The Daily Mail does a bit of digging on last year’s sale of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, noting that the high price was the result of a regional bidding war between two parties from the UAE and Qatar vying for the work. “They gave their proxies instructions, saying ‘you can go as high as you want, just make sure you get it,'” an unnamed source says. “It got to $450 million and the Emiratis gave up.” (more…)

The Louvre has rejected calls from France’s Culture Minister to set the Mona Lisa off on a tour of the nation, the Art Newspaper reports. The painting is so fragile that it can no longer be moved, according to museum director Jean-Luc Martinez.  “Doing so could cause irreversible damage.”

Art collector Budi Tek has announced plans to donate his full collection to a new foundation run in partnership with LACMA. “If I share more than a thousand pieces of artworks worth a lot of money, it actually means nothing,” he says. “I’d like to group it together to preserve the legacy, and actually to keep it forever. Then it means something to the world, because the collection’s meant to belong for the world.” (more…)

Creative Time has named Justine Ludwig, former deputy director and chief curator of Dallas Contemporary, as its new director. “I have admired Creative Time, with its commitment to social justice and art within the public sphere, for many years,” she said in a statement. “I believe that art is one of the greatest tools we have access to in creating better communities, and am committed to a Creative Time that stays ahead of the curve and establishes the golden standard for the social impact of creative visions.” (more…)

Christie’s will offer a landmark Brancusi piece, La Jeune fille sophistiquée at its May Evening Sale of Impressionist and Modern Art in New York, a piece which is rumored to be estimated at $70 million. “A daring and exquisite work of art, the Brancusi from The Collection or Elizabeth Stafford represents one of the vanishingly small number of the artist’s bronzes with its original carved base not in a museum collection, says Conor Jordan, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist and Modern Art, New York. “Its appearance on the market will be an exciting event for the world’s foremost collectors of Modern art.” (more…)

London mayor Sadiq Khan has launched a £1 million fund for grassroots arts projects as part of his draft strategy for encouraging arts and cultural development in the city. “I know how difficult it can be for emerging artists and small creative organizations to get quick access to funding to support some amazing grassroots cultural activity in communities around the city,” he says. (more…)

Zach Blas, Contra-Internet (Installation View), via Art Observed

Currently on view at Art in General, artist Zach Blas has installed a striking interrogation and deconstruction of the internet itself, framing his show Contra-Internet through a language that fuses both classic frameworks of punk antagonism with a new generation of digital counter-cultures.  Centered around a contemporary remake of director Derek Jarman’s masterpiece of radical queer cinema, Jubilee, Blas presents his own version of cultural collapse and reconstruction, framed through a group of artists and intellectuals seeking to rebuild from the ashes of Silicon Valley.  (more…)

The Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro announced that it plans to sell a Jackson Pollock painting estimated to be worth around $25 million in order to cover debts and improve the museum. “With this fund, MAM will be able to make short-, medium-, and long-term planning; infrastructure improvements; increase personnel; and update the Brazilian art collection, filling the gaps and acquiring works by contemporary artists,” MAM president Carlos Alberto Chateaubriand said. (more…)

Congress has rejected Donald Trump’s priorities towards cutting arts funding, increasing the budget for this year by about $3 million for both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. “With this funding, N.E.H. will be able to aggressively support essential cultural infrastructure projects across the country,” says Jon Parrish Peede, the senior deputy chairman of the N.E.H.

(more…)

Elizabeth Dee Gallery is vacating its Harlem location after its owner decide to demolish the gallery’s location, which also was the first home of the Studio Museum. “I’m sorry to see this storied building go, but it has been a privilege to present contemporary art in this space during the last phase of its existence,” the dealer says.

(more…)

Crozier Fine Arts, the storage and logistics company based in New York, has acquired Artex Fine Arts Services, another storage company with over 160,000 sq. Feet of space in a number of cities around the country. “Uniting Crozier’s network of facilities with those of Artex, and leveraging Artex’s strong brand and deep expertise in working with museum and institutional clients, positions Crozier for significant growth and momentum in both North America and on a global scale,” says Crozier president Simon Hornby. (more…)

The ICA Philadelphia will be the first museum certified by Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.), a New York-based organization pushing for sustainable economic relationships between artists and exhibiting institutions. “Our partnership with W.A.G.E. helps to set a new standard in the museum field, one that ensures equitable environments for the artists with whom we work,” director, Amy Sadao, said in a statement.“We’re proud to be the first museum to join this diverse group of arts and culture institutions across the U.S. who are certified, and hope that it will encourage other museums to do the same.” (more…)

