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  • Robert Newland. Photo: Superblue.
    September 27, 2022 at 2:54pm

    Dealer Robert Newland Pleads Guilty to Aiding Inigo Philbrook in $86 Million Fraud

    British art dealer Robert Newland, a onetime business partner of disgraced art dealer and convicted fraudster Inigo Philbrick, has pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud for his part in helping Philbrick swindle dealers and collectors out of $86 million. Newland entered the plea September 23 before US District Court Judge Sidney H. Stein in the southern District Court of New York after being extradited to the US earlier in the week, roughly seven months after being detained in the UK in connection with the crime. Philbrick this past May was sentenced by the same

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  • Jeffrey Weiss. Photo: Sharon Hayes and Brooke O'Harra.
    September 26, 2022 at 3:30pm

    Jeff Weiss (1940–2022)

    Playwright, actor, and doyen of downtown performance Jeffrey Weiss has died age the age of eighty-two. In the wake of his passing on September 18, figures including the novelist and historian Sarah Schulman, actor Harvey Fierstein, and the critic Lynne Tillman took to social media to express their grief, the latter writing: “He was electric.” 

    Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1940, Weiss dropped out of high school and moved to New York City as a young man, becoming involved in the city’s bourgeoning experimental theater scene as a performer and dramatist. Forgoing formal acting training—he

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  • September 26, 2022 at 2:33pm

    Toronto’s Power Plant Board Sees Mass Exodus over Management Kerfuffle

    Twenty-four of the twenty-seven members of the board of Toronto’s Power Plant contemporary art space submitted their resignations last week in protest of the institution’s management by the Harbourfront Centre, an affiliated nonprofit organization. In a resignation letter shared on social media, fifteen of the departing board members called out Harbourfront for attempting to unseat a dozen of the institution’s board members over the summer “and replace them with its own slate of directors from its own board or staff.” The authors of the letter noted, “This decision was made without consulting

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  • The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photo: Rgordon6/Wikipedia Commons.
    September 26, 2022 at 2:05pm

    Philadelphia Museum of Art Staff on Strike over Fair Contract

    Roughly 180 unionized employees of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) will go on strike today as part of a continuing effort to secure a fair contract, for which they have been negotiating with museum officials for two years. The union—which formed in May 2020 under the aegis of AFSCME District Council 47, Local 397—has accused PMA management of dragging its feet in the bargaining process, which began in October 2020. The strike arrives in the wake of a one-day warning strike staged by staff in early September, which itself came a week after union bosses filed an unfair labor practices grievance

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  • The Guggenheim Museum in New York. Photo: hounddiggity/Flickr.
    September 23, 2022 at 3:56pm

    Guggenheim Eliminates $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize

    New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is discontinuing its $100,000 Hugo Boss Prize, Artnews reports. The institution gave no reason for the cancelation of biennial prize, which was organized with the German luxury fashion company Hugo Boss in 1996 to reward innovation and influence in contemporary art.

    Modeled after the Turner Prize in Britain but unrestricted by nationality or age, the prize frequently included a solo exhibition at the museum and had become a mainstay of the international art world, bestowing emerging and established talents alike with international prestige. Dozens of artists

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  • A work by Ralph Lemon included in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Photo: Whitney Museum.
    September 22, 2022 at 6:21pm

    Ralph Lemon Awarded Whitney Biennial’s $100,000 Bucksbaum Award

    New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art has given the $100,000 Bucksbaum Award to American choreographer and visual artist Ralph Lemon, who was picked from the sixty-three artists and collectives included in the ongoing Whitney Biennial, titled “Quiet as It’s Kept,” which remains on view until October 16. 

    “With the Bucksbaum Prize, the Whitney seeks to honor an artist with the promise to make a lasting contribution to the history of American art,” said Scott Rothkopf, chief curator of the Whitney. “In Ralph Lemon’s case that has already happened. His body of work has shifted paradigms around

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  • vanessa german and Cauleen Smith. Photo: Joshua Franzos.
    September 22, 2022 at 4:11pm

    Cauleen Smith and vanessa german Win $250,000 Heinz Award for the Arts

    Cauleen Smith and vanessa german have been named the 2022 recipients of the Heinz Award for the Arts. The unrestricted $250,000 cash prize, given annually by the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Family Foundation to “honor individuals whose work and accomplishments are producing an impact that endures,” is one of the world’s largest. Past awardees include Conceptual artist Sanford Biggers, cartoonist Roz Chast, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove, and interdisciplinary artist Ralph Lemon, among others.

