Category: visual

You bet it does. “Of the top 100 artists whose works fetched the highest amounts at auction in 2017, just 13 were women, an analysis of sales data shows.” And 89-year-old artist Yayoi Kusama is the only living woman among all of those sales, at that.

The auction world is behind, though: It’s “belatedly reflecting re-evaluations that have been going on for some time in the museum world. Driven by seismic shifts in cultural politics, scholars and curators have challenged the fixity of the West’s artistic canon, rehabilitating neglected talent from a range of communities and cultures.”

As Philippe Vergne heads out the door, art critic Christopher Knight wonders if there’s some way to DNA-test curators to see if they can make the leap to becoming museum directors – a very different role. “Like his MOCA predecessors Jeremy Strick (1999-2009) and Jeffrey Deitch (2010-2013), Vergne was unable to make the transition from curator to director. That means MOCA, a major art museum of international significance, has been without an effective director going on 20 years — half its lifetime. That desperately needs to change — and fast.”

Who should have controlled his estate – and the various royalties from the famous “LOVE” sculptures? And who will control it now? “His will, filed on Friday in Knox County Probate Court, leaves most of his art and property to a nonprofit whose mission is to develop Mr. Indiana’s home into a museum featuring his works.” Lawsuits may delay that plan.

The parting of ways with the contemporary museum comes after the director fired the respected chief curator, Helen Molesworth, and after various other issues rocked the museum. “Neither Vergne nor MOCA would say where Vergne might be heading. A spokesperson for the museum did confirm that while the search for his replacement is underway, Vergne has no immediate plans to leave his position and that he intends to help with the transition process.”

“After a tumultuous stay in the United States, a stint in Tasmania, and three years in the art collection of Steven A. Cohen, the hedge-fund billionaire — whose company, in 2013, paid a fine of $1.8 billion after pleading guilty to charges of insider trading — The Holy Virgin Mary, the British artist Chris Ofili’s painting of a black Madonna, adorned with elephant dung, is soon to be installed in the Museum of Modern Art.” Tyler Foggatt recounts the story and suggests a reason why the artwork went the places it did.

“Momacha, a small matcha café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is fighting back against a trademark infringement lawsuit brought by the Museum of Modern Art, otherwise known as MoMA. On Monday, the café — whose name was originally styled MoMaCha — moved to dismiss MoMA’s claim of trademark dilution.

The Victoria and Albert Museum’s new show of items taken by British soldiers from the court of Emperor Tewodros after the 1868 Battle of Maqdala had led to renewed calls for the valuable art objects and manuscripts to be repatriated. Reporter James Jeffrey looks at the history of the loot (there have been calls for its return from within Britain ever since it was taken) and the reasoning behind the British Library’s reluctance to relinquish the objects.

“The odd, isolated end of Robert Indiana’s life included a lawsuit filed in his final days that accused two associates of taking advantage of the elderly artist in his later years by churning out inauthentic works under his name. … That conversation is likely to escalate with the discovery Thursday that Mr. Indiana’s last monumental sculpture was a tribute to bratwurst. It was commissioned by the owners of Johnsonville Sausage, in Wisconsin, that is one of the country’s largest producers. Mr. Indiana appears to have taken to the task of designing ‘BRAT’ with (sorry) relish.”

“Kunsthalle Wien director Nicholas Schafhausen … had an agreement with the City of Vienna to stay at the helm of the art center until the end of his ten-year term in 2022. But Schafhausen will instead leave next year, citing the fact that ‘advanced experiments in the arts’ in the country are being suppressed by the far-right government that took power at the end of 2017.”