The Economist reviews the touring exhibition of the M+ Museum collection, before the Hong Kong museum opens its doors in 2019, and profiles some of the most important contributors to the emergence of Chinese contemporary art worldwide, including businessman and diplomat Uli Sigg, and Guy Ullens, founder of the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art.  “The view was that art and culture were enshrined in the past—that Chinese art was ‘something ancient’,” says Edmund Capon, who served as head of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. (more…)

The LA Times looks at the immense efforts taken at the Broad Museum to ready the exhibition space, including the negotiations in installing and managing immense artworks like a recently purchased Takashi Murakami piece.  “Contemporary art is so varied in form, material and scale that you often need to devise new approaches for moving and installing certain pieces,” says the Broad’s director of collections management, Vicki Gambill.  “That’s what makes the work infinitely interesting and complex. Preparators love solving problems.” (more…)

White Cube Gallery will close its São Paulo exhibition space this August, when its three year lease ends, The Art Newspaper reports. The gallery told the paper that it will focus on “special projects” in Brazil,“as was the impetus when the gallery was first introduced to the region.”   (more…)

Roni Horn, Hack Wit – chasing blue out (2014), via Hauser and Wirth

Hauser and Wirth is currently devoting both its Saville Row Galleries to a collection of several recent series by Roni Horn, documenting the American artist’s ongoing investigations of language, repetition and meaning that stem from both the viewer and artist’s encounter with the work. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has opened a series of new exhibitions in Beijing, signaling a relaxation of the capital’s ban on the showing the artist, while foreign travel is still off limits.  “The decision-making process is opaque. I can only speculate that the authorities realize that they have created a situation that, sooner or later, has to be resolved,” says John Tancock, a longtime collaborator of Ai’s and an adviser to Chambers Fine Art. (more…)

Jeff Koons is interviewed in The Guardian this week, as the artist prepares to open his traveling retrospective at the Guggenheim Bilbao this month, and his views on critiques of his work as trophies for multi-millionaires.  “It happens to everybody – the work is held by someone who doesn’t even particularly enjoy the work, and just has it stored in some warehouse and will sit there for 20 years,” he says.  “Or someone doesn’t understand it physically, and their motivations are just to show that they have the power to purchase. There’s not much you can do; that’s about educating people, and the way you can educate them is through your art. And I try to educate people about materialism through my work. I try to show them real visual luxury.” (more…)

The New York Times travels to the Havana Biennial this week, and notes the arrest of artist Tania Bruguera during the event, following the artist’s live reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, an event that cast something of a pall over the first Biennial legally accessible to American visitors. (more…)

Damien Hirst has installed his large-scale work, Charity, outside of the Gherkin tower in London this week, a nearly 25-foot high statue of a young girl in a leg brace, holding a vandalized collection tin.  “Charity is an iconic piece of art. It is also a symbol of changing attitudes to disability over the past 50 years, since collection boxes like the one depicted in this sculpture were seen on high streets across the country,” says Alan Gosschalk, fundraising director at Scope, the British disability charity that once used the collection tins depicted in Hirst’s work. (more…)

Marina Abramovic is in The Guardian this week, reviewing her plans for her own funeral, to take place in the three cities she lived longest: New York, Amsterdam and Belgrade.  “I want to have three Marinas,” she says. “Of course, one is real and two fake because you can’t have three bodies.” (more…)

Manchester’s Whitworth Museum has been awarded the UK’s annual “Museum of the Year” award, recognizing the institution’s impressive new expansion project, unveiled this past February. (more…)

Olaf Breuning, Brancusi (2015)

Olaf Breuning, the Swiss-born, New York-based artist who has received wide acclaim for his playful appropriations of the iconography of popular culture, has returned to Metro Pictures for a highly anticipated solo exhibition, titled The Life. Consisting of 25 MDF panels each reaching to 9 feet high, the artist’s lofty, circular panels and free-standing steel sculptures incorporate Breuning’s mix of the humorous, quotidian and idiosyncratic imagery of the contemporary social landscape: emojis, bean bags, beer bottles, human figures and other objects, omitting any hierarchal separation so that each element blends into a somewhat objective examination of reality. (more…)

Philippe Parreno, Danny La Rue,  H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS

The Park Avenue Armory has opened its doors this summer to Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno’s largest U.S. installation to date, H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS, a symphony of events unfolding in scripted and random sequences that constantly blend and transform in shape and context, tuning the entire space as a series of interlocking events.  Sharing authorship, Parreno avidly collaborates with performance artist Tino Sehgal, artist Pierre Hughye and pianist Mikhail Ruby, giving Parreno the role of both artist and director.  (more…)

