Fine Art News

• New York’s billion-dollar art week
  The record-breaking Munch that sold for $119,922,500 (including premium) at Sotheby’s last night is not the only multi-million-dollar work of art on offer in New York right now. The inaugural edition of Frieze New York opened to invited VIPs on…
• Wanted: land-art sponsor to bury aircraft in sand
  The Swiss artist Christoph Büchel is seeking sponsors this week at Frieze New York for his major new land art project, Terminal, which involves burying a decommissioned 153-foot-long Boeing 727 jetliner (right) in the California desert. The…
• Pompidou at war with its US friends
  The president of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Alain Seban, has called for the resignation of Robert Rubin, the chairman of the French institution’s US philanthropic arm—the Centre Pompidou Foundation—after a bitter dispute over the way the Paris…
• Berlin Biennale branded a disaster
  The Berlin Biennale, one of the most important contemporary art events in Germany, which opened last weekend (until 1 July), has been greeted with derision in the local and national press.
  According to its critics, there is not enough art on show,…
• The art world falls in love with Courtney
  “Live Through This” may well be the perfect mantra for any art fair, but Courtney Love has proved to be the stand-out star of Frieze week so far, with the unveiling of the first ever exhibition of her own work at Fred Torres Collaborations, entitled…
• Off with a bang
  Frieze week got off to a big bang thanks to BOMB, the fabled downtown magazine that held its 31st gala on Monday night at Capitale on the Bowery, a cavernous space packed with le tout art world. Being honoured were a deliciously gruff Richard Serra…
• Artoon by Pablo Helguera
  Artoon by Pablo Helguera: “And what if the island was inhabited by really annoying art fair types?” See more of his cartoons about the art world in our next Frieze daily edition, as well as on his website….

Fine Art News

• Objects in Met’s Egyptian wing temporarily removed
  The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has unexpectedly closed around a quarter of its Egyptian wing, and removed some of the most fragile objects from galleries that remain open as a precaution against intense vibrations caused by drilling…
• Peabody Essex to get all dressed up
  The director and curators at the Peabody Essex Museum are planning a gallery that will include clothes and accessories from the wardrobe of the glamorous nonagenarian Iris Apfel. The Massachusetts museum was informed of a gift of hundreds of items…
• Feline arty at the Hermitage
  We have it on good authority from our sister paper in Russia that the Hermitage in St Petersburg has resident cats let loose at night to catch any mice. Traditionally, the kitties have been celebrated with an annual Day of the Hermitage Cat, with…

Fine Art News

• Pompidou plans to go global: focus is Brazil, India, China
  The Centre Pompidou is looking to expand abroad with a chain of galleries that will carry the flagship French institution’s brand. Alain Seban, the president of the Centre Pompidou, says that museums, universities and even shopping malls could host…

Fine Art News

• TV art turn for Lily Cole
  Model Lily Cole is putting her Cambridge art history degree to good use by hosting a series on contemporary art set to screen this autumn on Sky Arts in the UK. Big names queuing up to talk to the British beauty include Gabriel Orozco, Dame Paula…
• Galleries’ survival threatened by railway expansion plans
  The expansion of the new Exposition Light Rail (Expo) connecting downtown Los Angeles to Santa Monica means major changes to the Bergamot Station Arts Center, a 7.4-acre complex that houses 35 galleries in several metal-clad industrial buildings. An…
• Garage Centre to move to Moscow’s Gorky Park
  Dasha Zhukova, the patron of the not-for-profit Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, has announced plans to move the institution to the city’s Gorky Park at a press conference held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. The new…

Fine Art News

• Tax-relief cap will curtail major gifts
  Major projects planned by the UK’s leading arts organisations and museums are threatened by tax changes that the British government is proposing in an attempt to close loopholes enjoyed by the super-rich. In his March budget, the chancellor of the…
• Titanic spat over Picasso (now in 3D)
  The Artists Rights Society has sent the film director James Cameron a letter claiming compensation because the movie “Titanic 3D” includes a reproduction of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907 (right).

