Justin Paton picks up the 2012 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship

Justin Paton has been awarded the 2012 Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, which offers a residency of at least 6 months in Menton, France and $75,000. Currently senior curator at Christchurch Art Gallery, he is also well known as the author of How to Look at a Painting and presenter of the accompanying television series seen this year on TV1.

Another Power 100 list

In its annual Power 100 issue, Art & Auction positions Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamid bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the daughter of the Emir of Qatar, as the most influential person in the art world. Shiekha Al-Mayassa is the chairwoman of the Qatar Museums Authority, an organisation overseeing the country's cultural initiatives including the world's biggest art buying spree.

You can see the Power 100 top ten here.

Image: Sheikha Al-Mayassa at the opening of Takashi Murakami's exhibition at Versailles in 2010

Hye Rim Lee's Crystal City goes under the hammer at Christie's HK auction

Hye Rim Lee's Crystal City (Grey) sold for USD22,500 (against an estimate of USD17,900-23,100) at Christie's Asian Contemporary Art sale in Hong Kong on 27 November.

Image: Hye Rim Lee, Crystal City (Grey) 2007, C-type print, 182 x 182 cm, edition of 5

Art museum goes underground to take on bank loans

Frankfurt's Staedel Museum is expanding underground to double its storage space and create room for bank loans. Deutsche Bank AG (DBK) and DZ Bank agreed in 2008 to hand over more than 8oo works to the Staedel, including works by Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol. The loan includes an option to buy the art at 25% of its value, without interest over 25 years.

Image: Deutsche Bank headquarters in Frankfurt

Billy Apple®: A History of the Brand

Billy Apple®: A History of the Brand runs at Starkwhite to 8 December 2011. The works in the exhibition record the artist's transformation from an individual artist into a brand. The process culminated in 2007 when Apple became a registered trademark, formalising his status as an art brand.

Image: Billy Apple® A History of the Brand, Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam

Does art need bankers?

100 financiers, entrepreneurs, collectors, curators, dealers and academics gathered in Florence recently for a private conference on the future of art and finance. The cue for the conference was the exhibition Money and Beauty: Bankers, Boticelli, and the Bonfire of Vanities at the Palazzo Strozzi. The discussions ranged across a variety of topics including: whether financial centres necessarily became cultural centres, the shift of economic and cultural power from the West to the East, how art tracks money and power, and whether the art world has been hijacked by the same forces that possessed the world of finance. Read more...
Image: artworks from Andy Warhol's Dollar Sign series

Home Alone in Miami

Hedge fund manager Adam Sender has joined the ranks of collectors who mount curated presentations of their art collections during Art Basel Miami Beach. Sender's collection manager Sarah Aibel is presenting 70 works from Sanders holdings of over 1000 works in his vacant 5,0000 square-foot Miami property.

Instead of attempting the transform the house into a gallery, Aibel says she made the entire exhibition about toying with the notion of displaying art in a domestic space. Even the bathrooms have been given over to art. One is dedicated to Ramond Pettibon and in another Richard Prince's image of Brooke Shields hangs above a real tub in the children's bathroom.

Image:Urs Fischer's What if the phone rings, 2003

Art that is completed when the viewer is drunk

"For centuries, alcohol has played an important role in the art scene," says Erwin Wurm, so it seems entirely appropriate for his latest series, Drinking Sculptures, to be opened at the Bass Museum of Art on the same day as Art Basel Miami Beach, an art fair renowned for its partying, opulent dinners and champagne-fueled hobnobbing.

The sculptures in the series open to reveal bottles of liquor and the artist considers them complete only when the viewer is drunk. At this stage it is unclear whether visitors will be able to drink freely from the sculptures, or whether the museum will hire performers to get drunk. Museum officials say the decision will be made by the artist.

Image: Erwin Wurm's Drinking Sculptures (2011) at the Middleheim Museum, Antwerp

Prospect: New Zealand Art Now opens at the City Gallery Wellington

Dane Mitchell is amongst the artists in Prospect: New Zealand Art Now which opens today at the City Gallery Wellington. The exhibition has been curated by Kate Montgomery who has since taken up a new position at Creative New Zealand.

Image: Installation view of Dane Mitchell's Radiant Matter Part II (2011) at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Mitchell is represented in Prospect with works from this exhibition

European Commission plans the world's largest cultural funding programme

The European Commission is planning to introduce the world's largest cultural funding programme - a €1.8 billion Creative Europe fund to be administered between 2014 and 2020 as part of a larger pan-European goal to stimulate the economy through cultural enterprise.While approximately half will be allocated to the film industry, €500 million will be targeted directly to the visual and performing arts.

