A piece in the NYT this week asks if the transgressive character of Robert Mapplethorpe’s images have lost their power in the modern age of image distribution.  Mapplethorpe “was a pretty good commercial photographer who photographed things people weren’t accustomed to seeing in mixed company,” according to John Szarkowski, MoMA’s influential photography director at the Museum of Modern Art.  “It’s not photographically interesting.” (more…)

A new study on activist and about climate change points to art’s effectiveness as a form of activism, specifically when the works offer hope for the future.  Effective works “have the potential to retell the stories of climate change in a way that activates the slumbering potential in our societies,” say Laura Kim Sommer and Christian A. Klöckner of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. (more…)

Damián Ortega has won ICA Miami’s first sculpture prize. which includes fabrication of a new commission installed in the ICA’s Sculpture Garden and $15,000. “We see this as a wonderful place to honor the achievement of an artist who has innovated with sculpture throughout their career,” says Alex Gartenfeld, the museum’s artistic director. “Damián has been an artist who has consistently reinvented the form of sculpture, considered the role of the work in public, and experimented with materials and forms, perhaps like no one else of his generation.” (more…)

The J. Paul Getty Trust has purchased the archive of images from Ebony and Jet Magazine from Johnson Publishing, for a price of $28.5 million. The archive includes millions of shots of African-American figures like Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King Jr., and Billie Holiday. (more…)

Almine Rech now represents New Jersey–based artist Vaughn Spann, a young artist who has received impressive attention of late. He will open his first show with the gallery in January 2020. (more…)

Warren Kanders has stepped down as Vice Chair of the Whitney, following months of pressure to oust him from the position. “The targeted campaign of attacks against me and my company that has been waged these past several months has threatened to undermine the important work of the Whitney,” he wrote in his resignation letter to the board. “I joined this board to help the museum prosper. I do not wish to play a role, however inadvertent, in its demise.” (more…)

Yang Fudong, Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project, Day 30 (2018), via Marian Goodman

Considered one of China’s most important contemporary artists, the Shanghai-based Yang Fudong’s work has evolved through a diverse series of focal points and interests over the course of his career, moving through painting, video and other bodies of work that underscore his place as a central contributor to the landscape of Chinese contemporary art and a prominent voice in the national discourse. This month in London, the artist presents an exhibition of new work at Marian Goodman, the first with the gallery in London, and the international premiere of his epic project Dawn Breaking – A Museum Film Project. (more…)

A piece in National Geographic looks at the work of conservation scientist Eric Breitung at The Met. “My focus is the environment of the whole museum,” he says. “Conservation started by looking at how to treat objects that have been damaged…Now we’re thinking about how to set up displays and storage so that kind of damage doesn’t happen in the first place.” (more…)

David Hammons has designed a special limited edition release of jazz figurehead Ornette Coleman’s music. “It took me almost 10 years to understand abstract music,” he says.  (more…)

A number of artists have raised concerns about Boris Johnson’s record on the arts after assuming Tory leadership and the position of Prime Minister.  “When Boris Johnson campaigned to become mayor of London first time, one of his pledges involved cutting budgets for art projects like the Fourth Plinth; that was until he realised that culture for London was actually a good [thing],” says Michael Elmgreen of Elmgreen & Dragset. “Typically, he had strong opinions about subject matters he didn’t have any clue about, and then later he had to change his mind when he was finally confronted with the facts. However, that didn’t really make him interested in the arts.” (more…)

Marianne Boesky now represents the work of Gina Beavers, Art News reports.  “Gina’s works are incredible in their articulation of critical conversations in both contemporary art practice and in our wider society,” Boesky said in a statement. “She has an innate ability to play with and push the limits of our understanding of artistic hierarchies and disciplines, as well as to reflect to us our own cultural ideals—for better or worse.” (more…)

Eric Fischl, The Exchange (2018), via Sprüth Magers

For over four decades, Eric Fischl has produced uncompromising images of American society, presenting a challenging and often surreal perspective on the forms and functions of middle and upper class malaise as reflected in the body itself. Figures routinely share space on his canvases, yet their gazes rarely meet, lounging or posed in a manner that reflects a certain deconstruction of the body as persona. Even when they do, through composition, pose and gesture, they are trapped in the midst of strained exchanges, moments of exchange and interaction that seems to place the viewer in the midst of a meditation on the body and on the societies it constructs.  Marking his first solo exhibition in LA in 25 years, the artist’s current exhibition, Complications From an Already Unfulfilled Life, marks both a continuation of this thread and a new path forward, marking his first show in the Californian metropolis with Sprüth Magers. (more…)

