The New Museum has appointed Lauren Cornell, who recently co-curated the 2015 Triennial alongside artist Ryan Trecartin, as Curator and Associate Director, Technology Initiatives.  “Through her work at the New Museum and at Rhizome first, Lauren Cornell has been tracking the influence of technology on art and culture at large,” says Massimiliano Gioni, the Museum’s Artistic Director.  “In her new position, she will help the Museum take an even more active role in engaging with the present and the future.”  (more…)

A maintenance worker in Madison, CT has accidentally destroyed a bench created by New York City-based sculptor Jim Osman, valued at $10,000.  The work, which Art Observed previously stumbled upon during Bushwick Open Studios last year, was on view for the town’s Sculpture Mile contemporary art show, was taken apart and disposed of after the maintenance worker assumed it had been “left by skateboarders.”  “It’s kind of a big letdown,” Osman says. (more…)

The once rigid boundaries between commercial galleries and museum exhibitors are quickly diminishing today, The New York Times notes, as top galleries turn towards high profile museum curators to create historically and culturally resonant shows.  “I think galleries do it for prestige,” says John Elderfield, a former MoMA curator who has done independent work for Gagosian.  “It burnishes their image.  Of course, when one gallery does it, another one wants to do it.” (more…)

David Salle, Yellow Fellow (2015), via Art Observed

Painter David Salle is currently presenting a new body of work at Skarstedt’s Chelsea outpost, returning to his previous Product Paintings series in a set of vividly rendered prints and paintings that seem to address not only the artwork as object and commodity, but also that relation to the Post-War canon. (more…)

As London auction houses prepare for this week’s Impressionist and Modern sales, Bloomberg recaps the battles between giants Christie’s and Sotheby’s, and the aggressive stance on auction guarantees that have helped to define the massive prices achieved in recent sales.  “Our profit margin is good,” says Christie’s recently appointed CEO Patricia Barbizet. “Guarantees are risk management and offer an assurance to the seller.” (more…)

Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is finally leaving its Greenwich Village headquarters, and moving uptown to a former brewery on 126th Street in Harlem.  “In other cities people travel to see art,” Brown says.  “I’m not so far from the Upper East Side.” (more…)

Olafur Eliasson is interviewed in The Guardian this week, discussing some of his large-scale and ongoing projects, including his work on the ballet adaptation of the Jonathan Safran Foer work Tree of Codes in Manchester.  “On stage will be a mirror, and it will reflect the room. It’s a stretch to say that it puts the audience on the stage,” says Eliasson.  “However, they will be conscious of being visible there. But anyway, let’s see how it works.” (more…)

Kazimir Malevich, Suprematism, 18th Construction (1915), via Sotheby’s

Following the big ticket sales in Art Basel this past week, the art market’s focus will shift to London this week, where a pair of major Impressionist and Modern Evening sales will launch the last two weeks of market activity before the summer months and their lull of activity.  Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s will face off again following last month’s monumental sales results in New York, with a number of extremely impressive works offered, often with equally impressive price tags. (more…)

Takashi Murakami is the subject of the most recent “Lunch with the FT” Interview this week, joining a writer from the newspaper for lunch at the Kaikai Kiki Co. studios outside Tokyo, and discussing his role in a generation of artists investigating capitalism and its intertwined relationship with fine art, including his relationship to otaku subcultures.  “People say, ‘Oh, Takashi steals from our culture.’ But wait a minute. Our culture means my culture, too, right?” (more…)

Former MIT Lecturer and filmmaker Joseph Gibbons is the subject of a Washington Post profile this week, as the performer and artist awaits sentencing for a bank robbery he committed on New Year’s Eve last year.  “You never can tell if the character he is playing is actually him or a work of fiction,” says Vincent Grenier, a filmmaker and professor at Binghamton University. “For him, it’s been a fertile arena to play in the boundary between reality and fantasy.” (more…)

Sotheby’s is looking to break the record for the most expensive art auction in London this week, with an Impressionist and modern sale expected to top £203 million.  “The forthcoming sale offers a rich range of highly desirable works, including those that rank among the finest by Manet, Degas, Klimt, Malevich, Gauguin and Miro,” says Helena Newman, global go-chairman of Sotheby’s Impressionist & Modern Art department. (more…)

Anish Kapoor’s Dirty Corner, the central installation at the artist’s recently opening Versailles Palace commission, has been vandalized with spray paint.  The work has already commanded harsh criticism for its subject matter and relationship to French history.  “It was lightly sprayed with paint,” says the estate management.  “The work is being cleaned.” (more…)

The Art Newspaper profiles the work of Zlot Buell, the art consulting firm that has earned a reputation for discretely advising tech entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley wealth in the contemporary art market, and notes the commonly assumed myth that tech collectors are interested in digital art.  “They look at a screen all day long; they don’t need to look at another,” Ms Zlot says. (more…)

Katharina Grosse, The Smoking Kid (Installation View), all photos via Anna Corrigan for Art Observed.

