Two months ago, the Hollywood Reporter announced that actors Alex Williams, Rachel Griffiths, and Anthony LaPaglia had signed up for the lead roles in an Australian TV movie, “Underground,” about Julian Assange’s experiences as a teenage computer hacker. Now Jan Krüger, a producer working with German director Cyril Tuschi, has released details about Tuschi’s look at the recent history of WikiLeaks’s embattled editor-in-chief.

According to Krüger, who was interviewed by Screen Daily, Tuschi’s film, titled “Leaks – Three Dates With Harry Harrison,” will filter Assange’s activities and ordeals through three “romantic” liaisons. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the whistleblower’s amatory life is the source of his Shakespearean tragic flaw, or his Achilles heel.

“Cyril came up with the fact that Assange had been involved in Internet dating using the screen name of Harry Harrison,” Krüger told Screen’s Martin Blaney. “So the film recounts three dates with ‘Harry Harrison’ taking place in 2010. One date is in Iceland when he was establishing an organization that would change journalism, democracy, and the Internet. Then we jump to the second date with a fan in Sweden where he is the man of the moment and feted like a pop star.

“We are interested in the fact that, from an early age, this character had always wanted to change the world and was constantly on the move with his mother in Australia to get away from [his] stepfather,” Krüger continued. “As a 15-year-old, he had stood up to his stepfather as a symbol of authority. This is something like a common thread in ‘Harrison’’s s life.

“Finally, there is an Internet date in a manor house in London, with ‘Harrison’ all by himself wearing an electronic tag.” This date is “with a woman journalist who reflects on where he has ended up.”

“The film will chart the rise and fall of someone who pits themselves against authority, a Robin Hood of the digital age who stumbles over his own personality.”

Seeking political asylum in Ecuador, Assange recently broke bail to take refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy (opposite the Harrods department store) in Knightsbridge in London. Should he set foot outside the embassy, he will be immediately arrested by the police as having set foot on British territory. He was arrested in 2010 because Swedish authorities want to question him about allegations of rape and sexual molestation.

Assange fears that if he enters Sweden, he will be extradited to the United States where he would likely face espionage and conspiracy charges for WikiLeaks’ publication of secret US military and diplomatic documents. He had said he will cooperate with Swedish police if it is guaranteed that he would not be extradited to America. A number or prominent Republicans have called for Assange’s assassination.

Tuschi’s previous film was a documentary about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the martyred Russian oligarch who was sent to Siberia and is currently incarcerated in a labor camp near the Finnish border, pending release in 2017. Whether or not it comes up to date, his Assange film will need to handle its Swedish section with sensitivity and, like the Khodorkovsky film, broach the issue of human-rights abuses.

“Leaks,” which will be shot in Germany, will star a British or Australian actor. Filming is set for next summer.

Read more culture news on Spotlight

Spots will be sprouting across the globe this summer as Louis Vuitton rolls out seven pop-up shops to mark its capsule collection with Japanese avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusama, reports WWD.

The first shop is set to open inside the Louis Vuitton boutique in New York on July 10, two days before Kusama’s touring retrospective opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Next, polka dots — Kusama’s signature motif — will spring up in Asia, at Pacific Place in Hong Kong, Ngee Ann City in Singapore, and Isetan’s Shinjuku branch in Tokyo.

Following those launches, Tokyo, the city Kusama calls home, will get a second location in Dover Street Market in Ginza. Then the two largest Kusama concept stores will open at two department stores: an 860-square-feet shop in Printemps in Paris on August 23; and a 1,375-square-feet boutique in Selfridges in London on August 24. The Paris location will be centered around polka dots, while the London shop will revolve around Kusama’s famous pumpkin sculptures.

The pop-up outlets will be open for one to two months, offering a range of spotted trench coats, handbags, and other accessories created with the artist for Louis Vuitton. The European branches will also exclusively offer tentacle-festooned handbags two months ahead of their scheduled October launch date.

Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs must have been so taken with Kusama when she presented him with a customized a Louis Vuitton Ellipse bag during his first visit to her studio in 2006 that she should get special treatment. Out of the three other artists — Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, and Richard Prince — Jacobs selected to partner with the brand, Kusama is the only one to have multiple pop-up shops in her line’s honor.

NEW YORK — Shipping containers aren't so unusual a sight on the still partly industrial Brooklyn waterfront, but the 30 or so steel canisters recently delivered to Brooklyn Bridge Park cut a strange silhouette against its pristinely landscaped hills. The hamlet of containers housing United Photo Industries's inaugural Photoville exhibition, which opened this weekend, has an appropriately village-like atmosphere, and many participating institutions have emphasized this aspect of the setting by turning their containers into home-like installations.

At the exhibition's far end, Beijing-based photographer Sim Chi Yin's exhibition "China's Rat Tribe" centers on his photographs of that city's migrant workers in their cramped, windowless, subterranean apartments. To further exaggerate the effect, the container itself has been transformed into one such living space, complete with rice cooker, mattress, and foam floor tiles. Inevitably, a visitor on Saturday noted the room's relative spaciousness compared to her New York apartment, quipping: "This makes me feel even worse about what I'm paying for my tiny room."

