Art Industry News: MIT Media Lab Director Steps Down Over Ties to Jeffrey Epstein + Other Stories

by admin

Sep 9, 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
9.

NEED-TO-READ

Nazi-Era Design Show Sparks a Controversy –
Holland’s Museum of Design in Den Bosch has opened a controversial exhibition
about Nazi-era art and design—but has banned photography of many of the
exhibits, including sculpture by Hitler’s favorite artist, Arno
Breker, in an attempt to deflect criticism that it is glorifying
the regime. The museum’s director, Timo de Rijk, said his staff was
making every effort to treat the ideologically tainted displays
with sensitivity. Some of the loans come from Berlin’s
Deutsches
Historisches Museum, which has a vast collection
of Nazi-approved art and propaganda
that is mostly kept in storage. (Guardian)

Why a Calder Mobile Is So Precious for Tom Ford –
The fashion designer and film
director gave Vogue a tour of the Los Angeles home he has created
with his husband, the writer Richard Buckley, providing glimpses of artworks
on display by Andy Warhol, Franz Kline, Morris Louis, Lucio
Fontana, and Cindy Sherman, among other artists. One piece Ford
would never consider selling? An Alexander Calder mobile that once
belonged to Georgia O’Keeffe, who was often photographed with the
sculpture. Ford says that
his grandfather once introduced him to O’Keeffe herself when he was
a boy one memorable day in Santa Fe. “I thought she was the
strangest person I’d ever met in my life,” Ford recalls.
(Vogue)

MIT Media Lab Director Steps Down Over Jeffrey Epstein Ties
– The director of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology’s Media Lab, Joi Ito, has resigned following revelations
that he solicited funds from the disgraced financier Jeffrey
Epstein for the lab and his own projects. Ito had attempted to
conceal the extent of their relationship, claiming he was not aware
that Epstein had been convicted of sexual abuse of young women when
they first met. MIT president L. Rafael Reif, who ordered the
investigation into how Epstein’s money was still welcome although
he was disqualified on its donor database, called the situation
“deeply disturbing.” (AP)

Sackler Settlement Talks Break Down – Talks between members of the Sackler family and
US state attorneys have reportedly run aground, and
the attorneys general
involved in the negotiations with the maker of OxyContin, Purdue
Pharma, now expect the company to file for bankruptcy protection
soon. If it does, members of the Sackler family linked to the
opioid crisis could still be personally sued. Under the proposed
“structured bankruptcy” deal, $10 billion to $12 billion—including
at least $3 billion from the Sacklers—would have gone toward
reaching a settlement with claimants. Critics of the proposed
deal, including the
artist-activist Nan Goldin, want the Sacklers to be taken to court.
(Guardian)

ART MARKET

Lee Friedlander Estate Gets Added
Representation – New York-based Luhring Augustine has joined forces with
photography specialist Fraenkel Gallery to represent the American
photographer’s estate. Luhring Augustine will present a solo show
of Friedlander’s work in fall 2020. (Press release)

Why P.P.O.W. Is Moving to Tribeca
– P.P.O.W gallery has joined a
growing Chelsea exodus to set up shop in the rising gallery hub of
Tribeca. Gallery co-founder Wendy Olsoff says the move, which
will be complete next fall, allowed the gallery to open in a
“beautiful space in a neighborhood we felt comfortable
in…. Chelsea just got to be too corporate for us and our
identity. It just didn’t match anymore.” (ARTnews)

Xavier Hufkens Will Represent Zhang
Enli – The Chinese
artist best known for his abstract compositions and paintings of
everyday containers has a new gallery in Xavier Hufkens of
Brussels, where he has a solo show on view through October 19.
Zhang will continue to be represented by Hauser & Wirth.
(Art Daily)

Pulse Announces New Fair
Director – Cristina Salmastrelli has taken over as the director of Pulse
after Katelijne de Backer quietly stepped down. Salmastrelli is
the US regional managing
director of Ramsay Fairs, Pulse’s parent company.
(Press release)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Kara Walker’s Calliope Is Coming to New York
– For one day only,
the steam-powered organ and keyboard known as Katastwóf
Karavan that Kara Walker originally conceived for Prospect 4 in
New Orleans will be on view in New York. The instrument will be
featured in a performance as part of musician, composer, and artist
collaborator extraordinaire Jason Moran’s upcoming solo show at the
Whitney Museum of American Art this fall. Moran will play the
instrument at an event
on October 12. (ARTnews)

Earliest Known Footage of Miles Davis Is Discovered
– The France National Audiovisual Institute posted a
rare, newly uncovered Christmas Day broadcast of Miles Davis this
week. The footage, which was recorded December 7, 1957 and is
therefore the oldest known recording of the jazz great, was found
during a recent inventory. It shows Davis with four French
musicians recording the soundtrack to a Louis Malle crime classic.
(AFP)

Doug Aitken Unveils a Giant Wind Chime
– Doug Aitken’s
installation Sonic
Mountain (Sonoma) is the newest addition to Donum Estate,
a vineyard and sculpture
park in California. The site-specific artwork reacts to its
surroundings in a eucalyptus grove and creates sound as wind
moves through it. “With Sonic Mountain (Sonoma), I wanted
to create a living artwork, a piece that would change continuously
and be performed by the natural environment,” Aitken said.
(Art
Daily)

FOR ART’S SAKE

How This Gallery Is
Welcoming Disabled People – After Tate Modern and
artist Olafur Eliasson apologized for
including an installation in his London retrospective that was
not accessible to visitors in a wheelchair, the conversation about
how to make art museums more welcoming to disabled people is
growing. Now, a new gallery called “Being Human” at the Wellcome
Collection in London has just opened with step-free access to all
exhibits. (Guardian)

LACMA Conservator Is on
a Quest to Save ’60s Art – A conservator at the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art is trying to reverse-engineer
Day-Glo colors that appear in a number of works from the ’60s
and ’70s, including Andy Warhol’s “Flowers”
series, F-111 by James Rosenquist, and Frank
Stella’s Bampur (1965). To make matters more
difficult, some of the paints used at the time were created using
recipes that remain secret today. “It’d be like giving you the
formula for Coke,” says Tom DiPietro, Day-Glo’s vice president of
research. (Los Angeles Times)

Rineke Dijkstra Takes on the Night Watch
– The Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra’s new
film installation, Night Watching, is now on view at the
Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. The video triptych shows 14 groups of
people observing Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, though the
painting itself never appears. (Sounds sort of like the marketing ploy
Christie’s used for Salvator Mundi, no?) The
Dutch Old Master’s famous painting is currently being
restored in public at the Amsterdam museum. (Press release)