Marina Abramovic is partnering with a group of filmmakers, including Alejandro González Iñárritu and Roman Polanski, to realize a series of short films focused around the death of opera singer Maria Callas.  The work is premised on the idea that Callas died of a broken heart, with Abramovic recreating the deaths of famous characters the singer played.  “It’s a very private subject, a woman dying for love,” Abramovic said. (more…)

A group of Columbia students are protesting the installation of a Henry Moore sculpture on the campus grounds, alleging that the work does not gel with the institution’s neoclassical architecture.  “I just don’t think this is the right place for it,” says one student. “It interrupts the architectural harmony.” (more…)

Oliver Barker and Mario Tavella have been named the new co-chairs of Sotheby’s Europe, following a string of high-profile departures in the past weeks for the auction house.   (more…)

The Valsuani foundry, known for rolling out bronze editions of Edgar Degas sculptures despite the artist’s well-documented distaste for the metal, has been ordered closed by a French court.  “Although the Valsuani foundry is unfortunately closing,” says representing lawyer Eric Buikema, “my client, the Degas Sculpture Project, remains viable and active in placing the Degas bronzes with appropriate collectors and in organizing museum exhibitions.” (more…)

The massive leak of papers uncovering the role of various parties in the creation and use of Panamanian shell companies this week prominently features collector Dmitriy Rybolovlev, particularly his bitter divorce from his wife, and his alleged use of Panamanian companies to withhold artworks and other property from her during court proceedings.  “The closer in proximity to a divorce when these people take these kinds of steps, the more likely these assets will eventually be set aside for marital fraud,” says Sanford K. Ain, a Washington D.C.-based divorce attorney. (more…)

Manifesta 11 has unveiled further details about the upcoming exhibition this summer in Zurich, including an expanded artist list, and a series of collaborations between artists and other laborers, including a project between Maurizio Cattelan and a Paralympic athlete, or French author Michelle Houllebecq, who will treat visitors in to a health evaluation in conjunction with a trained physician. (more…)

A Mark Rothko will hit the auction block at Christie’s this May in New York, with an estimated sales price set at upwards of $40 million.  The work is from one of the artist’s first exhibitions in Europe at Whitechapel Gallery.  “It was a seminal exhibition positioning Rothko as a leading figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement,” said Brett Gorvy, international head of Christie’s contemporary art. “The effect of these exhibitions in Europe was very important to his career.” (more…)

Ragnar Kjartansson is profiled in The New Yorker this week, as he reflects on his career, and on the evolution of his work.  “I don’t believe in the truth of art,” he says. “As my mother says, ‘Let’s not destroy a good story with the truth.’” (more…)

During one of the worst recessions in U.S. history, the nation’s museums spent almost $5 billion in expansions and new building projects, The Art Newspaper reports, noting that these investments may cause future financial problems for institutions spending capital on buildings that may be unsustainable.  “There is a tipping point where, instead of the building being a resource, it becomes something that requires resources,” says Mary Ceruti, the director of New York’s SculptureCenter. (more…)

Erwin Wurm and Brigette Kowanz will represent Austria at the 2017 Venice Biennale.  Wurm previously was tapped for the 2011 Austrian Pavilion, where he installed Narrow House, a quite narrow cottage within the space.   (more…)

Adam McEwen, Harvest (Installation View), via Art Observed

Embarking on winding pathways through the landscape of modernity, Adam McEwen’s work frequently dwells on the structures and representations of cognition, discovery and intellectual unraveling, mixing consumer objects, banal materials and re-inscriptions of symbolic systems to create interconnected bodies of work that are as mysteriously compelling as they are varied. (more…)

Robert Mapplethorpe is the subject of a profile in the NYT this week, as Holland Carter charts the artist’s doubleheader retrospective at both the J. Paul Getty Museum and LACMA.  “Mapplethorpe had his own ideas of what makes art valuable. One was its role as witness,” he writes.  “‘Art is an accurate statement of the time in which it is made,’ [Mapplethorpe] said. And the Los Angeles survey is most persuasive when seen in that light…as a record of a radical personal and cultural history that retains some hint of what once made it provocative.” (more…)

Philanthropist and Tate trustee Elisabeth Murdoch has announced a £100,000 annual award to a mid-career, female U.K. artist this week. Phyllida Barlow will serve on the selection committee  “Women artists in mid-career are still woefully under-represented in the art world and this award aims to raise their profile,” Murdoch said in a statement.

