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Market Machinations
Last night Sotheby’s pulled in about $270 million at its Impressionist-modern sale, with a 1928 Chagall painting going for about $28.5 million. Nate Freeman has the story for ARTnews, reporting that there was a lot of bidding from Asia. [ARTnews]
Speaking of Asia, as you may have heard, gallerist David Zwirner is opening a space in Hong Kong early next year. “Now the wealth creation is moving away from Europe and America,” Zwirner told Architectural Digest India. “That’s what makes it so important for a gallery to think globally.” [Architectural Digest India]
Sean Kelly Gallery announced in an email that it now represents the artist Janaina Tschäpe. [SKNY]
Museums Building
Collaboration news! The Plain Dealer reports that the Cleveland Museum of Art is working with the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District on a $5 million project that will transform land west of the museum to reduce flooding and create a sculpture park. [The Plain Dealer]
The Associated Press checked in on the Denver Art Museum as it packed away thousands of objects for its planned renovation. Its headline: “Bubble Wrap Bonanza.” [Associated Press/The Washington Post]
Trouble
Hobby Lobby, the craft-store chain perhaps best known for winning a Supreme Court case that allowed it to not fund insurance programs that provide contraception coverage because of religious objections, was in the news earlier this year because it had to pay a $3 million fine for illegally importing antiquities from Iraq. In the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Kelly Crow tells the story of how the company’s president spent millions on artifacts, some of which allegedly have dubious provenances. [The Wall Street Journal]
Artists
Mark Bradford discussed with the Guardian his new show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. “I became really fascinated by the romanticism around the civil war,” he said. “I’d never really investigated it. I’m black, the Civil War was a good thing, the North won—that’s all I knew. I thought it was going to be textbook, ‘OK, this was bad and let’s move on.’ But it wasn’t cut and dried.” [The Guardian]
It’s still only November, but the 2018 edition of the Forbes “30 Under 30” list is out. The art section includes artists Diamond Stingily, Chloe Wise, and Martine Syms, dealer Joseph Nahmad, and many more folks you may know. [Forbes]
Toyin Ojih Odutola took activist DeRay McKesson through her current show at the Whitney Museum. You can watch the tour over on DeRay’s Twitter account. [@deray/Twitter]
The filmmaker Oren Jacoby, who’s directed a new documentary about the recently late artist Richard Hambleton, showed the New York Times what’s hanging on his walls (a Hambleton, a Walker Evans) and told stories about the artist’s life, including one encounter with Mary Boone in the 1980s. Said Jacoby, “Apparently, he came to her gallery, ripped up one of his paintings and said, ‘I don’t want you to show my work.’ One of Richard’s career-killing moves.” [The New York Times]