The Whitney Museum of Art will remain open for 36 consecutive hours at the conclusion of the museum’s Jeff Koons retrospective, running from 11 a.m. October 18th through to 11 p.m. October 19^th, a last marathon run before the museum decamps to its new building downtown.  “This will not only give more people an opportunity to see the Koons retrospective, it’s also a chance for some to say goodbye to the Breuer building as it was,” says Whitney Director Adam Weinberg. (more…)

Russian entrepreneur, mathematician, engineer and collector, Inna Bazhenova has purchased the Art Newspaper, with the intent of helping in the development of the site’s online offering.  “The quality of its journalism and scholarship are outstanding and its excellent coverage of international art news is vital in our global environment,” she said in a statement. “I want to reassure you that The Art Newspaper will retain complete editorial independence, now and for as long as I own it. My aim is to invest in it so that it may remain as good as it is today.” (more…)

Fergus McCaffrey, via Art Info

Fergus McCaffrey Gallery has announced new plans to expand its spaces, opening new spaces in St. Barths and Tokyo over the next several years.  “The continuity of artist production in St Barths is compelling,” says McCaffrey. “There is an interesting and very rich history of work being made there; including what might have been Cy Twombly’s last works, Polaroid photographs of flowers in the graveyards in Lorient and St. Jean.” (more…)

Ai Weiwei, Blossom (2014) (Detail) photo by Jan Stürmann, courtesy of FOR-SITE foundation

After much anticipation, Ai Weiwei has opened his new project at Alcatraz, the former island prison in the San Francisco Bay.  The project, which brings seven large-scale installations incorporating photography, installation, sound and video, is a fitting continuation of Ai’s projects examination of incarceration following his own imprisonment in 2011.

Ai Weiwei, Yours Truly (2014) (Detail) photo by Jan Stürmann, courtesy of FOR-SITE foundation

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CNN has published a list detailing some of the best attractions and galleries that the city of Berlin currently has to offer, including KW Institute, Sammlung Boros, and the popular Mobile Kino traveling cinema on its list. (more…)

An article in Barron’s this week charts the instability and unpredictability of various materials in contemporary art as a considerable liability towards a work’s valuation and security as an investment.  “A great deal of art being sold today may deteriorate quickly and cause the monetary value to decline – precipitously in some cases,” says Emily MacDonald-Korth, founder of Longevity Art Preservation LLC. (more…)

The Turner Prize shortlist has been announced with four artists – Duncan Campbell, Ciara Phillips, James Richards and Tris Vonna-Michell – competing for the £25,000 prize.  The shortlist is notable this year for its strong focus on installation and new media-based works.  “This reflects the mobility of art today, while the prominence of film, performance, and participation reveals an interest in work that adapts according to changing surroundings.” says jury chair and Tate Britain director Penelope Curtis. (more…)

The Telegraph takes a look at the focus on post-war Italian art spanning much of the market in London this, including upcoming auctions focusing on the Arte Povera and related movements, as well as a handful of selling exhibitions.   (more…)

Walead Beshty, Performances Under Working Conditions (Installation View) via Emily Heinz for Art Observed

Following Petzel Gallery’s open invitation for Walead Beshty to curate its summer group exhibition, the Chelsea space is presenting his first solo show with the gallery, titled Performance Under Working Conditions. Examining modes of work and the kinetic, human element of labor, the exhibition uses minimal, repeated actions to underline the interaction of human and non-human agents.

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Christie’s has added a new fee to its auction sales this month, a 2% performance fee that rewards sales far exceeding pre-sale estimates.  “The purpose is to incentivize and reward high performance that exceeds consignors’ expectations,” says Christie’s head of communications Paddy Feeny.  (more…)

Eric Fischl is in the New Yorker this week, taking writer Emma Allen on a tour of the Art Southampton fair in Long Island while he captures photographs for the artist’s newest series of paintings depicting the wealth and society of the world’s most prominent art fairs.  “They’re all art fairs,” he says of his work.  “All people in various relationships to each other or to the art, usually ignoring it, sometimes looking at their phones.” (more…)

Allan McCollum, Collection of Thirty-Six Perfect Couples (2005-2014), via Art Observed

Now on view at Petzel Gallery is a solo exhibition of works by Los Angeles-born, New York-based artist Allan McCollum.  Entitled The Shapes Project, the purpose of the series on view was to design a system that would allow for the production of a single, unique shape for every person in the world, using rapid manufacturing technologies to produce infinite variations of shape and form. This exhibition will be McCollum’s sixth solo exhibition at Petzel.

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Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island (1976) (P.054), all images courtesy Victoria Miro

Photographer Francesca Woodman is the subject of an exhibition exploring her broad range of innovative techniques at Victoria Miro this month, focusing on a theme of the zigzag as both a geometric and compositional form.

