The New York Times spotlights one of Mike Kelley’s final projects, re-creation of the artist’s childhood home titled Mobile Homestead, which has become a project space and “unofficial town hall” since it was installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
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The Louvre is in the midst of chaos after a much anticipated Vermeer exhibition opened to faulty ticketing systems and threats of strike by security.  “We should be happy to see that crowds can also show up for an Old Masters exhibition, and not just for contemporary shows,” a museum spokesperson said. (more…)

A recent panel discussion with Richard Gray Gallery director Andrew Fabricant featured some unexpected information on the current health of the market, including the note that many of the recent auction sales have been propped up by only two Asian buyers.  “There are two Asian buyers who have basically saved these auctions,” he says. “One is Chinese and one is Japanese.” (more…)

The Batcave, a former power station turned punk squat in Gowanus, is set to be converted to a workshop and exhibition space for the neighborhood’s artists, designed by Herzog de Meuron.  “The building has long been a destination for artists, and we wanted to keep it that way,” Katie Dixon, executive director of Powerhouse Environmental Arts Foundation, which is leading the project. (more…)

Documenta 14 will feature Works From Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) on view in the German city of Kassel, shown alongside works for the exhibition at the Fridericianum in Kassel.    “The EMST building and the museum’s collection are made public, though not simultaneously and not in the same space, in keeping with the conditions of displacement that both EMST and Documenta 14 currently work within,” a statement from Documenta says. (more…)

Christie’s will close one of its South Kensington location in London and scale back operations in Amsterdam, carrying layoffs of around 250 people.  “The art market is fast-evolving,” company CEO Guillaume Cerutti says. “We have been looking at the globalization of the market in the last decade and need to be present and strong where the clients are.” (more…)

French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault is set to open a new museum in Paris, aiming to transform the former Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires (close to his already operating Fondation Louis Vuitton museum) into a center for arts and crafts exhibitions.   The space will be named La Maison LVMH/Arts, Talents, Patrimoine, and will be designed by Frank Gehry. (more…)

Swiss hotelier Urs Schwarzenbach’s Hotel Dolder Grand has been raided for unpaid taxes on a range of works including pieces by Miró, Botero, and Dubuffet, all of which were confiscated by authorities.  Schwarzenbach has been accused of dodging taxes on works before, and authorities are now targeting his home offices in pursuit of other works.   (more…)

Performa 17 has announced its first round of commissions for its fall performance biennial, including pieces by Yto Barrada, William Kentridge, Julie Mehretu and Wangechi Mutu, among others.  This year’s edition will focus on the centennial birthday of Dada  “Performa provides an extraordinary platform for showing the important role of art in society,” says founder and director RoseLee Goldberg. “Through live performance we touch people directly, change their minds, and introduce them viscerally to the complicated emotional and aesthetic expressions of artists responding to the world that we inhabit.” (more…)

Art News has a piece this week on art world groups’ continued engagement and activism against Ivanka Trump, who has long collected contemporary works and often poses alongside new works after buying them.  “They were like, ‘Oh my god, I don’t want to be represented like this,’” curator Alison Gingeras saidm, referring to artists horrified at how Trump represented their work. (more…)

The Washington Post has a piece on the length preparations involved in Yayoi Kusama’s landmark exhibition at the Hirshhorn in Washington, D.C., including plans for building the exacting Infinity Room spaces and planning how to control the anticipated throngs of visitors.  “The Kusama show is the culmination of two years of hard work that has not been visible,” says director Melissa Chiu. (more…)

Okwui Enwezor is currently dealing with an “infiltration” of Munich’s Haus der Kunst by a group of Scientologists, leaked documents from the institution allege.   The museum is currently under investigation after one employee was fired for placing “psychological pressure” on fellow workers, with suspicious that there are more Scientology members currently working at the institution.   (more…)

Nashville collector Spencer Hays, who had pledged his entire collection of works to Paris’s Musée D’Orsay, has passed away.  Hay’s collection features over 600 works and is worth an estimated $381 million including works Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse and others. (more…)

The Telegraph examines last week’s Impressionist and Modern Sales, noting the pay-off in continued attention to the Asian market by both auction houses, and the increased number of guarantees used to keep works moving and prices strong.   (more…)

The Financial Times has a piece on the recently released TEFAF Markets report, the first under economist Rachel Pownall after Clare McAndrew left the organization for Art Basel.  Pownall has embraced a new strategy in this year, downplaying the number of galleries and focusing on narrow fields of information, with “the outcome that the industry estimates are smaller, yet we consider this to be more representative of the art and antiques market globally.” (more…)

Artist Adrián Villar Rojas will be the next artist invited to realize The Met’s annual rooftop sculpture commission, bringing around 20 works drawing on objects from the museum’s collection.  “My assumption is they expected me to sort of activate the museum,” he says. “One of the first requests I made was I wanted to meet everybody.” (more…)

Despite a low earnings figure posted during last week’s call to investors, Sotheby’s stock has jumped 20% in the last week, Art Market Monitor reports.  “Since the beginning of the current art market boom in 2004, BID has never sustained $50 as a price,” Marion Maneker writes.  “So the most important question surrounding these earnings is whether the stock price is sustainable and what happens to Sotheby’s shares when the stock is concentrated among institutional, activist and strategic owners.” (more…)

Jenny Holzer has been invited to exhibit in Blenheim Palace, the 18th Century structure in Oxfordshire, UK, and will bring a new series of text works to the space.  “My first visit to Blenheim Palace left me with too many ideas, on the complex past and its relevance to this knife-edge present,” Holzer said. (more…)

Catherine Opie is profiled in the New Yorker this week, as she reflects on some of her most powerful and controversial images, and the shared concepts of each of her diverse bodies of work.  “There’s a certain kind of equality I’m trying to create, which is what I believe American democracy is about,” she says. “If I were to pass judgment on, say, football players—that they were the asshole kids who used to beat me up in high school—that’s not really looking.” (more…)

Tony Cragg is featured in The Guardian this week, as the artist installs a show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and reflects on his life in the UK.  “This is what philosophers like Heidegger talk about,” he says.  “Everything is material. But the material is so complicated. We’ve no idea what absolute reality looks like. I find that sublime and uplifting. It has a spiritual quality. I’m most interested in the emotional qualities of things. Every emotion has a material basis – run by hormones and nerves. But isn’t that magnificent?” (more…)

Declassified UK government papers reveal extensive campaigning by former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher to bring the Thyssen collection to Britain, the Art Newspaper reports.  The article documents the extensive discussions and negotiations between the UK and Baron Heini Thyssen-Bornemisza before the works ultimately went to Spain. (more…)

A group is preparing to open a an 110,000-square-foot art shipping facility, where works can be stored tax-free, in Harlem, the WSJ reports.  A former parking lot will be transformed into Arcis, a space run by Tom Sapienza and Kevin Lay.  (more…)

A group of artists including Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu, have pooled their money and purchased the birthplace and childhood home of Nina Simone in Tryon, North Carolina.  “It wasn’t long after the election that this all began to happen, and I was desperate like a lot of people to be engaged, and this felt like exactly the right way,” says Johnson.  “My feeling when I learned that this house existed was just an incredible urgency to make sure it didn’t go away.” (more…)

New York publication and exhibition space OSMOS will host a wake for artist Martin Kippenberger this upcoming week, commemorating twenty years since the artist died at the age of 44, and opening an exhibition dedicated to the artist.  “There will of course be the consumption of alcohol,” says founding director and publisher, Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, “I’ve personally never hosted a wake.” (more…)