Art Industry News: One Critic Says Visiting the Mona Lisa Is Less Satisfying Than Flying With a Budget Airline + Other Stories

by admin

Nov 7, 2019

artnet

Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most
consequential developments coming out of the art world and art
market. Here’s what you need to know on this Thursday, November
7.

NEED-TO-READ

German Museum Directors Demand a Task Force to Fight Climate
Change – Cultural leaders in Germany have teamed up to ask the
country’s culture minister to create a central task force
dedicated to the unique climate policy challenges facing museums.
Signatories of the letter, including Yilmaz Dziewior, director of
the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Susanne Pfeffer, director of the
Museum of Modern Art MMK Frankfurt, want an administrative body to
set concrete goals to address issues like air conditioning,
lighting, and loan traffic, among other carbon-emitting
activities. “Due to their constantly growing collections…
museums have specific requirements for construction and operation,”
the letter states. “However, most exhibition halls are subject to
state administration and thus also depend on the government’s
climate policy orientation.” (Monopol)

Bruegel Masterpiece Found Broken in
Two – A badly damaged Flemish
landscape, which had been overlooked for years in the collection of
a UK museum, has now been attributed to the masterful Dutch and
Flemish Renaissance painter Bruegel the Elder. It is the latest
rediscovery by art historian and broadcaster Bendor Grosvenor and
will be officially unveiled on the BBC TV series he
hosts, Britain’s Lost Masterpieces.
The work, which was broken in two,
had languished a drawer for decades until Grosvenor looked closely
at the cows in the rural scene. “If there is one artist in
particular who loved the back end of a cow, it is Bruegel the
Elder,” Grosvenor said. (Daily
Telegraph)

Should the Louvre Take Down the Mona Lisa? – This
just in from the department of controversial
opinions: New York
Times critic Jason
Farago writes that it is high time the Louvre take down its most
famous painting. “The Louvre
is being held hostage by the Kim Kardashian of 16th-century Italian
portraiture,” Farago declares. In a last-ditch effort to manage the
crowds (80 percent of the museum’s annual 10 million visitors make
a beeline for the work), the Louvre has introduced a single-file
line system and limited visitors to one-minute viewings of the
painting. But Farago says it doesn’t help. This is a gallery that
makes the Spirit Airlines boarding process look like a model of
efficiency, and offers about as much visual delight,” he writes.
The only solution, according to Farago, is to build a dedicated
Mona Lisa Pavilion off-site, which would be better able to
accommodate crowds and selfies—while enabling the Louvre to return
to the business of being a museum. (New York
Times)

Meet the Video Art Pioneer Who Became a TikTok Star
– Video artist and retired professor Cecelia Condit
has work in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But
at 71, she’s finding new audiences in an unlikely place: the social
media app TikTok, a home for short videos that has around 100
million users worldwide under the age of 30. One of her best-known
works, Possibly in Michigan, began getting passed
around Reddit in 2015 and eventually made its way to TikTok, where
it gained popularity among makeup and costume communities that have
large followings on the app. “I get so many hits,” Condit said,
mystified. (T
Magazine)

ART MARKET

Murakami’s Monster Goes on the Block in Hong Kong –
A sculpture by Takashi Murakami
created in collaboration with Pharrell Williams will be sold at
Christie’s Hong Kong this month. The monstrous work riffs on
Murakami’s Mr. DOB character and features an open-mouthed, toothy
creature who displays bedazzled items Pharrell holds dear,
including a Heinz ketchup bottle, a can of Pepsi, and a bag of
Doritos. The work was on view at Art Basel in Miami Beach back in
2009, where Emmanuel Perrotin scooped it up for a cool $2 million.
Now, it’s estimated to fetch $3.8 million. (Highsnobiety)

Artory Teams Up With an Art Appraiser –
Artory, the blockchain-based art
register, has joined
forces with the art advisory and appraisal firm Winston Art Group.
Collectors will now be able to upload new works to Artory’s
registry anonymously and request certified registration from
Winston free of charge, which will provide them with a digital
certificate of ownership and the ability to communicate anonymously
with the appraiser through an encrypted messaging system.
(The Art
Newspaper)

COMINGS & GOINGS

The Academy Museum Adds 7 Trustees – The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los
Angeles has added seven board members to its ranks including
Big Little Lies
actress Laura Dern; David Rubin,
the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures; and media
executive Katherine Oliver. The long-delayed institution is in the
midst of a $388 million fundraising effort and now due to open in
2020. (Press
release)

Wangechi Mutu’s Met Sculptures Get an Extension
– The Kenya-born, New York-based artist will have a
presence on the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for longer
than initially planned. Her sculptures, installed in the four
niches of the Fifth Avenue building, will now remain on view
until June 8. (They were initially scheduled to come down January
12.) “I’m someone who really loves to get things going and then
react a little bit to the outcome, and the outcome was really
extraordinary,” says the museum’s director Max Hollein. (New York
Times)

Newark Museum Adds “Art” to Its Title – The Newark Museum
has been rechristened the Newark Museum of Art in a bid to attract
new visitors and refresh its identity. The name change at New
Jersey’s largest and most historic museum was announced on
Wednesday, effective immediately. (NYT)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Nicholas Party Is Painting the Walls of a Children’s Hospital
– The New York-based nonprofit
RxArt has commissioned king of pastels
Nicholas Party to paint
a 27-foot-long hallway at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
Some 16,000 kids travel down the sparse hallway each year on their
way into surgery, and the aim is for the artist’s fantastical
landscapes and beautiful colors to brighten the mood. “The hope is
to change this challenging walk into one that stimulates
imagination in the most positive way,” RxArt founder Diane Brown
says. (Observer)

A Closer Look at the Centre Pompidou in Shanghai
– The French institution’s newest arm opens to the public
in Shanghai tomorrow after a splashy inauguration by French
President Emmanuel Macron. Some are expressing concern,
however, over China’s ongoing issues with censorship and
wondering how the displays will be affected. Take a virtual look
around the David Chipperfield-designed institution below.
(Press release)