A piece in the New York Times notes that a number of collectors who made millions in crypto and NFTs are now competing for traditional, physical artworks on the secondary market. “The art market is always looking for a new territory to expand into and the NFT world is like the perfect gateway drug,” says Natasha Degen, chairwoman of art market studies at the Fashion Institute of Technology. “Anyone involved in a market like NFTs that is so volatile and speculative would have an easy time transitioning to the art world where those same dynamics occur.” (more…)

Ai Weiwei has sparked outrage after posting a video likening vaccine mandates to authoritarianism. “For or against the vaccine should be individuals’ autonomous decision, made for themselves and according to their social interaction, so society does not have the right to make vaccine compulsory,” he says. “I had vaccines myself but I can completely identify myself with those who do not want to get vaccinated. If individuals are forced to be vaccinated through social pressure and public opinion, it will be a very dangerous social tendency.” (more…)

Tomás Saraceno gets a NYT profile this week, as he prepares to open a show of work at The Shed. “He’s not afraid of scale,” says close friend Olafur Eliasson told me. “Ten meters, 20 meters, 30 meters — it doesn’t matter. He could scale things up easily. The other thing was how to work together. As architects, there is a division of labor. As soon as you’re not good at something, you find someone who is and have him do it, asking when you don’t know how to solve it. An artist goes down into the hyperlocal. A great architect is able to take a helicopter view.” (more…)

Kimberly Drew has joined Pace Gallery as Associate Director. “I am thrilled by the opportunity to join Pace’s team,” she says. “Over the course of my career, I’ve always been driven by opportunities to work alongside artists and in support of bringing new audiences to the world of contemporary art. Pace is a space that is vast in its offerings and always adapting and innovating. I look forward to the many lessons I will learn during this next chapter.” (more…)

Damien Hirst has been accused of forgery by the English artist and writer Joe Machine, who claims the artist ripped off his own cherry blossom paintings. “I saw Hirst’s cherry blossom paintings and, for a moment, I thought I was looking at my own paintings,” Machine says. “I was doing my cherry blossom paintings years before his.”  (more…)

A piece in Vanity Fair reports on a recently uncovered ring centered around creating forged George Condo drawings.“George is a celebrated, world-famous artist, and it is unfortunate but unsurprising that an artist of his caliber would be the subject of attempts to benefit from his success in an illegitimate way,” says Cristopher Canizares, partner at Hauser & Wirth. (more…)

A study by the U.S. Treasury has ruled that further regulation around money laundering in the art world is not needed. “We have found that while certain aspects of the high-value art market are vulnerable to money laundering, it’s often the case that there are larger underlying issues at play, like the abuse of shell companies or the participation of complicit professionals, so we are tackling those first,” says senior overseeing official Scott Rembrandt. (more…)

Cecelia Alemani speaks with Art News this week, discussing her curatorial vision for the 2022 Venice Biennale. “I love the idea of overcoming the centrality of man and then becoming earth, becoming machine, becoming nature. These are certainly the leitmotifs of the show,” she says.  (more…)

Pace Gallery has merged with Kayne Griffin, and will open a flagship in Los Angeles. “Los Angeles has always been magnet for artists, and its position as a center for world-class contemporary art has been growing stronger,” says Pace president and chief executive Marc Glimcher. “For the past five years Maggie and Bill have been our de facto partners in LA. After some serious conversations, we decided to make that partnership official. Besides running our Los Angeles operation, Maggie and Bill will be an integral part of our global team as we continue to reimagine and reinvent Pace for the future.” (more…)

Artist Theaster Gates gives The Guardian a preview of his Serpentine Gallery Pavilion design, set to open this summer. “Coming out of Covid, I thought how nice it would be to have a place of quietude,” he says. “It’s a place for people to be with their thoughts and rest, a sacred chapel where you can sit and be reflective. It should give you the ability to touch your inside self.” (more…)

A group of artists in Berlin are protesting the use of the public Tempelhof Park as the site of private exhibitions. “The city should decide what happens there, and this really wasn’t a democratic decision,” says photographer Tobias Zielony. “I think the main question is: how did this two-year contract come into being?” (more…)

