Art Industry News: The Artist Jenny Holzer Has Debuted a Line of Impeachment-Themed Skateboards + Other Stories

by admin

Feb 5, 2020

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 Tuesday, February
5.

NEED TO READ

German Court Rules in Favor of Looted Art Database
– A German court ruled that the owner of a work of art
cannot stop someone from listing the piece on the German government
database lostart.de, which is designed to help track Nazi-looted
art. The lawsuit was brought by a collector who had bought a
painting by Andreas Achenbach at auction, apparently unaware
that it had been sold in 1937 by the Jewish dealer Max Stern,
who the Nazis forced to liquidate his Dusseldorf gallery and flee
Germany. The collector says his painting, which is listed on
lostart.de, was sold in a “perfectly normal gallery
transaction.” (The Art
Newspaper)

Steve McQueen Reveals His Early Artistic Influences
– The filmmaker’s exhibition at Tate Modern opens
next week, on February 13, and will feature 14 works including the
early 1990s Super 8 film Exodus and his more recent
video work End Credits, which focuses on the
FBI’s surveillance of the early 20th-century African American
singer and activist Paul Robeson. In a profile in
the Financial Times, McQueen reveals the art that
first moved him—Edward Burra’s paintings of the Harlem
Renaissance—and recalls the importance of watching the BBC as a
child. He says that “people have died to get me where I am today,”
citing a young man named Stephen Lawrence who was the victim of a
racially-motivated murder in London in 1993. He “didn’t die in
vain,” says McQueen. (Financial
Times)

Jenny Holzer Unveils an Impeachment-Themed Skateboard –
Artist Jenny Holzer has unveiled
her newest work, timed to celebrate the historic impeachment trial
of President Donald Trump. Titled Impeach, the
limited-edition skateboards are produced in marble and wood, etched
into which reads: “Some moments should never be forgotten. Some
moments deserve to be set in stone. Make America Righteous Again.”
The decks, commissioned by the company Skateroom, will be sold
through High Snobiety beginning February 5. (TAN)

Calculating the Damage of the Historic Venice Floods –
Representatives for mayor Luigi
Brugnaro of Venice say that the cost incurred by the city after its
historical floods is more than $3.9 million. The damage prompted
the Italian government to declare a state of emergency back in
November, when stunning images of rising sea levels circulated
worldwide. Citizens of the so-called “floating city” worry that
additional damage caused by the recent floods will further delay
the implementation of infrastructure meant to prevent them in the
first place. (TAN)

ART MARKET

Judge Raises Botín’s Fine for Smuggling a Picasso
– A
Spanish judge has ruled that disgraced billionaire Jaime Botín, who
runs banking megalith Santander Grupo, will have to pay a whopping
$103 million and spend three years in prison, reversing the earlier
sentencing of $58 million and 18 months. Botín’s lawyers are
already formulating an appeal against the original ruling, which
came in January, after authorities found Picasso’s
Head of Young Woman
on Botín’s yacht. (ARTnews)

Sotheby’s Will Sell Hockney’s Sunflowers in Hong Kong
– At the upcoming
contemporary art evening sale in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s is offering
David Hockney’s 30
Sunflowers for up to
$10.3 million. The work, dating to 1996, is a steal compared to
Hockney’s Portrait of an
Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which fetched a staggering $90.3 million in
2018, and held the title of most expensive work by a living artist
for a few months until Jeff Koons’s Rabbit hopped over the record. (The
Value)

Solid Gold Cast of Nelson Mandela’s Hands Headed to Auction
– Guernsey’s auction house is selling four gold casts of the
late human rights advocate on March 2, at a sale taking place at
Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Mandela sat for the cast
sculptures in 2002 as part of an effort to raise funds for the his
eponymous Children’s Fund. Highlights include sculptures of two
fists: one inscribed with the date 1964, when he was imprisoned,
and the other with 1990, the date he was released.
(Press
release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Mazel Tov to Sienna Miller and Lucas Zwirner! –
In the latest chapter of Hollywood
starlets hitching their wagons to art boys, actress Sienna Miller
and Lucas Zwirner are engaged. Zwirner, the editorial director for
David Zwirner Books, reportedly made things official with a large
diamond ring that Miller was photographed wearing this week in New
York City. No word yet on when the nuptials will be.
(US
Magazine)

The Mauritshuis Names Its New Director – Martine Gosselink will serve as the next
director of The Hague’s Mauritshuis museum. Gosselink is currently
the head of history at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and she also
cofounded the De Collectie cultural collective. (Artforum)

CAA Honors Curator Denise Murell, Eleanor Antin –
The College Art Association
recognized the Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Denise Murell for
her 2018 show “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and
Matisse to Today,” which began as her
thesis project and
evolved into an international sensation, traveling from Columbia
University’s Wallach Art Gallery to the Musee D’Orsay. Artist
Eleanor Antin also received a lifetime achievement award for her
contribution to the field of conceptual art with her physically
rigorous series CARVING:
A Traditional Sculpture.
(ARTnews)

French Collector Felix
Marcilhac Is Dead at 78 – The Parisian art historian and
dealer was renowned for his collection of more than 300 art
deco and art nouveau works, often spotting and
acquiring decorative pieces that had been undervalued or
overlooked. (ARTnews)

FOR ART’S SAKE

German Court Rejects
Effort to Remove Anti-Semitic
Relic – A court in Naumburg,
Germany, has rejected a bid to have an anti-Semitic relief removed
from the side of a 14th-century church and placed into a museum
context. The court previously said the public is unlikely to view
the relic as an expression of the church’s current beliefs. The
relief, titled Jewish Pig, depicts a rabbi looking inside
a pig’s rectum with Jewish people suckling on its teats. The
court said that “in its current context,” it is not of “slanderous
character.” The plaintiff plans to take the case to Germany’s
Federal Court of Justice. (Courthouse
News)

Lost and Stolen Paintings Reunited in Cyprus –
After sitting in the basement of a
cultural center in the Turkish Cypriot area of northern Cyprus, 219
paintings are seeing the light of day, more than 45 years after
being removed from view. The artworks were believed to be lost or
stolen after they vanished as part of a broad sweep of cultural
objects after the Turkish invasion in 1974. The return is part of a
pact to boost morale and trust between Cyprus’s Greek and Turkish
communities. In exchange, Turkish Cypriots were given rare archival
footage of cultural and sporting events from the state’s CyBC
broadcasting organization. (Courthouse
News)

Painting Looted by Nazis found in Royal Library of Belgium
– A painting, originally owned by Jewish lawyer and art
collector Arthur Dorville, has been found in the possession of the
Royal Library Museum. The 1876 watercolor by Belgian artist
Félicien Rops, titled La Buveuse d’Absinthe (The Absinthe
Drinker), was sold under duress in
1942. (Brussels
Times)