November 29, 2024 – January 25, 2025

November 2, 2024 – January 25, 2025

November 21, 2024 – February 1, 2025

December 7, 2024 – January 25, 2025

Why David Lynch's film topped our poll to find the greatest film of the century

December 7, 2024 – February 1, 2025

Why the President-elect has become so closely tied to the Village People's songs

How faded stars have revived their careers with one breathtaking role

December 14, 2024 – February 1, 2025

The Dallas Invitational Art Fair is set to return for its third edition, running from April 10–12 and marking a new chapter with a venue change to the historic Mansion on Turtle Creek. Previously, the fair was held almost directly across from the Dallas Art Fair, at the Fairmont Hotel.

“As the Dallas Invitational enters its third year and continues to grow, a change of venue to the iconic Mansion Hotel seemed like a natural progression,” said the fair’s founder, James Cope, who runs an eponymous Dallas gallery. “The new venue will help with audience engagement having the capability to host events such as panel discussions and evening events.”

The fair remains an invite-only event and has assembled a roster of participating galleries from major art hubs, including Los Angeles, New York, London, Amsterdam, Hong Kong, and Dallas itself. Notable exhibitors include Bel Ami, François Ghebaly, Hannah Hoffman, and Night Gallery. 

The fair has also established a five-member advisory council comprising of art dealers James Cope and Hannah Hoffman; Melissa M. Ireland, former director of the Rachofskies’ TWO x TWO auction; art adviser Adam Green; and philanthropist Jessica Nowitzki. Green told ARTnews the council aims to shape the fair’s strategic direction and contribute to its growing reputation.

Additionally, this year the fair has partnered with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth to create the Dallas Invitational Acquisition Fund for the Modern. The fund will allow the museum to acquire select artworks exhibited at the fair for its permanent collection.

Gurr Johns, an art advisory and appraisal firm with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, and Paris, has appointed Maarten ten Holder to the newly-created role of Chief Executive Officer of its North American division as it places a bigger focus on clients in the US.

Based in New York, ten Holder will oversee the company’s US advisory services, reporting to Gurr Johns’s co-founder and executive chairman, Harry Smith, who is based in London. He joins a full-time staff of around 25 people, excluding outside consultants.

In a recent interview with ARTnews, Smith said that the US holds the most financial opportunity compared to other parts of the world. “We never want to underestimate the wealth of America. It is so much bigger than everywhere else, where they’re barely on the same planet, and they’re solid.”

Gurr Johns values around $12 billion worth of art and collectibles each year, according to Smith.

Ten Holder’s appointment comes as the advisory group has been expanding its reach towards finance. The company oversees nine subsidiary companies, including an art financing branch it launched in 2022 and the recently acquired UK auction houses Dreweatts and Forum. In April 2024, the art lending arm, Gurr Johns Capital, reported raising $9.5 million in capital for art financing, according to publicly available financial documents.

Mark Dion, an artist who has long worked with archives as a motif, recently established one of his own. The work, titled Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024), is one of four houses comprising the Troy Hill Art Houses in Pittsburgh; each residence constitutes a single work of art. Dion’s name is bringing new attention to the project that, since 2013, has remained discreet, with little to visually distinguish the “art houses” from other homes in the neighborhood.

Inside, Dion finds a permanent home in which to gather a number of his signature strategies, especially his engagement with the ordering and arrangement of collections ranging from the natural historical to the truly eclectic. Almost all the displays can be traced to past exhibitions. An attic filled with hundreds of small boxes, available to the visitor to open and peruse, harkens back to Memory Box (2015). A 2012 installation in New York’s Explorer’s Club becomes Pittsburgh’s own “Extinction Club”—visitors are made members upon entering the small room, where they are invited to sit down in the clubby chairs among half-smoked cigars and illustrations of extinct species papering the walls. A taxidermied bear was brought from Dion’s work at Storm King Art Center (2019).

Even an office is labeled with the title of one of his volumes, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism And Its Legacy (2005). Here and throughout Dion’s work, the real and the fictional blur. Taxonomic charts on the walls borrow the aesthetic of science but are populated with terms from the history of art and absurd twists: a bird is labeled with the names of 20th-century avant-garde movements, a shark is juxtaposed with a rolling pin and a cola bottle.

In the project’s self-referentiality, the way it archives Dion’s own career, Mrs. Christopher’s House echoes the concerns of another Troy Hill Art House, that of the Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski. In Kunzhaus, Kuśmirowski combines excerpts from his exhibition history with the history of the house’s past inhabitants, namely the Kunz family who rented rooms in the building beginning in the late 19th century. (Dion’s own project is likewise named after his house’s most well-known inhabitant).

Kuśmirowski’s practice engages Cold War legacies and retrofuturism, two aesthetics that today have a decidedly nostalgic feel at home in this domestic environment. Think a basement filled with transistor radiators and darkroom equipment, and a kitchen-cum-science lab, with text-based computer systems installed on countertops and coils of recording tape retrofitted into an electric stove. The ties to history here are evocative but thin, loose gestures at lost pasts. The same can be said for Darkhouse, Lighthouse, in which Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis reflect on a far more distant past—the Mesoproterozoic-era inland sea where the city of Pittsburgh now stands.

