Art Industry News: Billionaire Art Collector Adrian Cheng Is Building Face Mask Vending Machines in Hong Kong + 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 Tuesday, April
7.

NEED-TO-READ

Peter Schjeldahl Predicts the Future of Museums
– From his isolated
writing desk, the art critic rethinks his past visits to museums
and wonders why Old Masters contain a gravitas that seems to wane
in a lot of late 19th century to 20th century painting. He suspects
the reason is that these older artists had a “routine consciousness
of mortality,” since “pandemic diseases and innumerable other
causes of early death haunted day-to-day life, even for those
creators who were committed to entertainment.” He stops to ruminate
on Las Meninas
by Diego Velázquez, a work that he
studied for days some years ago. The exquisite work is a display of
power and elitism, but the death and tragedy that went on to
encompass the lives of many of the painting’s subjects is now
imprinted on it. Schjeldahl wonders how we will reread paintings
when we finally do return to museums after this pandemic. They
won’t have changed, he notes, but we will have. (New Yorker)

Grace Farms Offers More Than $2 Million for COVID Relief
– The New Canaan,
Connecticut-based arts foundation has launched a $2.5 million
relief fund to combat the dire shortage of medical gear and help
get around the distribution roadblocks. Already, the foundation’s
new platform Grace Farms Alliance Against Covid-19 has distributed
120,000 respirator masks, more than 32,000 surgical masks, and
4,000 isolation coveralls to more than a dozen local hospitals.
(The Art Newspaper)

Adrian Cheng Builds Face Mask Vending Machines
– Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, the billionaire art
collector and developer Adrian Cheng has announced plans to
distribute medical-grade surgical masks in 35 vending machines for
free throughout Hong Kong. The dispensers—managed by Hong
Kong-based NGOs—will enable vulnerable residents to pre-register to
collect a pack of five masks each week. At its peak, the program is
expected to produce more than seven million face masks per month.
In addition, Cheng’s property development company—which has
overseen the construction of the K11 Art Foundation and K11 art
malls—will invest HK$10 million in the production of advanced face
masks that can kill bacteria and viruses. (TAN)

Take a Virtual Tour of Tate’s Andy Warhol Show – Tate,
which opened a major Andy Warhol exhibition on March 12, just days
before the museum closed to the public, is offering viewers the
next best thing to seeing the show in person: the chance to take a
virtual tour with the show’s curators. The exhibition seeks to
focus on the lesser known aspects of Warhol’s life and work. “We wanted to look at
Warhol for who he was, taking into account his family’s journey to
America from eastern Europe, his queer identity, and the way in
which his work would ultimately be informed by death and religion,”
said curators Gregor Muir and Fiontán
Moran. (Guardian)

ART MARKET

Sotheby’s Online Photo Auction Brings in $3 Million
– Sotheby’s online photographs sale, which concluded on
Friday afternoon, reached its highest-ever total, bringing in $3
million. (It probably helps that Sotheby’s IRL photographs sale was
rolled into the online one.) The sale was led by a rare László
Moholy-Nagy photogram that sold for $524,000, under its high
estimate of $600,000. Notably, 30 percent of the buyers were new to
the auction house. (Press release)

Charity Auction Raises More Than $2 Million for Healthcare
Workers – An online
auction hosted by the Paris-based house Piasa netted
€2.4 million (about $2.6 million) in sales,
which will be donated to the group Protège Ton Soignant (Protect your
Caregiver). Thaddaeus Ropac
and Kamel Mennour were among the dealers who contributed to the
sale, which offered 370 artworks. The top lot was a work by Claire
Tabouret, which fetched €207,000 ($223,000). (TAN)

Expo Chicago Alters Payment Plan – Expo Chicago has become the latest fair to
offer accommodations to struggling galleries. In a letter, the
fair’s director Tony Karman said the event is “reducing the impact
of our invoicing, adjusting payment schedules, providing incentives
to reduce booth fees, and committing to work individually with our
exhibitors to accommodate to their needs.” He also said the fair
would donate a portion of its proceeds to dealer organizations ADAA
and NADA. (ARTnews)

Gagosian Launches New Artist Spotlight Series –
Mega-galleries are quickly rallying
to up their online game. In addition to David Zwirner’s new
initiatives, Gagosian has announced a new weekly series called
“Artist Spotlight,” which will highlight work by an artist
alongside interviews, film recommendations, and other supplemental
content. The effort will begin with a new assemblage by Sarah Sze,
who was due to be the subject of an exhibition at Gagosian’s Paris
gallery last month. (Art Market Monitor)

COMINGS & GOINGS

FRONT Triennial Is Postponed to 2022 – The impact of coronavirus on the art-world
calendar is rippling far into the future. The next edition of the
Front International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art,
originally scheduled for 2021, will now be delayed a full year. The
exhibition, curated by Prem Krishnamurthy and Tina Kukielski, will
run on roughly the same dates, one year later: July 16 to October
2, 2022. (ARTnews)

Collectors Donate Major Ceramics Collection to Hepworth
Wakefield – The UK’s Hepworth
Wakefield gallery just got a major gift of 100 ceramic works from
the couple Terence Bacon and John Oldham. The duo first visited the
gallery after falling in love with Barbara Hepworth’s garden in St.
Ives. Before long, they began “traveling around in our caravan,
buying things we really liked.” They told the
Guardian: “None of it was purchased with investment in
mind…though some of our friends thought we were bonkers.”
(Guardian)

Philanthropist Arlene Schnitzer Dies – The art philanthropist and collector Arlene
Schnitzer has died at age 91. Schnitzer was a champion of the
Northwest art scene in the 1960s and ’70s and helped launch the
careers of artists including Robert Colescott and Marita Dingus as
founder of the Fountain Gallery in Portland. Over the years, she
and her husband Harold donated more than $80 million to different
causes. (OPB.com)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Darren Bader Launches an AR App – The artist Darren Bader’s augmented reality
app, Mendes Mundi, is in beta testing, a year after it was meant to
be unveiled at the Venice Biennale. The app lets you choose one of
13 bizarre AR characters Bader has created with the animator
Rodrigo Pires and place them in your world. (ARTnews)

William Penn Foundation Offers a Boost to Philadelphia Arts
– The William Penn Foundation
in Philadelphia has fast-tracked $6.6 million in grants to 17 local
arts and culture groups that are usually awarded in late April in
order to respond to the financial pressures of the public health
crisis. The grants include $750,000 for the Conservation Center for
Art and Historic Artifacts and $450,000 for the Village of Arts and
Humanities. (Philadelphia
Inquirer)

A New Documentary Exposes Scandals in Canada’s Art World
– The new documentary
There Are No Fakes
tells the story of what art dealer
Don Robinson calls “the greatest art scam in Canadian history.” The
film, directed by Jamie Kastner, unravels an elaborate forgery ring
masterminded by Gary Lamont, who is currently serving a five-year
prison sentence. (TAN)

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Cheng Is Building Face Mask Vending Machines in Hong Kong + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.