Art Industry News is a daily digest of the most consequential developments coming out of the art world and art market. Here’s what you need to know on this Friday, May 5.
NEED-TO-READ
Matthew Barney Plans Video Installation About American Football – The artist is set to premiere a new epic video installation, titled Secondary, at his studio in Long Island City on May 12. Barney, who was an athlete himself, said it offers up a description of “the complex overlay of violence and spectacle inherent in American football, and more broadly within American culture.” The work, which includes a material-based choreography, will be installed around a flooded trench in floor of the studio. (ARTnews)
V&A To Platform a “Stock Exchange for Art” – Artex, a new online organization functioning as a “stock exchange for art” is offering its first initial public offering at the Victoria & Albert Museum at the end of this month, with works available valued at upwards of €50 million ($55.2 million). The Liechtenstein-based company owns all of the artworks, and will issue shares worth €100 ($110) each, which can be bought, sold, or traded on the Artex exchange, and shareholders are limited to a 10 percent stake in each piece. (The Art Newspaper)
Petition Launched for UK to Return Star of Africa – South Africans have called on the U.K. to return the world’s largest diamond, which is set in the royal scepter that will be used at the coronation tomorrow, to Africa. The 530 carat diamond, known as Cullinan I or the Star of Africa, was gifted to the monarchy by the British colonial government in South Africa 1905, after it was discovered there. (Reuters)
Documentary Explores the Art & Life of David Hammons – Harold Crooks’s and journalist Judd Tully’s documentary on the artist, The Melt Goes On Forever is on view now at Film Forum. Critic Wesley Morris notes how the film’s initial “rich interpretive consideration of Hammons’s essence, philosophy and process” including by many Black critics and artists, eventually cedes screen time to the views of moneyed (white) gallerists, collectors and dealers, leading him to read the film itself as conceptual piece, playing on how Hammons’s work is aware of “the stakes for Black people navigating the straits of the market.” (New York Times)
MOVERS & SHAKERS
Museum of the City of New York Creates New Curator Role – Angel (Monxo) Santiago-López has becoming the first Latinx permanent curator.The role was funded by a grant from the Leadership in Art Museums coalition of foundations working to diversify leadership roles. (Yahoo)
Diamond Brooch From Queen’s Coronation Fetches $88,000 – Sotheby’s sold a diamond brooch once owned by the late queen for £69,850 at a coronation-themed auction. The piece was gifted by the queen to one of her coronation maids of honor. (Evening Standard)
Armory Show Names Participants – More than 225 galleries will descend upon the Javits Center in New York this September for the 2023 edition of the Armory Show, with 140 galleries returning to the fair. Sections will include a “Solo” section for single-artist features; “Presents” for galleries established less than ten years ago; and the curated “Focus” section organized by Candice Hopkins. New York-based No Gallery is the recipient of the Gramercy International Prize, which is a complimentary booth awarded to a local gallery making its debut at the fair. (Artforum)
FOR ART’S SAKE
New Prints By Patrick Caulfield –Coinciding with an exhibition on Post-war British artist Patrick Caulfield on May 18, Josh Lilley gallery is releasing a new edition of posthumous screen prints entitled The Laforgue Four produced by the Caulfield family to mark the 50th anniversary of a book of poems by Jules Laforgue which Caulfield had illustrated during his lifetime. (Press release)
Patrick Caulfield, Untitled Laforgue Print 24 – (Broken Window). An edition of 100. Published by Patrick Caulfield Editions. Printed by Make-Ready, 2022.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