The accidental art mogul

Her fortunes come from caring more about showing art than selling it. Newsweek's Blake Gopnik on Marian Goodman's path to success. Read more...
Image: Barbara Gladstone by Thomas Struth

Hou Hanru to curate the 5th Auckland Triennial

Hou Hanru has been named as the curator for the 5th Auckland Triennial. "The Auckland Triennial interests me with the city's increasingly vibrant art scene, being one of the leading cities of the Pacific Rim with its Maori and Pacific influences," he says. "The Triennial can be a particularly inspiring and challenging context for artists: to engage themselves in reimagining the relationship between their work and the changing world, to generate more energy and new vision to an already dynamic art scene."

Damien Hirst's For the Love of God: a sign of the times?

A little over three years ago Damien Hirst abandoned the traditional method of selling art going straight to Sotheby's instead where the auction smashed top estimates to reach a record total of USD125m. Ironically it was also the day Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, setting in train a credit crunch and global recession which in turn sent a booming international art market into freefall.

As the sovereign debt crisis plays out in Europe and the world stares down the barrel of another global recession, Hirst is in the news again. His $78 million diamond-encrusted platinum skull, For the Love of God, is back in London courtesy of the Tate. The piece, which has yet to enter a major public collection and is owned by a consortium of investors including the artist himself, will be displayed in a special viewing room in the Turbine Hall during the first two months of the artist's retrospective at Tate Modern.

Image: Damien Hirst's For the Love of God (2007)

Martin Basher: melding minimalist sculpture and retail display at the Rockefeller Apartments

Martin Basher has installed two new works (Paradise Sale and The Everyday Solution for Shakey Hands) in the courtyard garden of New York's Rockefeller Apartments. The installation is a further development of his 9-month New York Public Art Fund project at the MetroTech Centre in Brooklyn, and the latest in an ongoing series of artists' presentations at the apartments.

Images: Martin Basher's Paradise Sale and The Everyday Solution for Shakey Hands (2011), installation views (day and night), Rockefeller Apartments, New York

Curator defends artist's use of imagery of Christ's crucifixion as a metaphor for human suffering

The Brooklym museum is refusing to budge in the face of calls for David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire My Belly to be removed from the Hide/Seek exhibition, saying the artwork is "an expression of the artist's outrage at indifference to human suffering during the early years of the AIDS crisis.

The co-curator of the exhibition, Jonathan Katz, has also weighed in saying the work belongs to a centuries-old tradition of using the imagery of Jesus Christ's crucifixion as a metaphor for human suffering. "What gets lost in all this brouhaha is how thoroughly informed he is by a Catholic iconographic tradition and how he is reinvigorating it to describe new social realities" Katz said of the artist. "This is a work of art of great complexity and sensitivity."

Image: David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly (1987), video still

Brooklyn bishop calls for A Fire in My Belly to be banned

The Catholic Bishop of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, is fueling the furore over David Wojnarowicz's video A Fire in My Belly, calling for it to be removed from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it is a disrespectful and blasphemous attack on their religion. In a strangely telling video statement on the web Bishop DiMarzio says that he admires Wojnarowicz's identification with the suffering Christ but that he shouldn't be allowed to express it publicly in art. Read more...

Image: Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio and David Wojnarowicz

Gavin Hipkins' film This Fine Island previewed at Centre Pompidu

This Fine Island, a postcolonial ballad by Gavin Hipkins that revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in 1835, will have its first screening in Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin/Madrid, an event that aims to create a space between new cinema and contemporary art. In Hipkins' adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.

Hipkins' experimental narrative screens at Centre Pompidu on 21 November in People's Television, a film programme curated for Rencontres Internationales by Laura Preston and Mark Williams.

Image: Gavin Hipkins, This Fine Island , 2012 (production still), 12 mins, 16mm transferred to Digibeta

MOCA gala raises $2.5m with Marina Abramovic's An Artist's Life Manifesto

The controversy surrounding Marina Abramovic's An Artist's Life Manifesto didn't dampen the enthusiasm of guests at the recent MOCA gala, an event that Jeffrey Deitch said "fused an art experience with a social experience". Attended by more than 750 guests, the gala raised $2.5m for the museum.

Image: Deborah Harry and Marina Abramovic at the MOCA fundraiser

Review of Ann Shelton's in a forest

You can read a review of Ann Shelton's exhibition in a forest here.

Image: Ann Shelton, Seedling, Imre Harange's Olympic Oak (These trees were awarded at the 1936 Olympics and are sometimes also called 'Hitler Oaks'), Nyiradony, Hungary. C-type print. 1.2 x 1.5m, 2011

Benetton's controversial "Unhate" campaign

In Italian clothing label Benetton's ideal world, foreign dignitaries from opposing sides would lock lips. Benetton took the concept to heart, making it the subject of its controversial "Unhate" campaign, which features political enemies getting a little too close for comfort. The company debuted its ads recently at its flagship Paris store much to the chagrin of the world leaders it featured. Read more...

Image: The Pope and al-Tayeb share a kiss on the latest United Colours of Beneton advertisement