BEST
Anish Kapoor aims do his part for the world’s 60 million refugees by using the $1 million Genesis Prize to their benefit.
Other artists and organizations are taking a stand for immigrants and those fighting on their behalf, with the NADA art fair sending some of its proceeds to the ACLU, New York’s Museum of Modern Art emphasizing artists from its collection who hail from the countries affected by Trump’s travel ban, and artists and other cultural figures signing a petition against the executive order.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is taking a big step toward open access to its collections, making available some 375,000 public domain images for both scholarly and commercial uses.
It seems that global superstar and art collector Oprah made a great return on a Gustav Klimt painting she picked up at Christie’s a decade ago, selling it privately to an unnamed Chinese collector for a whopping $150 million.
An English critic now posits an out-there analysis of the Mona Lisa’s smile. Sexually transmitted diseases are involved.
And finally, in case you missed it, the Venice Biennale announced the artist list for the next edition, opening this May and organized by Christine Macel.
The Eiffel Tower. Photo Sean Vos, via Flickr.
WORST
Artists from the seven countries affected by Trump’s executive order are seriously worried about their future.
A free speech advocacy group sees a disturbing rise in censorship of artists.
On a related note, vandals attacked Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center, targeting politically inflected works of art, and an anti-Islam group in Germany protested against a work by a Syrian-German artist in Dresden.
Terrorism throughout Europe is making Parisian officials nervous about the Eiffel Tower, so, depressingly, they are deciding to build a bulletproof glass wall around the landmark.