
The Warhol Foundation is turning art into grant money
Following the announcement by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts that it has sealed a deal with Christies to liquidate its remaining art holdings of around 20,000 works, The Art Newspaper looks at what the decision tells us about the Foundation's mission and how it differs from other forms of artist-endowed foundations.
Unlike many others, The Warhol Foundation's intentions from the outset has been to liquidate art assets to build a a financial endowment and fund grants to support its charitable purpose to advance the visual arts. This has enabled the Foundation to achieve a significant, generative impact on the visual arts on a national scale. Read more…

Nathan Coley's A Place beyond Belief reaches Kosovo
Image: Nathan Coley's A Place Beyond Belief in Pristina, Kosovo

Piss Christ hits the headlines again
Naturally a Republican congressman, Representative Michael Grimm of New York's 13th congressional district, responded accusing the Obama administration of hypocrisy for apologising for the anti-Islam video that has sparked unrest throughout the region while remaining silent on Serrano's photograph. In a statement he said: “As a Catholic I find Piss Christ to be vulgar and offensive just as many in the Islamic world found 'Innocence of Muslims' to be highly offensive.”
Image: Andres Serrano's Piss Christ

Australia's White Rabbit will soon house the world's largest private collection of contemporary Chinese art
White Rabbit is a not-for-profit art gallery in Sydney established to house and exhibit the collection of Kerr and Judith Neilson. When Swiss collector Uli Sigg completes the transfer of over 1400 works to M+ museum in Hong Kong in 2014, the Neilsons will possess the world's largest private collection of contemporary Chinese art.
Their collection covers the Chinese superstars that have become household names around the world, but they have also focused on museum-quality work by younger, emerging artists, giving it an adventurous edge that is often lacking in public collections.
White Rabbit's current exhibition, Double Take, is the sixth rotation of the collection since the gallery opened its doors to the public three years ago and reflects the family vision to share their collection with Australia. As Judith Neilson says: “What's the point of having it, if you can't share it.”
Image: Sydney's White Rabbit, which houses the collection of Kerr and Judith Neilson

Christopher Columbus statue gets an art makeover
Tatsu Nishi's new Public Art Fund-commissioned work puts viewers in a room with Christopher Columbus. Nishi has placed a spacious, furnished living room 60 feet above NY's Columbus Circle, atop a pedestal of metal scaffolding. Visitors climb six flights of stairs to to reach the room, which measures 30 x 17 feet with a 16-foot ceiling height. In the centre of the room is the 13-foot-tall marble statue of Christopher Columbus, made by Gaetano Russo, that has stood over the plaza for 120 years.
Image: Tatsu Nishi's Discovering Columbus, Columbus Circle, New York

Aerial art at Art Basel Miami Beach

Terry Smith talks about his new book Thinking Contemporary Curating

Paris collection goes under the hammer

Germany's program for the 2013 Venice Biennale challenges traditional formulations of national pavilions

WWII bomb shelter in Berlin houses a new art show

Russia's PM says free Pussy Riot
Russia's Prime Minister, Dmitry Medvedev, has joined the ranks of celebrities and political heavyweights calling for the jailed members of Pussy Riot to be released. Medvedev has long sought to portray himself as a liberal reformer, but critics say he fails to follow through and deliver results. In this case, he was quick to say he has no intention of interfering in Russia's notoriously politicised court system.
Image: Members of Pussy Riot show the court's verdict as they sit in a courtroom in Moscow.

Spectral Readings at the Liverpool Biennale
Image: Dane Mitchell, Spectral Readings (Liverpool), 2012 – Ghost Paper, 2012, installation view, 2012 Liverpool Biennale. The Biennale runs from 15 September -25 November 2012.

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever opens tonight
Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever opens tonight at 6pm and runs to 13 October.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Blue Glacier (2012), duratrans on lightbox, 950 x 1330 mm

Keith Haring Foundation disbands authentication committee
The Keith Haring Foundation has decided to disband its authentication committee and will no longer review works attributed to the artist. The news comes just months after the Warhol Foundation and Basquiat estate announced they will cease authenticating artworks because of the risks posed by legal action stemming from disputes over such judgements.
Keith Haring, Untitled, 1984, acrylic on canvas

