COURTESY THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN, NEW YORK, HONG KONG, AND SEOUL/SPEED ART MUSEUM
From the West Coast
“Is Los Angeles ready for its art market close-up?” asks Kelly Crow in a report on the city’s art market as it prepares for the first edition of Frieze Los Angeles. [The Wall Street Journal]
Among the many happenings in California this week is Desert X, an exhibition in which site-specific works are installed in and near the Coachella Valley. Read a report from on the ground by Janelle Zara. [ARTnews]
To the East Coast
Carl Swanson profiles Nari Ward, whose New Museum exhibition opens this week in New York. A fun fact to be gleaned: Ward’s famed sculpture We the People is inserted in plaster using the same tool that can install a microchip in the skin of a dog. [Vulture]
The Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have brought on Melanie Sheffield as chief development officer. [Press Release]
As its Andy Warhol retrospective enters its final few weeks, the Whitney Museum in New York will stay open seven days a week in March. [Press Release]
And Beyond
Here’s the exhibitor list for the 2019 edition of Art Basel, which is set to open on June 13. [ARTnews]
Axel Rüger will leave his post as the director of the Vincent van Gogh Museum to become secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. [The Art Newspaper]
Lives
Jerry Saltz memorializes the late artist Robert Ryman, whose paintings, he writes, “seem as if they were fated to come into existence from the beginning of modern art.” [Vulture]
Market
The Drawing Center director Laura Hoptman and artist Verne Dawson show us their art collection, which is unsurprisingly stylish. Hanging on the couple’s walls are works by Jim Lambie, Chris Ofili, Paul Bloodgood, and others. [The New York Times]
“Defining the future ‘gallery audience’ at a time when more and more people are staying home and not going to galleries as much as they were a decade ago seems to be critical to a gallery’s future vision,” writes dealer Elizabeth Dee in a piece about how galleries are adapting to today’s market climate. [Artnet News]