As reports of the Sackler family, whose fortune is tied tightly to the sale of OxyContin, donations to various art museums and institutions, the New York Times asks if it might be necessary for museums to vet their donation funds. “We regularly assess our funding activities to ensure best practice,” says Zoë Franklin, a spokeswoman for the Victoria and Albert Museum. “The Sackler family continue to be an important and valuable donor to the V & A and we are grateful for their ongoing support.” (more…)

Steven A. Olsen has been named as the next vice president, chief financial officer, and chief operating officer of the J. Paul Getty Trust, Art News reports. “I am very much looking forward to working for an arts organization with such an enormous impact here in Los Angeles and worldwide,” Olsen said in a statement. (more…)

The UK Creative Economies are growing at twice the speed of the rest of the economy, a new study shows. “Britain’s creative industries play an essential role shaping how we are seen around the world but as these new statistics show they are also a vital part of the economy,” says Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Karen Bradley. (more…)

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s current work and growing market value is profiled in Bloomberg this week, exploring how the artist’s paintings have expanded in value in recent months.  “She’s an extraordinary painter,” says Tamsen Greene, a senior director at Jack Shainman gallery. “She’s made her own, unique style, but she uses this classic, incredibly formal visual language that draws people in.” (more…)

Peter Doig’s work is spotlighted in the New Yorker this week, as the artist discusses his studio practice and approach to painting.  “I am trying to create something that is questionable, something that is difficult, if not impossible, to put into words,” Doig says. (more…)

Jewish Museum curator Jens Hoffman has been suspended from his post at the institution after sexual harassment allegations were brought forward by museum staff members late last week. “A number of Jewish Museum staff members came forward on November 30, 2017, with allegations of sexual harassment by Jens Hoffmann during his tenure at the Museum,” a statement reads. “In light of this information, we have suspended all current projects with him while we review the allegations.” (more…)

Nate Lowman, Maria (2017), via Maccarone

As another year in the art world draws to a close, global attention turns to the southern tip of the U.S. for another year of Art Week Miami, the sprawling multi-fair spectacle that each year flood both Miami Beach and Miami proper with waves of art lovers, artists, collectors and revelers for a range of installations and exhibitions, not to mention the infamous schedule of parties and events surrounding the week. (more…)

Geta Bratescu, The Leaps of Aesop (Installation View), via Art Observed.

This spring, the Romanian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale opened its exhibition for this year’s iteration of the institution’s ongoing exhibition. The show, a string of drawings and paintings creeping up the walls of the gallery, and running across each of the rooms formed dense networks of gestures and panels that made each of their respective movements and concepts all the more powerful.  The show was a review of the career of Geta Bratescu, the 91-year old artist whose career has investigated the range of 20th Century practice as her own relationship to it grew and evolved over the course of her life. In the months running up to the opening of the exhibition, Bratescu joined on with Hauser & Wirth, and now brings a range of her works to bear on the gallery’s Chelsea exhibition space.   (more…)

Cecily Brown, A Day! Help! Help! Another Day! (Installation View), via Art Observed

Since parting ways with Gagosian Gallery in 2015, painter Cecily Brown has remained conspicuously out of view, occasionally popping up for an exhibition here or there in her home city of New York.  Now, two years after her last show at Maccarone, the artist has appeared again, bringing a body of new paintings to bear on the spacious halls of Paula Cooper’s Chelsea exhibition space.  In its last week of exhibition, Brown’s pieces have once again underscored her complex relationship between the image and its modes of expression, ultimately blurring easy readings of the act of gestural abstraction and its relationship to the artist herself. (more…)

The Guggenheim Museum will collaborate with architect Rem Koolhaas to research “nonurban areas of the Earth.” “The fact that more than 50 percent of the world’s population now lives in cities has become an excuse to ignore the countryside,” Koolhaas says. “I have long been fascinated by the transformation of the city, but since looking at the countryside more closely in recent years, I have been surprised by the intensity of change taking place there.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper looks at Donald Trump’s proposed tax plan, and notes how its restrictions on deductions for charity giving and middle class tax deductions could affect the art world, which certain changes to the tax code would make them “almost impossible for people to use,” says Andrew Finch, the director of policy at the Association of Art Museum Directors. (more…)

During a speech in Burkina Faso, French Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron laid out a new plan in which he says France will distance itself from its colonial past in Africa, including a call for African art in European museums to return to the continent. “I’m from a generation that doesn’t tell Africa what to do: I have come to listen,” Macron says. “France has a historical link to Africa, Africa is engraved in French history, culture and identity. There were faults and crimes, there were happy moments, but our responsibility is to not be trapped in the past.” (more…)