  A copyright infringement was…

Fine Art News

• Kunsthal Charlottenborg forced to share building with academy
  Denmark’s biggest and most international exhibition space for contemporary art, the Kunsthal Charlottenborg, will have to halve its programme after a merger with the local Royal Academy of Arts. “We will have to start with less costly exhibitions…
• Quai Branly sheds further light on Chauvet cave art
  The Musée du Quai Branly, Paris’s museum of art and ethnography, has initiated a new cultural partnership with the Chauvet cave complex in the Pont d’Arc valley in Ardèche, southern France. The first exhibition under the new agreement is due to take…
• Media bigwig turns art scribe
  A media mogul is slowly, but surely, making his presence felt on the London art scene. Evgeny Lebedev, the chairman of Independent Print Ltd which owns the London Evening Standard and the Independent newspapers, has penned the introduction to a…
• Bringing back Art Cologne
  The general consensus of the 46th edition of Art Cologne (18-22 April) is that its director Daniel Hug is steering the fair in the right direction by improving its quality, but it needs to become more international. Hug, who took over in 2008,…

Fine Art News

• Posthumous show for war photographer
  Works by the photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya last year, are on show at the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York (until 19 May), which now represents his estate.

  “Tim had been interested in showing some of his work in a…

• Colosseum sponsorship deal at last hurdle
  Italian officials have approved a proposed €25m donation for the restoration of the Colosseum given by Diego Della Valle, the owner of the shoe and leather goods company Tod’s. The competition committee has also described the deal as transparent….
• What makes the Portrait of Wally case so significant?
  If true art aims to change the world, perhaps no picture has proven as successful lately as Egon Schiele’s 1912 tender, traditional portrait of his mistress, Wally Neuzil. Far less graphic and edgy than the works that made Schiele’s reputation, the…

Fine Art News

• Artists still await return of work from 2010 Dakar festival
  After more than a year’s delay, some of the works of art loaned by more than 100 artists to the third World Festival of Black Arts and Cultures (Fesman) have been returned to their owners. However, another group of art is still blocked in Senegal…
• Water damage
  This Sunday’s torrential rain caused at least one art casualty, James Grashow’s Corrugated Fountain, a monumental cardboard sculpture inspired by Bernini’s Trevi Fountain in Rome and installed at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in…
• Collectors make careful choices at Art Brussels
  The 30th edition of Art Brussels (19-22 April), described by the local art dealer Rodolphe Janssen as the “best fair of the second division”, was a typically relaxed and steady-paced event, where buyers took their time over purchases. During the…

Fine Art News

• Art Brussels: Karen Renders
  Karen Renders, the director of Art Brussels (19-22 April), on what makes the Belgian fair so unique.
  …

Fine Art News

• Alain Servais at Art Brussels
  An interview with the Belgian collector Alain Servais, who has opened his collection to the public during Art Brussels (19-22 April). We ask about the history of collecting in Belgium….
• Italian government to appoint commissioner to control Maxxi
  The board of directors of the Fondazione Maxxi has expressed outrage at the ministry of culture’s sudden announcement that it was transferring control of the foundation to a commissioner. The ministry says it made the decision because the board was…
• Call to close every other museum raises storm in Germany
  A call by a group of academics and cultural commentators to close every second state-subsidised cultural institution—in particular art museums and theatres—in response to the economic downturn has provoked a robust response from German artists,…
• Montevideo museum reopens after renovation
  The Bohemian Gallery and Museum of Contemporary Art in Montevideo reopened its doors in March following a six-month renovation. The cultural centre, museum and contemporary art gallery, run by the Uruguayan collector and gallerist Virginia Robinson,…
• Iranian artist released after arrest
  An Iranian artist arrested by the authorities in Tehran has been released. It is unclear why the photographer Tahmineh Monzavi, 24, was detained but she recently contributed images of homeless women to the book Iranian Photography: Reflections…
• Music mogul’s Oxford legacy
  The widow of Ahmet Ertegun (1923-2006), the co-founder of Atlantic Records who developed the careers of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton has given £26m to Oxford University.

  The money will fund a graduate scholarship program…