Europe

More powers to keep art treasures in Britain: The gentlemen’s agreement that has governed attempts to prevent the export of art treasures for decades will be revamped after claims that an American billionaire reneged on a deal.

15.12.2018, The Times: More powers to keep art treasures in Britain

Scholars call for Berlin centre on colonial-era heritage: More than 80 scholars in the fields of art history, ethnology and history called on the German government to found a central institute in Berlin to coordinate research, museum work and policy in addressing colonial history and handling colonial-era heritage in public collections.

14.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Scholars call for Berlin centre on colonial-era heritage

David Hockney’s Double Portrait of a Legendary Met Curator and His Partner Could Fetch Almost $40 Million: David Hockney is likely to continue his auction hot streak in London next year, when the artist’s intense double portrait Henry Geldzahler and Christopher Scott (1968–69) hits the auction block. The work, due to be sold at Christie’s London postwar and contemporary sale on March 6, carries an estimate in excess of £30 million ($37.75 million) and is the final work to be sold from the collection of the late travel magnate Barney A. Ebsworth.

14.12.2018, Artnet: David Hockney’s Double Portrait of a Legendary Met Curator and His Partner Could Fetch Almost $40 Million

Police Nab a Suspect in the Brazen Theft of a Renoir From a Vienna Auction House—But Others Remain at Large: One of the suspects behind the audacious theft of a Pierre-Auguste Renoir landscape from the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna has been apprehended by police.

13.12.2018, Artnet: Police Nab a Suspect in the Brazen Theft of a Renoir From a Vienna Auction House—But Others Remain at Large

Dutch court rejects Chinese villagers claim to have their Buddha mummy returned: A court in The Netherlands has dismissed a lawsuit brought by a group of Chinese villagers demanding the return of a 1,000-year-old Buddha statue containing the mummified body of a monk that was acquired by a Dutch collector.

13.12.2018, South China Morning Post: Dutch court rejects Chinese villagers claim to have their Buddha mummy returned

13.12.2018, Le Journal des Arts: Pays-Bas : la justice rejette la demande de villageois chinois sur le sort d’une momie

UK government’s ivory bill passes final stages in Parliament on way to becoming law: Amendments proposed by the House of Lords were passed in a debate in the House of Commons last night as the bill progressed through the final stages in parliament.

12.12.2018, Antiques Trade Gazette: UK government’s ivory bill passes final stages in Parliament on way to becoming law

Olafur Eliasson’s latest work is melting away on the bank of the Thames in London: Ice Watch, the climate change-themed public work by Olafur Eliasson, was unveiled at two London locations today. On Bankside, between the river Thames and Tate Modern, 24 blocks are arranged in a circular formation, while six further chunks of ice are outside Bloomberg’s HQ in the City of London. The ice was melting fast, even on a cold London morning: a metaphor for the urgency of taking action on climate change. The work’s unveiling was timed to coincide with the COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where world leaders are meeting to discuss climate change.

11.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Olafur Eliasson’s latest work is melting away on the bank of the Thames in London

11.12.2018, Wallpaper: Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Ice Watch’ confronts Londoners with the realities of climate change

Has Belgium’s Newly Reopened Africa Museum Exorcized the Ghosts of its Colonial Past?: Belgium’s Africa Museum has reopened after a five-year period of renovation and expansion that has cost EUR€74 million and doubled the museum’s exhibition space. Founded in 1898 in Tervuren, just outside of Brussels, the museum, formerly the Royal Museum for Central Africa, was originally conceived as a showcase for King Leopold II’s personal property: the Congo Free State. Today it is a public museum and the world’s foremost research institution dedicated to Central Africa, covering countries in the former Belgian Congo: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. With one of the strongest research capacities in Europe, the museum has around 80 full-time historians, anthropologists, biologists and geologists, working on projects in 20 African countries.

11.12.2018, Frieze: Has Belgium’s Newly Reopened Africa Museum Exorcized the Ghosts of its Colonial Past?

10.12.2018, France24: Belgium’s Africa Museum reopens to confront its pro-colonial past

DR Congo to request restitution of works from former coloniser Belgium: Joseph Kabila, the president of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has said that his country is preparing to lodge an official restitution request for works in the collection of the Africa Museum in Belgium.

10.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: DR Congo to request restitution of works from former coloniser Belgium

United States

How Artists Can Use Copyright Law to Safeguard Their Work: Visual artists in the United States own the copyright to any original works they create that are fixed in a tangible form, per the terms of the copyright law of the land. But that doesn’t stop companies, brands, people in other creative industries, and fellow visual artists from using their works or images of them without their permission. So what can visual artists do when they want to assert their copyright? An instructive example involves one of the year’s most popular songs.

