The full Egon Schiele Catalog Raisonné has been digitized, and is now available online for search adn exploration. “Several hundred works have been authenticated since the publication of the last print edition of Egon Schiele: The Complete Works in 1998,” says resarcher Jane Kallir. “So an update was long overdue.” (more…)
The Economist has a piece on auction guarantees, and how their use in major auctions has an impact on prices and market perceptions. “If enough leave what they see as a tilted playing field, the auction ends up being a “private sale in public’,” the piece reads. (more…)
Christie’s is planning to sell another high-profile David Hockney work this month, “Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott,” a 1969 piece from the collection of Barney A. Ebsworth next March in London. The work is expected to carry an estimate of £30 million. “David Hockney’s double portraits are undoubtedly some of the finest paintings the artist ever realized,” says Katharine Arnold, Christie’s head of the evening sale of post-war and contemporary art in London. (more…)
The WSJ profiles Muzeum Susch, an ambitious modern and contemporary art institution in the remote Swiss town. “There were these rural, industrial buildings, unlike anything in the region,” says founder Grażyna Kulczyk. “I very much liked them, and I looked into buying them because in my mind, of course, I still had an ambition to finally build this museum.” (more…)
A group of artworks exploring artificial intelligence and the human genome have been banned in China, and barred from exhibition in the Guangzhou Triennial. “The news is really filled with concern about the gene editing of babies,” says Heather Dewey-Hagborg, an American artist whose work “T3511” was among those pulled from the show. “It definitely seems like a moment where I can imagine that art or any kind of content that deals with biotechnological futures and some of the vulnerabilities and the dark side of those futures might seem to be dangerous.” (more…)
The Hammer Museum has added Jay Brown and Cindy Miscikowski to its board, and two new appointees to its board of overseers, Bill Block and Darren Star. “Cindy Miscikowski, Bill Block, Jay Brown, and Darren Star are all extraordinarily talented individuals who are passionate about art and the creative culture of Los Angeles. I am so thrilled to work with them during this exciting transformational time at the Hammer,” says Hammer director Ann Philbin. (more…)
A New York judge has ordered collectors Harry and Linda Macklowe to sell their collection and split the proceeds. The collection spans a vast selection of contemporary and post-war works, and is valued at over $700 million. (more…)
Kevin Beasley gets a profile in the NYT this week, as he prepares to open a show at the Whitney Museum. “There’s a story here that I think talks about migration, geography and ancestry,” he says. “But it’s really a Conceptual work.” (more…)
Works by Adam Pendleton, via Eva Presenhuber
Exploring two distinct voices in the evolution of art practice over the past 20 years, Eva Presenhuber has brought a strikingly confrontational, challenging exhibition to New York City, showing a body of works by Adam Pendleton and Liam Gillick that works between each artist’s strengths, and mines an ever-shifting understanding of the world around them to motivate and elaborate their respective iconographies.
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Brian Faucette, a director at Derek Eller Gallery, will head to Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Art News reports. “It’s been an honor working at Derek Eller Gallery these past years,” he says, “and I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank Derek and Abby for giving me the opportunity to organize some amazing exhibitions.” (more…)
Dan Colen, The Trap (2016-2018), via Gagosian
Currently on view at Gagosian Gallery’s Beverly Hills location in Southern California. Dan Colen has pulled together a body of paintings that feel decidedly at home in a location so close to Hollywood. His show of new works, High Noon, is a striking interrogation of corporate image production, shared memories, and the cognitive effects of modern commercial communication, all pulled together by their use of a distinct style of background painting utilized heavily in the classic Wile E. Coyote cartoons of the Warner Brothers’ cartoon universe. (more…)
Tania Bruguera will not attend the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and instead will stay in Cuba to fight the implementation of the newly announced Decree 349 in the country, which limits artistic speech. “We are all waiting for the regulations and norms the Ministry of Culture will put forward to implement Decree 349 in the hope that they include the suggestions and demands so many artists shared with them,” she said in statement. “I would like to add that the instructor from the Ministry of Interior who is in charge of my case [threatened] me yesterday, saying that if I didn’t leave Cuba and if I did ‘something’, I would not be able to leave in the future.” (more…)