Les and Milly Paris Collection goes under the hammer at Art+Object
One of New Zealand's finest private art collections goes under the hammer this week in a two-part auction at Art+Object on Wednesday and Thursday. Formed by Les and Milly Paris over four and a half decades, the collection covered just about every square inch of their walls, prompting a later decision to lift their home and build a gallery space underneath it. Collecting was an all-consuming passion for Les and Milly, but it wasn't ever just about the art. They built longstanding, personal relationships with artists fortunate enough to be in their collecting sights, becoming much-loved figures in the New Zealand art world.
Image: Peter Peryer's 1989 portrait of Les and Milly Paris

Catch Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery today
You can see a live performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery today. The performance takes place at 3pm in the artist's space in the Walters Prize exhibition.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Floor Resistance, shown at Hebbel Am Ufer, HAU3, Berlin (25 June 2011)

Live performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the AAG tomorrow
You can catch a live performance of Alicia Frankovich's Floor Resistance at the Auckland Art Gallery tomorrow. It takes place in the artist's space in the Walters Prize exhibition.

Hirschhorn's new installation grounded in the Concordia disaster
When the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off Isola del Giglio, its captain made headlines because he abandoned ship and was ordered by a coast guard officer to return to the boat. Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn found poetry in the situation. “I liked that a lot,” he said in a recent interview. “You have to come back on the boat – you know, 'Man there is no escape in our time!' There is no escaping, you cannot escape.”
The disaster inspired Hirschhorn's latest installation Concordia, Concordia at the Gladstone Gallery where he has created a room inside a room, a giant box built from plywood and decorated in cruise-ship chintz, and it is capsizing, not capsized. Read more…
Image: Thomas Hirschhorn Concordia, Concorda, Gladstone Gallery, NY

Singapore lifts its art game with the opening of Gillman Barracks
The Gillman Barracks cluster of art galleries opens today, marking another step in Singapore's long-running effort to become a cultural hub. “We hope this will become a truly iconic international arts destination,” said Eugene Tan, program director at Singapore's Economic Development Board, which has sponsored and overseen its development.
A cluster of international galleries, all with ties to Asia, have set up in the site of the former British military barracks. They include Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Mizuma Gallery, Ota Fine Arts and Tomio Koyama Gallery from Japan, along with Shanghai's ShangArt and Pearl Lam Galleries, and the Drawing Room from Manila. They will all be hoping to ride the Southeast Asian economic wave, looking to attract buyers from Indonesia, the region's largest economy, and Singapore. According to the Boston Consulting Group, Singapore is now home to the highest proportion of millionaire households in the world.
Eventually the barracks will house a centre for contemporary art, which will be one of the key programming platforms at the new art destination, along with an international artists residency program and a centre for contemporary art research.
Image: Gillman Barracks, Singapore

Sharjah Biennial: the production through art and architectural practices of new ways of knowing, thinking and feeling
The Sharjah Art Foundation has been slowly releasing the names of the artists selected for the 2013 Sharjah Biennial which is being curated by Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator at Tokyo's Museum of Contemporary Art. The latest batch is: Francis Alys, Tiffany Chung, Runa Islam, Lucia Koch, Nasir Nasrallah, Ernesto Neto, Otobong Nkanga, Gabriel Orozco and Ayman Ramadan.
Earlier this year, Hasegawa, announced plans to build a new city structure to house works by artists in next year's edition of the biennale. She has invited a selection of Indian, Lebanese, Belgian, Japanese and Spanish architects to help envision a new urban structure that connects the historic area of Sharjah and its courtyard typology with the larger city. She says: “Within these new and traditional structures a broad range of artists will be invited to create works that will offer new experiences to be shared. Here the courtyard becomes more than a 'place' – it becomes a 'condition' where culture is nourished and true knowledge is formed.”
Image: Lucia Koch, Riso Aborio, 2010, lambda on photographic paper, mounted on pvc

Venice Architecture Biennale: “One foot in the past and the other gingerly testing the new”
David Chipperfield's Common Ground at the Venice Architecture Biennale has attracted mixed reviews ranging from “lazy and culturally confused” to “more than a simple compendium of the most spectacular buildings by the usual suspects.”
In a New York Times article, Michael Kimmelman says: “With a sea change (partly generational, mostly philosophical) overtaking architecture, and attention turning from glamorous buildings and celebrated designers to broader issues like urbanism, public space, social responsibility and collaboration, Common Ground is well intended but, alas, a missed opportunity.” Read more…
Image: a cinder-block installation at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale inspired by a community of squatters who took over an unfinished 45-story building in Caracas

Independent Curators International launches a book questioning what curating is today
“Do curators think in ways that are unique to their profession? Can curatorial thought be distinguished from the thinking processes within the myriad of closely related practices – especially art criticism, art history and art making – and from curating within other kinds of museum or display spaces, public and private?”
In his new ICI publication, Thinking Contemporary Curating, Terry Smith offers an in-depth analysis of the volatile territory of international curatorial practice and the thinking – or insight – that underpins it. He describes how today curators take on roles beyond exhibition making, to include reimagining museums; writing the history of curating; creating discursive platforms and undertaking social or political activism, as well as rethinking spectatorship.

