COURTESY MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, HOUSTON
Discontent
Artnet News has the story of how students at Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie have become divided over a controversial talk at the school. The duo Keeping It Real Art Critics was meant to screen a video about the collector Bert Kreuk, but students began protesting the duo once they discovered that KIRAC had produced videos about the allure of Harvey Weinstein, among other salacious topics. [Artnet News]
Bloomberg reports that the Swiss art dealer Yves Bouvier appeared for questioning yesterday in front of prosecutors in Geneva. Bouvier has been accused of fraud in relation to the sale of $2 billion worth of art to the collector Dmitry Rybolovlev. [Bloomberg]
Suspect Museum Developments
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will unveil one of its most spectacular holdings—a 30-foot-tall stainless steel Anish Kapoor sculpture from 2006—this coming May, Chron reports. It will be part of the museum’s new Brown Foundation, Inc. Plaza, and the sculpture is already the subject of jokes because it looks like . . . something that isn’t safe for work. [Chron]
Five organizations, including the College Art Association, have signed a letter denouncing the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new admissions policy, Artnet News reports. “The Met has so very much to offer, to teach, and this cannot be restricted to those from only a single region or socioeconomic stratum,” they write. [Artnet News]
Collecting
Curbed NY notes that Aby Rosen’s condo project in Midtown Manhattan now has “skyscraper lofts” that are intended for art collectors. The smallest of these lofts is a 1,140-square-foot one bedroom. Its cost: $2.45 million. [Curbed NY]
Harry “Hunk” Anderson, the collector who, with his wife Moo, gave his holdings to Stanford University, has died at 95, according to SF Gate. The gallerist John Berggruen said that, for a while, he was the single most important collector in the Bay Area. [SF Gate]
Barron’s predicts that the art market will boom in 2018, thanks to tax reform that works in collectors’ favor. One possible hurdle: a 1031 “like-kind” exchange law that allowed collectors to sell expensive artworks, but has more recently been limited by governments. [Barron’s]
Now on View: Nymphs and Heartbreakers
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, the San Diego Museum of Art has acquired two significant works by Lucas Cranach the Younger and John Singer Sargent. Of the Cranach painting, which depicts a mythical woman napping in a verdant landscape, the museum’s executive director, Roxana Velásquez, said, “The face of the nymph is just spectacular.” [The San Diego Union-Tribune]
For the New York Times, Holland Cotter takes on the Morgan Library & Museum’s Peter Hujar retrospective, writing, “It’s hard to say which is more surprising: that Peter Hujar’s photographs of 1970s and ’80s underground life in New York have found their way to the Morgan Library & Museum, or that this Classically-minded institution has become unbuttoned enough to exhibit them in a heartbreaker of a show.” [The New York Times]