COURTESY SOTHEBY’S
Around London
Andrea K. Scott weighs in on Banksy’s self-destructing artwork, which shredded itself as it came up for auction at Sotheby’s in London, writing that the “stunt cutting fails to rise above the level of empty gesture.” [The New Yorker]
At the London edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair last weekend, there were steady sales, according to one report. Attendees included the actor Idris Elba and the collector Rita Sigg. [Artnet News]
Museums
New York’s Studio Museum in Harlem and Washington, D.C.’s Duke Ellington School of the Arts will receive the collection of Peggy Cooper Cafritz, who died earlier this year. [The Washington Post]
The Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art and the School of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of Indiana in Bloomington have been given an estate gift from William “Bill” Itter valued at $4 million. Included are some 500 works, many of them by African artists. [Press Release]
A Vincent van Gogh biopic may be Julian Schnabel’s biggest project on the horizon, but he’s also got a fun little show at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris: an exhibition juxtaposing 11 works of his with 13 pieces of his choosing from the museum’s collection. [The New York Times]
Fashion
“Has fashion’s licensing of art gone too far?” [The Wall Street Journal]
Changes
After it fell off the wall at the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial in Spain, Titian’s Crucifixion (ca. 1555) will be restored. But there will be significant obstacles—the fall caused a “horizontal tear” in its support structure, a statement said.
[The Art Newspaper]
Per an ordinance passed in September, at least 30 percent of public artworks in San Francisco must depict non-fictional women. [Quartz]
Photography
Dawoud Bey on his “Birmingham Project” series of photographs: “I wanted to engage the idea of the passage of time . . . I decided to make portraits of African American adults in Birmingham who were the ages they would have been had their lives not been cut short.” [The Guardian]