John Waters is the subject of a profile in The Guardian this week, as the filmmaker-turned-artist prepares to open a show of his work in London, and discussing his aims towards his most recent body of work.  “I wanted to be the most despised person imaginable, like I was when I started.  I built a career out of it. I wasn’t hated by the people I wanted to like my work – I was hated by the people it was bait for,” he says.    (more…)

Josef Helfenstein, the Director of Houston’s Menil Collection for the past 12 years, is leaving his position to head the Kunstmuseum Basel, the New York Times reports.  “It’s a very hard decision for me to leave the Menil – I love this institution enormously,” Helfenstein says. “I think we have accomplished a lot, so it was kind of a natural moment.” (more…)

A series of six new public commissions spearheaded by Norman Rosenthal, former head of exhibitions at the Royal Academy, have been announced for Embassy Gardens, the site of the new U.S. Embassy in London.  “Each show is a germ of an idea that could become a museum exhibition,” Rosenthal says. “They are all shows I have dreamt of doing.” (more…)

The New York Times notes the increasing popularity of Athens as a destination for artists in the wake of the country’s financial hardships, noting the increased affordability of studios and opportunities to show work in the city while commenting on the complex financial exchanges the country is currently involved in.  “I realized it would be much more useful to have an artistic platform in a city like Athens than another European city,” says Greek curator Iliana Fokianaki. “The crisis kind of boosted our energy to do more things, rather than flee the country.” (more…)

The Washington Post notes two American museums battling in court to prevent works claimed as Nazi-loot from returning to the families who claim them as rightfully theirs.  “I find it outrageous, and I’m embarrassed,” says Oklahoma state Rep. Paul Wesselhoft of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma, one of the museums refusing to return a work. “With this artwork, we have definitive proof that it was stolen. We have copies of the Nazi documents. As an Oklahoman, I think it’s a moral outrage.” (more…)

Andy Warhol, One Dollar Bill (1962), via Sotheby’s

The results are in for Sotheby’s Evening Sale tonight, drawing the first half of the 2015 market year to a close with a mixed sale that saw impressive strength in unexpected places and a number of major letdowns at the higher end of the sale, ultimately closing on a final tally of £130,376,500, well shy of the £203 million mark the auction house had trumpeted earlier this month, with 9 of the 58 lots going unsold. (more…)

Damien Hirst is the subject of a lengthy profile in The Guardian this week, exploring his often overlooked role in curating and presenting the work of the YBA’s in their early years, and his soon to open London gallery.  “I’ve always wanted a gallery like Saatchi, the original Boundary Road,” he says. (more…)

Doug Aitken has launched another iteration of his Station to Station project at London’s Barbican Center, bringing his vast multimedia project to bear on the British capital.  “It will be amazing to see Station to Station come to life in London in such a unique, multi-arts environment as the Barbican,” Aitken says.  “This is a living exhibition with artists of all mediums, creating unique works and unpredictable encounters every day.” (more…)

The Independent Art Fair has announced its plans to move downtown, and will open the 2016 edition of the popular Armory Week art fair at Spring Studios in TriBeCa March 3rd.  “We’re excited about the Spring/Independent partnership, as it will allow us to take the fair to a new and exciting dimension by hosting it in an extraordinary environment that the art world has yet to experience,” says fair Co-Founder, Elizabeth Dee In our new home at Spring, Independent will be even more adventurous in support of galleries’ and artists’ projects with the flexibility the space allows.” (more…)

Doug Aitken is interviewed in the Financial Times this week, as he opens the newest edition of Station to Station at The Barbican in London.  “Culture is the language that will bring us into the future,” Aitken says.  “But at the same time it is being surrounded by this conservative, capitalist system, which makes it harder than ever for individuals who have voices to push them as far as they can go.” (more…)

An arrest warrant for Artist Shepard Fairey has been issued in the city of Detroit, alleging that the artist has caused over $9,000 in damages from various tags and murals he left in the city.  Fairey’s public recognition “does not take away the fact that he is also a vandal,” says Police Sgt. Rebecca McKay. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal notes the growing number of volunteer museum docents and tour guides among the baby boomer generation, and problems with managing the volunteer staff that often comes with the territory.  “There was this culture of resistance,”says Hirshhorn Museum spokeswoman Kelly Carnes of volunteers who opposed changes in the tour guide structure. “They really felt entitled after spending enough time here not to make any changes from the way they had previously done things.” (more…)