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September 17, 2021 at 1:42pm

Met to Deaccession $1 Million Worth of Prints and Photos to Make Ends Meet

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is to sell 219 prints and photographs to make up for a $150 million budget shortfall caused by the continuing Covid-19 crisis, according to Artnet News. Auction house Christie’s will handle the sale. The works, all duplicates of those in the Met’s collection, will be made available in three tranches beginning September 24, when a raft of Civil War photographs hit the block. The sale is expected to generate roughly $900,000 to $1.4 million and includes works by Robert Frank, Roy Lichtenstein, and Frank Stella. The museum confirmed that private dealer Tobias

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September 17, 2021 at 1:28pm

Hito Steyerl Rejects Top German Honor, Citing Country’s Pandemic Response

Artist and documentary filmmaker Hito Steyerl on Wednesday said she would decline one of Germany’s most prestigious civilian honors, the Federal Cross of Merit. In a letter published in the German weekly Die Zeit, the Munich-born artist, who is known for her work investigating militarization, surveillance migration, and the global dissemination of images, pointed to the government’s handling of the Covid-19 crisis as the reason behind her rejection of the award, considered the equivalent of a British knighthood or the French Legion of Honor. Previous recipients of the award include art historian

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September 16, 2021 at 2:13pm

NFT Sales Platform OpenSea Rocked by Insider Trading Scandal

NFT sales platform OpenSea has revealed that a high-ranking executive within the company profited from trading its crypto digital assets using insider information, as first reported by TechCrunch. The employee, said to be the platform’s head of product, used secret crypto wallets to purchase NFTs before they were made available to buyers online, sold them once they were unveiled on the OpenSea website, and directed the profits to a personal account.
The illicit transactions were allegedly first pointed out by Twitter user @ZuwuTV, who on September 14 approached OpenSea via their Twitter account,

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September 16, 2021 at 12:26pm

Christophe Leribault Appointed Director of Musée d’Orsay

Christophe Leribault was yesterday announced as the new director of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and of its affiliate, the Musée de l’Orangerie. Leribault, who served as a curator at the Louvre and as director of the Musée Delacroix, Paris, before going on to helm the Petit Palais, Paris, in 2012, will replace Laurence des Cars. Des Cars this month assumes leadership of the Louvre, becoming its first female director.
In his new role, which he will step into on October 5, Leribault will be tasked with overseeing the Musée d’Orsay’s large-scale redevelopment, which is expected to take ten years to

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September 16, 2021 at 11:50am

The Kitchen Launches $28 Million Capital Campaign to Secure Future

New York arts nonprofit the Kitchen is kicking off a five-year $28 million capital campaign to raise funds for the renovation of its historic home in the city’s Chelsea neighborhood, and to secure its future. The organization, which supports artists working across an array of practices and is especially known for fostering the city’s experimental music and performance scenes over the past decades, has timed the effort to coincide with its fiftieth anniversary, taking place this year. The campaign is being overseen by director Legacy Russell, who assumed leadership of the Kitchen this past June

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September 15, 2021 at 5:50pm

Gagosian Will Open Third Paris Gallery

Global megagallery Gagosian in October will open its third outpost in Paris. The gallery, at 9, rue de Castiglione in Paris’s 1st arrondissement, will be Gagosian’s eighteenth. In addition to the Paris branches, the dealer has half a dozen locations in New York alone, as well as three in London, and one each in Athens, Basel, Geneva, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and Rome. Earlier this year, Gagosian shuttered its San Francisco outpost and leased space in the former Marciano Museum in Los Angeles, already home to the dealer’s Beverly Hills branch.
“Paris is an important center for modern and contemporary

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September 14, 2021 at 1:58pm

Palais de Tokyo President Emma Lavigne to Helm Pinault Collection

Emma Lavigne, president of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, has been named chief executive officer of the Pinault Collection, which is headquartered in the same city. Lavigne is just two years into her job at the Palais de Tokyo, France’s largest noncollecting museum of contemporary art, where she was the first woman to lead that institution since its founding in 2002. She will take up her post at the Pinault Collection, which oversees the art collection of French billionaire François Pinault, on November 1, succeeding Jean-Jacques Aillagon, who will stay on as an adviser to the collection.
In her

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September 14, 2021 at 11:54am

Nairy Baghramian Awarded 2022 Nasher Prize for Sculpture

Iranian-German artist Nairy Baghramian has won the 2022 iteration of the Nasher Prize. The prize, considered to be the world’s most prestigious sculpture honor, is awarded annually by the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, to a living artist whose work expands the parameters of the form. Baghramian will receive $100,000 and, at a ceremony in Dallas in April, a Renzo Piano–designed award.
“Deeply committed to the object-making traditions of sculpture, Baghramian carefully considers materials and form to create sculptures that are evocative, enigmatic explorations of the body and that probe our

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September 13, 2021 at 5:14pm

Baltimore Museum of Art Receives $150K Grant to Research Museum Structures

The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has received $150,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of a multi-year project aimed at reimagining the museum through the lens of equity and diversity. Dubbed the Mellon Initiative, the project will investigate through a series of interviews with artists, program partners, local leaders, and constituents the ways in which the museum could better serve the surrounding community.
“Through the Mellon Initiative, we’re seeking to engage the critical conversations, debates, and creative imaginings about the future that are happening in museums,” said

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September 10, 2021 at 4:12pm

Cao Fei Wins 2021 Deutsche Börse Prize

Guangzhou-born, Beijing-based artist Cao Fei, whose work across media including film, photography, digital media, and sculpture explores the impact of technology on modern society, has won the prestigious $43,000 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation prize for her show “Blueprints.” The solo exhibition, the artist’s first in the UK, opened at London’s Serpentine in 2020, ahead of the Covid-19 crisis, and featured works including the 2018 video Asia One, about the last two remaining humans in an automated world, and the 2019 video Nova, which the artist has described as being about a “father-son

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September 10, 2021 at 12:40pm

Klaus Biesenbach to Head Neue Nationalgalerie

Klaus Biesenbach has been announced as the next director of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie and of its forthcoming Museum of the 20th Century. Biesenbach, who is currently artistic director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (LA MoCA), will take up his new post in January 2022. The news comes just days after LA MoCA announced that Biesenbach would be sharing leadership duties there with Johanna Burton, who was named executive director of that lately beleaguered institution on September 2. Biesenbach had led LA MoCA since 2018; following a restructuring of the museum spurred by the

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September 09, 2021 at 5:55pm

Art Basel UBS Report Suggests Galleries’ Recovery Gaining Strength

Citing “resilience” as the buzzword characterizing the international art scene, a mid-year survey released today by Art Basel and UBS and written by Clare McAndrew shows gallery sales up 10 percent globally in the first half of 2021 over the preceding year. And while 23 percent of galleries were forced to cut staff in 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic surged, 25 percent hired new employees in the first half of this year, and 50 percent said sales had improved over the previous year. Despite the good news, many of those reporting an increase in fortune were larger galleries, which reported a 21

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