The exhibition of American photographer Wyatt Gallery (yes, his name is "Wyatt Gallery") is called "Tent Life: Haiti" and uses the container space to similarly evocative ends, suggesting the cramped, makeshift urbanism endured by dwellers of Port-au-Prince's tent camps, which he photographed following the 2010 earthquake. The tarp-covered, cardboard-reinforced shelters in his bright, light-filled photographs seem all the more fragile and inadequate against the canister's thick steel walls.

The playful group show "Phoot Camp 2012" takes the inverse approach, creating a lighthearted faux-campsite complete with astroturf inside its container. The collective's images, taken during a recent lakeside retreat, tend towards the Ryan McGinley school of photography — beautiful young people in beautiful natural settings — marking a sharp contrast to the predominantly photojournalism-driven festival. Right next to it, the New York Times's container of war photographers' shots from Afghanistan and Iraq — and yes, you read that right, the New York Times has a container here — are all the more harrowing and arresting in their often-uncomfortable beauty.

Perhaps the two most affecting exhibitions, however, eschew theatrical installations while nonetheless evoking, in their dark, cramped quarters, the conditions endured by their subjects. Amsterdam-based Noorderlicht Photography's exhibition "Cruel and Unusual" — curated by Hester Keijser and Pete Brook — features 11 photographers' series on prisoners in various parts of the world. Some focus on inmates' coping mechanisms within their respective systems, like Lori Waselchuk's remarkable series on a prisoner-run hospice service at a maximum security prison in Louisiana, while others highlight brutal conditions, like Nathalie Mohadjer's images of the dungeon-like cells where men and boys in Burundi are held for months and years at a time.

Meanwhile Josh Lehrer's large-scale platinum and paladium photographs of homeless transgender teenagers employ the tropes of classical portraiture rather than conventional photojournalism. Arranged inside a shipping container and lining its exterior walls, his striking and beautiful images of these marginalized and abused teens make it impossible to ignore the hurdles they face, and the many power structures penning them in.

The incredible range of perceptive and conscientious exhibitions housed at Photoville makes up for a few less satifsying booths — and a decidedly unpopular "Photo Dog Run," an actual dog run featuring a canine-accessible camera obscura and pictures of Kickstarter supporters' pups (don't ask) — for a festival that on the whole resembles something like a literal global village.

Photoville continues at Brooklyn Bridge Park until July 1. Click the slide show to see more views from the exhibition.

Model Kate Upton’s most visible magazine presence this month must be the cover of July’s GQ, where she’s wearing a tiny American flag bikini and licking a red, white, and blue ice pop. That issue hits newsstands tomorrow, but those who look closely will find Upton within the pages of a different Conde Nast fashion rag. The Internet-famous model has made it into the July issue of Vogue. 

“I enjoy fashion so much,” Upton says in the story, which is not yet online but can be found on newsstands. “But I don’t think people realize it, because I’m always in a bikini.”

Unlike the racy Terry Richardson shoot for GQ — and the sensation that is the “Cat Daddy” video — the photo shoot for Vogue is decidedly more demure, with Upton in a Michael Kors dress and coat, a hat from Hermes, and Givenchy boots. Later, she’s pictured in an Altuzarra blazer and skirt, leaning on what looks like a fence at the edge of a farm. Clearly, the magazine is trying to make the argument that she can shed her skin-baring image and make the transition to high fashion. 

Michael Kors seems to be going along with that idea.

“I think we have a new generation of designers who don’t understand why a Sports Illustrated model can’t be in the mix,” he told Vogue.

Joseph Altuzarra’s a fan, too.

“I personally love a beautiful bust, a curvier body,” he said. “When I was growing up, it was the supermodel era—they were goddesses!”

While it’s unclear whether these designers are planning on having Upton in the mix this September, when New York Fashion Week rolls around, the article itself is an accomplishment. It was just a few months ago that Page Six reported that Upton had to pay her way into the Costume Institute Gala, the ball where every attendee is personally approved by Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour.

An appearance in the magazine, though, means that the model will probably get the nod gratis next year. Especially if she ups her high-fashion credentials between now and then. But who will invite her up to the runway? We can’t think of many designers who look to the “Cat Daddy” video for inspiration, but then again, 8 million viewers can’t be wrong. 

I live for coffee. Iced, flavored, steaming hot I'll take it any way, any time of day. Recent studies suggest that drinking between two and three cups of java a day may prevent basal cell carcinoma (the most common type of skin cancer), which got me thi

LONDON — Scholars have just confirmed the attribution to Thomas Gainsborough of a previously unknown portrait. The piece pictures Catherine Warnford, of Warnford Place, and it has remained in her family since it was commissioned in the mid-18th century.

"There's no other portrait painter that paints in such a free, impressionist way," director of the Old Masters department Andrew McKenzie told ARTINFO UK. "In that period, artists are much stiffer, harder in their technique — that's why it's really unquestionably Gainsborough."

