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  • Photo: Ontario Provincial Police.
    March 09, 2023 at 4:00pm

    Canadian Police Arrest 8 in “Biggest Art Fraud in World History”

    The Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) on March 3 revealed that they had arrested eight individuals in connection with “the biggest art fraud in world history.” Those detained are alleged to have been involved in the forgery and sale of works of art attributed to noted Ojibwe artist Norval Morrisseau, known as “the Picasso of the North.” The fraud scheme is said to have spanned decades and aroused suspicion even before the artist’s 2007 death.

    The arrests followed a two-and-a-half-year investigation conducted by the OPP with the assistance of the Thunder Bay Police Service. Those nabbed in the March

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  • Adam Weinberg in 2015. D Dipasupil/Getty Images.
    March 08, 2023 at 3:52pm

    Adam Weinberg Steps Down as Director of Whitney, Scott Rothkopf to Succeed

    Adam Weinberg is stepping down from New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art after two decades as its director, the New York Times reports. Scott Rothkopf, who is currently the institution’s senior deputy director and the Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, will take the reins from Weinberg on November 1. During his directorship, Weinberg shepherded the museum through its move from its longtime Upper East Side Brutalist digs to its airy, modern current home in New York’s trendy Meatpacking District. He also weathered the Covid-19 crisis, which saw the museum shutter temporarily and lay

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  • David Chipperfield. Photo: The Hyatt Foundation/The Pritzker Architecture Prize.
    March 08, 2023 at 2:58pm

    David Chipperfield Wins 2023 Pritzker Prize

    British architect David Chipperfield, who is known for designs that respond to their local surrounds, and for his elegant modernist interventions in historic buildings, has been named the winner of the 2023 Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor. Among the museums Chipperfield has built are the Museo Jumex, Mexico City; Turner Contemporary, Margate, England; Kunsthaus Zürich; the reconstruction of the Neues Museum, Berlin, and the expansion of the Mies van der Rohe–designed Neue Nationalgalerie, also in Berlin. In 2017, he was chosen to restore the sixteenth-century Procuratie Vecchie in

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  • Tate Liverpool’s Albert Dock. George M. Groutas/Flickr.
    March 07, 2023 at 5:52pm

    Tate Liverpool Closing for $35 Million Renovation

    Tate Liverpool will shutter on October 16 ahead of a planned £29.7 million ($35.1 million) restoration of its Royal Albert Dock home. The refresh of the converted warehouse is being partially paid for by the UK government’s Levelling Up Fund, which will cover roughly one-third of projected costs. The money represents half the amount won by the museum in a joint £20 million bid with National Museums Liverpool the joint Work is expected to be completed in 2026; Tate Liverpool will in the meantime host off-site events and projects; emblematic of this effort is the institution’s recent inauguration

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  • March 07, 2023 at 1:45pm

    Piero Gilardi (1942–2023)

    Italian artist Piero Gilardi, whose “Tappeti-Natura,” or “Nature-Carpets,” brought the wilderness into the gallery, died March 5 in Turin at the age of eighty. His death was confirmed by his gallery, Michel Rein. Gilardi in the 1960s set himself apart from his compatriots in the Arte Povera movement with his floor-bound works made of polyurethane blended with vinyl resin and rubber latex. Variously evoking environments such as a forest floor scattered with fallen logs, a rocky seashore, or a verdant field and laid flat on the floor, these sculptures invited visitors to relax upon them and thus

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  • New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. Photo: Shinya Suzuki/Flickr.
    March 06, 2023 at 3:44pm

    Whitney Union Reaches Tentative Labor Agreement

    Unionized workers at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art have reached a tentative inaugural contract with their employer after sixteen months of negotiations that saw frustrated workers picketing a fundraiser on an icy night earlier this year. Hyperallergic reports that the three-and-a-half-year contract awards staffers, particularly the lowest-paid among the ranks, substantial raises. Those previously being paid a minimum hourly wage of $17 will now earn $22, retroactive to January 1, 2023, with a target hourly wage of $24 by the end of June 2025. Additionally, the museum will increase

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  • Kate Fowle. Photo: James Hill.
    March 06, 2023 at 2:58pm

