Art Industry News: Banksy Proposes Erecting a Statue of Protesters Tearing Down a Colonialist Statue + 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, June
9.

NEED-TO-READ

Dip in UK Public Arts Funding Leaves the Sector Vulnerable
– According to the annual
Arts Index, public investment in the arts per capita in the UK
tumbled by a staggering 35 percent over the past decade. Meanwhile,
earned income by arts organizations from things like ticket sales
increased by 47 percent. Considering this trend, the Arts Index’s
commissioner, National Campaign for the Arts, is concerned that
theaters and cinemas could be decimated by the prolonged shutdown.
“It’s bitterly ironic that the arts sector’s resourceful response
to the 2008 financial crash is now the very thing that makes it
vulnerable to the COVID-19 crisis,” said its chair Samuel West,
“with theaters closed and income from tickets and bars dropping off
a cliff.” (BBC)

Advocates Want to Preserve George Floyd Street Art –
Institutions and organizations are
working hard to conserve and preserve the street art and murals
memorializing George Floyd. The University of St. Thomas in
Minnesota has been asking people to photograph works of street art
honoring Floyd and Black Lives Matter for its Urban Art Mapping
project, for which it will create a George Floyd & Anti-Racist Street
Art database. Meanwhile,
other groups including Urban Mapping are asking for plywood with
street art on it to be collected for posterity. (Pioneer Press)

Banksy Proposes a Replacement for the UK’s Colston
Statue – As Black Lives Matter demonstrations swell
outside of the United States, protesters in Bristol toppled a statue
commemorating slave trader Edward Colston this past weekend and
plunged it into the nearby river. Now, discussions have turned to
what to put in its place. Banksy, for one, has an idea. Along with
a sketch, he posted a suggestion on Instagram: “Here’s an idea that
caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who
don’t,” he wrote. “We drag him out the water, put him back on the
plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size
bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down.
Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.” (Instagram)

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago Cuts Ties With City
Police – The MCA Chicago is the latest art
institution to sever its contracts with police, who are often hired
off-duty to patrol museum events. After current and former
members of the Teen Creative Agency, the museum’s youth development
program, penned an open letter demanding that MCA cut ties with the
Chicago Police Department and “acknowledge the systematic
abuse of power and overt brutality exhibited by the police,” the
museum agreed to stop contracting the CPD’s services until the
department makes signifiant reforms. But the teen activists say
there is more work to be done. (Hyperallergic)

ART MARKET

Examining the Generation Gap in Online Art Buying –
The 2019 Hiscox Online Art Trade
Report found that 29 percent of surveyed collectors younger than 35
said they preferred the online buying experience to buying in
person, while only 10 percent of those older than 60 said they
preferred transacting digitally. This suggests that, while the art
world remains under relative lockdown, the collecting audience may
continue to skew younger. (New York Times)

KAWS Wants to Donate $250,000 to Black Lives Matter –
The top-selling artist says an
unspecified portion of all sales made today, June 9, on his website
KAWSONE will go toward supporting Color of Change and Black Lives
Matter. The goal is to
raise $250,000. On offer is a new work, titled TAKE,
alongside pieces from inventory and editions of his book
KAWS: COMPANIONSHIP IN THE AGE OF LONELINESS.
(Complex)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Smithsonian Launches Race and Community Initiative –
The Smithsonian has launched a new
initiative to better understand how Americans see, experience, and
confront race, and how it impacts communities and, by extension,
the future of the country. The program, called “Race, Community and
Our Shared Future,” is supported by a $25 million donation from
Bank of America. The initiative follows another project,
“Talking About Race,” launched last week by the National Museum of
African American History and Culture. (Press release)

France Triples Its Aid for Artists – In response to criticism that it has offered
too little support for the arts, the French culture ministry has
tripled its emergency bailout fund
for artists, to €1.5 million. The ministry is also doubling the
funds allocated to its national center for visual arts, CNAP, to
acquire work by France-based artists for French museums, to €1.2
million. (Journal des Arts)

FOR ART’S SAKE

The Scaffolding on Notre Dame Begins to Come Down –
Yesterday, construction workers
began removing the scaffolding around the burned Notre Dame
cathedral in Paris, which caught fire in April last year.
Conservationists and engineers have been shoring up the cathedral
to make sure its vault will not collapse, and are now moving to the
next phase of actually restoring the building. (Journal des Arts)

France Launches Open Call for Slavery Memorial –
The French ministry of culture has
launched an open call for designs for a work of art memorializing
the victims of slavery to be installed in the Tuileries Garden.
(The plan for the memorial has been in the works for some time, but
the open call is a new strategy.) Applications are open through
September 1, and the choice will be made in the first half of 2021,
aimed at completing the work by the fall. (Press release)

Kids Design Covers for Italian Vogue – The latest issue of Vogue Italia is
dedicated to children—and has given them the chance to become cover
stars by asking them to design the cover. (This is, of course, also
a very keen tactic at a time when photo shoots are essentially
impossible to conduct.) See the eight quirky covers designed by
kids between 2 and 10 years old below. (Vanity Fair)

The post Art Industry News: Banksy Proposes Erecting a
Statue of Protesters Tearing Down a Colonialist Statue + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.