Nan Goldin is confronting the makers of painkiller OxyContin, after battling a painkiller addiction that nearly killed her, condemning the Sackler family’s continued support of arts institutions around the globe. “Your own skin revolts against you,” she said. “Every part of yourself is in terrible pain.” (more…)

Cho Yoon-sun, South Korea’s former culture minister, has been sentenced to two years in prison for her role in creating a blacklist of ten thousand artists whose political beliefs went against now impeached president Park Geun-hye. “It is unprecedented that the president and her aides, who are at the top of the highest powers, organized, planned and carried out such discriminatory treatment,” the court said. “There is no right or wrong in culture. . .once the government discriminates against those who think differently, it leads to totalitarianism.” (more…)

Thomas Dane is the latest in a string of major galleries opening locations in Italy, as the institution opens a space in the city of Naples. “The scene in Italy has always been discreet, established and savvy—not dissimilar to Germany, Holland and Belgium in the 1960s and 70s,” says François Chantala, a partner at Thomas Dane. (more…)

An Emil Nolde painting stolen four years ago from a Danish church in Ølstrup has been returned after a failed ransom attempt. Police managed to track encrypted messages through a law firm to the thief, who is currently in prison. (more…)

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has replaced a map in the museum that failed to include the Qatari peninsula after public outcry. The move was interpreted as a direct attack on the country amid difficult relations in the Gulf region. “Louvre Abu Dhabi is a universal museum which celebrates cross-cultural exchange and tolerance,” the museum said in a statement. “In line with international best practice, our curatorial narratives are shaped by the historic and cultural context of the fascinating objects.” (more…)

LACMA is exploring plans to create a satellite campus in South Los Angeles, which will target underserved areas. “If you look at a map of L.A.’s public schools, the dots representing the neediest students are all through South Los Angeles,” Director Michael Govan says. “You start thinking, where can the value of your collection and program be the greatest, when you’re behind a big fancy fence on Wilshire Boulevard or out in the community?” (more…)

The Getty has announced plans for a traveling version of the PST: LA/LA Exhibitions, Art News reports. “Although Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA will officially close at the end of January, in many ways this is just the beginning,” Getty Trust president James Cuno said in a statement. “Over the last four months, our many partners reexamined and realigned narratives of art history through their exhibitions and events, bringing together the many connections between Latin American and Latino art without regard to borders or categories. Their discoveries will live on in the many exhibitions that will travel far beyond Los Angeles.” (more…)

Danh Vo gets a profile this week in the New Yorker, and explores his own perspectives on his field, as well as his unique practice and the years of travel that shaped his practice. “My work is really through installation,” he says. “It’s always about how things speak together.” (more…)

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #59 (1972), via Art Observed

Dwelling on a unique body of work in artist Tom Wesselmann’s expansive oeuvre, Gagosian Gallery in New York is currently presenting a series of the artist’s monumentally-scaled “Standing Still-Lifes,” a series of works that saw the artist explore past practices and themes in his work, while embracing a scattered, varied approach towards his own imagery.  On view through the end of February, Wesselmann’s work in series presents a unique opportunity to dive deeper into the artist’s relentlessly innovative vision and interests in the language of American consumerism.   (more…)

Jack Whitten, The First Portal (2015), via Osman Can Yerebakan for Art Observed

Artist Jack Whitten, a pioneering painter whose exploration with formalism and abstraction made him an instrumental voice in the landscape of post-war abstraction and the history of American modern art, has passed away at the age of 78. The news was confirmed by his gallery, Hauser & Wirth. (more…)

Alex Needham has been named the new arts editor of The Guardian in London. Needham has worked at the Guardian for eleven years, and will take over guiding the newspaper’s expansive arts coverage.  (more…)

NADA has added a new acquisition fund for the Bronx Museum to its programming for its New York fair, Art News reports. “We are thrilled to be partnering with the Bronx Museum,” Heather Hubbs, NADA’s executive director, said in a statement. “NADA was founded in New York, and we could not be more proud to have artwork from our exhibitors in such a venerable collection. This initiative reflects our continued commitment to providing our exhibitors with unique opportunities to connect directly with influential curators.” (more…)

Artist Jill Magid has won the $50,000 Calder Prize, a grant issued biannually to a living artist by the Calder Foundation. “In his mobiles and stabiles, Calder unites symmetry and asymmetry, or parity and disparity, in ways that assimilate the larger, unseen forces at work in the natural world,” a statement from the organization reads. “Likewise, Magid pulls on loose ends both tangible and intangible—probing seemingly impenetrable systems—and finds unification in disparate elements. Her tenacity echoes Calder’s own in his radical transformation of sculpture.” (more…)