    “This year’s recipients are engaging the arts as a tool for healing,” founder Teresa Heinz said about

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  • An image produced by Stable Diffusion based on the text prompt “a photograph of an astronaut riding a horse.”
    September 22, 2022 at 2:24pm

    Getty Images Bans AI-Generated Content over Legal Concerns

    Getty Images will outlaw the sale and uploading of AI-generated content on its platform due to uncertain copyright laws surrounding AI imagery, the company announced on Tuesday. The news follows recent decisions by websites such as Newgrounds, PurplePort, and FurAffinity, though Getty is the largest user-generated content marketplace to implement such a ban.

    AI image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion scrape the internet in search of publicly available pictures—often copyrighted ones on news sites, blogs, and stock photo sites like Getty Images itself—that are used to

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  • A rendering of the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles.
    September 21, 2022 at 3:42pm

    Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Delays Opening to 2025

    The opening for the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art has once again been deferred. The museum, founded by filmmaker George Lucas and Mellody Hobson, now plans to open in 2025, after previously postponing its opening from 2022 to 2023 owing to construction delays. Lucas Museum director Sandra Jackson-Dumont told the Los Angeles Times that supply chain issues deepened by the pandemic are the cause of the latest pushback. 

    The $1 billion spaceship-shaped museum, which began construction in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park in 2018 after abandoning plans to build in Chicago and San Francisco, will explore

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  • Senga Nengudi’s Performance Piece, 1978, activated by Maren Hassinger. Photo: Harmon Outlaw.
    September 21, 2022 at 12:53pm

    Senga Nengudi Wins $100,000 Nasher Prize for Sculpture

    Senga Nengudi has been named the recipient of the 2023 Nasher Prize, the $100,000 award given by the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas which honors “a living artist who elevates the understanding of sculpture and its possibilities.” The Los Angeles–based artist will recieve the award at a gala at the Nasher Sculpture Center in April. Previous winners of the Nasher Prize, which began in 2016, include Nairy Baghramian, Theaster Gates, Isa Genzken, Pierre Huyghe, Michael Rakowitz, and Doris Salcedo.

    Nengudi—whose five-decade career encompasses sculpture, performance, dance, photography, and film—is

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  • David Breslin. Photo: Eileen Travell/Met.
    September 20, 2022 at 2:54pm

    Met Appoints David Breslin to Helm Modern and Contemporary Department

    David Breslin, a curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a co-organizer this year’s Whitney Biennial, has been hired to lead the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s modern and contemporary art department. He fills a vacancy left by Sheena Wagstaff, who announced her departure earlier this year after almost a decade at the Met.

    Breslin’s arrival coincides with the museum’s long-anticipated $500 million renovation of the modern and contemporary art wing, to be designed by Mexico City–based architect Frida Escobedo and projected to take at least seven years to finish. The wing will be named after

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  • Yves Bouvier, from the film The Lost Leonardo. Photo: Sony Pictures.
    September 20, 2022 at 2:16pm

    Crypto Pioneer Buys Yves Bouvier’s Singapore Freeport for $28.4 Million

    Chinese crypto tycoon Jihan Wu has acquired Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier’s “Le Freeport,” the maximum security freeport in Singapore, according to Bloomberg.

    The $28.4 million sale marks a steep loss for Bouvier, who spent $70 million building the state-of-the-art facility—dubbed “Asia’s Fort Knox”—in 2010 before becoming embroiled in a years-long court feud with collector Dmitry Rybolovlev in 2014. The Russian oligarch accused Bouvier of cheating him of nearly $1 billion by inflating the prices of thirty-eight art transactions—among them Rybolovlev’s $128 million acquisition in 2013 of Leonardo

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