Art Industry News: New Museum Workers Vote to Strike If They Can’t Reach a Deal With Management + Other Stories

by admin

Sep 30, 2019

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 Monday, September
30.

NEED TO READ

Salvator Mundi Is
Probably Not Coming to the Louvre – With a little
less than a month to go before the opening of the blockbuster
Leonardo da Vinci show at the Louvre in Paris, chances are slim to
none that the most mysterious Leonardo—Salvator Mundi—will
be included in the flesh. The loan of the work has not yet been
approved, and the curator of the show has chosen not to disclose
his own view of the painting’s attribution in the catalogue.
The precise whereabouts
of the most expensive painting ever sold at auction—which was
supposed to go on view at the Louvre Abu Dhabi last year—remain
unknown. (The Art
Newspaper)

Anti-Prison Activists Protest Ford Foundation –
The head of the Ford Foundation,
Darren Walker, is under fire from prison abolitionists for
statements he made supporting the construction of better prisons in
New York. Walker has
defended his support of
replacing the Rikers Island detention center with four modern
jails. But activist groups,
including Decolonize This Place, accuse the foundation’s chief of
supporting “skyscraper jails.” Around 100 Ford fellows signed an
open letter criticizing Walker’s stance, while others staged a
demonstration outside the foundation’s headquarters on Friday.
Walker says he was
addressing the issue of “inhumane incarceration” and prison
reform. (Hyperallergic)

New Museum Union Votes to Strike If No Contract Is Reached
– The unionized staff at the New
Museum in New York has threatened to go on strike if they are
unable to reach an agreement with management. The vote to authorize a strike follows months
of negotiations over the terms of their employment. The union is
pushing for a minimum annual
wage of $51,000, health care for all employees, and a greater
attention to worker safety. The museum’s management insists that
talks have not stalled and remains “hopeful” that an agreement can
be reached. A spokesperson says that the museum has requested
additional meetings to make more progress before the unspecified
strike deadline. Union member Dana Kopel, a senior editor at the
museum, says: “We’ve been bargaining for almost a year now….
They’ve been hostile to most, if not all, of our
proposals.” (ARTnews)

Robert De Niro Remembers His Artist Father – A new
scholarly book on Robert de Niro, Sr, the artist father of the
famous actor, draws on unpublished notebooks he left behind when he
died in 1993. The actor gave unfettered access to the authors
of data-link-name=”in body link”>Robert De Niro,
Sr: Paintings, Drawings and Writings: 1942-1993, which
will be published by Rizzoli next month—even though he could not
bear to read the journals himself. After a promising start, with a solo show at
Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, the senior de Niro’s career stalled,
though his works are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum
of Art and the Whitney. Of the journals, which recount the Abstract
Expressionist painter’s mental health battles and his
struggle to accept his homosexuality, Robert de Niro says: “I’ll
read them when it feels right.” (Guardian)

ART MARKET

Chicago’s Imagists Are In Demand – Paintings by
the Hairy Who? and the Chicago
Imagists are gaining traction in the market. An auction at
Hindman’s in Chicago on September 26 brought in more
than $3.4 million, led by Jim Nutt’s Plume. The painting sold for $516,500, more than double its
low estimate, setting an auction record for the artist’s
work. (Press release)

UOVO Workers Vote to Join a Union – Staff at the New York-based art storage and
transport company UOVO have voted to join the Teamsters
union. UOVO’s is part of a growing number of new unions
formed by culture workers, including those at the New Museum, the
Brooklyn Academy of Music, and the Frye Art
Museum. Local 814
president Jason Ide
says: “Something is happening in
the art world now.” (Artforum)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Darren Walker Joins the
National Gallery’s Board – Not long after Kaywin
Feldman took over as director
of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the museum
is making some changes to
its board. Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation,
will join, while industrialist Mitchel Rales, the founder of
Glenstone, has been elected president. Andrew Saul, who has been a
trustee since 2013, is stepping down. (ARTnews)

Michael Xufu Huang
Launches His Own Museum – The star millennial
collector Michael Xufu Huang is leaving the museum he co-founded, M
Woods, to open a new home for his collection in Beijing. The X
Museum is due to open in 2020 and will focus on young artists in
Huang’s private collection, such as Amalia Ulman and Nicolas Party.
(Artforum)

Center Pompidou Shanghai
to Open in November – The Center Pompidou has finally
announced the opening date for its Shanghai outpost. The official
inauguration will take place in the first week of November, with
the public opening on November 8. The center is located in a part
of the huge West Bund Art Museum designed by British architect
David Chipperfield. (Monopol)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Brazilian Artists Fear
Crackdown – After the Caixa Cultural Theater, a
state-run institution in the capital of Brasilia, canceled an
LGBT-themed stage show, actor Artur Luanda Ribeiro, who would
have played a transgender character, feared it would be the start
of a wave of government censorship. Although President Bolsonaro
has denied the charge, he has advocated for the use of what he
calls “filters” when deciding on grants and support for cultural
projects. The former culture secretary Henrique Pires says
“filters” is simply censorship by another name. (AFP)

Maurizio Cattelan on the
Golden Toilet Theft – In an exclusive interview,
Maurizio Cattelan talks about the recent heist of his
storied golden toilet from Blenheim Palace. He says there are
rumors the theft was orchestrated by a famous gang active in the
area, but they have never targeted the palace before. Overall, he’s
getting a bit sick of talking about the whole thing. “I wish the
loo could give interviews by itself,” he says. “Being the press
office for a toilet can be kind of depressing.” (Garage)

Dia Plans New Projects
– The Dia Art Foundation is planning a rare
exhibition of works on paper by Marian Zazeela. The New York artist
and her longtime partner, La Monte Young, staged multiple art and
performance events at Dia back in the ’70s, but Zazeela’s own
drawings remain little known. The long-term show, which opens on
October 5, includes 30 drawings and paintings on paper that date
back to 1962. A 4-LP vinyl record dedicated to Young is due to be
released next summer. (ARTnews)

Kara Walker’s Tate Modern Fountain Makes a Splash
– The artist Kara Walker’s highly anticipated Turbine Hall
installation at Tate Modern is finally here, and it does not
disappoint. Walker has created a 43-foot-tall fountain called
Fons Americanus, inspired by the Victoria Memorial in
front of Buckingham Palace. The sculpture—chock full of
art-historical, literary, and cultural references—tells the story
of the African diaspora and questions the power and function of
memorials. One particularly searing reference is J.M.W. Turner’s
Slave Ship from 1840, which depicted an episode in
which slavers threw people from a boat headed for Jamaica in order
to collect insurance money. (Press release)