The Financial Times profiles the Fondation Beyeler this week, as the privately run museum in Riehen prepares to open for another Basel Art Week.  “One instantly gets a sense of vision when entering the Fondation Beyeler,” says Reto Thuring, curator of contemporary art at the Cleveland Museum of Art.  “It’s a place where art and everything that surrounds and supports it seem to be truly balanced and in a productive dialogue with each other, and that’s a rare thing nowadays.” (more…)

Lisson Gallery founder Nicholas Logsdail is profiled in the Financial Times this week, as his gallery celebrates its 50th year in operation.  “The Cork Street crowd were snickering down their sleeves at me and I knew they were, and I enjoyed it,” he says of his early years.  “We had been showing some of the greatest artists of our time in the present rather than their wallowing in the past.” (more…)

Writer and artist Michel Houellebecq is profiled in the New Yorker this week, as the artist opens his new show of photographs at Venus Over Manhattan.  “I don’t take pictures of human beings, because I prefer literature for describing a human being,” he says. “And I don’t do much description of the landscape in my books, because I find that a photo is better.” (more…)

Marina Abramovic and Jeff Koons are part of a new virtual reality art project, Acute Art, which will promote and exhibit new works in virtual reality by the artists.  “One of the things I noticed with VR is a tremendous sense of center,” says Koons. “Knowing that I am within a space and understanding the parameters around me. I have also noticed that one’s affirmation of existence is always missing. You look down at your feet and there’s nothing there, so there’s a lot to be said about defining your own presence.” (more…)

Agnes Gund has sold a Roy Lichtenstein painting from her collection for over $150 million, using the money to fund a criminal justice reform project.  “The larger idea is to raise awareness among a community of art collectors that they can use their influence and their collections to advance social justice,” says Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation. “Art has meaning on a wall, but it also has meaning when it is monetized.” (more…)

As William Pope L.’s Claim goes off view at the Whitney this week, the Atlantic reflects on recent challenges to art conservation, particularly with works involving food or other perishable materials.  “I bet you can ask me about any food in existence and I’ll tell you at least three significant concerns. Food drastically changes in composition over time,” says Emily MacDonald-Korth, founder of the Art Preservation Index. (more…)

Lisson Gallery has taken on the foundation of painter Leon Polk Smith, and will present a show of the artist’s works in New York this fall.  The artist was considered a major influence on a younger generation of color field and hard-edged abstractionists like Ellsworth Kelly and Al Held.   (more…)

Painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye is profiled in the New Yorker this week, spotlighting the artist’s dramatic work on view at the New Museum this summer, and her parallel work as a writer.  “I don’t paint about the writing or write about the painting,” she says of her work. “It’s just the opposite, in fact: I write about the things I can’t paint and paint the things I can’t write about.” (more…)

An article in the New York Times this week examines the shifting tastes and popularities of various mediums, artists and styles in the secondary market, as the contemporary market’s continued hegemony leaves dealers and galleries scrambling to keep up.  “There’s a domino effect,” says dealer Howard Rehs, who specializes in classical art. “People see high levels of unsold lots and it becomes difficult to attract works that can carry the market. Where have all the paintings gone?” (more…)

Walead Beshty, Office Work (Canon imageCLASS D1350 Monochrome Laser All-in-One Printer, Copier, Scanner, Fax F161402) (2017), all photos via Sarah Cohen for Art Observed

Artist Walead Beshty’s work has frequently mined the language and situations of modern labor as productive systems for rendering his works in the gallery space.  There are his postal works, for instance, which use the often rough delivery methods of varied delivery companies to create shattered, misshapen sculptures produced through the route’s inherent inefficiencies; or his works from the last show at Petzel Gallery in New York, which used the movements of gallery employees on a copper table top to create swirling patterns emphasizing the movements and gestures of modern office work.  For the artist’s most recent exhibition at Petzel, this interest in production and systems returns, running through a broad body of works that underscores his intuitive use of simple gestures and deft manipulations to create his pieces.

Walead Beshty, Open Source (Installation View)

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Joan Jonas, What is Found in the Windowless House is True (Installation View), via Art Observed

Taking over almost the full expanse of Gavin Brown’s impressive Harlem exhibition space, artist Joan Jonas returns to New York with a body of work in tow that mingles previous explorations and new meditations on man’s relationship with the natural world.  Pulling the viewer along a meandering pathway up through the gallery’s multi-floor exhibition space, Jonas’s work greets the viewer with visual twists and turns of their own, each time dwelling on the act of perception and understanding, natural phenomena and man’s modern contexts.

