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

A Camille Pissarro work looted by the Nazis will head to US Supreme Court to hear a case over its ownership, as the descendants of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer sue for the painting’s return. “This has been three generations of the Cassirer family trying to take back what is theirs,” says attorney Stephen Zack of the US law firm Boies Schiller Flexner.

Read More at The Guardian

Employees at the Jewish Museum in New York have voted to unionize. “The Jewish Museum is aware that staff have petitioned for a union election,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The Museum greatly values its staff and will respectfully engage in any process that transpires.”

Read more at Art Newspaper

London’s Serpentine Galleries have formally removed the Sackler name from its North Gallery. The museum had faced criticism over its sluggishness to remove the name after fierce criticism and similar moves at other major institutions.

The director of the Uffizi in Florence has called on museums to take an active role in reconciling the “toxic” past actions of society. (more…)

A piece in the Art Newspaper looks at efforts to begin regulating NFTs alongside cryptocurrencies, and how much catch-up those governments will have to play. “Education is paramount to protect new entrants from falling prey to bad actors, and the online community can contribute to increasing the level of understanding around NFTs,” says Omri Bouton of the London-based media and technology law firm Sheridans. “The industry may also benefit from having standards to allow consumers to quickly identify trustworthy projects.” (more…)

After less than a year at the Parrish Museum, Kelly Taxter has left. “It was something she worked out with the board as being the right thing to do at this point in time,” says  Parrish board president Mary E. Frank. (more…)

Spain has granted protected status to a small work believed to be a Caravaggio original, The Guardian reports. “Elements such as the psychological depictions of the characters, the realism of the faces, the luminous force that illuminates the body of Christ, the interplay of the three characters and the communication it establishes with the viewer make this a work of great artistic interest,” the government said in a statement. (more…)

A piece in the Art Newspaper notes that two years after forming its union, MOCA employees are still negotiating their first contract with management. “I, along with many of my fellow coworkers in the union, felt very disrespected and undervalued by the proposal,” says Anna Marfleet, a member of the union organizing committee. “The fact that the museum spent six months stalling and delaying only to deliver a gravely insufficient proposal really shows how little the museum values the time and labor of its employees, and how unaccountable upper management is to the actual workers that make the museum run every day.” (more…)

The latest in the ongoing fight over the estate of Robert Indiana accuses Michael McKenzie of forgery and emotional abuse as well as lying under oath about evidence in his possession. “We’ve corroborated every single allegation of wrongdoing against Michael McKenzie,” says the lawyer Luke Nikas, partner at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. (more…)

A piece in the New Yorker this week notes the extensive push by a wide-ranging group of artists to convince The Met to remove the Sackler name from the museum’s iconic wing. “Honoring the Sackler name on the walls of the Met erodes the Met’s relationship with artists and the public,” read an open letter from a group that included Nan Goldin, Ai Weiwei, and Maurizio Cattelan. (more…)

French lawyer Claude Dumont-Beghi, who pursued Guy Wildenstein over alleged fraud charges, has herself been convicted of aggravated tax fraud and money laundering over $5.1 million kept in an anonymous account. Dumont-Beghi denies the accusations, and has partially challenged the conviction. (more…)

The White House has turned its regulatory attention towards the art world, calling out “built-in opacity, lack of stable and predictable pricing, and inherent cross-border transportability of goods sold, make the market optimal for illicit value transfer, sanctions evasion, and corruption,” in a recent report.  (more…)

The Desert X Biennial will return to Saudia Arabia for its second edition, Art Newspaper reports. “Following the success of the inaugural edition in 2020, Desert X AlUla is continuing in sustaining the artistic and natural heritage of the region by placing visionary contemporary works by Saudi and international artists amidst this extraordinary and majestic desert landscape,” says Nora Aldabal, arts and creative planning director at the Royal Commission for AlUla, the government body run on behalf of the Crown Prince. (more…)

Dealer Jeffrey Deitch will represent the estate of Rammellzee, the prolific graffiti artist, painter, philosopher, and musician.  “Rammellzee was not at all focused on the art world when we met or aware of how if functioned but was essentially just looking for a platform and an audience for his ideas. I decided to take Ramm under my wing, so to speak, and introduced him to some of the friends I was making downtown, like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Charlie Ahearn, Edit deAk, and Patti Astor. All saw he was brilliant and believed he was a fascinating artist who should be known and shown,” says his contemporary, musician Fab 5 Freddy. (more…)

A piece in Art Newspaper this week documents the string of Los Angeles galleries setting up shop in New York. “I think the move is giving us the chance to work more closely and be in more constant dialogue with the best institutions in the country,” says dealer François Ghebaly, who is opening a space in the city. “Selling art at this moment is not difficult, it’s more a question of who we want to sell to.” (more…)

Andy Dixon at Over The Influence, via Art Observed

Located just off the beachside drag of Ocean Drive, amid the sandy hills of Miami Beach and the Atlantic Ocean, Untitled Art Fair has once again raised its posts and opened its doors for its annual show during Miami Art Week. Place amid meandering beachgoers and booming soundsystems, as well as the annual throng of Art Basel Miami Beach visitors, the fair has one of the more unique positions in a week full of unique offerings, one that balances some of the most familiar sights of the city with the impressive work on view inside.

Untitled Art Fair, via Art Observed

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