The Smithsonian Institute is bracing for the effects of the government shutdown, but will remain open Monday using funds saved up for contingencies such as a shutdown. “I hope they can avoid the shutdown, obviously, because I would like for government employees to continue to draw a paycheck and the government to continue to function,” says one visitor to Washington D.C. “I’m praying that we can stabilize it.” (more…)

Petrit Halilaj, Abetare (Fluturat) (Installation View), via Kamel Mennour

Currently on view at Kamel Mennour in Paris, artist Petrit Halilaj has brought a nuanced body of works that explore the constitution of both history and society through its youngest members.  Exploring the phenomena of early childhood, the various cultural touchstones and worlds created from young minds, and their analogs in the world around them, Halilaj’s work is a striking and empathetic exploration of both violence and youth, memory and time. (more…)

The Art Newspaper reports on Parisians’ response to Jeff Koons massive tulips installation offered to the city of Paris. “Placing this artwork in front of the Palais de Tokyo would taint the museum and take up too much of its landscape. Jeff Koons had enough attention with his installations at the Château de Versailles [in 2008-09] without resorting to benefit from the memory of the Paris attacks,” one citizen says. (more…)

Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Barn in Elterwater is up for sale.  “Our fear is that we’ll be forced into selling it to a property developer,” owner Ian Hunter says. “We feel that we’ve been pushed into this situation by the Arts Council.” (more…)

Ida Ekblad, Proper Stuff (Installation View), via Herald St

It would be understandable to overlook the works currently on view at Herald St. in London as paintings by Norwegian artist Ida Ekblad.  The young painter and sculptor, whose work so often mines the scrawling hands of graffiti writing or mixes in cast-off detritus from her daily daily wanderings, here has taken a decidedly more contemplative route.  Over a small series of paintings, she embraces a distinct sense of foreground and backdrop, mining new ground to create a particularly compelling body of works. (more…)

A piece in The Economist looks at recent technologies in art appraisal and conservation, and questions how these developments may challenge the authority and stability of work in the field. “In the pursuit of knowledge about works of art, the language of science and that of the humanities both have to be spoken,” claims Robert van Langh, the Rijksmuseum’s head of conservation.  (more…)

The Guardian has an interview with Andreas Gursky this week, detailing the artist’s early experimentations in a photo of Salermo harbor that brought him to realize his most iconic works. “My teachers, the conceptual artists Bernd and Hilla Becher, had told me to avoid photographing with sunlight, blue sky or strong shadows, he says. “But I thought the warm sunlight here made for something quite kitsch. Also, up until this point, human beings had been the focus of my work – but here there were none in sight. Yet I was overwhelmed by what I saw: the complexity of the image, the accumulation of goods, the cars, the containers. I hadn’t been sure the photograph would work. I just felt compelled. It was pure intuition.” (more…)

Tate Britain director Alex Farquharson is interviewed in the Art Newspaper this week, detailing his vision for a major rehang at the museum. “Tate Britain has an exciting role in presenting art in a societal context, both past and present, so it is a question of the stories that we tell,” he says. “I have set out three pillars that inform our curatorial choices and how we communicate them. These are a trio of relationships: art and society, history and the present, and Britain and the world.” (more…)

Eddie Martinez, Love Letter #15 (2017), via Art Observed

Artist Eddie Martinez has returned to Mitchell-Innes & Nash this month, bringing two different bodies of work to the gallery’s two exhibition spaces in Chelsea and Uptown.  These two shows mark the first time Martinez’s work has been exhibited in New York since major solo exhibitions at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College and at The Drawing Center, New York, and signal a continuation of themes explored in those shows. Martinez’s work, which draws on languages of modernist painting while abstracting its language through varied techniques and imaginative approaches to the canvas.

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A major controversy is boiling over in Ghent over an exhibition that featured over 25 works attributed to Russian avant-garde artists like Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, which are being labeled as fake by a group of curators and museum professionals.  The news broke thanks to an open letter published by the group of professionals which is printed in full today at the Art Newspaper. (more…)

Moscow is set to embark on a project to build its own “Museum Mile,” part of a project by the Russian city to make it a “cultural capital of the world.” “The idea arrived after understanding the level of cultural segregation in which Moscow has been for so long,” says Teresa Mavica of the V-A-C Foundation. “It’s time for the Russian capital to become more open, for institutions to work together and themselves become an important actor of the social movement—that is what I mean by an art revolution.” (more…)