A protest at The Whitney this past Sunday called for the departure of Warren B. Kanders, the vice chair of the museum’s board, from his post. “We are not fools,” the group Decolonize This Place said in a statement. “We know law is not justice. Your statement makes it clear which side you are on: the side of Safariland, and this we simply cannot accept.” (more…)
Kimberly Drew is profiled in the New York Times this week, as she moves on from her position at The Met and embraces writing full-time. “I want to give my whole heart to this skill that I have been cultivating,” she says. (more…)
Walmart is acquiring the art and framing company Art.com, which claims to be the “world’s largest online specialty retailer of high-quality wall art.” “This will enhance the customer experience with millions of additional choices for art, wall décor and personalized print-on-demand capabilities while creating a richer, deeper shopping experience across the home category,” the company said in a statement. (more…)
Kaywin Feldman, the director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, will be the new director of the National Gallery of Art. “For more than two decades, she has had a distinguished career as an art museum director with major successes,” says NGA president, Frederick W. Beinecke. (more…)
Ken Price, NeGrum (1994), via Matthew Marks
Currently on at Matthew Marks Gallery’s New York exhibition space, a body of small-scale works by American sculptor Ken Price dot the room, each drawing the visitor’s eye with a meticulously arranged series of loping curves, compellingly evocative forms and lumpy, surrealist modes of expression. This range of pieces, underscoring Price’s intuitive knowledge of bronze and its potential sculptural capacities, makes for a colorful, striking break from the chilling cold and overcast days of December in the city. (more…)
Myrlande Constant, via Art Observed
With the proceedings of Art Week Miami winding on, the halls at the Miami Beach Convention Center continue to draw massive crowds of both buyers and visitors, its luxe appointments and impressive stock of established blue chip works commanding big headlines and even bigger price tags. But across Biscayne Bay, the New Art Dealers Alliance had kicked off its annual take on the Miami Fair Week. NADA Miami, set up inside the Ice Palace Film Studios, puts itself forward as showcasing new art and to celebrating the rising talents from around the globe, exploring new or underexposed art that is not typical of the “art establishment,” by their words. NADA Miami is also the one of the only major American art fairs to be produced by a non-profit organization, and is recognized as a much needed alternative assembly of the world’s youngest and strongest art galleries dealing with emerging contemporary art.
Nathan Hylden, via Art Observed
The Guardian profiles how Cuban artists are fearing a government crackdown on artists in the wake of Tania Bruguera’s arrest this week over a new law restricting artistic speech in the country. “The decree criminalizes independent art activity,” the Cuban-American artist Coco Fusco says. “It allows a cadre of roving censors to go around issuing fines, to take away your equipment. These are not liberal individuals – if you are a rap musician and they simply don’t like your lyrics, they will shut you down. These draconian actions already take place but this law systemizes it.” (more…)
Art Newspaper profiles the increasingly high popularity of street art in mainstream art fairs, and questions how it is affecting the medium. According to adviser Lisa Schiff, sales of street artists like the recent bidding war for KAWS prints at Art Basel “encourages pure speculation; it’s an empty value-making system. Street art should disrupt the commercial and institutional setting. I don’t want it in a museum or a fair.” (more…)
The NYT profiles the recent protests by MoMA PS1 art handlers over pay and worker rights at the museum, as they demand equal pay to the museum workers across the East River at the main museum space. “I feel as an artist worker you’re betwixt and between,” handler and artist Marley Freeman said in a telephone interview. “You aren’t seen as a professional art handler. At PS1 they are always treating us like this is just temporary work we’re doing between other things.” (more…)
A piece in Art Newspaper this week documents the challenges of a US Supreme Court ruling demanding companies take on responsibility for sales tax, and its effects on the art world. “Our industry is being watched with greater diligence,” Robert Dimin says. “As a young gallery, even a small mistake could send us into a spiral with legal problems.” (more…)
Anish Kapoor has won his case against the NRA, preventing the organization from using an image of his work Cloud Gate in a recent propaganda video. “Their bullying and intimidation has not succeeded. This is a victory not just in defense of the copyright of my work, but it is also a declaration that we stand with those who oppose gun violence in America and elsewhere,” he said in a statement. (more…)