V&A East, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s future venue on the former Olympic site in Stratford has unveiled its initial plans. It will combine exhibition and research space. (more…)

Trevor Paglen has won the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize 2018. “It’s an honor to be awarded the Nam June Paik Art Center Prize. Nam June Paik was an incredible visionary, an artist who taught us how to see a rapidly changing world, and an huge inspiration to me personally. To be recognized in relation to Nam June Paik is truly one of the greatest honors I can imagine,” he says. (more…)

Sotheby’s has reported a net loss of $27.8 million for the third quarter, a 19 percent drop over the same period last year.  “With respect to the market conditions,” says Sotheby’s president and CEO Tad Smith, “there are uncertainties, including political noise here and abroad, as well as rising interest rates and slowing global growth.” (more…)

Georg Baselitz, The Orange Eater VI (1981), via Art Observed

Gallerie Thaddeus Ropac London is currently offering a museum-quality show of ground-breaking inverted paintings, drawings and sculptures by Georg Baselitz, tracing the artist’s shift to a freer, more expressionistic use of paint and of color, while still staging works of startling intensity and solemn power. The exhibition presents seminal works from each of the series Baseliz developed during the 1980s such as Orangenesser, Strandbilder and Trinker, as well as works on paper from the era evoking religious icons, drawings from the Strandbilder series, and untitled figure sketches. Standing alongside his paintings, the show’s deep array of archival works establish the evolution of his personal iconography across media. (more…)

Houston’s Menil Drawing Institute is set to open this weekend following a lengthy construction proces. “We’ve been sticklers and are proud of it,” says director Rebecca Rabinow. “I’m very proud of this board of trustees, that they agreed to slightly delay the opening in order to take the time to get everything right. Because when you walk into this building, it shows.” (more…)

The New York Times does another spotlight on Andy Warhol’s business practices this week, exploring how his work set the stage for so many artists exploring the nuances of business and commerce as aspects of their work. “I think it’s impossible to make art today without somehow taking that on board,” Damien Hirst says. “I think business in art is more important than politics.” (more…)

As MoMA prepares to open its landmark Andy Warhol retrospective, Bloomberg takes an inside look at the market, noting the artist’s recent lull in auction prices but his uptick in private sales. “It’s not a market that’s on fire, making big moves,” says Evan Beard, an art-service executive for Bank of America’s U.S. Trust unit. “It’s a little soft.” (more…)

Art Basel Hong Kong has revealed the exhibitor list for its forthcoming edition, running March 29 to 31 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. The show will include 240 galleries with 21 of them showing at the fair for the first time. (more…)

Lévy Gorvy gallery has added Bona Yoo as sales director, based in NYC. “She has deep knowledge and passion for 20th century art, and has an incredible global network, with expertise and experience working in Asia, and Korea in particular,” Lévy said in a statement. (more…)

A group of artists including Mickalene Thomas and Julia Wachtel are interviewed in the NYT this week, discussing the impact Andy Warhol had on their lives and art. “I remember going to MoMA and seeing his Campbell Soup Cans (1962), and it was at that moment I decided to become an artist,” Wachtel says. “What makes Warhol the gold standard is the utter elegance, simplicity and directness of his paintings — his ability to distill a world of information out of a picture through minimal but brilliant intervention.” (more…)

The third edition of Untitled, Art in San Francisco will take place at Pier 35 on the city’s waterfront Embarcadero, from January 18 to 20, 2019. Last year’s fair was held at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts. “It became apparent that, as challenging as it is to move close to the date of the fair, we were going to be able to provide a much stronger experience for not only our exhibitors but our visitors,” says director Manuela Mozo. (more…)

Tatiana Trouvé, A Quiet Life (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour

Currently on view at Kamel Mennour’s Paris exhibition space, artist Tatiana Trouvé has filled its rooms with a constellation of matter, clusters of material and physical elements that rise and fall int intensity, creating an elaborate physical narrative that moves the viewer through the gallery while offering little in the way of exterior context. Continuing the artist’s elaborate and intricate participation in multiple modes and movements simultaneously, the show is an impressive continuation of her practice. (more…)

