ARTNEWS
WHAT EVERYONE SAW LAST YEAR
An average of 5,352 people saw the Whitney’s show “America Is Hard to See” each day of its run last year, but the reopened New York museum didn’t rank among the top-visited museums from last year. The most-visited museum of 2015 was the Louvre, with 8.6 million visitors. The National Palace Museum in Taipei didn’t fare too poorly either—it came in at number six, and nine of its shows were among last year’s most-visited exhibitions. [The Art Newspaper]
GRANTS AND PRIZES
Elisabeth Murdoch, a philanthropist and a Tate trustee, is starting a £100,000 ($143,730) prize that will be awarded annually to a mid-career U.K.-based female artist. [The Art Newspaper]
The Getty Foundation has awarded $8.45 million in grant money to 43 institutions based in Southern California for its second Pacific Standard Time initiative. [Artforum]
MARGINALIZED NEW YORK ARTISTS DEPARTMENT
Holland Cotter on why Robert Mapplethorpe still matters: “For an artist with ambitions for big-time success in a still-closeted art world, [his] was an unusual direction to take, and Mapplethorpe took it even further.” [The New York Times]
Olivia Laing, the author of a book on New York artists and loneliness, visits NYU’s Fales Library and looks through David Wojnarowicz’s archive. [The New Yorker]
LESS MARGINALIZED NEW YORKERS
A 14th-floor Madison Square Park apartment that once belonged to Susan Sollins, the creator of Art21, is now on the market. It costs $5.3 million. [New York Post]
Elmgreen & Dragset discuss a new sculpture based on van Gogh’s ear, which can now be seen near Rockefeller Center. “We thought it would be interesting to put that symbol of the good, middle-class leisure life out in that environment,” Elmgreen said. [The Guardian]
B. Wurtz at 83 Pitt Street in New York. [Contemporary Art Daily]
AND IN LOCAL NEWS…
A vandal ran off with a statue remembering orphans who went to New York at the Louisiana Orphan Train Museum in Opelousas. [Opelousas Daily World]