COURTESY CONVERSO
The Italian Art World
If you’ve ever had the desire to play tennis in the presence of Renaissance art, you can now do so, thanks to an Asad Raza installation in a former Milanese church, the Art Newspaper reports. But fear not: the installation isn’t blasphemous because the church was desacralized over a century ago. [The Art Newspaper]
Barbara Jatta may be the first female director of the Vatican Museums, but she didn’t know just how much her gender mattered to the larger public until recently. “Whenever I attended conferences or public events, so many women would come up to me, saying: ‘We are proud, and you are also, in some way, representing us,’ ” she told the New York Times this weekend in a new profile. [The New York Times]
The Critics
In next week’s issue of the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl addresses a a controversial Balthus painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a “crackling” exhibition at New York’s Galerie St. Etienne that brings together works by Käthe Kollwitz and Sue Coe. Of the latter, Schjeldahl writes, “You needn’t share Coe’s opinions to be moved by her art.” [The New Yorker]
The Year in Review
Interview names its top ten favorite art shows of 2017, from a Carolee Schneemann retrospective at MoMA PS1 to Anne Imhof’s German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. [Interview]
Relive this year in the art world with ARTnews’s most-read stories of 2017. Some highlights include Salvator Mundi, Hannah Black’s open letter to the Whitney Museum regarding a Dana Schutz painting, and a disastrous Damien Hirst show. [ARTnews]
Looking Forward
The inaugural FRONT International Cleveland Triennial will continue as planned sans co-curator Jens Hoffmann, with a much-anticipated opening currently set for July 2018. But, as Cleveland.com reports, it’s hardly the only major art event set to happen in the Ohio city next year. Here’s a helpful guide to major Cleveland art shows, from a survey of Alex Katz’s 1950s paintings to two Fred Wilson shows. [Cleveland.com]
After authorities canceled the show, following what they called “current demands for information and restitution in German museums in connection with the Galerie Max Stern,” an exhibition about the art dealer Max Stern will continue on as planned, Haaretz reports. It will open first at the Stadtmuseum in Düsseldorf, Germany, in February. [Haaretz]
Market
In a new book, Titia Hulst bravely sets out to trace six centuries of art-market history. According to a review in Forbes, the book is a good one—“a golden go-to reference,” even. [Forbes]
Museums
The New York Daily News reports that the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is offering $10 million to anyone who comes forward with tips about the famed works stolen from its collection in 1990. But hurry: that offer ends at midnight on December 31. [New York Daily News]
Four new James Turrell installations are set to go on view this month at the Museum of Old and New Art, the private museum in Australia founded by collector David Walsh, the Art Newspaper reports. They will be housed in a new extension called Pharos, which will now connect the museum and its library. [The Art Newspaper]