VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Five Francis Bacon paintings have been stolen from a collector’s home in Madrid. Together, they are worth an estimated $33.4 million. [Daily Mail]
The legal battle between Larry Gagosian and the royal Qatari family, over a 1931 Picasso bust, continues on, this time with new claims about how the $106 million sale went down. [The New York Times]
Artists across the United States are making work about the nation’s prison system, most notably Andrea Fraser, whose Whitney installation closed this past weekend. Fraser said her Whitney work gets at “the institutional and symbolic polarization that increasingly defines American society.” [The New York Times]
DEVELOPMENTS ABROAD
Citing a “challenging business environment,” and not protests by activists, BP has ended its partnership with the Tate in 2017. [The Guardian]
As Russia and Iran try to grow their tourism industries, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg will show more Iranian art. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the Hermitage, is also beginning to look into acquiring contemporary Iranian art for the collection. [The Art Newspaper]
SHOWS AROUND AMERICA
Five words: Peter Schjeldahl on David Hammons. [The New Yorker]
Here’s a look inside Tom Sachs’s studio ahead of the New York–based artist’s solo show at the Isamu Noguchi Museum, which will feature art that responds to Japanese tea ceremonies. [The New York Times]
Julien Ceccaldi at Jenny’s in Los Angeles. [Contemporary Art Daily]
NEW MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES
Photographs of the Breuer building’s transition from the Whitney’s headquarters to the Met’s annex show an empty modernist structure in transformation. [The New Yorker]
Visiting Hauser Wirth & Schimmel now that it’s opened in Los Angeles? Carolina A. Miranda has a guide of other galleries nearby to check out. [Los Angeles Times]
MACKLEMORE, NSFW ART COLLECTOR
Macklemore bought a very, very weird painting of a nude Justin Bieber with a pancake on his nether regions. Needless to say, it’s mildly NSFW. [Vulture]