THE WINDY CITY
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, no doubt relishing the opportunity to discuss something other than the city’s beleaguered police department and a looming teachers strike, defended his complex plan to help finance George Lucas’s Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which has a total price tag of $1.2 billion. [Chicago Tribune]
“There was a war to get this show,” the MCA Chicago’s director, Madeleine Grynsztejn, said of the touring Kerry James Marshall retrospective that opens at her museum this week. “I had no problem placing the exhibition both on the West and East Coast.” [Chicago Sun-Times]
Flashback. ARTnews editor-in-chief Sarah Douglas profiled Marshall earlier this year. [ARTnews]
Deeper flashback. Here’s the video for Kanye West’s 2008 paean to his hometown of Chicago, “Homecoming.” [YouTube]
THE GOLDEN TOILET AND OTHER RENOVATIONS
Maurizio Cattelan has created a solid 18-karat-gold toilet that will be installed at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Lines are expected. Randy Kennedy writes, “You could go into the restroom just to bask in its glow, Mr. Cattelan said, but it becomes an artwork only with someone sitting on it or standing over it, answering nature’s call.” This would seem to mark the end of the artist’s five-year retirement. “Actually, it’s even more of a torture not to work than to work,” he said. [The New York Times]
Speaking of museum structural changes, the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois will close this summer for renovations. (Also, The Daily Illini: what a name for a newspaper!) [The Daily Illini]
TWO GIANTS UNITED
On a James Rosenquist show that Flavin Judd, Donald Judd’s son, is organizing at 101 Spring Street, the Judd family’s onetime home in SoHo. [T: The New York Times Style Magazine]
MONEY TALK
A look at the market for work by Marcel Broodthaers. Many major works are remarkably affordable! [Art+Auction]
Marion Maneker takes a look at Hiscox’s report about online art sales, which includes a ranking of company’s in the game. Christie’s Live comes in at number one. The big takeaway: about 24 percent more art sold online in 2015 than 2014, but it’s not clear if that signals a bullish market or just the fact that more work is not available for purchase on the old Internet. [Art Market Monitor]
EXTRAS
If you’re not following New York gallerist Mitchell Algus on Instagram, I do not understand know what you are doing on Instagram. He posts little-known public artworks, obscure gems of Modernist architecture, juicy archival images, and so much more. Tell a friend. [Instagram]
Nancy Lupo at Swiss Institute: one of the freshest New York shows of the year so far, says one ARTnews editor. [Contemporary Art Daily]
Lali Foster at Muscle Beach in Portland, Oregon. [Sex Life]