Art advisors and experts told ARTnews the works are high caliber and have “crazy” starting bids relative to their actual value based on previous auction records and sales information. However, the simple auction website and association with an international fugitive may deter potential bidders in an already sluggish art market. - ARTnews
Farah Nayeri: “Powered by the tech giant OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, an audio tool lets visitors (on or off site) converse with 20 outdoor statues in three languages. On that summer afternoon, I put the chatbot to the test.” - The New York Times
When director Joanna Burton revealed last week that she’s going to ICA in Philadelphia, she said she’d stay at MOCA through late October. On Wednesday, however, MOCA announced that it has appointed an interim director, Ann Goldstein, and a source said that Burton’s last day is this Friday. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
Chief Justice John Roberts is, ex officio, the Smithsonian Institution’s chancellor (the equivalent of board chairman). When Trump up and decided to fire National Portrait Gallery director Kim Sajet, Roberts led the board to state publicly that only they can hire and fire Smithsonian museum directors. - ARTnews
The images, bookended by posts cheering the administration’s deportation campaign, have been widely shared by conservatives and sparked alarm among the artists, their families and some historians, who see their use as part of an effort to rewrite the past with an exclusionary view of American history. - Washington Post
The art world’s consensus has been that the painting was inspired by the African masks Picasso saw on a visit to Paris’s first ethnographic museum in 1907. Collector/researcher Alain Moreau argues that Demoiselles was completed before then and Picasso inspiration came instead from medieval Catalan frescoes. - The Times (UK)
The 1966 watercolor-and-felt-tip painting was meant to be part of a series of illustrations for The Arabian Nights; Dalí never finished the project. When someone bought it in Cambridge two years ago for £150, nobody realized it was a Dalí. Then someone spotted the signature. - The Guardian
Site Santa Fe opened in 1995 in a former warehouse turned nonprofit gallery in the city’s art-filled Railyard District, but it stretches to museums and unconventional venues nearby, including a much-beloved novelty store and a boutique-y cannabis dispensary. - The New York Times
The 12th-century Sijena Murals were moved from the monastery where they were created following heavy damage during the Spanish Civil War. Ever since, they’ve been in Barcelona at the National Art Museum of Catalonia. Spain’s highest court ordered their return to Sijena, but museum officials think the works won’t survive the trip. - Artnet
Hungary’s autocratic prime minister has ordered the renovation of the district around Buda Castle to what the government claims is its 19th-century glory. Many critics argue that the reconstructions are modern concrete structures with period veneers that owe more to Orbán’s taste than to history. - Bloomberg CityLab
It has been a century since the term “Art Deco” was coined, a shortened version of the name of the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative Arts and Industrial Style, held in Paris in 1925. That the building is on the market — and a steal! - Hyperallergic
The museum announced that more than 5.7 million attendees visited its two locations — The Met Fifth Ave and The Cloisters. While the visitor rates do not surpass The Met’s 2019 attendance record of over 7 million guests, the data indicates a 5% increase from last year. - Hyperallergic
“From reports we received from the field, the Brighty statue did survive the fire at the Grand Canyon Lodge, however, it is heavily damaged with two front legs and an ear missing." - SFGate
These include the art-market subfield, the exhibition subfield, the academic subfield, a multitude of community-based subfields, and the field of cultural activism. While these subfields overlap to varying degrees, they operate with and within fundamentally different economies, discourses, practices, institutions, and social spaces. - e-flux
On Thursday, the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania announced that Burton, 53, would be exiting the Los Angeles museum at the end of October after just four years in the job to become director of the institute. - The New York Times