Now through June 21, Johan König in Berlin presents The Smoking Kid, a collection of new paintings by Katharina Grosse.  Grosse is known for her work employing bold colors and ambitious movement in order to transcend, open, and test the limits and boundaries defining space.  Color and gesture are central concerns of this artist, whose works are at once challenging and whimsical, and her current exhibition departs from Grosse’s typical method of large-scale sculptural installation, turning her abstract style instead towards work in which movement and color is tidily contained to the canvas instead of imposed onto walls and other three dimensional forms.

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The Art Newspaper notes the impact that the soaring price of the Swiss Franc has had on the market at Art Basel this year, pushing Switzerland’s high prices even higher, with prices about 15% higher than last year as a result.  “Even the bratwurst is unaffordable,” jokes Andreas Gegner of Sprüth Magers. (more…)

Richard Prince, Original (Installation View)

Richard Prince’s Original series is currently the subject of a new exhibition at Gagosian Gallery, nestled at the gallery’s Upper East Side bookstore showroom, and using Prince’s ‘arrangements’ of soft-core adult novels with artworks created for their covers, showing the next step in the artist’s fascination with collecting, ownership and presentation.  An ardent, perhaps even obsessive collector himself, Prince often mines and unfolds worn and sometimes clandestine images, not only from vintage pulps, which serve for the selection here, but also from copies of influential literary pieces, a pattern the artist has studied throughout his career of media appropriations.  A devoted member of a group of artists who started experimenting with appropriation in the ‘70’s, Prince usually employs minimal alteration to his subject matter; rearranging, editing and sometimes even rephotographing what already exists. (more…)

A rare Bernini sculpture that many historians had thought lost or destroyed has been acquired by the Getty Museum.  The marble bust of Pope Paul V will “become one of a handful of the most important sculptures in the Getty’s collection, no question,” says Director Timothy Potts. (more…)

Candida Höfer, Schauspielhaus Düsseldorf I (2012), Image via Sean Kelly Gallery

Some of the more subtle technical and aesthetic currencies of architectural design are found in the details of space, namely, how that design deals with, circulates and shapes the spatial conceptions of any given construction. Throughout her career, Candida Höfer has captured these deep design concerns through brightly-lit and grand photographs, and the artist turns this gaze to Düsseldorf, Germany for her newest exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery, a show of large C-Print photographs elegantly laid out throughout a two-floor, multi-series exhibition. Höfer’s work is presented in three parts: color photographs of grand interiors, multi-level buildings altered to form curving spirals, and even a series of much smaller-scale observations of space.

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Michael Heizer, Altars, via Art Observed

In Gagosian Gallery’s 24th Street Outpost, lithe, twisting steel platforms sprawl across the floor, smooth lines that undulate across the faded, industrial steppes that they lay across. In another room, an immense boulder hangs suspended from the ceiling, displayed in a case cut between two walls of the gallery so that viewers can see the rock’s sides from two separate rooms. The show could only be the work of Michael Heizer, one of the founding voices of American land art, whose new work continues his pioneering investigations into the construction of space and time along abstract, self-realized formats. (more…)

The Art Newspaper sits down with Guggenheim Director Richard Armstrong to discuss a range of issues with the Guggenheim’s ongoing expansion plans in Finland and Abu Dhabi, including pressures to improve labor conditions through the sub-contractors working on the project.  “These are all questions that come under sovereignty; I feel unequipped to answer them,” Armstrong says.  “I can state our position: we are in constant dialogue with TDIC and other intergovernmental agencies. It really is top of my mind.” (more…)

Former banker Jonathan Weal is facing prison time after allegedly withholding information on his art collection during bankruptcy proceedings, a collection that included a work recently authenticated as a J.M.W. Turner seascape.  “Mr Weal was required by law to declare all property that he owns but failed to do so,” says prosecutor Klentiana Mahmutaj. (more…)

As the Broad Foundation prepares to open its Los Angeles Museum, its founders are on a major buying spree, buying about one work per week to bulk up its collection.  The museum already holds the world’s largest collection of works by Cindy Sherman, and is noted as having more Roy Lichtenstein works than anyone else outside the artist’s own foundation.   (more…)

Artist Marlene Dumas has been commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St Anne’s Church in Freiberger Platz, Dresden, replacing the current work, which was damaged in WWII.  “They are giving me a lot of freedom. I can choose the form. The theme is also open,” Dumas says.  “The only ‘restriction’ is that [my painting] should not be too depressing. It should offer some hope.” (more…)

The Smithsonian has acquired the complete records of New York Gallery OK Harris, the renowned downtown dealers who helped launch the careers of Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Chamberlain, among others.  The collection of paperwork includes exhibition files, correspondence, and other documents from the career of Ivan and Marilynn Gelfmann Karp, the gallery owners. (more…)