Your weekly 5 art world updates: July 17th!
In the wake of multiple recent gallery closures, several newspapers have been investigating how gallery owners and art dealers are adapting to survive.
Aside from sharing facilities, organising pop-up events and showing only at art fairs, the world is slowly starting to embrace the importance of the internet when it comes to selling and buying art.
Last week, the Financieel Dagblad (Financial Times) reported on the fact that even within the slightly conservative art world of the Netherlands, gallery owners are beginning to recognise the power of Instagram.
It’s not just collectors from all over the world that use #’s to find the art they like, gallery owners themselves are also discovering new talent through the medium.
Bad news for the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. Recent research into the collection reveals that over 96% of its pre-Colombian artifacts are either fake or cannot be authenticated.
The museum was established over 40 years ago by the artist Peter Rodriguez, and later expanded by generous donations and grants from mostly private collectors.
Following an agreement to begin co-operating with the Smithsonian Institution, the SI ordered an audit, which is standard procedure.
However, out of the 2000 objects that have been investigated so far, only 83 passed the test. Luckily, the Mexican Museum will receive 80 more high-quality pieces following a donation by professor John Casida from UCA Berkeley.
Pre-Colombian Mapuche sculptures in the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art in Santiago.
Billionaire Hans Melchers, who opened his second private museum in a completely renovated castle in Ruurlo just a month ago, is taking action against the town council.
Ever since it’s public opening on June 27th of this year, the museum has received over 10.000 visitors for whom there were not nearly enough parking spaces, resulting in heaps of fines.
Despite Mechers’s warnings, Ruurlo hasn't taken the necessary steps to secure a safer flow of traffic. Kasteel Ruurlo forms the décor for an extensive collection of works by the Dutch interbellum painter Carel Willink.
Kasteel Ruurlo.
Seeing as President Trump has officially decided to ignore climate change after pulling out of the The Paris Agreement (Accord de Paris), the American art world is finding different ways to create awareness of the issues we are currently facing.
The Norton Museum in West Palm Beach is opening an exhibition in September titled 'Earth Works: Mapping the Anthropocene', that features photographs of melting glaciers amongst others. Coincidentally, Trump’s southern residence lies just across the Mar-a-Lago lagoon.
Melting polar ice caps, Arctic Circle. Courtesy Creative Commons/NASA.
And in a crossover to the pop-music domain that is definitely worth mentioning, up and coming contemporary artist Awol Erizku had the honours of photographing Sir Carter and Rumi, Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s newborn twins.
Erizku’s work asks questions about race within the context of art history, and he has already collaborated with MoMA.
Beyoncé's Instagram.
