Art Industry News: Meet the Artist Who Convinced Britney Spears to Become an Advocate for Wealth Redistribution + 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 Friday, March
27.

NEED-TO-READ

The Lockdown May Not Produce Great Art – Will artists stuck at home create amazing
things? Ian Wheeler, the co-founder of Partisan Records, warns that
we put a lot of pressure on creatives “to make the things that make
us feel better,” and we sometimes forget they may be suffering,
too—financially and otherwise. Live performers in particular have
been hard hit by the crisis, so he is unimpressed with glib remarks
that Shakespeare wrote some of his greatest plays during the
plague. “Shakespeare’s patrons were earls and high court officials.
They kept him sheltered and fed and ultimately insulated from the
horrors of the plague while the theaters were closed,” Wheeler
notes. America’s artists, he concludes, need a patronage system in
this emergency for the many, not the few. (New York Times)

Jeff Koons Sends a Message to Italy – The American artist has sent a message of
solidarity to Italy. Koons, who is preparing for a solo show
at the Palazzo Strozzi in
Florence, joined Marina
Abramović, Ai Weiwei, and Tomás Saraceno in a show of solidarity
with the institution and the country by contributing a video
message to its new platform. In the dispatch, Koons
said, “Italy is such an
amazing country and as people you’ve gone through so much and you
will defeat the virus.” He ends on a characteristically upbeat
note: “Italy, you can do this!” (Press release)

This Artist Has Convinced Britney Spears to Become a
Socialist – Is Britney a
socialist now? The singer made Internet waves when she reposted a
left-leaning text written by Mimi Zhu, a queer Chinese-Australian
writer and artist based in Brooklyn, on her Instagram account. (One
line reads: “We will feed each other, re-destribute wealth,
strike.”) Zhu says that she when she found out, “I literally
dropped my phone—I was like, Britney?” The artist says she wrote
about standing together in these days of enforced isolation after
many of her friends got laid off due to the coronavirus shutdowns.
“There were definitely socialist undertones,” she says. Britney’s
otherwise innocuous post has now spawned meme after meme about
“Comrade Britney.” (Paper)

The UK Has a Serious Backlog of Museum Repairs –
An audit of England’s museums has
revealed a huge backlog of much-needed building repairs, including
a leaky roof at the British Museum. The Parthenon Marbles stored
there were undamaged, but the National Audit Office report
highlights just how much museums have been forced to skimp on
maintenance as their government funding fell, putting collections
at risk. At the Wallace Collection in
London, a piece of
masonry fell from the portico because its supporting beams had
deteriorated. (Guardian)

ART MARKET

Barbara Gross Galerie to Close – The veteran Munich-based dealer Barbara Gross
is closing her gallery. Over the past three decades, she championed
female artists including Silvia Bächli, Miriam Cahn, and VALIE EXPORT.
Gross’s closure follows the shuttering of two other beloved smaller
galleries, Parque Galeria of Mexico City and Galerie Forsblom in
Sweden, in recent weeks. (Artforum)

Masterpiece London Is Cancelled – Masterpiece
London, the art and design fair with wares spanning all eras,
announced it would cancel its 2020 edition as a result of the
public health crisis. The fair, whose majority shareholder is Art
Basel’s parent company MCH, was originally scheduled to take place
from June 24 to July 1. (Artnet
News)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Architect and Critic Michael Sorkin Had Died of Coronavirus
– The architect and
architecture critic has died at age 71 after contracting COVID-19.
Michael Sorkin was a judge for the design competition for the
ultimately unbuilt Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki. New York
Times critic Michael Kimmelman said of Sorkin: “He
wrote with moral force about big ideas and about the granular
experience of life at the level of the street.” (Architects Journal)

Pompidou’s South Korea
Partnership on Ice – The president of Paris’s Centre
Pompidou was on the verge of signing a deal on a space in
Seoul—which would have made it the latest addition to the
Pompidou’s global network—just before the coronavirus outbreak sent
nations the world over into lockdown. The project was first
proposed in 2016; its fate is now uncertain. (TAN)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Ralph Lauren Donates $10 Million to Corona Relief Funds –
The Ralph Lauren Corporate
Foundation has pledged $10 million to coronavirus relief efforts.
The majority of the sum is going to the World Health Fund, but some
money will also go to the
Council of Fashion Designers of America and Vogue Fashion Fund’s initiative, A
Common Thread, aimed at
helping members of the fashion community in distress. The brand has
also joined other fashion companies in making masks and gowns for
medical workers. (The Cut)

Roberta Smith Reviews a Now-Closed Judd Show –
Roberta Smith—who, in addition to being the New York
Times‘s co-chief art critic, is also Donald Judd’s former
assistant—reviews a large, unfinished plywood installation by
the artist that she saw on view at Gagosian in New York before it
closed prematurely. The 80-foot-long installation hasn’t been on
view since 1981 and doesn’t look like anything else Judd ever made.
“The piece is a big, magnanimous puzzle and an exercise in
vision-sharpening comparative looking,” Smith writes, concluding
that “the process of self-enlightenment it stimulates may make you
feel smarter than you thought you were.” (NYT)

The post Art Industry News: Meet the Artist Who Convinced
Britney Spears to Become an Advocate for Wealth Redistribution +
Other Stories appeared first on artnet News.