A 17th century painting in the holdings of the Allentown Art Museum has been confirmed as the work of Rembrandt. “We’re very thrilled and excited,” says Elaine Mehalakes, vice president of curatorial affairs at the institution. “The painting has this incredible glow to it now that it just didn’t have before. You can really connect with the portrait in the way I think the artist meant you to.” (more…)

The High Line’s 2020 season has been announced, featuring work by Guillermo Galindo, David Horvitz and more, united under the title The Musical Brain. “Usually when you think of a sound or music show, you don’t necessarily visualize objects or sculptures,” curator Cecelia Alemani says. “But we made an effort to have a physical presence because we realized that, if you were to do like a just a sound show on the High Line, the audience would miss half of it because it’s already so loud. So we invited artists to really think of sculptural embodiments of sound and music.” (more…)

The Kunsthalle Vienna is currently experimenting with a collective structure, with shared directorial and curatorial authority split between Natasa Ilic, Ivet Curlin and Sabina Sabolovic. “When you have been working as a collective for 20 years, discussion and exchange is really the basis of your work method,” the trio say. “We are tying to demystify curatorial and managerial work and think about it in more democratic terms. Ours is a progressive model.” (more…)

Garage Magazine’s new cover features an unlikely collaboration between Maurizio Cattelan and Kendall Jenner, with the Italian artist reprising his work Stephanie (2003) with Jenner in place of Stephanie Seymour.  “In retrospect, the banana episode seems like a way to think about everything from fake news to viral fame to institutional distrust to wealth inequality,” says editor-in-chief, Mark Guiducci. “In the way that Jeff Koons was the artist of the glittery neon aughts, Maurizio Cattelan is the artist of our dystopian era. Like it or not.” (more…)

SCMP has a piece on Kit Bencharongkul, the son of Thai business tycoon Boonchai Bencharongkul, who runs his father’s Museum of Contemoprary Art in Bangkok, and is pushing to keep the museum’s cutting-edge focus.  (more…)

New York Magazine profiles the efforts to construct Destination Crenshaw, a new social and arts site akin to New York’s High Line, which many see as a way to continue the healing and development of a long-neglected community. “It’s wide enough to be a real place for gathering, sitting, and hanging out,” says architect Zena Howard. “There are places to sit, stop, and look down at the events happening below. We even designed it so you could bring back the Sundays with the lowriders and have a show.” (more…)

Jasmine Wahi, founder and co-director of Project for Empty Space in Newark, New Jersey, has been named the Holly Block Social Justice Curator at the Bronx Museum. “A city like Newark that has been predominantly a city of color and outside the mainstream has a stigma,” she says. “I feel it gives me a bit of insight into working in the Bronx, which is also a city mainly made up of people of color from all different backgrounds. That is the appeal for me, and that is also what gives me the experience with people who are beyond just the art world. I’m really hoping to make an impact at a wider community level.” (more…)

The Aspen Art Museum will close its Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room show 11 weeks early due to an unresolved building code violation.  “The AAM and the City of Aspen have reviewed the museum’s [Kusama] installation to ensure its compliance with municipal building codes,” the museum says. “It is the determination of both parties that fulfilling the artwork’s need for natural light and appropriate space and code requirements cannot be achieved equitably within the museum’s layout at this time.” (more…)

LA Times critic Christopher Knight has won the $50,000 Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation’s lifetime achievement award.  “He was always the one who chose the important things and wrote in detail and beautifully,” says Executive Director Susan C. Larsen. “The most outstanding thing about his career, that lifts him and distinguishes him across the country, is his fearlessness. He’s not afraid to tackle the issues everyone talks about.” (more…)

Bloomberg reports that David Geffen was the buyer of David Hockney‘s The Splash at Sotheby’s last week. “Everyone was thinking about Brexit,” says gallerist and former auctioneer Brett Gorvy. “No one wanted to consign unless there was a financial situation that guaranteed security.” (more…)

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The Cooper Hewitt’s ouster of director Caroline Baumann is profiled in the NYT this week, as some point to controversy behind her wedding and a perceived conflict of interest in her work with a wedding dress designer. “I know the circumstances of the investigation that led to Caroline’s dismissal and I must say I am appalled that this was its conclusion,” says philanthropist and Cooper Hewitt Board Secretary Judy Francis Zankel. “I have been working with her long enough to know without a doubt that she has been unfairly accused and unjustly judged.” (more…)

Artist Dawoud Bey gets a profile in The Guardian this week, as he opens a retrospective at SFMoMA. “What I hope to create is work that makes it apparent that black people exist not only in a social world,” Beys says at the press preview for the SF Moma opening, “but they also have rich interior lives as human beings.” (more…)

Artist Pyotr Pavlensky is once again facing possible imprisonment over his recent stunt leaking a politician’s sex tape. “[Candidate Benjamin Griveaux] despises his constituents,” the artist says in a statement. “He was the only candidate to use his family to promote a political image. He told a big lie; he began his campaign with a big lie.” (more…)

The LA Times has a piece this week on the closure of the Marciano Foundation, noting issues with unionizing labor alongside organizational breakdowns and a lack of internal structure. “[Maurice Marciano] didn’t really know how expensive it is to run his own private museum,” says an unnamed source. “He did it in a very generous, very first-class generous way.” (more…)

Clément Chéroux, senior curator of the photography center at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, is heading to MoMA’s to serve as the museum’s chief curator of photography. “It was a pleasure to work at SFMOMA for three years and to have the support of a fantastic Bay Area photo community,” Chéroux said in a statement. “I am very excited to be part of the energy of the new MoMA and to work with the team and collection to develop great projects.” (more…)

Billionaire Mark Pincus, founder of online gaming firm Zynga, has pledged $3 million to James Turrell’s Roden Crater project. “The project itself feels, to me, like modern-day pyramids,” he says. “The ambition and scale and scope of it is something that has the potential to be something that people, many generations from now, will be able to experience and get something amazing from—maybe something beyond what we can imagine today.” (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper asks why so many private museums are already shuttering. “It’s more fun building a museum and a collection and opening it than running it,” says Adrian Ellis, the founding director of AEA Consulting. (more…)

Oil and ranching heiress Anne Marion, founder of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico has passed away at the age of 81. “Anne Marion was one of the most generous, admirable, and inspirational people I have ever known,” says Marla Price, director of the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, where Marion was an active benefactor. “Her great leadership and generosity to the museum has continued until the present, and her loss is heartbreaking for everyone involved with the Modern.” (more…)

Russian provocateur and artist Pyotr Pavlensky, whose prior stunts involved setting the doors of a Russian security organization aflame, has taken reportedly taken responsibility for interfering in the Parisian mayoral elections, leaking compromising sexually graphic videos of candidate Benjamin Griveaux online. “He is someone who is always playing up family values, who says he wants to be the mayor of families and always cites as examples his wife and children. But he does the opposite,” Pavlensky is quoted. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama will stage another major show of her Infinity Rooms at the Tate Modern this May, the museum has announced.  The show will feature two such works as well as documentation of early performance pieces by the artist.  (more…)

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Artist Amoako Boafo criticizes Stefan Simchowitz over the collector’s attempt at flipping one of his works at auction tonight at Phillips. “Now he wants to make profit from it,” he says. “It’s only sad. The painting is so recent.” (more…)

A piece in the Art Newspaper this week documents a series of court cases around gallery-artist splits, noting the various ways and legal issues around the break of a business relationship in the art world. (more…)