- The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has completed an expansion project for the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, increasing exhibition space by 90%. [Curbed]
- Independent Brussels opened yesterday, and apparently the vibes strike a good balance between Independent circa it’s scrappy Dia building days and it’s sleeker current iteration at Spring Studios in TriBeCa. “It’s the Dia building breathing new life,” marvelled Brussels collector Alain Servais. Further, it looks like a lot of booths took risks and avoided pushing paintings, which is appropriate given the city’s collector base for conceptual art. [Artsy]
- Juicy Q&A of the day: this interview with Gary Indiana, who adroitly addresses why his time in New York was omitted from his long-awaited memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love: “all the recent necrophiliac nostalgia for the late 1970s and early 1980s New York…is so off-base that I didn’t want to engage with it at all.” [The White Review]
- “When is too rich, too rich to not notice you’re missing a Picasso for 10 years?” Yes, it’s true: billionaire socialite Wilma “Billie” Tisch didn’t notice her Picasso portrait “Tete” had been missing for nearly that amount of time, and was unaware it had been offered at Sotheby’s in 2013. [New York Post]
- Kimiko Nishimoto is an 87-year old photographer who takes a lot of “I’m falling and I can’t get up” self-portraits. She learned how to use a camera at 71, and then took courses in digital editing. Amazing. [Booooooom]
- AFC Staffer Rea McNamara wrote a feature about the tyranny of celebrity lifestyle gurus. In it she parses the love-hate relationship many women have with Gwyneth Paltrow, Reese Witherspoon, Blake Lively, et al. — and how the distributed content age strengthens the hold celebrities have on our lives. [Globe and Mail]
- Uh oh, scientists claim Damien Hirst’s 2012 Tate retrospective featuring his infamous preserved animals leaked unsafe levels of carcinogenic formaldehyde gas. [BBC News]
- Jennifer Smith checks in on Anne Pasternak’s first seven months as director of the Brooklyn Museum. On top of green lighting the Jeremy Deller project that had Iggy Pop pose for a life drawing class, she’s striped away by at least over 20% objects on display in the American and European galleries, and plans to hire more curators. Her first show won’t appear until the summer of 2017. [Wall Street Journal]
- Hate-read alert: Rémy Martin CEO Eric Vallat complains about how inconvenient a transfer to a cushy job in Tokyo was. Thankfully, he found peace by visiting Naoshima, the island of outdoor art installations and a boutique hotel designed by Tadao Ando. Also, cognac aged in a barrel for 100 years—apparently art appreciation on Naoshima taught Vallat to let it linger in his mouth before swallowing. [The Wall Street Journal]
- Josh Baer recommends seeing Georges de La Tour 1593-1652 at the Museo Del Prado in Madrid. We took a look at the work and we wish we were there. Masterful. The image of a young rich man demanding an old woman’s last coin seems not so unfamiliar these days. [Baer Faxt]
- Sarah Ann Ottens was raped and murdered on the University of Iowa campus in 1973. Her death inspired some of Ana Mendieta’s most provocative works, who attended the same college, but today Ottens’ name is rarely mentioned. Even Mendieta’s most thorough auto-biography includes no mention of Ottens. Read the whole piece tracing the two histories by Sarah Weinman. Incredible. [The Guardian]
- Who in the art world donates what to which politicians? It’s pretty surprising how many collectors and dealers donate to right-wing super PACs. There’s also plenty of bet-hedging: many people donate to both a Republican candidate or PAC and the Clinton campaign. [ART News]
