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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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  • Wassily Kandinsky, View of Murnau with Church, 1910.
    September 19, 2022 at 5:19pm

    Kandinsky Painting Returned to Heirs by Dutch Museum

    A Dutch museum is returning a painting by Wassily Kandinsky to the heirs of a Jewish family from which it had been stolen during World War II, bringing an end to a twisting six-year-long legal battle and marking the first major restitution since the Dutch announced a new restitution policy of “humanity and goodwill” two years ago. View of Murnau with Church, 1910, which has resided in the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven since 1951, will be transferred to the relatives of Johanna Margarethe Stern-Lippmann, a modern art collector based in Berlin who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

    Although a Dutch

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  • Clément Chéroux. Photo: Frederic Neema.
    September 19, 2022 at 11:50am

    MoMA’s Chief Photography Curator to Depart

    Clément Chéroux, who arrived to the Museum of Modern of Art as chief curator in June 2020, is leaving the institution to helm the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in his native France, the New York Times reports. Chéroux was named to his MoMA post just weeks before the Covid-19 crisis effectively shut down New York and with it the museum, which had only been open for a few months following it shuttering for a major renovation and expansion. Chéroux at that time replaced Quentin Bajac, who himself left for a French institution, Paris’s Jeu de Paume, of which he remains director. The post has been

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  • Ai Weiwei. Photo: Alfred Weidinger/Flickr.
    September 15, 2022 at 6:14pm

    Ai Weiwei and Sanaa Win Praemium Imperiales for Sculpture, Architecture

    Dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei won Japan’s 2022 Praemium Imperiale Award for sculpture while Tokyo-based architecture firm Sanaa received the honor for architecture. The international prize has been awarded annually since 1989 by the Japan Art Association, which is under the patronage of Prince Hitachi, and additionally encompasses the fields of painting, theater/film, and music. Giulio Paolini, Wim Wenders, and Krystian Zimmerman won the awards in those categories. Each recipient of the honor is awarded ¥15 million ($104,500).  

    Ai was cited particularly for his 2009 project Remembering,

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  • Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Les Fraises, ca. 1905, among the twenty-nine works to be sold.
    September 15, 2022 at 1:40pm

    MoMA to Auction $70M in Art to Expand Museum’s Digital Footprint

    Twenty-nine of the eighty-one works comprising the collection of the late William S. Paley, the founder of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) and a former president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, will be auctioned off by Sotheby’s this fall in aid of the museum’s digital footprint. The collection has been on loan to MoMA since Paley’s death in 1990, with many of the pieces in storage since that time.

    The sale is expected to bring in between $70 million and $100 million, with the lion’s share of the funds going toward the founding of an endowment for digital media and technology at the museum

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  • Candice Hopkins. Photo: Thatcher Keats.
    September 14, 2022 at 4:03pm

    Candice Hopkins Wins Independent Curators International’s 2022 Leo Award

    New York–based nonprofit Independent Curators International (ICI) has announced Candice Hopkins as the winner of its 2022 Leo Award. Hopkins, a Carcross/Tagish First Nation citizen, is the first director and chief curator of Taghkanic, New York’s Forge Project, a Native-led initiative launched in 2021 and focusing on “Indigenous art, decolonial education, and supporting leaders in culture, food security, and land justice.” She will share the prize with the nonprofit American Indian Community House, a New York nonprofit that assists Native Americans living in the metropolitan area and runs the

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  • The Riggio Galleries at Dia Beacon in in Beacon, New York. Photo: Bill Jacobson Studio/Dia Art Foundation.
    September 14, 2022 at 1:58pm

    Dia Art Foundation Staff Vote to Unionize

    Just two months after announcing their intention to form a union, workers at the New York–based Dia Art Foundation on September 14 voted 101–6 to join the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which represents staff at various arts institutions across the country. The Dia Art Union will operate under the aegis of New York’s UAW Local 2110, joining their unionized peers at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Shed, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Dia is unique among those institutions in that it

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  • Jean-Luc Godard on the set of Pierrot le Fouin in 1965. Photo: Giancarlo BOTTI/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images.
    September 13, 2022 at 4:20pm

    Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022)

    Revolutionary French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, the towering figure of New Wave cinema whose innovative camerawork and eschewal of narrative order influenced generations of filmmakers, died September 13 at his home in Rolle, Switzerland, at the age of ninety-one. The Guardian reports that he chose to end his own life via assisted suicide, after suffering “multiple incapacitating illnesses.” “He was not sick, he was simply exhausted,” an anonymous source told French daily Libération. “It was his decision [to end it] and it was important for him that it be known.” Godard rose to fame with

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