Calvin Klein has entered into a four-year agreement with the Andy Warhol Foundation that will allow the fashion company to license Warhol’s art across its collections, Vogue reports. “I’ve come to realize that Warhol’s genius goes much deeper than cheerful Campbell’s Soup paintings,” says creative officer Raf Simons. “He captured all sides of the American experience, including sometimes its darker sides. Warhol’s art tells more truths about this country than you can find almost anywhere else.” (more…)

Artist Catherine Opie has joined the board of the Mike Kelley Foundation. “Cathy’s strong voice, energy, and commitment to the arts as an artist, teacher, and advocate will undoubtedly deepen our efforts and will be invaluable to the development of our organization,” says Mary Clare Stevens, the foundation’s executive director. (more…)

The majority of artists in the UK earn less than £5,000 a year after tax, and below $10,000 in the US, a recent report finds, marking a decrease in income from its last iteration. “I used to believe that winning prizes was a mark of success for an artist but am now of the opinion that simply living as an artist is the greatest achievement,” says Rob Pepper, the principal of London’s The Art Academy. (more…)

Artist Jack Pierson has been invited to design a bag in collaboration with Dior, translating the city’s windows and streets into a series of brightly adorned bags. “I felt I was absorbing all of that in graphic line and motion,” he says of his time in the city. “At the same time I was capturing what I as an Okie American might consider Parisian.” (more…)

Artist Yinka Shonibare has created a massive sculpture commissioned by the Public Art Fund for Doris C. Freedman Plaza. “Monumental in scale and imposingly sited on axis with the entrance to Central Park, Yinka Shonibare’s Wind Sculpture (SG) I assumes the aspect of a classical civic monument,” says Nicholas Baume, the director and chief curator of the Public Art Fund. “Its patterned, fluttering sail suggests the geographical, cultural, and personal layers of a migration borne aloft on the cross currents of colonial history.” (more…)

Shirazeh Houshiary, Exuviae (2016-2017), via Ondine Charlesworth for Art Observed

Iranian-born, London-based artist Shirazeh Houshiary returns to Lisson Gallery this month for a show of new works at the gallery’s New York location on 24th Street in Chelsea, continuing her nuanced exploration of architectural and gestural interactions.  Reflecting on physical and immaterial qualities that shape art and human life, the artist’s work in her new show draws on dualities of structure and chance, friction and fluidity, and the nuances of space that both bound and interact with the work itself.

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Now through December 9, Sprüth Magers presents new work by John Baldessari. For his second show at the Los Angeles gallery, this exhibition features 27 works from Baldessari’s new series of large-scale paintings that all center on the ubiquitous Emojis.

COURTYARD BEN I’M AFRAID THERE’S BEEN A SERIOUS ERROR, 2017. All images courtesy Sprüth Magers. (more…)

The New York Times speculates on the broader impacts of Leonardo da Vinci’s astronomical auction record of $450.3 million, examining possible movements its price may cause among the upper echelons of the market, and how sales strategies might change. “It probably wouldn’t have made that much in a 19th-century sale,” says Wendy Goldsmith, an art adviser based in London.  “We’ll probably end up with ‘best of the best’ sales, with complete cross-fertilization.” (more…)

A civil court in Florence this week ruled against a tourist agency, ordering it to remove images of the Michelangelo’s Statue of David because of copyright infringement.  Claiming that Galleria dell’Accademia holds exclusive rights to license and distribute images of the statue.  “Now many other museums who have been victims of the plague of tickets sold at inflated prices can take this path to defeat this scam,” says gallery director Cecilie Hollberg. (more…)

Bloomberg spotlights a new startup, Arthena, this week, which aims to use artificial intelligence to determine changing interests and preferences among art collectors. “Most people in the art world don’t like what we’re doing,” says co-founder Madelaine D’Angelo. “We’re not advocating that art shouldn’t exist for art’s sake, or that people should stop building collections, but we want to make it more widely available as an asset class and investment opportunity.” (more…)

Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York now the archives of the late Sardinian artist Maria Lai. In a statement, Boesky praised Lai’s “uncanny ability to stitch together a kind of universal experience that brings together disparate viewers and inspires both personal and shared responses.” (more…)

The Pentagon has cracked down on Guantanamo Bay prisoners’ art, claiming that all works created while in the notorious prison is the property of the U.S. government. “My clients were told that their art would no longer be processed for release,” says Ramzi Kassem, a professor at the City University of New York School of Law and lawyer who represents three men held at Guantánamo Bay. “And then one of my clients was told that, even if he were ever to be released, that he would not be able to take his art with him, and that it would be incinerated.” (more…)