The Guardian’s running series of highlights of 21st Century arts features Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors, calling it the best artwork of the 21st Century so far.  “It has a special place in my heart, but it was such a feelgood piece that I had to make some really dark shit afterwards,” he says of his work. “No artist has a favorite piece. Maybe you can pick one when you’re really old – but it’s something I’m super proud of. It took on a life of its own.” (more…)

A major Old Master forgery scandal is boiling over after painter Lino Frongia, 61, was arrested by the Carabinieri in northern Italy. The scandal over allegedly forged works sold by dealer Giuliano Ruffini, has embroiled some of the world’s most prominent museums. (more…)

Artist Niki de Saint Phalle will be the subject of a major MoMA PS1 retrospective, Art News reports. “She’s one of the most famous female artists of the 20th-century, but she’s so misunderstood and, in some ways, under-recognized,” curator Ruba Katrib says. (more…)

Luhring Augustine is the latest gallery to announce plans for an exhibition space in TriBeCa, opening a space at 17 White Street this fall. “We have long been looking for a space in Tribeca where we could join the growing community of notable galleries, both older and younger, in providing a fresh and exciting new context that is rejuvenating the contemporary art scene in New York City,” co-founders Lawrence Luhring and Roland Augustine said in a statement. (more…)

Phillips‘s Edward Dolman is interviewed in Art News this week, as the auction house gears up for the fall season. “Collectors have changed,” he says. “They want to be there at the beginning when an artist emerges. If it’s not working for them, they’ll sell. Their own tastes will change but they’ll take a profit if there’s a profit.” (more…)

Untitled Miami has unveiled its exhibitor list for its 2019 edition, with 126 exhibitors included for its eight edition. (more…)

The Guardian has tapped the Tate Modern as one of the great buildings of the early 21st Century, profiling how the conversion of the Bankside Power Station has changed the face of London. “It is totally unimaginable now,” says architect Jacques Herzog, “but this was a huge chunk of the city that was completely excluded from public life, overgrown and set back behind high walls. It felt like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.” (more…)

Hilton Als pens a piece on photographer Roy DeCarava this week in The New Yorker, reflecting on the development of his craft and his impact on the world of African-American art. “I’m not sure if the immediacy of photography—the ability to record one’s impressions of the world relatively quickly—contributed to DeCarava’s love of the medium,” he writes, “but as a young black man he knew something about how ephemeral life could be, and about the forces around him that didn’t want him to exist at all.” (more…)

Scientists at MIT have developed a black even darker than Vantablack, previously thought to be the darkest color ever made. “Any object covered with this CNT material loses all its plasticity and appears entirely flat, abbreviated/reduced to a black silhouette,” says Diemut Strebe, the artist who collaborated on the project. (more…)

Art Newspaper profiles ProjectArt, as the Harlem-based arts education program looks to expand beyond New York. “In terms of less populated communities, we’ll get there too,” says director Diana Buckley Muchmore. “Eventually, we’ll be in all the cities that have libraries.” (more…)

Frieze London will install its first augmented reality work this fall in Regent’s Park, The Guardian reports, a piece by Korean artist Koo Jong A. “No shipping, no installation costs,” says Frieze director, Victoria Siddall. “It is interesting for us to be able to test the boundaries of what sculpture can be.” (more…)

William Kentridge and Mona Hatoum have won this year’s Praemium Imperiale awards, among the largest cash prizes for art in the world. Other 2019 Praemium Imperiale laureates include architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, musician Anne-Sophie Mutter, and actor Bando Tamasaburo V. (more…)

Artist Charles Ray will curate a show of  Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculptures alongside his own works at the Hill Art Foundation this fall.  “I’m interested in dialogues as a way to show the influence of work,” collector J. Tomilson Hill says. “I want to create these dialogues that use the art of today to look back but also use the art of the past to inform the art of today.” (more…)

Artist Lari Pittman gets a profile in the LA Times, as he prepares for his museum retrospective at the Hammer Museum.  “The language prompts the imagery,” he says of his work. “I’ve never separated language from visual culture.” (more…)

Artist Kathleen Ryan gets a profile in NYT this week, as she prepares for a show of new works at Art Basel Miami Beach. “They’re not just opulent, there’s an inherent sense of decline built into them,” she says, “which is also something that’s happening in the world: The economy is inflating, but so is wealth inequality, all at the expense of the environment.”  (more…)

A Daniel Buren painting has been damaged severely after a man slashed the work at Centre Pompidou. Experts are now considering how they should go about restoring the work. (more…)

A Sandro Botticelli portrait will test the Old Masters market this fall at Frieze Masters, with an asking price around $30 million. “That’s an intelligent range,” says dealer Carlo Orsi. (more…)

The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow will take over running Russia’s National Center for Contemporary Arts, which includes nine branches across the country. “We are in the process of understanding the opportunities, which are huge, of working across our country’s considerable expanse,” says director Marina Loshak. (more…)

The National Art Gallery of the Bahamas in Nassau is spearheading recovery efforts in the country after last week’s brutal hurricane. “We’re dealing with people first,” says executive director Amanda Coulson. “The whole country is traumatized.” (more…)

Arts Council England has published details of 46 objects and collections worth £58.6m that will go to UK museums and galleries in lieu of tax, among them works by Damien Hirst and a portrait by Rubens. “It is also heartening to see that, in line with last year, around 86% of the total tax settled has been for items allocated outside London,” says ACE Chair Nicholas Serrota. (more…)

The Oakland Museum of California is launching an $85 million capital campaign for renovations to its building. “We are as close to a town square as Oakland has,” says Lori Fogarty, the director and chief executive of the Oakland Museum of California. “We started with the framework that the museum was going to contribute to Oakland becoming a more equitable and empathetic city.”  (more…)

Art News asked visitors at Pace Gallery’s opening last week about the “craziest experience” they’d had at an art opening. “I had a friend in Vienna who lost a bet and he had to take his pants off and order a drink at the bar,” says artist Christian Rosa. (more…)

Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat golden toilet has been stolen from its installation at Blenheim Palace. “We are shocked and saddened by this news and are working with the Police to restore the artwork to the exhibition as soon as possible,” says Edward Spencer-Churchill, the founder of the Blenheim Art Foundation. (more…)

The Manchester Art Gallery is taking an active role in improving gender imbalances in its collection, The Guardian reports, acquiring a series of works by women in an attempt to even out representation among its holdings. “They will, without doubt, extend the discourse around representation and identity through their integration into the permanent collection,” says Caroline Douglas, the director of Contemporary Art Society, who donated works to the collection. (more…)