Hephaestus Analytical, a London-based tech company that authenticates artworks by using a combination of AI, provenance research, and advanced chemical analysis, has acquired scientific art analysis firm ArtDiscovery.

ArtDiscovery’s pigment database, spectral libraries, and team of conservators will enable Hephaestus “to unlock new possibilities in art authentication, making it more precise, accessible, and impactful than ever,” the merged companies’ CEO, Denis Moiseev, told ARTnews.

He said the merger will lead to the “world’s highest evidentiary standards in art authentication.”

Founded in 2009, ArtDiscovery has worked with the FBI, Sotheby’s, museums, and art dealers to verify artworks.

“Joining Hephaestus feels like we are catching up with the digital world,” Nica Gutman Rieppi, ArtDiscovery’s managing director, said in a statement. “Working with Hephaestus does not so much alter our rigorous application of scientific standards as it accelerates them. We are now able to research across our vast provenance, imaging and pigment libraries, conduct chemical analyses, and provide our customers with definitive answers, all in less time and with even greater accuracy than before.”

Hephaestus, which is also headquartered in New York, specializes in the Russian avant-garde, an umbrella term for modernism that flourished in other Soviet nations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Moiseev demonstrated the company’s authentication technology as part of the 2024 BBC documentary The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection. He previously told ARTnews that more than 95 percent of the Russian avant-garde paintings brought to him are fake.

“The market is so saturated with forgeries that it’s impossible not to talk about it,” Moiseev said. “We believe our technology can clean up the market. It is a solvable problem. The issue is that there’s an adversarial component to the Russian avant-garde market—there are so-called experts who are authenticating or contributing to the authentication—of forgeries. There are people who say things are real and actually, they’re not. This is what makes this market so complicated, but it really shouldn’t be.”

Hephaestus is also developing blockchain technology to increase security surrounding authentications and creating products for art finance and securitization.

“Our commitment to eliminating forgery from the art markets led us to develop our proprietary AI protocols [Pictology] and blockchain-secured records,” Moiseev added. “When presented with the opportunity to integrate this service with the decades-long research on pigments maintained by ArtDiscovery, we realized this was a win-win situation for the art world. We are redefining the standard of certainty for art collectors, galleries, museums, and even law enforcement worldwide.”

In Los Angeles this week, museums burned to the ground, many artists’ homes were lost, and a number of artworks were endangered. And with four fires currently blazing, members of the city’s art scene have banded together to raise money for artists and art workers impacted by all the destruction.

On Thursday, a GoFundMe effort was launched by artists Andrea Bowers and Kathryn Andrews, Various Small Fires senior director Ariel Pittman, Vielmetter Los Angeles associate director Olivia Gauthier, and arts professional Julia V. Hendrickson. As of publication time, the fund had already raised more than $23,000.

“Over the last few days,” they wrote in their GoFundMe’s description, “we have watched as neighborhoods that are home to many of Los Angeles’ artists, gallerists, and cultural workers burn to the ground in an unprecedented Santa Ana wind and fire event. Many members of our personal communities, and our broader creative communities, have lost everything. The ramifications of that impact are varied: some people will be able to rebuild, while others may not have the same access to insurance coverage or other resources.”

Dealers Matthew Marks and Jessica Silverman have already donated $2,000 each. Artist Dyani White Hawk, curators Rujeko Hockley and Amy Sadao, and art adviser Benjamin Godsill have also donated to the fund, which has a goal of $500,000.

Andrews lost her home this week to the fire in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, which also claimed her collection works by Rashid Johnson, Charles Long, and Jim Shaw. She previously told ARTnews, “It’s not just the loss of stuff, you know, it’s the loss of nature, it’s the loss of a community, it’s the loss of dreams. It has a very intense impact.”

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The Headlines

DEALER KAVI GUPTA’S LEGAL TROUBLES. Chicago dealer Kavi Gupta, who has championed many artists featured in major international exhibitions, is facing lawsuits and claims of mismanagement, reports Brian Boucher for Artnet News. Artist Jeffrey Gibson, who represented the US at the Venice Biennale, filed a suit against Gupta’s gallery in 2023 alleging unpaid sales proceeds to the tune of nearly $640,000. The gallery responded at the time that those funds were spent on production expenses, per their contract with the artist. Then, dealer Thomas McCormick also sued Gupta in June 2024, alleging the misuse of funds from a refinanced loan on their co-owned building at Gupta’s main location on West Washington Blvd, in addition to falling behind on rent. Gupta’s lawyer has denied those allegations. But several people familiar with the gallery’s operations told Artnet News anonymously that the gallery and Gupta’s troubles go far deeper and the alleged practices far more widespread than previously known.

