Tracey Emin to carry the Olympic Torch today, completing her 400 meter leg at the Turner Contemporary in her hometown of Margate.

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The New York Times explores the changes and trends currently facing curators by looking into Independent Curators International’s popular 10-day training program in New York City. Addressing the mechanics of this fast-growing professional phenomenon, the program boasts a faculty of notables in New York’s museum and nonprofit organization sector, and facilitates networking among its participants.

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The Tate Modern‘s Tanks, designed to hold commissions, acquisitions, and live performances, opened yesterday. “We are the first in the world with the ambition, the scale, and with the consistency to meet that increasing demand. The Tanks are a new instrument for the orchestra that is the Tate,” claims Sir Nicholas Serota, head of the Tate museums in the U.K.

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Yayoi Kusama, Fireflies on the Water (2002) – Whitney Museum

Multi-media artist Yayoi Kusama has been creating immersive, otherworldly paintings, video, sculpture and large-scale installation environments for over 50 years, both in the United States and her home country of Japan.  Now, the Whitney Museum in New York is exhibiting a retrospective selection of works spanning her career as a preeminent voice in Japanese contemporary art.

Yayoi Kusama, A Flower (1952)- Whitney Museum

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In further auction news, China Guardian emerges as a player in the mainstream contemporary game and will hold auctions in Hong Kong this fall, joining Christie’s and Sotheby’s. The oldest auction house in mainland China is now the fourth largest house in the world, and maintains plans to expand internationally.

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In other auction news, The Wall Street Journal analyzes Christie’s and Sotheby’s most recent auction performances and current buyer trends. “The combination reflects the increasingly unsettled state of the art market lately, as billionaire collectors chase after the world’s priciest masterpieces while collectors further down the food chain sneer at second-tier material that suddenly looks overpriced.”

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In auction news, Bloomberg reports on Christie’s 13% sales boost for this past half-year, aided by the sizable profit from various Rothko and Renoir sales. Chief executive officer, Steven P. Murphy says, “clients are driving this, the trend will continue.”

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Disbelief over the authenticity of the recovered ‘Caravaggio‘ drawings is further expressed by Italian scholars with a negation from Maria Teresa Fiorio, the former director of Milan’s Castello Sforzesco, stating “how can you attribute [so many of] Peterzano’s drawings to his young apprentice and how can you trash all previous research? That archive has been studied by many academics before me, and none of them ever detected Caravaggio’s hand.”

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Ed Ruscha has resigned from the Board of Trustees at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Following Joh Baldessari, Catherine Opie and Barbara Kruger’s departure over the dismissal of long time curator Paul Schimmel, the board is now with no artist representation. In a letter to museum director Jeffrey Deitch, Ruscha was candid; “My defection may look obvious, but it will be all the better for the museum, which is on a course different than I imagined, but one I hope to support in the future.”

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A missing supposed Gustav Klimt fresco was discovered in an Austrian garage. The ceiling piece ‘Trumpeting Putto’ is in good condition, but is highly believed to have been painted by Gustav’s brother, Ernst Klimt.

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Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija releases his first film ‘Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbors’, which follows a 60 year-old retired rice farmer based in Chiang Mai, a rural province of Thailand. The film, released today in Manhattan, maintains no story line or screenplay in its minimalist progression.

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Nowness highlights Paris based photographer Alessandra d’Urso’s latest shift from profiling musicians to leading artists like Kiki Smith, Terence Koh and Tom Sachs. “It began while I was in New York for a month. I made a portrait of my old friend Francesco Clemente and he liked it so much that he encouraged me to begin a series. I didn’t know very many artists so he made the introductions,” explains d’Urso.

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In keeping with their aspirations to “invest the experience of public space with wonder,” The Bruce High Quality Foundation is currently exhibiting Art History With Labor in New York’s Lever House Art Collection through September 28^th. The exhibit consists of three pieces on display in the open-air courtyard and the glass-walled lobby of the Lever House.

