News to Know: Must-Read Art World Headlines from March 31–April 4

From locked-up artists to South American sales, the week's top stories and news.

VIEWERS’ CHOICE
From playing dead in an LA street to planting false bombs in New York, and from pants-less sightseeing in Paris to threatening the museum establishment, artists have oft run afoul of the law. This week, we picked out seven of the most oddball and audacious of them all.

CRITICAL
Glasgow may only be the UK’s second city when it comes to art, but as Coline Milliard finds when visiting for the biennial art extravaganza, Glasgow International Festival, the city’s scene is fresher than ever. Touring Sarah McCrory’s multi-venued and non-thematic show, she finds the curator to have created a show that is “locally grounded but international in scope, open-ended, and very much of its moment.”

LONG LOOK
Ai Weiwei’s largest-ever exhibition opened Wednesday night at Berlin’s Martin Gropius Bau, featuring mostly new works that take an increasingly personal bent on the Chinese dissident artist’s struggles with his country’s government. In unpacking the show’s 18 rooms, Alexander Forbes finds previously unmatched resonance in the works on view while also questioning whether Ai’s celebrity status might be deleterious to both their reception and the artist’s end goals.

MARKETABLE
Sao Paulo’s SP-Arte kicked off on Wednesday at the city’s Biennial Pavilion with a flock of early sales. Collectors were drawn to both blue chip Latin American artists like like Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto as well as established Europeans—Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1968) may have even broken the seven-figure mark for Milan’s Cardi Gallery.

DATA MINE
The first installment of our new weekly column Buy, Sell, Hold trains its eye on the market (and market-to-be) of mid-career painter Jeff Elrod and emerging art darling Christian Rosa. While one has collectors and gallerists still aflutter, Rozalia Jovanovic finds that the other needs a little more time off the market. Read to find out who’s who.

NEWS TO KNOW
Important Monet Found Among Gurlitt’s Nazi-Era Art Trove, Valued at $13 Million

Italian Factory Worker Hopes to Keep Stolen Gauguin and Bonnard Paintings

New Knoedler Lawsuit Targets Art Historian for Selling Rothko Forgery

Daniel Loeb’s Poison Pill Suit Against Sotheby’s Fast-Tracked By Judge

Edward Snowden Makes Cameo in Austrian Collective’s Video


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