IN MEMORIAM. The artist Raquel Rabinovich, known for her land art and monochromatic paintings, has died at age 95. Born in Buenos Aires in 1929, she studied in Europe before moving to the US, where Rabinovich became an active member of the Hudson Valley artistic and Buddhist communities, reports Hyperallergic and Artnet News. “To me, when I see something—say, the world around me, art, or people—I realize that’s not all there is,” she said in 2021. “There is something behind, something beyond. Because it’s not obvious or visible, I feel inclined to explore it and discover what is there.” Her work is in collections such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., and in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art. Yet observers say she has not received deserved recognition. “She leaves behind a rich legacy as a visual artist built over more than seven decades of rigorous practice,” stated the Raquel Rabinovich Art Trust, which also announced her death after a short battle with cancer.

The Digest

The National Museum in Damascus has reopened in Syria, following the fall of President Bashar Assad. The museum, which houses ancient archaeological artifacts, closed a month ago as a preventative measure against looting during the rebel takeover of the city. “Thank God, we did not suffer any serious damage, but there was more fear than damage,” said Rima Khawan, chief curator of the museum. [The Associated Press]

For the final weekend of the National Gallery in London’s blockbuster Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers exhibit, visitors will get to soak in the Post-Impressionist’s paintings all night long. The museum will be open 24 hours, with the extra time slot starting from 9pm on Jan. 17 until 10 a.m. on Jan. 18. What could be more romantic? [The Guardian]

As fires raged across Los Angeles this week, due to the ongoing Palisades, Eaton, and Hurst fires, numerous artists, collectors, and arts professionals have reported losing their homes and art collections in the affected areas. While it is still too early to truly assess the damage, art insurers and conservators told ARTnews that they expect it to be extensive.

“This is going to be substantial and possibly one of the most impactful art losses ever in America,” Simon de Burgh Codrington, fine arts insurance specialist and managing director at Risk Strategies, told ARTnews in a phone interview. The devastating losses, de Burgh Codrington added, are expected “to be much more impactful than Sandy was to the art world.”

Similarly, Christopher Wise, vice president of Risk Strategies, told ARTnews, “There are huge amounts of fine art value under threat at the current moment. Many, many billions of fine art.”

While Risk Strategies insures “many collectors, museums, galleries, artists, and warehouses throughout Los Angeles,” according to Wise, many have already moved artworks into safer locations following evacuation offers. Still, he said, the “destruction is devastating.”

“Our hearts break to hear of the scale of the losses,” Wise said. “We have also been actively reaching out to try and help … As the fires continue to expand and new areas are affected, we continue to communicate and act vigilantly on behalf of our clients.

After several Sally Mann photographs were removed from a show at Texas’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth amid controversy, the institution has finally responded, issuing a brief statement on the matter.

The Mann photographs were removed after some locals and politicians claimed that these images were “child porn.” The Dallas Express, which published several articles reporting on locals’ concerns, previously reported that there was a police investigation surrounding the works as evidence for alleged child abuse, but the museum had not responded to inquiries about it until now.

Mann has regularly faced controversy about her depictions of children. She became known for photographing her home in Lexington, Virginia; some of her shots have featured her own children in the nude. These photographs do not depict sexual activity.

“An inquiry has been made concerning four artworks in the temporary exhibition Diaries of Home. These have been widely published and exhibited for more than 30 years in leading cultural institutions across the country and around the world,” a spokesperson for the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth told ARTnews in an email. The spokesperson said the museum was unable to comment further.

“Diaries of Home” features the work of 13 women and nonbinary artists who, according to the museum’s website, “explore the multilayered concepts of family, community, and home.” The website includes a warning that the show features “mature themes that may be sensitive for some viewers.” Glasstire reported news of the removal of five Mann works and their accompanying wall texts this week.

In a late-term legislative move, President Joe Biden signed the EXPLORE Act, whose name is short for the Expanding Public Lands Outdoor Recreation Experiences Act. The law reforms existing rules that restrict film and photography in national parks.

A part of the law, the FILM Act, will also address long-running concerns about burdensome permit requirements for filmmakers and photographers seeking to take footage in the parks.

Under the old standards, permits were mandatory and could be denied for various reasons that some detractors saw as inconsistent. The process was challenged in a lawsuit in December 2024 by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the National Press Photographers Association, and videographers Alexander Rienzie and Connor Burkesmith. The groups claimed the government’s restriction as unlawful, arguing the procedure violated First Amendment rights.

The new law takes away permit requirements for small groups carrying out photography on national park land. Fewer than six people are now allowed to shoot footage of the parks, provided they abide by regulations by avoiding disruptions to the habitats native to these lands. Sets and staging equipment are still not permitted under the new law, which stipulated that commercial producers with larger-scale operations still require permits.

In a statement, FIRE Chief Counsel Bob Corn-Revere approved of the permit reform, saying, “This new law allows filmmakers to share the beauty and stories of our national parks without facing jail or fines for how they use the footage.”

The tough childhood and KGB career of Vladimir Putin

November 8 – December 20, 2024