Art Industry News: California’s Easy Fire Destroys a Historic Midcentury Architectural Gem + Other Stories

by admin

Oct 31, 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 Wednesday, October 31.
Happy Halloween!

NEED-TO-READ

Paris Will Build an
Outpost for the Grand Palais During Renovations
– Rest easy, French art lovers! While the major
museum is closed for a three-year renovation beginning in 2021, an
outpost near the Eiffel Tower will serve as a temporary exhibition
space. As the Grand Palais undergoes construction in the run-up to
the Paris Olympics in 2024, the so-called Grand Palais Éphémère will host cultural and art events for the
interim. The institution’s culture chief, Chris Dercon, says that
the Grand Palais will also use its itinerancy as an opportunity to
collaborate with other Paris-based organizations like the Musée du
quai Branly-Jacques Chirac and UNESCO. (The Art Newspaper)

A Fight Over a Diamond Puts Christie’s in the Crosshairs
– A trial kicking off this week in New York pits an
Italian family against Christie’s. Some members of the family have
accused the auction house of selling the Princie diamond—a pink,
34.65-carat gem valued at $40 million—despite accusations that it
had been stolen by their stepbrother. The diamond was purchased
by Sheikh Jassim Bin Abdulaziz Al-Thani of Qatar, who is the
husband of Sheikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani,
the chairwoman of the Qatar Museums. Christie’s maintains it had
the authority to sell the diamond, and describes the current battle
as an “inheritance dispute among family members.” (New York
Times)

California Wildfires
Destroy an Architectural
Gem – The Getty Center may be safe—for
now—from the ongoing California fires, but a new blaze, named the
Easy fire, ripped through Ventura County yesterday, edging close to
the Reagan Presidential Library before firefighters fought back the
flames. A beloved midcentury Modern home designed by architect
Craig Ellwood was not so lucky. Called the Zack House, the 1952
hillside home has been reduced to charred rubble, as seen in images
captured by photojournalist Christian Monterrosa. Historian Alan
Hess called it a “real loss to the architectural heritage of Los
Angeles.” (LA
Curbed, NYT)

LACMA Teams Up With the Yuz and Qatar – Speaking of
Qatar, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is continuing plans for
ambitious international
collaborations with its announcement that it will jointly
develop and share exhibitions and programs with the Yuz Museum
Shanghai and Qatar Museums. The inaugural shared
exhibition, “In Production: Art and the Studio System,” will
explore how the production of studio art and film have evolved over
the past 20 years. The museums will also share upcoming shows of
work by Zhang Daqian and Yoshitomo Nara. (Artforum)

ART MARKET

Meet the Longest-Serving
Man in the Art Fair Business Over the past 40 years, 80-year-old Sanford
Smith has produced a whopping 130 art fairs. And in that time, he’s
amassed quite the collection of antiques, design objects, Modernist
painting, and furniture, including Thornton Dial works he picked up
for about $100 a pop when he launched the Outsider Art Fair in
1992. His next fair, Salon Art + Design, returns to New York’s Park
Avenue Armory next month for its eighth edition. (New York
Times)

The Problem With
Fractional Art Ownership – Heads turned when, in
2018, the start-up Maecenas sold 31.5 percent of an
Andy Warhol work via cryptocurrency for $1.7 million.
However, fractional ownership has yet to really take off in the art
market—and for good reason. “The high prices are for a tiny
fraction of works, and to imagine that all art is a good investment
is simply wrong,” Georgina Adam writes. “The lack of homogeneity
between different artworks is another obstacle and a Warhol can be
worth ten, or 100, depending on a number of factors: art is not a
fungible asset like gold or stocks.” (TAN)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Cooper Hewitt Names
Board Chair – The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum
in New York has appointed Jon Iwata as chair of its board of
trustees, taking over for Elizabeth Ainslie. Iwata is a veteran of
IBM, where, before his retirement last year, he served as chief
brand officer, leading the company’s global communications arm.
He’s served on Cooper Hewitt’s board since 2014. (Artforum)

GES-2 Complex Gets an Opening Date – The Russian billionaire Leonid Mikhelson’s
Renzo Piano-designed contemporary art center in Moscow, GES-2, is
opening in September 2020. The vast complex is a redesign of a
turn-of-the-century power plant that includes exhibition halls, a
theater, a concert hall, and a workshop space. (TAN)

Abstract Painter Matthew
Abbot Dead at Age 54 – The English painter, whose
compositions incorporate labyrinthine images with numeric titles
that are both confounding and poetic, died earlier this month.
Although he was born in London, Abbott was based in New York and
was represented by the Lower East Side’s LMAKgallery, where his
most recent show was held in 2016. (ARTnews)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Rothko Chapel
Reopening Delayed – When renovations began on Houston’s
Rothko Chapel in February, the space was expected to reopen at the
end of this year. But engineers found that there isn’t any steel
reinforcement in the structure’s concrete masonry walls, a
precaution against hurricane-force winds that is now required due
to changes in local building codes since the chapel was first
built. Rectifying the situation will cost an extra $1.1 million and
take an extra four months, pushing the reopening back to late
spring 2020. (TAN)

Researchers Examine the Science Behind Pollock’s Abstract
Style – Scientists at Brown
University’s School of Engineering analyzed the action painting of
Jackson Pollock by watching videos of him at work and recreating
the effect using a syringe to distribute the paint onto a canvas
laid flat from various heights and angles. From their research,
published in the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists noted
that although Pollock’s style is often called a “drip” technique,
that’s actually a misnomer, since his paint application was more
continuous and less splattered than the word implies. His paintings
lack what is called coiling instability, which is evident when a
fluid is poured. (CNN)

That Salvator Mundi Coming to Italy Is a Copy by an Artist
– Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev, director of the Castello di Rivoli Museo
d’Arte Contemporanea in Turin, Italy, has been hinting that
the museum was poised to show Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator
Mundi, unseen since its record-breaking $450 million auction in
2017. Instead, it’s a tiny copy by German-Turkish artist Taner
Ceylan, who previously recreated Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s
1901 painting Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate) for
Christov-Bakargiev’s 2015 Istanbul Biennial. (Press
release)