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Barbara Kruger and Catherine Opie resign from MOCA board, following John Baldessari’s leave last Thursday after curator Paul Schimmel’s departure following reported conflicts with new Director  Jeffrey Deitch.  Opie stated that: “I love and respect MOCA. It’s the first place I’ve ever had a solo museum show, and it’s had a profound influence on artists in Los Angeles, but the museum is taking such a different direction now… What concerns me is seeing the museum embracing more celebrity and fashion.”

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The Financial Times sits down with Tate Modern director, Nicholas Serota, to discuss his perspective and vision for the most popular modern art museum in the world. “Only recently have I begun to understand what it felt like to be Picasso and Braque in 1907- absolutely determined to bury the previous century.”

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Google honors the 150th birthday of Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt with a Google Doodle of Klimt’s ‘The Kiss’.

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Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Olympic Rings (1985)

During the 1980’s, the personnages of both Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat loomed large in the New York art world.  Warhol as one of its most visible older guard, and Basquiat as one of its prominent, up-and-coming stars.  But the two were also friends, and it was in this context that Basquiat and Warhol collaborated on a number of paintings that would end up being some of the last of their lives.  Blending Basquiat’s striking, often visceral approach with Warhol’s measured explorations of pop culture iconography, these pieces offered a marked commentary on both the style and subjects exhibited.

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Plans to replace 3,000 old masters with modern art in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie have left many local fans of classical art, and art historians, incensed. The galleries will be filled with an extensive collection of surrealist and expressionist art donated by a billionaire industrialist named Heiner Pietzsch, who gave his collection under the condition that it be displayed in its entirety. The old masters collection–including works by Brueghel, Raphael, and Caravaggio–will be temporarily housed in the Bode Museum, with no plans announced for a permanent home.

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Faced with rising rents, galleries in Chelsea are slowly moving to areas such as the Lower East Side. Multi-tenant buildings have been affected the most, with small dealers suffering a lack of foot traffic, while large galleries have opened up mega-spaces that also steal viewers. With the High Line‘s popularity and increasing gentrification, rents are only slated to continue increasing.

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A sculpture by the British artist Henry Moore has been stolen from the grounds of his former home, now the Henry Moore Foundation, in Much Hadham, England. Valued at £500,000, Sundial was stolen in between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Investigators are leading a search for the bronze work, fearing that it may be melted down as scrap metal, a fate that awaited Moore’s Reclining Figure, which was stolen and melted down in 2005.

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John Baldessari resigns from the board of MOCA, Los Angeles after the museum’s ousting of chief curator Paul Schimmel, who came into philosophical disputes about the museum’s direction with major benefactor Eli Broad and director Jeffrey Deitch.  Baldessari is the fifth trustee to resign since February.

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A Sandro Botticelli painting, estimated at $9.5 million, may alleviate a portion of the losses suffered by the victims of Lawrence Salander‘s art fraud, the largest in New York to date.

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Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view. All photography courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery unless otherwise noted.

Ellsworth Kelly‘s installation of four 2-panel paintings executed this year is on view at Galerie Marian Goodman in Paris until July 13, 2012. The show, as the gallery’s press release relates, is his first in Paris in 20 years, when his formative paintings made in his youthful residence in the city were exhibited at the Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume. This new work comprises four paintings, each consisting of a curved geometrical relief on a white panel, progressing on the ordered spectrum from red, yellow, blue, to green. Laconically hung a single panel to each of the four walls in the gallery, the paintings seem a further distillation of Kelly’s painterly system, a continuation of the experiments he first executed in Paris in his early years.

Marian Goodman Gallery, “Ellsworth Kelly,” installation view

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Olafur Eliasson‘s ‘Little Sun’ newly installed at the Tate Modern uses solar powered, sunflower-shaped lamps and blackouts, and additionally address the social issues of energy use and expense. “Little Sun is a small work of art with a large reach,” says the Danish artist about his vision.

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