14.12.2018, Artsy:  How Artists Can Use Copyright Law to Safeguard Their Work

Judge Orders Collectors Harry and Linda Macklowe to Sell Their $700 Million Art Trove and Split the Proceeds: It reads like a blue-chip collector’s dream checklist: a $50 million Andy Warhol Marilyn, nine works by Picasso, a Jackson Pollock worth up to $35 million, roughly a dozen works by Jeff Koons—including a $10 million bronze sculpture Vest with Aqualung—and a $12 million Brice Marden.

14.12.2018, Artnet: Judge Orders Collectors Harry and Linda Macklowe to Sell Their $700 Million Art Trove and Split the Proceeds

Cataloguing Egon Schiele: a digital work in progress: A century ago, Egon Schiele died of influenza at the age of 28. Even so, he had produced enough paintings and drawings that the cataloguing of his work is still an ongoing process. Now a digital update of the Schiele catalogue raisonné is available, allowing scholars and other enthusiasts to make rapid connections and to search for works on specific subjects.

13.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Cataloguing Egon Schiele: a digital work in progress

This artist is using AI to paint with his mind: In recent months, the artistic provocateur and technologist Alexander Reben has devoted his time to producing a series of visually arresting paintings. And yet, the California-based artist and MIT-trained roboticist has yet to pick up a brush or a tube of paint.

12.12.2018, The Washington Post: This artist is using AI to paint with his mind

US anti-money-laundering bill could reappear early next year: The Illicit Art and Antiquities Trafficking Prevention Act (HR 5886), proposed in the US Congress in May, is now in limbo after the November mid-term elections. However, it could be reintroduced to the new Congress in January 2019, amid a recent rise in anti-money-laundering initiatives worldwide.

11.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: US anti-money-laundering bill could reappear early next year

Natural History Museum’s Expansion Can Proceed After Judge Dismisses Community Group’s Lawsuit: The American Museum of Natural History’s $383 million expansion can proceed as planned after a Manhattan Supreme Court Judge ruled against a neighborhood group that tried to block the project to protect a popular local park.

11.12.2018, Artnet: Natural History Museum’s Expansion Can Proceed After Judge Dismisses Community Group’s Lawsuit

With Fans Like Sean Penn and Viggo Mortensen, Hyperrealist Painter Eric White Has Become Hollywood’s New Favorite Artist: There is more than one way to be a successful artist. Some zoom onto the scene fresh from Yale’s MFA program and hit it big early, while others are rediscovered after decades spent in obscurity. Then there are the artists who consistently sell to high-profile figures while maintaining a low profile themselves.

11.12.2018, Artnet: With Fans Like Sean Penn and Viggo Mortensen, Hyperrealist Painter Eric White Has Become Hollywood’s New Favorite Artist

Art Dealer Who Claims He Found Six De Koonings in a New Jersey Storage Locker Sells Them for Combined $2.5 Million: An art dealer who claims he found six paintings by Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning in a New Jersey storage locker has now sold the artworks in a series of three self-organized auctions for a combined total of $2.5 million.

10.12.2018, Artnet: Art Dealer Who Claims He Found Six De Koonings in a New Jersey Storage Locker Sells Them for Combined $2.5 Million

Price Check! Here’s What Sold—And For How Much—at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2018: This year’s Miami Art Week launched during a rocky moment in the stock market and amid ongoing fears of a trade war between the US and China. But art fairs have a tendency to feel as if they are operating in an alternate universe, far removed from real life. Inside the newly renovated Miami Beach Convention Center, Jennifer Lopez and Leonardo DiCaprio rubbed shoulders with Blackstone Chairman J. Tomilson Hill and Guggenheim Museum director Richard Armstrong at the week’s flagship fair.

10.12.2018, Artnet: Price Check! Here’s What Sold—And For How Much—at Art Basel in Miami Beach 2018

World

From an Outperforming Algorithm to Dakar’s Overnight Art Star, Here Are the 8 Biggest Auction Surprises of 2018: Auction sales this year may not have reached the dizzying heights of the last art-market boom four years ago, but there was still plenty of drama, unexpected twists, and unlikely successes. Below, we break down the seven most surprising auction sales of the year. (Yes, that shredded artwork makes the cut.)

13.12.2018, Artnet: From an Outperforming Algorithm to Dakar’s Overnight Art Star, Here Are the 8 Biggest Auction Surprises of 2018

Natural history museums have never been more necessary: Could the 21st century be a golden age for natural history museums? The recent announcement of €660m in funding from the German federal and state government to the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin suggests this may be the case. Funds were pledged to for the renovation of the 19th-century buildings and creation of a research and public engagement campus within the museum, focusing on ‘the themes of nature and society, life sciences and innovation’. The size of this investment demonstrates a recognition of the increasing relevance of natural history to science and society.

13.12.2018, Apollo: Natural history museums have never been more necessary

Tasmanian museum expands with £230m luxury hotel that includes a Marina Abramović-designed spa: The Tasmanian collector and gambling millionaire David Walsh is expanding his empire, announcing ambitious plans to launch a vast new hotel complex. The new venue, named Motown, will be located alongside the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), Walsh’s vast private subterranean museum of Modern and contemporary art in Hobart, Tasmania, which opened in 2011.