Chris Martin, Golden Age #2 (2018), via Anton Kern

Drawing inspiration from the impressive two-floor layout at Anton Kern’s uptown locale, painter Chris Martin has dug into his voluminous output for a show of paintings in New York City.  Cultivating the artist’s love for the painted canvas, and for the boundless enthusiasm that surges forth from each of his compositions, the show offers a fittingly colorful, joyous survey of the artist’s work, both in recent months and more broadly over the course of his career. (more…)

Art News has a piece exploring the firing of Helen Molesworth at MOCA in-depth, seeking to understand what the museum’s claims that she had been “undermining the museum.” The piece explores a series of public statements and quotes by the curator that were critical of MOCA and its programming choices.  “Everything that happens in museums is a microcosm of what happens in the world,” she says in one quote.  “I’ve been told that I have lot of ‘swagger’—code: gay, code: black. I have been told: Do I have to look at everything through the lens of identity politics?” (more…)

Joan Jonas gets a feature in The Guardian this week, as the artist opens her retrospective at the Tate Modern. “When I use a myth or a story or a literary text in my work, I often extract particular passages from a larger narrative that resonates with me,” she says. “In performance, the audience hears the text, recorded in advance or recited in real time, in fragments, and sees components – such as movements, props, drawings and video – that may relate only indirectly to the text. I don’t change the language, but rather I change the context, which opens up the text to different possibilities of meaning. I don’t illustrate; I juxtapose.” (more…)

A 1929 Marc Chagall painting of the Eiffel Tower in Paris is being sold by the National Gallery of Canada at Christie’s this May in New York, and will be used to pay for new acquisitions.  “Filled with an air of sensuous, passionate romance, Marc Chagall’s La Tour Eiffel (estimate: $6-9 million) encapsulates the wonderfully poetic style that emerged in his oeuvre during the 1920s and 1930s,” the auction house said in a statement. “It was during this period that he experienced unprecedented period of happiness, stability, comfort and professional success amidst.” (more…)

A rare Vincent Van Gogh painting which formerly hung in the collection of Elizabeth Taylor will go to auction this May at Christie’s in New York, expected to sell for $35 million. “I’ve always felt that I am merely a caretaker for the extraordinary objects I’ve received,” the piece quotes Taylor. “You can’t possess radiance, you can only admire it.”  (more…)

Artist Sheila Hicks gets a profile in the New Yorker this week, as she reflects on her work and gives a tour of her studio. “You see the junk all over my studio?” she says of her cluttered studio and the practice that emerges from it. “It’s like drawing or sculpting with the scissors.” (more…)

Former Art Basel fair head Magnus Renfrew is launching a new art fair, Taipei Dangdai, set to coincide with next year’s Taipei Biennial. “With Hong Kong, I was proud to be involved in organizing a fair that asserts itself as a global fair for the region and will remain so,” Renfrew says. “There is a big gap between Art Basel Hong Kong and other fairs in the region, in terms of quality and how they are progressing. It’s necessary to have other fairs that have real quality and don’t necessarily aspire to be the global fair for the region.”  (more…)

Artist Anthea Hamilton is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares a work for the Tate Britain’s Duveen Commission. “Well, I don’t think I’m allowed to talk about the work yet, I’d have to check,” she says drily. “But no, it’s not intimidating. The architecture is obviously very powerful but if you take that as a given, it’s not an issue.” (more…)

Paul Allen will be selling a $35 million Willem de Kooning painting at Art Basel Hong Kong through Lévy Gorvy, Bloomberg reports. “This sale is part of normal course of business for a collector like Paul,” said Alexa Rudin, a spokeswoman at Allen’s Vulcan Inc. (more…)

Tracey Emin has a new installation project in Sydney, installing small works around a section of the city. “I’m being gentle,” she says. “I’m not being domineering, I’m not being macho. I’m not using ego. I’m literally integrating within what’s already here. I really do think that there are a lot of public art projects that are just so ego-based, that take over everything.” (more…)

Amy Sherald, the portrait artist behind the acclaimed Michelle Obama official portrait, is now represented by Hauser & Wirth. “I have never seen portraits painted like this,” Marc Payot, a partner and vice president of Hauser & Wirth, says. “I believe the singularity of Amy’s approach is in itself a major achievement.” (more…)

The Cooper Union will return to free-tuition scholarships for all students over the course of the next ten years, Art News reports. “The return to full-tuition scholarships must be aligned with a sufficient endowment and reserve to weather the financial challenges of ever-rising costs, volatile markets, and economic uncertainty. This plan is designed to accomplish that,” the school said in its announcement of a schedule to return to its storied tuition program. (more…)