Week in Review offers a curated overview of recent happenings and shifts within the art sector. You can opt to receive these updates as a weekly newsletter. Two individuals, consisting of an artist and a New School graduate student, disrupted Hans Haacke’s renowned visitor poll at the New Museum retrospective. This act was a protest against the museum’s ‘complicity in capitalism.’ The hackers assert that their interference will continue to generate approximately 150 survey responses per minute, altering the results unless the museum significantly revamps its security systems, particularly the survey application.
The Visitor Experience team at The Shed, encompassing around 75 part-time, hourly front-of-house employees, has successfully unionized. On Wednesday, The Shed declared its choice to forego an election process and officially acknowledged the union after the American Arbitration Association independently verified it.
The CEO of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Timothy Rub, issued an apology for the museum’s inadequate response to sexual misconduct allegations against former employee Joshua Helmer. During a staff town hall meeting, Rub committed to implementing better actions. This meeting was prompted by a recent petition from current and former PMA staff demanding ‘structural change’ in the museum’s policies on sexual misconduct.
In a tweet last Saturday, actress Ellen Barkin disclosed an assault by Carl Andre in the late 1970s. Barkin recounted that Andre choked her while she was a waitress and linked this incident to Andre’s alleged murder of his spouse, artist Ana Mendieta.
Following Iran’s admission of shooting down a Ukrainian passenger plane, numerous visual artists, filmmakers, and musicians have withdrawn from the state-backed Fajr festivals in Tehran, expressing solidarity with anti-government protesters and those grieving the tragedy.
The Hecht Museum at the University of Haifa in Israel canceled a planned talk by an artist identified as Palestinian, citing that his nationality conflicted with the Hecht Foundation’s politics. Miari, who completed his MFA at Haifa University in 2018, condemned the cancellation as a ‘blatant act of racism.’
Performance Space in Manhattan is transitioning to an artist-directed model for 2020. A group of NYC-based artists and collectives will oversee the organization’s programming and manage its annual production budget, working collaboratively with its staff, board, and leadership.
A German casino employee is taking legal action against Ai Weiwei after the artist accused him of displaying a ‘Nazi attitude.’ Renowned for his dissidence, Ai Weiwei, highly regarded in the gambling community as a ‘Blackjack Guru,’ explained the lawsuit’s background in a New York Times op-ed.
The National Archives in Washington, DC, apologized for modifying a photograph from the 2017 Women’s March by blurring protest signs that criticized Trump and referenced women’s anatomy to avoid ‘current political controversy.’ The altered image has been removed, with plans to replace it with the original version.
China’s largest independent film festival has been indefinitely suspended due to escalating government censorship. The China Independent Film Festival (CIFF) announced it is ‘impossible to locally organize a film festival with a purely independent spirit.’
Syrian filmmaker Feras Fayyad, whose documentary ‘The Cave’ is nominated for an Oscar, might miss the Academy Awards ceremony due to President Trump’s travel ban. Fayyad faced visa denial at the start of this year, joining a list of high-profile artists facing similar issues.
Spanish collector and banker Jaime Botin received an 18-month prison sentence and a $58 million fine for attempting to smuggle his Picasso out of Spain. At 83, Botin tried to remove ‘Head of a Young Woman’ (1906) via his yacht, defying a court order that deemed the piece culturally significant to Spain.
Two thieves claim they stole a Gustav Klimt painting and returned it over two decades later. Gardeners rediscovered the piece, missing since a 1997 exhibit, hidden in a wall at Italy’s Ricci Oddi Modern Art Gallery in December 2018.
Oprah Winfrey stepped down as executive producer of ‘On the Record,’ a documentary exploring sexual assault allegations against Russell Simmons, shortly before its Sundance Film Festival premiere. Winfrey cites creative differences, despite Simmons’ personal pressure to exit the project.
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired Joseph Wright of Derby’s ‘Two Boys with a Bladder’ (1769-70). While the UK had imposed an export ban on this masterpiece, an export license was granted when no UK buyer emerged, allowing the Getty to purchase the work from Lowell Libson & Jonny Yarker Ltd. in London. The painting, depicting two boys inflating a pig’s bladder by candlelight, is featured in our latest Transactions story.
