Art Industry News: Coronavirus Postpones the Venice Architecture Biennale + 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, March
5.

NEED-TO-READ

Turkey Releases Jailed Kurdish Artist – The Kurdish activist-artist and teacher Fatos
Irwen has been released after serving more than three years in
jail. She was sentenced in 2016, charged with resisting the police,
attending a demonstration, and “belonging to a terrorist
organization,” which she has denied. The group Artists at Risk said
Irwen has “faced harsh prison conditions under charges designed to
silence dissident freedom of expression and action in Turkey under
President Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian
regime.” (The Art Newspaper)

Boorish Graffiti Artists Upset Locals in Africa –
A group of anonymous graffiti
artists on tour in Namibia has outraged locals. Nrupesh Soni, a man angered by the tags, hunted
for the rogue artists’ graffiti, finding their boast posts on
Instagram and Facebook. Soni was helped by others upset at the
group’s tagging. The alleged
perpetrators include a Canadian and Frenchman, both in their mid 30s. The French
newspaper Le
Progres splashed their
photographs on its front page as two of the tags,“Soli” and “JAB,”
are linked to a graffiti group in Lyons. (Times of London)

Venice Architecture Biennale Postponed – The Venice Architecture Biennale was due to
open in May but has been pushed back to the fall and will only run
for three months. The move is one of a number of precautionary
measures to limit the spread of coronavirus in Italy. Various
governments’ advice against travel to Northern Italy, which has
borne the brunt of the epidemic in Europe so far, “will have a
domino effect on the movement of people and works in coming weeks,”
the biennial’s organizers said in a statement. Venice’s museums, along with those in Milan and
Turin, have reopened with restrictions in
place. (Guardian)

The Royal Academy Pokes Fun at Social Media Prudery –
The Royal Academy’s social media
team has been posting cheeky images to mock social media giants’ rules about
nudity. The academy has
been highlighting bare buttocks and breasts painted by Titian ahead
of the National Gallery’s exhibition. Other risqué images included
work by Sarah Lucas and Tom of Finland. When images were flagged on
Twitter, the Royal Academy responded that “our video for February’s exhibitions contained
a massive phallus and didn’t get flagged.” It is no coincidence that the academy’s new
social media manager is Adam Koszary, who is back in the UK having
been briefly headhunted by Elon Musk, a big fan of Koszary’s droll
Tweets about museums. When the Barbican gallery moaned about images
in its “Masculinities” show being censored, the Royal Academy
replied: “We’ll start our
own Twitter… with butts.” (Times)

ART
MARKET

Marc Anthony Drops $150,000 to Fund an Exhibition –
The singer Marc Anthony admires
Florian Eymann’s art so much that he bought out the French artist’s
solo show before it opened. Anthony snapped up 12 portraits based
on remixed Old and Modern Masters’ work for $150,000 after a sneak
preview of Eymann’s show at Avant Gallery’s Miami space.
(Page Six)

Can TEFAF Survive a Dwindling Old Masters Market? –
Sotheby’s and Christie’s Old
Masters sales totaled $239 million in 2019, which is less than a
single auction of contemporary art. But Old Master dealers soldier
on. At TEFAF Maastricht the Swiss-based dealer Salomon Lilian says
even Old Master paintings in the €100,000 to €300,000 range have
become difficult to sell. “We used to sell nice, but not museum
quality, pictures to Belgian and Dutch private clients, but they’ve
disappeared.” (TAN)

COMINGS &
GOINGS

IM Pei Partner Henry Cobb Has Died – The architect Henri Cobb has died at age 93.
During his 70-year career, Cobb was a partner of IM Pei, and
designed some of the most recognizable buildings in the US,
including the blue-glass skyscraper, the John Hancock Tower, in
Boston. (NYT)

A Rare Isaac Newton Manuscript Turned Up in a Corsica Library
– A conservation researcher
discovered a first edition of Isaac Newton’s Mathematical
Principles of Natural Philosophy in a library on the French
island of Corsica. Another rare Latin edition of the 17th-century
tome sold for $3.7 million at Christie’s in 2016. The director of
the Fesch public heritage library has stumbled on many unexpected
texts since they began reviewing its holdings a few years ago but
calls the Newton find a “Holy Grail.” (Courthouse News)

Prospect New Orleans’s Arist List Announced –
The New Orleans triennial
Prospect.5 has announced the artist list for its 2020 edition,
titled “Yesterday we said tomorrow.” Highlights include the
LA-based artist Mark Bradford and rising star Simone Leigh, who
will be installing a temporary public monument on the site of the
felled statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee. The triennial
runs October 24 through January 24. (Glasstire)

FOR ART’S
SAKE

Calida Rawles Comes Into the Spotlight – Artist Calida Rawles’s star is rising following
her gallery debut at Various Small Fires in February. The
44-year-old artist is finally seeing a decade of hard work pay off
in the market after her work was featured on the cover of Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s first novel, The
Water Dancer, and a solo
booth of her work sold out at Frieze LA. (The
Cut)

Catherine Opie Doesn’t Want to Drain the Swamp –
The artist Catherine Opie has
turned her lens to swamps for a new series “Rhetorical Landscapes,”
on view through April 4 at Regen Projects in Hollywood. Opie says
she is fascinated by their murky depths as well as their political
associations. “[There is] the rhetoric of ‘drain the swamp,’” Opie
says, “but the swamp is also a beautiful, vulnerable ecosystem.”
(Los Angeles
Times)

Preservationists Battle the Children’s Museum Over Plans to
Convert Church – Heritage
defenders and community locals are protesting the Children’s Museum
of Manhattan’s plans to convert a landmarked Beaux Arts church in
Central Park West, particularly the plans to remove its stained
glass windows. An earlier attempt to transform the space in 2015
was eventually shelved after the owners faced similar community
objections. New York’s Landmark Preservation Committee has asked
the museum to rework the plans and come back to them at a later
date. (Curbed)

Take a Sneak Peek at Joana Vasconcelos’s Sculptures in
Yorkshire – The Portuguese
conceptual artist Joana Vasconcelos is showcasing work from the
past 20 years in an expansive show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Take a sneak peek at some of her works, which often subvert the use
of traditionally feminized materials such as crochet and textile.
(Instagram)

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