Daniel Richter, Plications of Come (2019), via Regen Projects

Currently on view at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, painter Daniel Richter has brought forth a selection of new works, continuing recent explorations in methodology the artist first began experimenting with in 2015.  One of the most influential painters of his generation, Richter’s work continues the lineage of post-war German painting that includes artists such as Werner Büttner, Martin Kippenberger, and Albert Oehlen.  Mixing together disparate threads of figurative painting and abstraction, his pieces twist pop culture, media images and other bits of communicative detritus through a shared space, resulting in swirling compositions that implies an ever-open eye on the world around him. (more…)

The Louvre Museum will partner with french luxury cruise company Ponant to organize two culture cruises in 2020.   The first chartered trips will cover the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean.  (more…)

UK Parliament’s DCMS Committee will investigate how lotteries are “having an impact on the way people choose to spend their money”, and consider how the lottery might be restructured for “good causes.”  “Against a background of falling lottery receipts we want to consider the sustainability of the lottery,” DMCS chair Damian Collins says. (more…)

The NYT looks at the challenges faced by museums and employees in the recent struggles over unionization that have roiled institutions in the U.S.  “There’s a really endemic feeling in the art world, that’s definitely maintained by the people in charge of institutions, that we’re lucky to have these jobs,” says Dana Kopel, who helped organize for employees at the New Museum.  “But these are jobs, and we deserve to have rights as workers.” (more…)

Artist Lee Ufan gets a profile in the WSJ this week, exploring his life and practice.  “His studio is a very serene and uncluttered space where he’s probably only thinking about one painting at a time,” says Hirshhorn director Melissa Chiu. “The moment at which he decides to paint or selects the rock, that’s the one brief moment of making, but it’s all the thinking that went into it before that trains and prepares him for the act.” (more…)

A piece in Art News looks at the continued push for an arts museum in Las Vegas, and the players involved.  “Vegas has been the entertainment capital of the world, and it has been daunting to introduce a bona fide cultural institution into this energized mix,” says David Walker, director of the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.  (more…)

Marisa Merz, via Gladstone

Marisa Merz, the Italian sculptor whose enigmatic and intricate sculptural arrangements was a foundational part of the impact of the Arte Povera movement in the country and around the globe, has passed away at the age of 93.  Merz, the only woman associated with the vanguard movement, blazed her own path through the landscape of post-war Italy, and founded a sculptural language that is enduringly important today.

The wife of Mario Merz, Marisa was born in Turin, Italy, in 1926, but little information on her early years persists.  Yet her time at home during the 1960’s marked her first experiments with simple materials, working with sheets of metal and thread to create nuanced clusters of material and subtle engagements with her family life.  Merz’s work maintained a sense of intimacy and love, tenderness and the human body, that marked her work as distinct from her contemporaries, and which has made her work enduringly resonant.

Marisa Merz, via Gladstone

She is survived by her daughter Beatrice, who heads the Fondazione Merz, and who told the NYT Style section in 2017: “I recently asked her how some of her works came about, what was the thought, inspiration, or approach behind them. She answered that she always and only did what she liked, and that every work originated from the pleasure of making it, from a spontaneous gesture or finding of a particular object or material.”

Read more:
Marisa Merz, Key Arte Povera Figure and Relentlessly Inventive Sculptor, Is Dead at 93 [Art News]
MARISA MERZ (1926–2019) [Artforum]

Two Sotheby’s shareholders have sued in NY to block the planned $2.7 billion purchase of the auction house by French collector and telecom magnate Patrick Drahi’s BidFair USA, claiming that Drahi has not disclosed enough information. “As the vast majority of all public company mergers over $100 million are the subject of shareholder litigation, the lawsuits filed were expected and routine,” Sotheby’s said in an emailed statement. “We do not expect the suits to have any impact on our targeted closing timing of the fourth quarter of this year.” (more…)

Judy Chicago will open a major retrospective next year at San Francisco’s de Young Museum.  “I’ve been working for a long time,” Chicago says. “I used to say I hope lived to long enough to come out from behind the shadow of The Dinner Party.” (more…)

More artists have withdrawn from the Whitney Biennial over Warren Kanders’s ownership in several defense companies, with collective Forensic Architecture withdrawing after finding ties between Kanders and bullets used by the Israeli Military in Gaza. (more…)

Collector Jean Pigozzi has donated 45 works to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with a focus on his substantial holdings of contemporary works from Africa. The gify includes work by Bodys Isek Kingelez, Jean Depara, and more.  “I hope that this donation will help open the eyes of millions of art lovers from all over the world to the amazing, and not yet well-enough known, art from the oldest—and now the youngest—continent on our planet,” Pigozzi said in a statement. (more…)