As 2021 dawns, we want to pay tribute to the artists, curators, writers and dealers who died in 2020. Below is a selection of our obituaries for the year January Artist John Baldessari A thinker and, in his own words, “a frustrated writer” (there was a short-lived stint as a critic in the 1950s), Baldessari…
Read More
Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection, Paris Opening 23 January, cost: €160m At 84, the billionaire François Pinault will finally realise a 20-year plan to build a private museum for his contemporary art collection in Paris. The Bourse de Commerce-Pinault Collection, housed in an 18th-century grain exchange, is poised to open just two blocks away from the…
Read More
Maripol does not remember what she got her boyfriend for Christmas in 1977. His present to her, on the other hand, became the photogenic stuff of New York legend. From the moment Edo Bertoglio gifted an SX-70 Polaroid camera to Maripol, a young École des Beaux-Arts alum working as a stylist, it became her accessory and artistic instrument of…
Read More
Unesco has pulled back images from an advertising campaign intended to highlight international trafficking in looted artifacts after receiving complaints that it misrepresented the provenance of the works pictured. Among the objects used in the campaign were three from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that were not stolen in recent years…
Read More
After a decades-long struggle, legislation to create a National Museum of the American Latino and a National Women’s History Museum in Washington, DC under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution was approved last night by the US Congress. Since the passage of separate bills by the US House to found the women’s history museum in…
Read More
Covid-19 has laid bare the unsustainable expectations of an increasingly stratified market and the narrowing margins of both creative and financial success it yields. But the Los Angeles gallery Commonwealth & Council has revised its business plan to rethink how small and mid-level galleries can turn a profit and support their artists in both lean and flush…
Read More
The controversy engulfing the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark’s most prestigious art school, over a dumped royal bust took a new turn last week when the college rector was forced to step down. Kirsten Langkilde resigned after the Danish culture ministry said “new powers” are needed at the academy. The move…
Read More
Art dealers have joined the luxury goods and watch industries in condemning the UK government’s “hammer blow” plans to scrap tax-free shopping for tourists from 1 January. Mark Dodgson, the secretary general of the British Antique Dealers’ Association, warns that dealers who specialise in portable objects such as jewellery, silver and small pictures will be…
Read More
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Kunstmuseum Bern have jointly acquired a major sculpture by the Ghanaian artist El Anatsui. The work, entitled In the World But Don’t Know the World (2009), comes from the Sigg collection founded by Uli Sigg, a former Swiss ambassador to China. For the Stedelijk Museum, the purchase was funded by the Vereniging Rembrandt…
Read More
A new independent conservation organization is calling on members of the public and culture professionals to monitor and report on the status of Unesco’s World Heritage sites because safeguarding these cultural hot spots has become a “secondary concern” for the United Nations cultural agency. The new heritage body, Our World Heritage, says it is determined to preserve…
Read More
Recent Comments