News

September 30, 2020 at 12:32pm

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to Lay Off 103 Workers

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum has entered consultation with staff over plans to cut 103 workers, or 10 percent of its workforce, to offset the financial downturn caused by the continuing Covid-19 crisis. Most of the job losses will be in the front-facing retail and visitor experience departments, which have been among those most affected by the pandemic.
While voluntary redundancy is open to staff in all departments of the institution, only workers in the aforementioned sectors face layoffs. The Public and Commercial Services Union, which represents the museum workers, slammed the move,

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September 29, 2020 at 8:07pm

Arts Nonprofit A Blade of Grass to Restructure, Relinquishing Staff and Fellowship Program

Brooklyn-based arts nonprofit A Blade of Grass has announced that it is restructuring amid the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. All five of the organization’s full-time employees will be laid off in mid-October, and executive director Deborah Fisher will take a pay cut as the nonprofit seeks new avenues of providing support to its artists. The organization expects to hire one full-time associate following the restructuring: The position has been offered to current staff.
Founded in 2011, A Blade of Grass for nearly a decade sought to nurture socially engaged art through direct funding to artists via

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September 29, 2020 at 2:37pm

Centre Pompidou Faces Three- to Seven-Year Renovation Closure

Paris’s Centre Pompidou could fully close for three years, beginning in 2023, or close partially for seven years, in order for necessary repairs to be made to the iconic 1970s building, The Art Newspaper reports. The schedule of the projected $235 million maintenance work is currently under consideration by the French government.
The repairs are a long time coming. Though an overhaul of the building’s external glass-enclosed escalators was begun in 2019 with expected completion in 2021, with further plans afoot for a new, expanded entrance, Centre Pompidou’s president, Serge Lasvignes, told French

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September 28, 2020 at 1:05pm

Grand Palais’s Renovation Scaled Back in Wake of Covid-19

The hotly anticipated renovation of Paris’s historic Grand Palais is to be somewhat less grand following government intervention in the project, The Art Newspaper reports. Costs, originally projected at $543 million, soared to $700 million, prompting the Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais (RMN-GP), the government entity which oversees the structure, to step in and pare the scheme back to fit the original budget.
The initial plans for remodeling, announced in February 2018, would have reconfigured the site and required extensive excavation of the grounds surrounding the 120-year-old structure

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September 28, 2020 at 11:38am

Vincent Namatjira Becomes First Indigenous Artist to Win Australia’s Archibald Prize

Vincent Namatjira on Friday was awarded Australia’s prestigious Archibald Prize, becoming the first Indigenous artist to receive the honor since the prize was established in 1921. Namatjira won the $100,000 prize for his work Stand Strong for Who You Are, painted in the colors of the Aboriginal flag (red, black, and yellow) and featuring himself and Indigenous footballer Adam Goodes, who played for the Sydney Swans before becoming an anti-racism activist.
Namatjira acknowledged his inspiration in a statement. “When I saw the 2019 documentary [The Final Quarter] about Adam’s final season of AFL

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September 27, 2020 at 8:23pm

Ebony L. Haynes to Create Black-Run NYC Gallery with Support from David Zwirner

David Zwirner has hired Ebony L. Haynes to create and oversee a new Manhattan gallery, which she intends to run with an all-Black staff, reports the New York Times. Haynes begins on October 1 and expects to open the gallery—whose name, location, and programming have yet to be determined—next spring.
Formerly the director of the Chinatown’s Martos Gallery, the Toronto-born Haynes hopes that the new enterprise will help remedy the significant lack of Black decision-makers in art dealerships, a countrywide scarcity that reflects decades of entrenched inequality in the industry. “There aren’t enough

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September 27, 2020 at 1:50pm

Harold Evans (1928–2020)

Harold Evans, the swashbuckling newspaperman who redefined publishing on both sides of the Atlantic—first as a muckraker for London broadsheets and then as the chief of Random House in New York—died last week at ninety-two. His death was confirmed by his wife, Tina Brown, the iconic editor of American magazines. Evans, who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2004 despite having left the country two decades prior and obtained US citizenship, authored and edited myriad books and contributed to dozens of publications, including this one, and in recent years operated as editor-at-large for Reuters.

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September 25, 2020 at 5:03pm

Paddle8 Bankruptcy Trustee Launches $6 Million Suit Against Former Member of Board of Directors

Megan Noh, Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee of defunct online auction house Paddle8, this week filed suit in US Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of New York, against John Textor, an alleged member of the company’s board of directors, Artnews reports. The suit seeks $6 million plus interest from Textor and an additional $1 million plus interest from companies with which he has been affiliated, on claims that Textor showed a “reckless disregard for his duties” by placing the interests of his own companies ahead of those of Paddle8’s shareholders and creditors.
Paddle8, which launched in 2011, was

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September 25, 2020 at 2:36pm

Sale of Keith Haring’s Personal Collection Expected to Raise $1 Million for New York’s LGBT Center

More than 140 objects from Keith Haring’s personal collection are on the block at Sotheby’s this week, with the proceeds going to benefit New York’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center. The auction, which is online September 24–October 1 and on view at Sotheby’s in New York September 26–30, is expected to raise roughly $1 million.
On sale are items including a Gumby watch gifted to Haring by Andy Warhol, which the older artist signed; works from a show Haring curated at the legendary but short-lived downtown nightspot Club 57; and an original invitation to a TriBeCa show reputed

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September 25, 2020 at 8:00am

Major Philip Guston Exhibition Pushed to 2024 Over KKK Imagery Concerns

A highly anticipated Philip Guston retrospective conceived by curators at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and London’s Tate Modern has been pushed back four years amid concerns by the museums’ directors over the Ku Klux Klan imagery that recurs throughout the American painter’s oeuvre, particularly his later works. The decision has sparked outrage among some scholars, curators, and critics, who say that the museums have not only betrayed a lack of faith in their viewerships but have also missed an opportunity to

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September 24, 2020 at 4:16pm

Hedge Fund Manager Alexander Klabin Bets Big on Sotheby’s

US hedge fund manager Alexander Klabin has acquired a minority stake in storied auction house Sotheby’s and will serve as executive chairman of the company’s financial arm, Sotheby’s Financial Services (SFS). In his new role, the terms of which have not been disclosed, he will oversee the modernization of SFS’s underwriting services and improve its access to capital markets.
Klabin, a cofounder of the Blackstone Group–backed Senator Investment Group, was approached in 2019 by a coalition of four former Sotheby’s shareholders hoping to secure his aid in blocking a $3.7 billion buyout of the auction

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September 24, 2020 at 2:28pm

After Raising $20 Million, Artist Relief Fund Extended to End of 2020

The Artist Relief fund announced today that it will continue to distribute unrestricted $5,000 grants to US artists in straitened financial situations through the end of 2020. The fund, which has raised $20 million since its inception in April, will accept applications through December 10, three months past its initial expected September deadline; it will also continue fundraising efforts during this time.
To date, more than 130,000 artists across all states and territories have applied for the grants, with those demonstrating the greatest financial need in four categories—food, rent, medical,

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