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Maria Bukhtoyarova is the subject of a profile in the Wall Street Journal this week, as the young collector (just over 30), reviews her already impressive collection of works.  “I got interested in art in the late 2000s when I was working for L’Officiel magazine in Moscow,” she writes.  “In 2009, I went to Venice to visit the Biennale. It was an experience that brought me into the art world. I was fascinated by all the art around me and its power.” (more…)

Bloomberg takes a look this week at the trend towards artists painting luxury automobiles, profiling specially commissioned projects by Frank Stella, Jeff Koons, and others, and investigating the economic versus aesthetic values that the work brings up.  “It’s not a given that because it’s a Calder or a Warhol car it’ll automatically get a huge premium — that has not been proven by the market,” says luxury auto insurance head McKeel Hagerty. “An art car raises more questions about the real value of the car than it answers.” (more…)

Roxy Paine, Checkpoint (2014), via Henry Murphy for Art Observed

Roxy Paine makes work that can perhaps only be described as a challenge: large-scale carved wood sculptures capturing the most banal and unimposing scenes of contemporary American life.  Executed with a painstaking hand, the intense verisimilitude of his scenes and objects takes on a surrealist edge, oscillating between stark realism and its material grounding. (more…)

A recent US Fifth Circuit Court decision over the estate of collector James A. Elkins Jr has considerable implications for collectors leaving behind works after their death.  The court decision allowed a considerable discount on the the Elkins Family’s collection, which included pieces by Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Jackson Pollock, as the works were owned partially by the collector’s children, and not wholly by himself.  “Finally we have an applied fractional discount based on the facts,” says art lawyer Joy Berus,  in Newport Beach, Calif. “These are major discounts. It’s a huge affirmation that opens the door to help art owners reduce their estates.” (more…)

Parisian Taxidermy specialist Peyrolle has announced a collaboration with Damien Hirst.  Titled Signification (Hope, Immortality and Death in Paris, Now and Then), the “Cabinet of Curiosities” includes stuffed birds and insects, alongside a selection of cleaning products.  “From the Surrealists to now, artists have come to Deyrolle not only to be inspired, but also to have a relationship with le vivant — the living — and the collapse of the living,” says Deyrolle’s owner Prince Louis Albert de Broglie.  (more…)

Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art has announced that the New York-based DIS Collective will be the curator’s for the 2016 edition of the Berlin Biennale. The collective has made increasingly larger waves among the institutional art world in the past years, drawing rave reviews for its DISown exhibition, as well as its DIS Images Studios project last year.  Previous curators include Klaus Biesenbach, Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni. (more…)

Space Group, an iconic building in downtown Seoul, has been converted into an art museum.  The Ariano Museum, opened by collectoer Kim Chang-il opened this month with a show of works from Mr. Kim’s collection, over 200 pieces by 43 international artists, including notable pieces by Subodh Gupta and Marc Quinn.   (more…)

Bradford Young, Bynum Cutler (2014), via Art Observed

Founded in 1838, the Brooklyn community of Weeksville was a landmark moment in the history of African-American self-determination.    Just 11 years after the abolition of slavery in New York, Weeksville was founded by free Black landowners, a venture that grew to over 500 households and earned its citizens the right to vote.  As a social project, Weeksville’s impact is vastly significant, allowing a supportive, radical structure for its citizens to define and build their own system of economic and cultural stability.  Weeksville’s powerful history that sits at the center of Creative Time’s newest project, Funk, God, Jazz & Medicine, a series of collaborative on-site projects and initiatives incorporating the communal, radical mission of Weeksville and examining its presence in the contemporary landscape of Central Brooklyn. (more…)

Monika Sosnowska, Tower (2014), via Art Observed

Following the gallery’s exhibition of Sterling Ruby’s slurred, industrial run-off and massive assemblages earlier this summer, Hauser and Wirth New York returns for the first show of its fall season with a similarly inclined, yet considerably more restrained take on architectural and industrial forms.  This time, the work is Monika Sosnowska’s, and the subject is that of high architectural modernism, reinterpreting the forms and elements of “International Style” as developed and professed by landmark German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Monika Sosnowska, Tower (2014), via Henry Murphy for Art Observed

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Artist Glenn Ligon has created a specially-designed tote bag, for sale to benefit Harlem’s Studio Museum.  Based on the artist’s work Untitled (I am Somebody), the bag is co-designed with MZ Wallace, and is available for $225.  “It’s always been a favorite text of mine,” Ligon sayws. “When I was approached about an image for this project, I thought the message of that image and its history, and also how it works on the bag when I saw the sketches, that this is a perfect marriage of these two things.” (more…)

The New York Times reports on the opening of the third and final section of the High Line Park renovation, stretching a loop from 30th to 34th Street and looking out on to the Hudson River.  The $35 million renovation was recently the site of an expansive installation by artist Carol Bove, with more projects planned for the future. (more…)