Joan Jonas, What is Found in the Windowless House is True (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Artist Huguette Caland is profiled in the New Yorker this week, as the artist’s work begins to see broader exposure at the Venice Biennale and elsewhere.  The piece profiles the artist’s life and work, including a story from her daughter, Brigitte, in which the artist entreated a woman to rescue a painting from a Beirut restaurant threatened by bombing, then gifted her with the piece.  “Mom says, ‘Now that the painting is safe, you can keep it if you wish,’ ” her daughter says. “She has it in her living room.”

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Artist William Pope L. has been awarded the Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award for his work in the 2017 edition of the exhibition.  “For almost four decades, Pope.L has challenged us to confront some of the most pressing questions about American society as well as about the very nature of art,” Museum Director Adam Weinberg says.  “We are thrilled that he is joining the illustrious group of American artists whom we have honored with the Bucksbaum Award.” (more…)

Katie Hollander has stepped down as the head of Creative Time, with deputy director, Alyssa Nitchun, will serve as acting director in the interim.  “After almost a decade at Creative Time, the time is right for me to explore new possibilities,” Hollander said in a statement. “My time spent with this organization—the incredible artists, partners, and colleagues that I’ve had the pleasure to work with and the inspiring projects that we’ve created together—will always be a career highlight.” (more…)

Artist Andrea Fraser is embarking on a project to chart the various political donations made by American museum patrons and trustees, which will explore ties between museum institutions and American political power.  “For me, the larger question about the relationship between museums, trustees and the political field has to do with plutocracy—the fact that the United States is now a plutocracy and that museums, in their origins, are a product of plutocracy,” she says. (more…)

Karole P.B. Vail will take over in Venice as the next director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, the Art News reports.  Vail has worked as a curator at the Guggenheim Museum in New York since 1997.  “I have the deepest respect for her scholarship, curatorial insight, unfailingly sound judgment, and collegial management style,” Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead the Peggy Guggenheim Collection into the future, and know that her personal ties to the institution and roots in Italy and Europe will add an unmatched depth and nuance to her work.” (more…)

LACMA is launching its first-ever Kickstarter Project, aiming to raise funds to bring Guatemala City’s Nuevo Museo de Art Contemporáneo, a small, egg-shaped museum, to Los Angeles for its upcoming Pacific Standard Time exhibition.  “It’s playful, but it was also dead serious when it comes to the effort,” said LACMA’s Rita Gonzalez, co-curator of PST. “We were really impacted going to NuMu. It was the spirit of the place — two artists who launched a contemporary art museum in a former egg stand.” (more…)

The Fondazione Piero Manzoni will be represented by Hauser & Wirth, the Art News reports.  “Manzoni already has quite a strong following in American collections and museums,” gallery partner Marc Payot said. “But what I think is important is engaging with a new, younger crowd of critics, curators, and thinkers, and really bringing this to life today.” (more…)

New York’s Armory Show has named Gabriel Ritter, curator at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and Jen Mergel, former senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, as curators for its 2018 edition. “The growth of these curated sections and the introduction of a curatorial leadership summit reflect the Armory Show’s core identity as a place for presenting new ideas and strong curatorial viewpoints,” says Benjamin Genocchio, the Armory Show’s executive director. (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles the work of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, an organization that has promoted the work of African-American artists of the South working beyond the traditional gallery system, and which will take over the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco for a major exhibition this year.  “We’ve spent a lot of time trying to illustrate to people that a great Gee’s Bend quilt or a Thornton Dial sculpture or a Lonnie Holley can stand next to any contemporary work,” says board member Michael Sellman. (more…)

Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Barn in Cumbria, UK, is under threat as funding dries up to maintain the artist’s small stone studio and installation, and many art institutions refuse to take on its maintenance.  “Don’t get me wrong, we love it – but we’re two old people who realistically can’t be here laboring for much longer,” says Ian Hunter, one of the lone people currently working to maintain the space. “So what we’ve tried to do is keep it going as best we can because we feel like we have a moral responsibility.” (more…)

Tate Britain is planning a rehang of its full collection, Artforum reports, changing the previous hanging strategy of director Penelope Curtis. “We want to look at how social factors caused art to take the forms it did,” director Alex Farquharson said. “So there could be big themes, like London as an urban space in the eighteenth century or Britain in the post-war age of anxiety.” (more…)

Former financier Asher B. Edelman is charging that Dutch art dealer Remko Spoelstra deceived him in the sale of an Edvard Munch painting.  Edelman claims that a loan he secured from his mother’s estate to help sell the piece was never repaid, even after the work was sold for $7 million.   (more…)

The New York Times reports on the ongoing discussions over artist Sam Durant’s artwork recently de-installed at the Walker Art Center, as the Dakota governments in Minnesota debate whether to destroy the work permanently.  “There is discussion now within the broader Dakota community about whether it should burn or not burn,” says director Olga Viso. “We’re really clear that it’s for them to decide, not for the Walker or the artist.” (more…)