Plus, pop star Grimes opens up about her baby's love of "radical art" and Berlin lays out its next bailout plan for the locked-down culture sector.
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 Thursday, November 5.
Grimes’s Baby Loves Avant-Garde Art – The five-month-old son of billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk and pop star Grimes, named X Æ A-XII, likes “radical art” and already has “taste,” according to a recent interview with the musician. “I’ve watched Apocalypse Now and stuff with my baby,” she said. “He’s into radical art. Like, he just actually is, and I don’t think it’s problematic to engage with them on that level.” (USA Today)
Berlin Issues Bailout Plan for the Second Partial Lockdown – The Berlin government has shared its plan to bail out the cultural sector for the second time this year. Ahead of a second wave of closures this month, companies and self-employed people affected by the lockdown can apply for a “fictitious entrepreneurial wage” from the state that will be equivalent to 75 percent of their turnover in November 2019. (Monopol)
Glenn Ligon on the Election – Artforum has asked artists to share a text or image in the wake of the (still-sort-of-underway) US presidential election. Glenn Ligon put forth a new sculpture titled Aftermath: a neon that spells the fateful date of November 4, 2020. He says it was lit up before Tuesday to signal “that we are already in the aftermath, that the emergency started generations ago for Indigenous people who resided here before the colonizers arrived, and for the enslaved Africans brought to these shores over four hundred years ago.” (Artforum)
Miquel Barceló Criticizes the Spanish Government’s Use of His Work – The Spanish artist has criticized his country’s government for holding its public-health briefings in front of one of his works. Barceló’s L’atelier aux sculptures (The Sculpture Studio) (1993) is on loan from the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid and has served as a set piece for the prime minister and other officials as they hold regular televised press conferences. (ARTnews)
Christie’s Hong Kong Will Offer a Pricey Sanyu – A luck-filled canvas of eight jarred goldfish is up for sale at Christie’s in a single-lot sale on December 2. Sanyu’s Goldfish was painted in the 1930s or ’40s and is expected to fetch between $16 million and $23 million. The French-Chinese painter’s market has remained strong during lockdown. (Press release)
Bernar Venet Joins Waddington Custot – The French conceptual artist, known for his large-scale, gravity-defying steel sculptures, has joined the roster at Waddington Custot. The gallery will include Venet’s work in its presentation at this year’s online-only Art Basel Miami Beach ahead of his first solo exhibition at its London space in February 2022. (Press release)
Two Unseen Emily Carr Works Are Donated to a Museum – A pair of brothers in British Columbia have donated paintings by the Canadian artist—an Impressionistic landscape from the early 1930s and a watercolor of a Nisga’a totem pole from around 1907—to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. The works, which have never been displayed in public, were acquired directly from the artist by their grandmother more than a century ago. (The Art Newspaper)
Stadtmuseum Acquires Manfred Hamm Archive – Berlin’s Stadtmuseum has acquired the archive of photographer Manfred Hamm, who chronicled the urban and architectural history of the German capital. The trove includes 1,700 prints, 3,000 color slides, 19,000 black and white negatives, and 17 large formats spanning 1972 to 2010. (Monopol)
A New Tool Tracks Artists’ Historic Haunts – A New York nonprofit, Village Preservation, has created an online map documenting locations in Greenwich Village where prominent artists, publicists, and activists lived throughout the 20th century. People can use the Vintage Village tool to plan guided walks around the neighborhood and juxtapose the current scenes with archival photos, like one of a row house that belonged to Jackson Pollock in the 1930s. The tool aims to convince the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate the neighborhood as a protected historic district. (TAN)
See Edinburgh’s Climate Change Monkey Sculpture – A 45-foot-tall, hand-painted golden sculpture of an endangered snub-nose monkey has been installed at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh. The sculpture, by the ecological artist Lisa Roet, is meant to highlight the urgent need for action on climate change, which is endangering these primates. (Press release)