13.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Tasmanian museum expands with £230m luxury hotel that includes a Marina Abramović-designed spa

Collaboration is key to solving art-market financial crime: As the art market grapples with the possibility of new regulatory law enforcement to institute anti-money laundering (AML) programmes, the challenge art dealers and auction houses face is instituting compliance while managing cost and operational burden. As a result, the commercial art industry may want to consider creating a collaborative consortium that securely pools data, technology and even human resources to implement and manage AML compliance programmes so that art specialists can train their efforts on art rather than policing financial crime.

11.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Collaboration is key to solving art-market financial crime

Tania Bruguera pulls out of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, vowing to stay in Cuba and fight censorship law Decree 349: The artist and activist Tania Bruguera has said in an open letter that she will not attend the Kochi-Muziris Biennale as planned, which launches this week, and will stay in Cuba to continue fighting government censorship. Bruguera was due to give a lecture and performance at the biennial in southern India.

11.12.1028, The Art Newspaper: Tania Bruguera pulls out of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, vowing to stay in Cuba and fight censorship law Decree 349

10.12.2018, Artnet: Released From Jail, Artist Tania Bruguera Vows to Remain in Cuba to Continue Her Fight Against a New Censorship Law

Staff at State Russian Museum take legal action to halt renovation: Staff of the State Russian Museum are taking legal action to protest against the imminent $17m reconstruction of its main building, the Mikhailovsky Palace in St Petersburg. They argue that the project has not been properly vetted and threatens both the 19th-century structure designed by Carlo Rossi, an Italian architect to the tsars, and one of the world’s most important collections of Russian art.

11.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Staff at State Russian Museum take legal action to halt renovation

The year in museums: big ethics questions dominate the field: Museums have been reckoning with the momentum of the #MeToo movement in 2018, as accusations of sexual harassment and misconduct have been brought against artists, directors, curators and patrons in the US and beyond. The year has seen high-profile resignations and suspensions, exhibitions cancelled or modified in light of unfolding claims, and considerable debate over how now to interpret the work of problematic male artists of the past, from Pablo Picasso to Egon Schiele. Ever alert to art-world misogyny and abuses of power, the activist collective Guerrilla Girls even produced a tongue-in-cheek guide to rewriting the humble museum label in the age of #MeToo. The crux of the problem, they say, is the persistent belief that “art is above it all”.

11.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: The year in museums: big ethics questions dominate the field

Strongman of the circus who hauled Egypt’s treasures to UK: A circus strongman whose plunder of ancient Egypt helped to fill the galleries of British museums is to be reunited with one of his treasures. A portrait of the Great Belzoni, whose strength enabled several colossal pharaonic monuments to be dragged to the banks of the River Nile and onward to Britain during the 19th century has been given to the state.

10.12.2018, The Times: Strongman of the circus who hauled Egypt’s treasures to UK

2018 in the market: the price is right for pale males: A decade after Damien Hirst took over Sotheby’s London saleroom in September 2008 with a sale of his own work, the same New Bond Street room staged the most notorious London auction since—where Banksy’s Girl with Balloon shredded itself. In 2008, Hirst’s sale made £111m as Lehman Brothers collapsed, sparking the global financial crisis. No such catastrophe has yet followed Banksy’s stunt, but despite art sales’ strength this year, on 1 November, Tad Smith, Sotheby’s chief executive, predicted the art market in 2019 would be “more subdued” than that seen in early 2018.

10.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: 2018 in the market: the price is right for pale males

Easter Island mayor concedes Moai statue might be better left in British Museum: Pedro Edmunds Paoa said Easter Island had a “thousand” of its iconic statues, known as the Moai, “both buried, ignored and discarded” and lacked the means to maintain them. “Those thousand are falling apart because they are made of a volcanic stone, because of the wind and the rain are. We need global technology for their conservation,” he said.

10.12.2018, Reuters: Easter Island mayor concedes Moai statue might be better left in British Museum

11.12.2018, Apollo Magazine: Easter Island mayor suggests Moai statue should stay in Britain

11.12.2018, Artnet: Easter Island’s Mayor Says a Monumental Moai Sculpture Is Better Off in the British Museum

12.12.2018, The Times: Easter Island doesn’t want its statue back

Rule of law: Legal tips for art lovers: Of special interest at Art Basel in Miami Beach are the new exhibitor regulations announced by the fair in 2017, which go into effect this week. Exhibiting dealers must agree not to accept works known or suspected to be stolen, fake, or subject to claims, and must use due diligence to establish origin and authenticity. Galleries are requested to adhere to the rules in their regular business, not just at the fair.

09.12.2018, The Art Newspaper: Rule of law: Legal tips for art lovers