The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is launching an ambitious multivolume catalogue raisonné for its namesake artist, available online and free for all to access. “There is this kind of messiness to Rauschenberg’s career, and we didn’t want to artificially clean it up,” says Julie Blaut, senior director of curatorial affairs at the organization. (more…)

President Biden has reversed the prior rule on public art commissions for public buildings put in place by President Donald Trump, which had stipulated that only “historically significant Americans or events of American historical significance or illustrate the ideals upon which our Nation was founded,” could be considered. (more…)

A piece in the NYT notes the Uffizi Gallery’s new focus on contemporary art. “The Uffizi very rarely in the past had contemporary art exhibitions,” says director Eike Schmidt. “It was seen as intruding on these sacred halls.” (more…)

Frieze Los Angeles has cancelled a public sculpture show in Beverly Hills Park amid shipping delays and labor shortages caused by Covid-19. “We have determined that we do not have sufficient artworks to realize a full-scale public-sculpture installation,” fair spokesperson Belinda Bowring says. (more…)

Christie’s has an impressive Lucian Freud portrait of his former lover Janey Longman for its March sales in London, expected to fetch between £10 million–£15 million ($13.4 million–$20 million). “The dexterous handling of the paint sumptuously brings every detail of the sitter’s body into sharp focus,” Katharine Arnold, head of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s Europe, said in a statement. “The gentle framing of her pose within the composition seems to invite the viewer closer still, a witness to this moment of contemplation.” (more…)

Art Basel will delay the opening of its Hong Kong fair until May following a recent surge in Covid cases.  “We believe shifting the fair to May is the right decision given the current development of the pandemic and its impact on international travel restrictions,” says Adeline Ooi, Art Basel’s Director Asia. “By taking the decision early, our aim is to support our galleries in advance planning for their 2021 programs. We very much look forward to hosting our show in May next year and to welcoming gallerists, collectors, and art lovers back to Hong Kong at that time.” (more…)

Vito Schnabel has purchased the Chelsea exhibition space that he has been renting. “It’s an incredible space with amazing light. The artists love it and embrace it as well,” he says. “Chelsea has always been a special neighborhood for me, and I’m happy to be a part of its fabric.” (more…)

The Whitney has released a 63-artist list for its upcoming Biennial, which will open this April, under the title “Quiet as It’s Kept.” “The Whitney Biennial is an ongoing experiment, the result of a shared commitment to artists and the work they do,” curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards said in a statement. “While many of these underlying conditions are not new, their overlapping, intensity, and sheer ubiquity created a context in which past, present, and future folded into one another. We’ve organized the exhibition to reflect these precarious and improvised times. The Biennial primarily serves as a forum for artists, and the works that will be presented reflect their enigmas, the things that perplex them, the important questions they are asking.” (more…)

Charles Ray gets a profile in the NYT this week, as he prepares to open a new show at The Met. “The pace and rate at which Ray works are important,” says Hamza Walker, the director of the nonprofit art space LAXART in Los Angeles. “It’s perverse on the one hand; he could sit with something for 20 years.” Ray, he observes, “distills down what we think we know, and it somehow becomes resonant, and produces reflections that show there’s so much more here than you know.”

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A piece in the New York Times profiles Stuart E. Eizenstat, the diplomat and lawyer who has long advised on the process of restituting Nazi-looted art, and who will now take on his first court case seeking the return of an allegedly looted Camille Pissarro. “No self-respecting government, art dealer, private collector, museum or auction house should trade in or possess art stolen by the Nazis,” he says.

Read more at NYT

A Yves Tanguy work long thought destroyed during a raid by a fascist mob has been rediscovered and restored. She said: “We were able to do different types of imaging and analysis and demonstrate that it was the original work that had been put back together again,” says Professor Jennifer Mass, an American conservation scientist.

Read more at The Guardian

Artist Samara Golden gets the profile treatment in the New York Times this week as she opens a show of new work at Night Gallery in LA. “The piece speaks to the art history of Southern California because of its viscerality,” says Night Gallery founder Davida Nemeroff.

Read more at NYT

KAWS is launching an online exhibition in the video game Fortnite, as well as one at London’s Serpentine Gallery. “Being able to create works,” the artist says, “and the version that I’m viewing in Brooklyn is the version you could be viewing in India, I just started to get really obsessed with the opportunities within that.”

Read more at The Guardian