Art Industry News: Uniqlo China Yanks KAWS Merch After His Mao Art Draws Fire at Sotheby’s + Other Stories

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, October
3. 

NEED TO READ

Walid Raad Will Get His Prize After
All – Walid Raad will receive the Aachen Art
Prize worth around $11,000, the Ludwig Forum for International Art
has announced. The news comes as a reversal, overturning
Monday’s decision by the city of Aachen to rescind the
prize because the artist was associated with the pro-Palestinian
movement of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions against Israel
(BDS), which a recent German law has labelled anti-Semitic. The
board of the Ludwig Forum says that it has found no evidence that
Raad held anti-Semitic views, and that it did not need the city’s
permission to give out the award. (ARTnews, WDR)

Royal Shakespeare Company Cuts Ties With BP After Protests
– After a group of students
threatened to boycott the Royal Shakespeare Company over its
partnership with BP, the theater has dropped the oil giant as a
sponsor. Company reps explain that they “could not ignore” the
“strength of feeling” against the deal, which had been in place
since 2011. Representatives for BP say they are “disappointed and
dismayed” at the decision. (BBC)

Sotheby’s and Uniqlo Hit With KAWS Mao Controversy –
The clothing retailer Uniqlo has
pulled KAWS’s mega-popular
merch from its website after Chinese fans took issue with a
2002 work that depicts Chairman Mao in the style of the artist’s
signature cartoon characters. Some angry critics were burning their
merchandise and sharing it on Chinese social media after the online
platform 2CCM pointed out that the work, which was due to be
auctioned at Sotheby’s Hong Kong on October 7 and estimated
at $79,000–121,000, was coming up for sale in the same week as
the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Sotheby’s
has removed the image of the Mao work from its site, but you
can still see it elsewhere online.
(Highsnobiety, ARTnews)

Museum Patrons Debate Kanders Controversy – The Times does a deep dive into
the recent debates about museum funding. Among other things,
the paper charts the sources of wealth of museum trustees: some 40
percent of museum board members hail from the world of finance, by
far the biggest slice. Other revelations from the piece are more
human-scaled: When the
Whitney’s controversial trustee Warren
Kanders stepped down from the museum’s board earlier this year,
fellow trustee Kenneth Griffin was “livid,” threatening to leave
himself. He only came back when the museum’s chairman emeritus,
Leonard Lauder, “phoned Mr. Griffin from a boat to coax him back,”
the Times reveals. (New York
Times)

ART MARKET

Beware the Blue-Chip Art Investment –
Works by brand-name artists may not
be as “bankable” as collectors may think. In an economic downturn,
there are few works that are gold-plated assets, even if they are
by a Warhol, Basquiat, Richter, or Jeff Koons. Art advisor Todd
Levin says blue-chip art is less volatile as an investment “because
it has institutional status.” A lot, of course, depends on the
quality of your Warhol, Basquiat, Richter etc. The auction analyst
Christine Bourron points out that the value of artworks tends to
vary widely “even for some of the best brand-name artists.”
(The Art Newspaper)

Jane Fonda’s Painting Heads to Christie’s
– The octogenarian star of Netflix’s
comedy Grace and Frankie is selling a
mixed-media work by Thornton Dial for $200,000 at Christie’s London
auction during Frieze week. The work, titled Trophies (Doll
Factory), is a melange of Barbie dolls, stuffed animals,
toys, rope carpet, and other detritus covered in a layer of spray
paint and enamel, affixed to canvas. (Page Six, Christie’s)

PAD London Going Strong Despite Brexit – Dealers at the art and design fair PAD London,
which opened yesterday, say that sales have been good despite
Brexit blues. Some traders are debating ditching the pound in favor
of the euro and dollar because of the poor exchange rate, however.
(Financial
Times)

COMINGS & GOINGS

The Morgan Museum & Library Goes Green(er)
– Part of the institution’s four year, $12.5 million
renovation will include a garden designed by award-winning
landscape designer Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. The garden marks the
first time in the Morgan’s 113-year history that outdoor grounds
will be publicly accessible. (Observer)

Bad News for the Rubin Museum – New York’s
Rubin Museum is cutting staff, hours, and exhibition programming in
order “to chart a course for long-term financial sustainability and
success,” wrote executive director Jorrit Britschgi in a letter to
staff yesterday, the institution’s 15th birthday. A quarter of the
staff will lose their jobs, and the museum will close Wednesdays
and cut back temporary exhibitions from five to six to just two a
year. On the flip side, they plan to retain a new “chief experience
officer” to specialize on immersive visitor experiences.
(The Art
Newspaper)

Deborah Marrow, Former Director of the Getty Foundation,
Has Died – Art historian Deborah Marrow, who had
worked at the Getty in Los Angeles since 2003, has died. She
retired at the end of 2018, having most recently serves as director
of the Getty Foundation, overseeing the organization’s grant-making
operations. That included the Getty’s ambitious Pacific Standard
Time initiative, which provided dozens of southern California
institutions some $28 million in funding for two cycles of themed
exhibitions. (ARTnews)

Katherine Crawford Luber to Succeed Kaywin Feldman in
Minneapolis – The Minneapolis Museum of Art has
tapped Katherine Crawford Luber as its director and president,
filling the vacancy left by Kaywin Feldman’s 2018 departure to lead
the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Luber comes from the
San Antonio Museum of Art, where she has been director for eight
years. (New York
Times)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Tune Into the Radio at CCA Wattis Institute –
Cinthia Marcelle, who represented Brazil at the 2017 Venice
Biennale, is turning San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute galleries
into a temporary radio station for her upcoming
exhibition “A Morte.” The show is named after Brazilian poet Oswald
de Andrade’s 1937 play A morta (The Dead
Woman), and will feature on-air programming taking place inside
the museum gallery, activating the space, as well as radio
broadcasts from the artist’s native country. (Press
release)

Jerry
Saltz’s Ode to the Modern – Modernism is so much a part of
art critic Saltz’s life story, “all of our life stories,” that what
happens at the mothership of MoMA matters dearly. So when it
reopens in October, he hopes the rehang is not too radical. He
accepts that the cannon has to expand, the strict timeline has to
go, and segregation between media must be a thing of the past. But
he does not want the museum to be unrecognizable. “I still need to
return there regularly to commune with the ancestors,” he
writes. (Vulture)

Who Is London’s Most-Exhibited Artist? – Data shows that Lucien Freud has been the
most-exhibited artist in London over the past two decades, with ten
exhibitions at the city’s public museums and galleries.
Unsurprisingly, David Hockney clocks in second, with eight shows,
and Tacita Dean steals joint third place with Andy Warhol, with
both Dean and the Pop artist having had seven exhibitions.
(TAN)

See Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Ballet at Frieze London
– One of the highlights of Frieze London’s opening
day was Thaddaeus Ropac gallery’s restaging of a Bauhaus ballet by
Oskar Schlemmer. The artist’s grandson, C. Raman Schlemmer,
organized the performances of Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Dances for the
Live program at the fair. (artnet
News)

The post Art Industry News: Uniqlo China Yanks KAWS Merch
After His Mao Art Draws Fire at Sotheby’s + Other Stories
appeared first on artnet News.