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Artists Elmgreen and Dragset will erect an enigmatic public sculpture at Rockefeller Center, a four and a half ton swimming pool turned on its side in a reference to Vincent Van Gogh’s severed ear.  “Nobody really knows how that story came about, if it’s true, if it’s proven,” says Ingar Dragset. “Maybe Gauguin and Van Gogh invented the story together? It’s a fascinating thing.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper’s annual account of museum attendance figures has yet again placed the Louvre at the top of the most attended museum list, but has a surprise with National Palace Museum in Taipei’s Chen Cheng-po retrospective seeing the highest single exhibition attendance at 12,000 visitors a day. (more…)

The New Yorker has an interesting profile on David Wojnarowicz this week, as writer Rebecca Mead visits his personal archives with writer Olivia Laing, whose recent book chronicles loneliness and the lives of artists in New York,  “So much of my book is about gender, and frustrations of gender, and that desire to be an anonymous person in a city in a way that I think you only can if you are a man—and a woman never is, because a woman is always on some level a desirable or non-desirable sexual object,” Laing says. (more…)

The Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas is expanding to a now defunct Kraft cheese plant for additional space to show contemporary art.  “This project is going to be huge for the younger generation, the millennials,” says Tom Walton nephew of the museum’s founder, Alice L. Walton. (more…)

Joe Bradley is profiled in the New York Times this week, as the artist prepares to open his first show of new paintings with Gagosian Gallery in New York.  “Oil paint has so much life. It really behaves like it wants to behave,” he says. “You’ll go into a painting with an idea of what you want to do, and 40 seconds later your plan has been upended. You always have to deal with these little skirmishes on the canvases.” (more…)

Sarah Meyohas, the artist who recently bought and sold stocks in real-time at 303 Gallery, has reportedly had her Charles Schwab trading account suspended, ostensibly over her manipulations of the stocks she traded. (more…)

Greene Naftali Gallery has announced a temporary exhibition space in Williamsburg, which will open April 8th with a show by Lutz Bacher.  The gallery forecasts “dynamic, open, and spontaneous programming” at its new location at 227 Leonard Street.  (more…)

The charges against Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky for igniting the doors of the FSB Headquarters have been changed by prosecuting investigators from vandalism to “damaging a cultural heritage site.”  The artist himself has been asked to be tried under charges of terrorism.  (more…)

The Untitled Art Fair is expanding to San Francisco, announcing plans for a January 2017 exhibition with 40 to 60 in the city’s Pier 70 space.  “We want to make it manageable, we want to focus on quality, we want to make a very strong program,” says spokesman Jeffrey Walkowiak added. “This will be an opportunity for us to work with galleries we haven’t been able to work with before because of Art Basel in Miami.” (more…)

Renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid has passed away at the age of 65.  Hadid has been a foundational voice of contemporary architecture over the course of the early 21st Century, including London’s Olympic Aquatic Centre, the Guangzhou Opera House, and the MAXXI in Rome.   (more…)

Carroll Dunham, Mound A (1991-1992), via Art Observed

Flexing his curatorial muscle at both Skarstedt Gallery locations in New York, David Salle has compiled an intriguing collection of recent paintings by a vastly diverse group of artists, and examines their shared interests in the grounds of abstract painting: formal concerns of size, scale and focus, in combination with the compositional elements of color, contrast and hue. (more…)