested.  “It’s incredibly frustrating because it doesn’t matter what you do,” says one anonymous figure affected by the cases. “You do everything you can to check a painting is clean, and it’s useless. How can you protect yourself? You can’t.” (more…)

Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh has stated his fears that more art is missing from the Boston Public Library collection following the disappearance of two prints valued at $600,000.  “I think the lack of security with these two prints and (more) … really, really concerns me greatly that there’s other things missing,” Walsh said in an appearance on Boston Herald Radio. (more…)

Chicago artist Theaster Gates is planning his first public installation work in the UK, a “sound sanctuary” that will look to be installed in a disused church in central Bristol.  “We are looking at a number of different sites of historical importance, but Theaster is particularly interested in sound,” says Claire Doherty, the director of Situations, a UK non-profit sponsoring the project. “We need to get scheduled monument consent [to use the church], so it may change.”  (more…)

Established artists and classic masterworks are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of eager art flippers, Bloomberg reports, pointing in particular to a Francis Picabia that saw a massive 220% gain in price in less than six months.  “Because art is seen as an asset class, the more rapid turnover is considered encouraging. There’s a whole new generation of collectors who are playing the art market,” says Frances Beatty, VP at Richard L. Feigen & Co. (more…)

Last night’s Party in the Garden at MoMA was marked by vocal protests from museum staff, following museum proposals to reduce health care coverage during ongoing contract negotiations.  “A lot of us here are professionals,” says Luke Baker, an architecture and design curatorial assistant. “We’ve got master’s degrees. You know, we’re here for the long haul. We really want to make sure that working here, and giving as much as we give to the museum, that this is a tenable position for us and that we’re able to stay here.” (more…)

Richard Serra was awarded last night with The Insignia of Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, the highest honor in France, recognizing the artist’s long history of work in the nation, and his contributions to the development of contemporary art both in France and abroad.   (more…)

Jasper Johns’s Foundation for Contemporary Arts has opened a new project space, Other Room, next to its Meatpacking District Offices, providing space for curated shows focused on young and emerging artists.  “We’re not really set up to be a gallery—we have regular office hours except for the occasional Saturday—but the idea was to do something artist-centric,” says executive director Stacy Stark. (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles the recently closed Off Biennale Budapest, a response to the right-leaning Hungarian Government’s interference in the selection and promotion of the city’s arts institutions.  “Cultural institutions are losing their autonomous position,” warns Tijana Stepanović, one of the event’s lead curators. (more…)

The Tate is receiving an additional £6 million in funding from the British Government this year, earmarked to help fund the operations at the Tate Modern.  “Late last year the government in principle committed to an uplift in grant-in-aid to support the running of the new Tate Modern,” a Museum spokesman confirms. (more…)

The case surrounding the theft of works from Picasso descendent Catherine Hutin-Blay has taken a new turn, as Art Newspaper reports that more than 60 works could be missing from Hutin-Blay’s Gennevilliers storage facility.  “One thing is for sure,” her lawyer, Anne-Sophie Nardon says, “this case is extremely serious and much bigger that we first thought.” (more…)

Al Jazeera looks at the massive Savitsky collection in Uzbekistan, where tens of thousands of Russian avant-garde masterpieces were salvaged and put on display by artist and founder Igor Savitsy following their censorship in their home country, including long forgotten works by Kandinsky, Chagall, and more.  “Without him, they would have been gone without a trace,” says Marinika Babanazarova, the current director of the Nukus Art Museum where his collection lies.  “These days, he is an authority figure, genius, but at the time they saw him as a weirdo, an absolute nutcase.” (more…)

The retrospective of Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch’s work, previously pulled from Mexico City’ s Museo Jumex this past year, has found a new home at Palermo’s Museo Zac.  “Everybody who knows me, knows that I am an animal protector,” says Nitsch, responding to accusations of animal cruelty that some feel were responsible for closing the show.  “From my point of view, factory farming is the biggest crime in our society.”   (more…)

The WSJ looks at the recent focus on algorithms as hot items on the art market, as collectors purchase classic codes and objects emblazoned with famous code.  “It is a whole new dimension we are trying to grapple with,” says Cooper Hewitt curatorial director Cara McCarty. “The art term I keep hearing is code.” (more…)

Marina Picasso is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as she prepares to sell off an extensive collection of her grandfather’s ceramics and paintings, a gesture she feels will help to heal a painful childhood. “Being Picasso’s granddaughter was very hard. I don’t snub the inheritance, not at all, I just want a lighter way to live and to be able to devote myself to my humanitarian work,” she says. “There is absolutely no hatred, no bitterness, no vengeance on my part.”  (more…)