Ai Weiwei unimpressed by Hayward Gallery's exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China
Ai Weiwei has dismissed the Hayward Gallery's exhibition Art of Change: New Directions from China, comparing it to “a restaurant in Chinatown. “It is simply a consumerist offering” he wrote in the Guardian, “providing little in the way of genuine experience of life in China today”. “How can you have a show of Chinese Art that doesn't address a single one of the country's most pressing issues?” Read more…

Creative Time sends a poetic meditation on the legacy of our civilisation into outer space
Creative Time will soon launch The Last Pictures, an archival disc created by artist Trevor Paglen, into outer space, where it will orbit the earth for billions of years fixed to the exterior of communications satellite EchoStar XVI. The artist describes the images on the disc as “cave paintings from the 21st century,” as they will become one of the longest-lasting remnants of contemporary civilisation.
The project originates from the idea that communications satellites in Earth's orbit will ultimately become the cultural and material ruins of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, far outlasting anything else humans have created. These geostationary satellites, located above the equator at an altitude of 24,000 miles, experience no atmospheric drag, and will remain in orbit until our sun expands into a red giant and engulfs the earth in about 4.5 billion years. The Last Pictures envisages a future Earth where there is no evidence of human civilisation beyond derelict spacecraft we have left behind in our plant's orbit.Read more…

Poland's Lech Walesa asks Putin to pardon Pussy Riot
Poland's former leader Lech Walesa has asked Russian President Vladmir Putin to pardon the jailed members of Pussy Riot. The 1983 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who is also a fervent Catholic, slammed the group for abusing a church for political purposes and distanced himself from “the forms of expression used by the group.” But he insisted that it was impossible to “subject to maltreatment and isolation people who fight with words and who promote their views publicly, even though they do so in such an iconoclastic manner.”
Image: Pussy Riot performing in Moscow's Red Square

Nominees announced for the second Independent Vision Curatorial Award
The New York-based Independent Curators International has announced the nominees for this year's Independent Vision Curatorial Award. The 15 nominees from a dozen different countries were selected by Performa founder RoseLee Goldberg, White Columns director Matthew Higgs, Documenta's Chus Martinez, MIT List Visual Art Centre curator Joao Ribas, LACMA's chief curator of contemporary art Franklin Sirmans, and Guggenheim chief curator Nancy Spector.
European curators dominate the list, but it includes two curators based in Asia – Beijing's Bijana Ciric, an independent curator and former staffer at the Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, and Erin Gleeson, the co-founder and artistic director of SA SA BASSAC in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
Han Ulrich Obrist will select the overall winner to be announced at the ICI's fall benefit auction and gala on 19 November.
Image: curators nominated for the Independent Vision Curatorial Award, left to right, top to bottom: Aimar Arriola, Anna Colin, Cesar Garcia, Astria Suparak, Erin Gleeson, Jay Sanders, Lara Khaldi, Laurel Ptak, Lisette Smits, Nav Haq, Richard Birkett and Bijana Ciric

This week at Starkwhite
We are deinstalling our downstairs show this week, but Der Tiefenglanz by Karl Fritsch and Gavin Hipkins continues upstairs to 15 September.
Image: Karl Fritsch and Gavin Hipkins, Der Tiefenglanz (Buddha), 2012, 24-carat gold, sliver-gelatin print

Controversial exhibition opens today at the Dowse Art Museum
Security has been beefed up for the opening of In Spite of Ourselves: Approaching Documentary at the Dowse Art Museum today. The show includes Sophia Al-Maria's Cinderazahd: For Your Eyes Only, which hit the headlines when it was discovered that only women would be allowed to see the film. The Dominion Post fueled controversy with reports of gender discrimination at work in the art museum and an editorial on “No place for women-only exhibits”, and talk back radio jumped on the bandwagon inciting men to go to the museum and demand to see the film. The upshot is the museum has been placed on the back foot, addressing security concerns and the need for a police presence at the opening rather than leading a timely conversation about issues raised by the film.
Image: filmmaker Sophia Al-Maria