    Ex-MoMA PS1 Director Kate Fowle Joins Hauser & Wirth

    Kate Fowle has joined Hauser & Wirth as curatorial senior director, according to Artnews. She will be based in New York. The British-born Fowle last June sent ripples through the art world with the announcement that she was departing as director of MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, New York; she had spent barely three years in the role, in which she succeeded longtime director Klaus Biesenbach, who left to helm the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (he soon returned to his native Germany to lead Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie). Fowle offered no reason for her resignation at the time; by the

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  • Among the works at issue is Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo. Photo: Carl Court/Getty Images.
    March 03, 2023 at 9:44am

    Court Rules Sotheby’s Must Face Fraud Lawsuit Leveled by Russian Oligarch

    Advising the two parties to settle out of court to avoid an “expensive, risky, and potentially embarrassing” trial, a New York judge on March 1 ruled that Sotheby’s must contend with billionaire Dimitry Rybolovlev’s claim that it assisted his former dealer in defrauding him of hundreds of millions of dollars in regard to fifteen artworks. Rybolovlev since 2015 has pursued Yves Bouvier in courts around the world, claiming that the Swiss art dealer overcharged him on thirty-eight artworks that the Russian fertilizer magnate purchased for $2 billion between 2003 and 2015.

    Sotheby’s was implicated

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  • Peter Weibel in 2014. Photo: Lorenz Seidler/Flickr.
    March 03, 2023 at 9:32am

    Peter Weibel (1944–2023)

    Artist, educator, and curator Peter Weibel, who led Germany’s ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe for more than two decades, died March 1 in Karlsruhe at the age of seventy-eight following a brief illness. The news was confirmed by ZKM. Weibel was an early and impassioned supporter of media art, and worked tirelessly to advance and sustain its now widely recognized lofty position in the art world. “Normally, media art is seen in the history of art as a medium of images, as a medium of representation to depict the world,” he told the Korea Times last month. “But I have a different position:

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  • The walkway at the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. Photo: Ron Cogswell/Flickr.
    March 01, 2023 at 1:23pm

    Glenstone Foundation Receives $1.9 Billion Gift from Its Founder

    Billionaire Mitchell Rales donated $1.9 billion to his Glenstone Foundation, which supports Potomac, Maryland’s Glenstone Museum. The 2021 gift is one of the largest ever to an arts organization. To date, it has been used to fund operating costs at the private contemporary art museum, which Rales cofounded in 2006 with his wife, Emily Wei Rales, and on whose grounds the couple maintain their primary residence. The money has also gone toward costs associated with capital building projects, facilities maintenance, and acquisitions. The museum this past June inaugurated a new 4,000-square-foot

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  • Çağla Ilk. Photo: Ural Biennial.
    February 28, 2023 at 6:29pm

    Çağla Ilk Will Curate German Pavilion at 2024 Venice Biennale

    Architect and curator Çağla Ilk, codirector of Germany’s Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, has been invited to curate the German pavilion at the Sixtieth Venice Biennale, to take place April 20–November 24, 2024. No artist has yet been commissioned for the pavilion, which is typically under intense scrutiny, having won the Biennale’s prestigious Golden Lion six times in the past.

    The Istanbul–born Ilk has since 2020 shared charge of Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden with Misal Adnan Yildiz. From 2012, she served as dramaturge and curator at Berlin’s Maxim Gorki Theater. Ilk studied architecture

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  • The new Sotheby’s location in Shanghai will be adjacent to the Suzhou River. Photo: Steffen Wurzel/Wikipedia Commons.
    February 28, 2023 at 2:12pm

    Sotheby’s Expands in Shanghai

    Sotheby’s will open an office in Shanghai, Bloomberg reports, thus establishing its first foothold in mainland China after operating in Hong Kong for years. As well, the global auction house will conduct business in-country for the first time since the 1990s, when it did so briefly before consolidating operations in Hong Kong as the market there heated up. The behemoth’s move to mainland China is fueled by the region’s rapidly increasing wealth: China is home to the world’s second-largest number of billionaires, and Chinese consumers are expected to account for 40 percent of all global luxury

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