Art Industry News: Museums Commission 14 Artists to Create New Balcony Performances Since They Are So Popular in Europe + 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 Wednesday, April
8.

NEED-TO-READ

Marc Glimcher on How Coronavirus Changed His View of the Art
World – The president of Pace
Gallery opens up about his personal experience with coronavirus. He
is now on the mend, but being confronted with his own mortality
changed his view of how the art world and market can and should
operate in a post-virus landscape. “Within a week, talking to
collectors about buying work went from fruitless to tasteless,”
Glimcher writes. In this brave new art world, unsustainable
practices are drawn into question, including “the pricing, the
over-promotion, the travel, the relentless catering to the lowest
instincts of speculators, the ballooning overheads, the
mutually-destructive competition, the engineered auction records,
and the desperate search for capital to burn, just to prove that
you can burn it.” (ARTnews)

Vogue Italia Printed a Blank Cover –
Since photographers, art directors,
stylists, and subjects can’t physically gather to stage a shoot in
locked-down Italy (or anywhere else, for that matter),
Vogue Italia
decided to
get conceptual for its
latest issue. The cover of the magazine’s April edition is just a
blank white page—a reference to the world’s current state of
standstill due to COVID-19. “To speak of anything else—while people
are dying, doctors and nurses are risking their lives and the world
is changing forever—is not the DNA of Vogue Italia,” wrote editor-in-chief Emanuele Farneti.
(The Cut)

Museums Commission Artists to Make “Balcony Art”
– Inspired by the singing from balconies that has
become a popular and uplifting sign of the power of art in Italy
and elsewhere, a consortium of international museums has teamed up
to commission 14 artists to create new works from their own
balconies or at their windows about life in isolation. The project,
first revealed in an op-ed by Manuel Borja-Villel, the
director of the Reina Sofía, for Artnet News, is still
under development, and the artists have yet to be announced. The
participating institutions include the Museum of Modern Art in
Warsaw, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, and MHKA Museum of
Contemporary Art in Antwerp. “It is important to remember that
human beings cannot be separated from nature, the importance of
joy, and the importance of care,” Borja-Villel says. (The Art
Newspaper, Artnet
News)

Demolition Begins on LACMA – The demolition of LACMA to make way for its
controversial $750 million redesign got underway on Monday
despite the fact that much of Los Angeles is currently under
lockdown. The first building to fall was the museum’s theater, a
1965 edifice designed by William L. Pereira, and interior demo has
begun in the Hammer, Ahmanson, and Art of the Americas buildings.
Museum director Michael Govan says the project is an “investment”
in the city’s future post-virus, and that it will be “an engine of
job creation and economic recovery.” (LA Times)

ART MARKET

Phillips Announces a Series of Spring Online Sales –
Phillips is hosting a series of
cross-category online sales through April and May offering
editions, works on paper, contemporary art, and design. The first
editions sale launches today and will include works from 1970 to
2016, ranging from a unique work on paper by Mark di Suvero to
photo-based works by Mickalene Thomas and Marilyn Minter.
(Artfix Daily)

French Charity Auction Raises Questions About Government
Action – After a Piasa charity
auction raised €2.4 million for French healthcare workers between
April 3 and 5, some have questioned the state’s meager €2 million
emergency fund for the arts. “France is clearly not up to the
task,” gallerist Georges-Philippe Valois says, comparing the modest
bailout to Berlin’s hefty €500 million
pot. (Le Journal des Arts)

Why TEFAF Opened Its 2020 Edition Amid Risk –
The majority of TEFAF exhibitors
urged the Maastricht fair to go ahead despite the early warning
signs that coronavirus was headed for Europe, according to a new
report. Just one French exhibitor pulled out ahead of time, and it
was only after fairgoers began to contract the virus and the fair
was forced to close four days
early that exhibitors changed their tune on
how it should have been handled. (Le Journal des Arts)

COMINGS & GOINGS

Artist and Writer Helène Aylon Has Died – The artist, whose work focused on the
intersection of feminism, Judaism, pacifism, and environmental
justice, died this week at age 89 from COVID-19. A pioneer of
environmental art, Aylon had just begun to gain renewed art-world
attention: Her first solo show in Los Angeles was held earlier this
year at Marc Selwyn Fine Art and her first New York solo exhibition
since 1979 was staged last year at Leslie Tonkonow gallery.
(Artforum)

TACA Announces 2020
Grants – The Arts Community Alliance (TACA) in Dallas has
awarded 46 grants to local visual arts organizations,
including the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dallas Contemporary,
and the Nasher Sculpture Center. An award also went to the Cedars
Union in Dallas, a community workspace for artists that features
private and shared studios. (Glasstire)

FOR ART’S SAKE

Albers Inspires a
Soothing Display at London’s Children’s Hospital
– Josef Albers thought that yellow was the color of
healing and happiness. A ward for children in the UK now
has yellow and orange
geometric patterns inspired by the artist and his wife and partner
Anni Albers. The new installation is part of a £10 million
refurbishment of the St Mary’s Hospital in London, a collaboration
between Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, Imperial Health
Charity, and the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. (The Art Newspaper)

Editors Review Crappy
Reproductions at the Met(ropolis Museum) – The editors of
ArtAsiaPacific were not impressed by the new Metropolis
Museum in Hong Kong, a private exhibition space dedicated to
copies, which debuted with Monet reproductions in plastic
gold-colored frames. “Metropolis Museum is not a repository
of valuable cultural objects—and definitely not to be confused with
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—but a rented office space
with drab industrial carpeting, temporary walls on wheels,” writes
one editor. “Many of the replicas are truly awful—born of internet
.jpgs and the chromatic incapacities of cheap acrylic
paint.” (ArtAsiaPacific)

Jeremy Deller Releases
(and Sells Out) a Fundraising Poster – The British
artist has teamed up with graphic designer Fraser Muggeridge
to create Thank God for Immigrants, an A2 print
meant to be displayed in windows to show gratitude for frontline
workers, many of whom likely come from immigrant backgrounds. The
proceeds from the £25 prints—which sold out within a day—will go to
a UK food bank and refugee organization. “This situation is going
to reconfigure how we view immigration but also class and status
and wealth and your value in society—all these things have totally
inverted our value system,” Deller says. (TAN)

The post Art Industry News: Museums Commission 14 Artists to
Create New Balcony Performances Since They Are So Popular in Europe
+ Other Stories appeared first on artnet News.