Warhol Foundation to sell art worth $100 million to boost its grant-making capacity
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts will sell “thousands” of works from the artist's estate to boost its endowment, currently worth around $225 million. Foundation chairman Michael Straus said: “We have chosen to mark the Foundation's 25th anniversary by expanding the scope of our art sales in order to in crease our grant-making capacity.” Since its founding in 1987, the Foundation has made grants totalling nearly $250 million to artists, museums and non-profit organisations. Read more…
Image: Detail of Andy Warhol's dollars painting

Gavin Hipkins' Second Pavilion closes this weekend
Gavin Hipkins' photographic installation Second Pavilion closes tomorrow at 3pm but Der Tiefenglanz, his collaborative project with Karl Fritsch, continues upstairs to Saturday 15 September. You can read a review of the shows here.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, Second Pavilion, 2012 (detail)

Downturn in Australian art market puts an end to Deutcher and Hackett's plans to open a new gallery in Gene Sherman's Paddington space
The downturn in the Australian art market has put an end to Deutscher and Hackett's plans to start a new high-end gallery in Gene Sherman's exhibition space in Paddington. Director of the auction house Chris Deutscher said: “Given the tougher environment for commercial galleries and the primary market, which has been pretty grim over the last 12 months, we thought it was a sensible decision to continue to run shows at Deutscher and Hackett rather than going to that bigger space.”
Gene Sherman had been set to follow the family's $2 million gift to the Sydney College of Art with two exhibitions a year in a new gallery to be completed next year. Now she will stay in her Goodhope Street space and show work from her 800-item collection of contemporary art in a series of curated exhibitions. She has been there for two decades, initially as a commercial space and since 2008 as a not-for-profit foundation.
Image: Charwei Tsai writing a Buddhist sutra on the leaves of a lotus plant at the Sherman Gallery, Sydney

Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon launch Artists Against Fracking coalition
Yoko Ono and son Sean Lennon have launched an Artists Against Fracking coalition as New York officials are finalising regulations to govern new drilling. The coalition will spread the word that fracking threatens watersheds and wilderness areas. Read more…
Image: Yoko Ono and Sean Lennon

A collector's view on what's happening behind the scenes in the global art market
In a recent post titled What's art got to do with it?, Edward Winkleman presents a text by Alain Servais, a Brussels-based collector profiled in Modern Painters 50 Most exciting Collectors Under 50, from his Art News Digest, which offers art news and commentary on developments in the art market for an undisclosed list of email recipients. Winkleman says the text is a synthesis of what's happening behind the scenes in the global art market, sprinkled with some rather blunt truths that need wider discussion.
Servais talks about branding; the rise of mega-galleries and their focus on “very bankable artists”; the emergence of a “grow or go” culture and its impact on the art being created, exhibited and collected; and the need to support “resistance organisations still defending an ideal which is measured not only in hard cash.” Read more…
Image: Walter De Maria's 13, 15, 15 Meter Rows at Gagosian

Golden Lion Awards at the Venice Architecture Biennale
The Golden Lion awards at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale have gone to Alvaro Siza (Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement), Toyo Ito (Golden Lion for Best National Participation) and Urban Think Tank and Justin McGuirk (Golden Lion for Best Project).
Ito commissioned the Japanese Pavilion's A Home For All, a forest-like exhibition of housing concepts in response to the post tsunami and earthquake crisis, and Urban Think Tank/Justin McGuirk's Torre David/Gran Horizonte featured a presentation on a squatters' community established in an unfinished Caracas skyscraper.
Image: Japanese pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale

This week at Starkwhite
Gavin Hipkins' photographic installation Second Pavilion enters its final week at Starkwhite. The exhibition closes on Saturday at 3pm.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, Second Pavilion, 2012 (detail)

Campbell's launches a limited edition of Warhol-themed soup cans
Campbell's is launching a limited edition of Andy Warhol-themed tomato soup today. Priced at 75 cents each, the cans are intended to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the artist's first paintings of the familiar soup cans. The soup will come in a variety of intensely coloured cans meant to mimic Warhol's pop-art style.
Image: Campbell's limited-edition line of cans launched in honour of the 50th anniversary of the artist's 32 Campbell's Soup Cans