Art Industry News: Banksy’s Poignant Christmas Mural Is Returning to View for Just 36 Festive Hours + 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, December
17.

NEED-TO-READ

Families Object to a $45 Million
Pulse Nightclub Memorial – The debate over how to mark the site of the 2016
Pulse nightclub mass shooting rages on. Survivors and family members of the
victims have voiced
opposition to a planned $45 million museum and memorial, pushing
instead for a smaller and simpler marker of the tragedy in Orlando,
Florida. “My son’s brutal death is not a tourist attraction to fill
hotel rooms,” said Christine Leinonen, the mother of one of the
victims. The club’s owner, Barbara Poma, now head of the
OnePulse Foundation, argues that she has broad support for the
project. The memorial museum—which has received design
proposals from artists including Jenny Holzer and Sanford
Biggers—could be complete by 2022. (New York Times)

England’s Culture Minister Carries
On – UK Prime Minister Boris
Johnson is keeping his minister of culture on until at least
January, even though she has stepped down as a Conservative MP.
Nicky Morgan, who has been in the role since July, will remain part
of Johnson’s inner circle. But her term may be only temporary, as a
bigger re-shuffle is expected in early 2020. Morgan had previously
said that she wanted to leave the post to spend more time with her
family, but campaigned
energetically for Johnson during the general
election. On Twitter,
she quipped: “Well it turns out that leaving the Cabinet is harder
than leaving the EU!” (Financial
Times)

Banksy’s Christmas Mural Goes on Show for 36 Hours Only –
The artist’s Seasons
Greetings mural, which caused a sensation when it appeared in
a Welsh town last Christmas, has returned to public view. But the display
will only be open for 36 hours, from Wednesday through Friday,
which has upset the mural’s owner. The collector
John Brandler has criticized the
local council, which is covering the cost of security and staffing.
Brandler paid a six-figure sum for the work and agreed to keep it
in Port Talbot for three years. The Welsh government paid for the
work’s removal from the side of a garage earlier this year.
(BBC)

Swizz Beatz Curated an Art
Exhibition for His Third Date With Alicia Keys – In a new
profile, the producer and collector Kasseem Dean, better known as Swizz Beatz,
reveals the starring role art played in his romance with now-wife
Alicia Keys. (In the process, he also makes every man trying to woo
someone look bad.) For their third date, the music mogul flew works
in from around the world to organize a private exhibition of Erté.
It was a natural extension of their first date, to which he was
late because he was buying his future wife a painting by the
Russian-French artist. Keys’s art-themed gifts to her husband include
a surprise 30th birthday party at the Guggenheim Museum in New York
and, for Father’s Day, enough photographs by Gordon Parks to make
their collection the largest in private hands. [For a more in-depth
insight into Swizz Beatz’s strategy in the art world, read our interview with him
from earlier this year.] (ARTnews)

ART MARKET

Collectors Turn to Safety Deposit
Boxes – As banks shut down
their vaults, political uncertainty spreads across the UK, and
people look to invest in stable commodities, more and more
collectors have been turning to safety deposit boxes to store small
and valuable items. “We are seeing a lot of art and collectibles
being moved from England to Dublin,” says Seamus Fahy, the
co-founder of safety-deposit box company Merrion Vaults. “People
are worried and hedging their bets.”  (The Art Newspaper)

Babe Ruth’s Historic Bat Sells for
$1 Million – The baseball bat
with which Babe Ruth hit his 500th home run sold for more than $1
million over the weekend. It had been hidden away for decades after
the legendary athlete gave it to a friend in the 1940s. David
Kohler, president of SCP Auctions, says Ruth memorabilia is among
the most prized items it offers. (BBC)

Sotheby’s Design Sales Top $32 Million – The company’s New York design sales generated a
record $23.3 million, the highest recorded total for a design sale
series in the city. The results were boosted by the $8.2 million
sale of designer Marc Jacobs’s collection of European design, which
nearly doubled expectations. (Press release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

MoMA PS1 Names Curators for “Greater New York” –
 The curators for MoMA PS1’s
flagship survey of artists living and working in the New York area,
which comes once every five years, has been announced. They are:
PS1 curator Ruba Katrib, Ugandan independent curator Serubiri
Moses, PS1 director Kate Fowle, and Inés Katzenstein, MoMA’s
curator of Latin American art. The fifth edition of “Greater New
York” is slated to open in fall 2020, and it will present the work
of intergenerational artists with different perspectives on the
city. (Press
release)

Sarasota Opens Contemporary Art Museum – Sarasota residents have turned the former
campus of the city’s high school into a contemporary art museum.
The transformation took 16 years, and the Sarasota Art Museum will
now host touring exhibitions for around five months each. The
inaugural show is a solo exhibition of the Brazilian artist Vik
Muniz. (Herald Tribune)

Autry Museum Taps Two New Curators – The Autry Museum of the American West in Los
Angeles has appointed the curator Joe Horse Capture, who is known
for exhibitions that piece together fragmented indigenous
histories, as vice president and curator. The California African
American Museum’s curator of history, Tyree Boyd-Pates, has also
come on board as associate curator of Western history.
(Los Angeles Times)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Jordan Casteel Tapped for Next High Line Mural –
The sought-after painter Jordan
Casteel has been commissioned to recreate her 2017 oil
painting The
Baayfalls as a giant
mural overlooking 22nd Street on the High Line. (The highly
trafficked spot has been previously occupied by commissions from
Henry Taylor, Barbara Kruger, and others.) The work is a double
portrait of a hat seller and her brother outside the Studio Museum
in Harlem; the title references a sect of the Sufi brotherhood to
which the brother belongs. (Press release)

Nan Godin’s Sackler Protest Is One of TIME’s Photos
of the Year – Footage of the artist Nan Goldin’s protest against the
Sackler family and its links to both the opioid crisis and elite
museums gets a mention as one of TIME‘s best photos
of the year. An image of the artist lying on the floor
of the Guggenheim Museum in New York in February, leading a die-in with her
anti-Sackler organization PAIN, is included in the magazine’s
annual list of top 100 photos. The photograph was taken by
Elizabeth Bick for the New
Yorker. (TIME)

The post Art Industry News: Banksy’s Poignant Christmas
Mural Is Returning to View for Just 36 Festive Hours + Other
Stories appeared first on artnet News.