Category: visual

Which country is this? On a per capita basis, Laos, on which the U.S. dropped 2 million tons of explosives between 1964 and 1973 in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese military supply lines. “A new generation of artists from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic are emerging, following decades of isolation in the orbit of the Soviet empire. The economy is growing rapidly, and the country is opening up.” — The Guardian

With a new announcement about gallery expansion seeming to hit the art-industry newswire every day, it can be vexing to try to visualize just how physically large even one major dealer is in 2018, let alone how that dealer compares to some of their closest peers. – Artnet

“The Castle was a jewel in its heyday, but it has been falling into disrepair for years and is now mainly an office building, providing space for about 200 employees. … Last year, there was an electrical fire; the year before that, stones fell off its exterior. And this fall, an outbreak of mold — not the first — forced the evacuation of more than 30 employees. … Meanwhile, the institution has focused on dozens of other projects at its 19 museums, research centers and zoo,” including several renovations and the building of two museums from scratch. — Washington Post

“Anish Kapoor reached an out-of-court settlement yesterday in a dispute with the National Rifle Association over its use of an image of his Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate (2004)” — aka “The Bean” — “in a promotional video. An agreement has been reached to remove the image from the video.” — The Art Newspaper

The need to assess sales tax is now dictated by what is known as an “economic nexus”, meaning that if a vendor’s sales reach a certain threshold (which varies by state), then it has enough of an economic presence there to justify the need to pay taxes. What could prove most problematic for dealers is that many states define the nexus differently. – The Art Newspaper

 

“The ruling by the Court of Cassation was handed down Monday after a long battle over the ancient Greek bronze, which was found by Italian fishermen off the Adriatic coast in 1964 and purchased by the Getty in the UK for almost $4m in 1977. The court was rejecting the Getty’s appeal of a ruling in June by a lower court in Pesaro stating that the statue must be returned.” — The Art Newspaper

Bridgit, “a series of short clips filmed on an iPhone featuring the Scottish countryside from a train window, a T-shirt on a radiator and a cat pawing at a lamp has helped Charlotte Prodger win the 2018 Turner prize. … The Glasgow-based artist has been making moving-image works for 20 years and is on many contemporary art radars, but she is far from being well known.” — The Guardian

What counts as a problematic work tends, loosely, to be anything explicitly sexually suggestive, some nudes, those with religious subject matter and politically engaged works that might be construed as criticising the Chinese regime. A foreign exhibitor at one of the fairs says anonymously that they were not allowed to bring a work that joked about global trade and Chinese manufacturing. Works by Georg Baselitz and Francis Bacon, proposed by international galleries were apparently among those turned down this year.