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will invest $20 million into arts organizations in Detroit over the next five years, the Detroit Free Press reports. “Great art, tough art, challenging art helps to tell a great city’s own story. Nowhere is this more true that today’s Detroit,” says Alberto Ibarguen, president of the Knight Foundation. “This is the place where art, culture and design have changed the narrative of a community. And in the art world, Detroit has become the new Berlin.” (more…)

Venice Musuems have reopened after severe flooding caused closures across the city.  The city’s floods, caused by a weekend storm, saw an exceptional high tide that left 75% of the city underneath several feet of water. (more…)

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Morning) (2018), via Art Observed

It’s been a good few years for Kerry James Marshall.  The Chicago-based painter opened his landmark show at The Met Breuer, a critically-lauded exhibition that toured the U.S. and earned the artist an impressive response from both viewers and critics.  Now, the artist turns his attention towards a body of new paintings, the first new series produced since the Mastry exhibition, for a new show at David Zwirner’s exhibition location in London.  (more…)

Painter Alex Katz is profiled in The Guardian this week, holding court on a range of subjects from his favorite painters to his current workload. “My production has gone insane,” he says. “I work seven days a week.” (more…)

In a bizarre twist, Former Met Director Thomas Campbell will head up the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, taking over for Max Hollein, the director who left to take Campbell’s old job in New York. “I am deeply gratified to take up the responsibility of leading the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco,” Campbell says. “It is a great privilege to become part of an institution with such outstanding curatorial expertise and famously loyal audiences and supporters, and I am especially pleased to have the opportunity to continue the great work done by my friend and predecessor Max Hollein.” (more…)

Julie Mehretu, SEXTANT (Installation View), via White Cube

Moving through a range of historical and aesthetic modes of exploration for her most recent exhibition at White Cube in London, artist Julie Mehretu has offered a new fold in an already complex and multilayered body of work.  Her new exhibition, which opened just this past month, brings together a diverse and challenging arrangement of pieces that sees the artist mining contemporary image archives and newspaper headlines for her grounding material, a mode that moves beyond her prior practice and into new ground.  (more…)

Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Mirror Study (0X5A1237) (2017), via Matthew Marks

Matthew Marks Los Angeles has given over its West Hollywood exhibition space to a striking group show, exploring a younger generation of artists under the name Positioner.  The show takes its name from work by exhibiting artist Julia Phillips, and, much in the same way that the artist explores institutional power and discrimination in her own works, this exhibition focuses on the the manner in which artists today are currently focusing on depictions, representations, or consolidations of the individual within the modern field of art practice.   (more…)

Juergen Teller gets an interview in The Guardian this week, and notes his recent experience teaching, as well as the proliferation of photography thanks to smartphones. “I do like holding something in my hand – a piece of paper, books and magazines. I think it’s highly questionable what the role of a normal fashion photographer is now – I’m not sure that still exists,” he says. “On the iPhone, on Instagram, even a shit picture looks kind of good. It’s only in a magazine, in a long fashion story which has to unfold, that you can see an image doesn’t work.” (more…)

Two Massachusetts Arts Organizations, The Barr Foundation and Klarman Family Foundation will partner on a new $25 million initiative in support of Massachusetts arts institutions, Artforum reports. “Arts and cultural organizations have enormous potential to add value to the vibrancy, social wellbeing, and creative economies of their communities,” the project website reads. “Yet, amidst rapid change in our communities and broader society, these organizations must also grow and change.”  (more…)

Jeff Koons will get a “mini-retrospective” at the Ashmolean in Oxford, Art Newspaper reports, the first retrospective of his work in the UK. “It’s a poetic, miniature retrospective with a concentration on recent work,” says co-curator Norman Rosenthal. (more…)

Yayoi Kusama is threatening legal action against several exhibitions allegedly using counterfeit versions of her works, The Guardian reports. “These dishonest acts are a violation of public morals and decency of a notably malicious nature, and are a contemptible transgression of the originality and copyrights of all artists,”The Yayoi Kusama Foundation said in a statement. “We therefore strongly condemn these actions.” (more…)

The New York Times looks at the changing face and roles of the art gallery in a market where art fairs remain a major part of doing business, with mega-galleries evolving into varied economic ventures. “We are a business and are unashamed to be a very, very successful one,” says Hauser & Wirth’s Marc Payot. “We want to create a multidimensional global enterprise that connects the realms of art, architecture, education, food, and environmental responsibility.” (more…)