The sitter is pictured in an elegant powder blue silk gown, complete with lace shawl. Around the time of the picture, she had inherited the estate of her father, a drug merchant from Southwark, and would go on to inherit from her sister in 1805.

Gainsborough is thought to have executed this portrait of the heiress in Bath in 1766, while he was honing his skills as a society painter. The piece is the star lot of Bonhams's Old Master Paintings sale on July 4th, sporting a relatively modest presale estimate of £20,000-30,000 ($31,000-47,000).

"It is incredibly rare for an unknown painting by such a well-documented artist as Gainsborough to emerge on the open market, and it is a truly exciting moment when a discovery like this is made," commented McKenzie.

In just five years and eight shows, the scrappy company The Amoralists has generated a deafening buzz in the New York theater world, and now they’ve harnessed that momentum to move from Downtown to just-Off-Broadway. The group of unpaid actors and off-stage friends has brought its trademark intensity and manic energy to the new setting, while broadening the world of the play — previous shows were all set within one home or hotel room — to comment on everything from gentrification and environmentalism to the Occupy movement, terrorism, and police brutality, the lot wound tightly into a riveting detective story.

Company co-founder Derek Ahonen makes knowing nods to classic film noir throughout “The Bad and the Better” (at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater through July 21), juxtaposing the small-town boredom of hero cop Detective Lang (William Apps) with his brother Venus’s (David Nash) high-stakes undercover operation. The former investigates a real estate developer’s violent takeover of a Long Island refuge and the latter infiltrates a potentially terrorism-prone Occupy cell. As connections between their respective cases emerge, each cop turns out to be not so heroic.

For all its zeitgeisty topicality, though, “The Bad and the Better” remains hilarious from start to near-finish, poking fun at the state of contemporary theater — Venus poses as a wannabe anarchist playwright who hopes joining the protesters will lend his upcoming sequel authenticity — and deploying filthy police banter. “When was the last time you smelled a dead body?” a younger detective (Ugo Chukwu) asks Lang. “The last time my face was between your wife’s thighs.” The often-crude laughs are matched by the brutality of the play’s dramatic scenes, particularly as secret motives are revealed and the body count reaches “Departed”-caliber levels. Seemingly every character inhabited by the cast of 26 — an unheard-of figure in the perpetually belt-tightening world of non-profit theater — is riddled with conflicting allegiances, dark secrets, and regrets.

Ahonen and director Daniel Aukin keep all these strands moving in an exquisite bit of stage choreography, with different stories and subplots unfolding in overlapping scenes on Alfred Schatz’s elaborately cluttered set. The resulting arc invokes a kind of nostalgia for the less muddled morality of a romanticized past — signified in the familiar character types of countless cop dramas — before systematically complicating and darkening every motive. In a world gone so bad, Ahonen implies, one can only aspire to be better, and the Amoralists’ latest show is certainly their most better to date.

Read more culture coverage on Spotlight

HONG KONG — Earlier this month the legendary Swiss collector Uli Sigg announced he was donating the majority of his collection to Hong Kong’s planned contemporary art museum M+. The 1,463 artworks he has gifted to Hong Kong's West Kowloon Cultural District have been conservatively valued at $163 million.

This is reportedly the largest art donation ever made to a single museum. The Sigg collection is considered the world's most important and comprehensive private collection of contemporary Chinese art, with works spanning from the early 1990s to today, and including many important pieces by prominent Chinese artists including Zhang Xiaogang, Zeng Fanzhi, Ai Weiwei, Xu Bing, Liu Wei, Zhang Peili, Yue Mingjun, Yu Youhan, and Ding Yi, as well as works by Hong Kong artists Lee Kit and Pak Sheung Chuen, which were added to the collection recently.

It is yet to be announced when the collection will make its public debut, but M+ has indicated that part of the collection will be shown in a Hong Kong venue before the museum officially opens in 2017.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from the M+ Sigg Collection.

This story also appears on ARTINFO Hong Kong.

Summer in the art world is a relaxed affair — galleries close early, publications slow down, and tourist-filled museums tend to scare away the professionals. A lively annual tradition, however, is summer group show, which is often an opportunity for younger artists to get exposure and younger curators to get practice. Though the art industry is known to reward the experience that comes with age, summer is an opportunity for young upstarts to experiment, and perhaps make a lasting impression.

With this trend in mind, ARTINFO compiled a list of 30 influential art professionals who are 30 years of age or younger. They range in age from 21 to 30 and include patrons, critics, dealers, and curators. (We decided to exclude artists, who would make this an entirely different kind of list.)

Our selection — in no way exhaustive — aims to capture what interesting young art-inclined professionals are up to today. Some of them are already known worldwide, while others remain just under the radar. But by next summer, we wager, you’ll know them all.

To see our illustrated list of influential art worlders who are 30 or under, click on the slide show.

– Dance Comes to MOCA: Choreographer Benjamin Millepied (aka Mr. Natalie Portman) is teaming up with artist Mark Bradford to create a site-specific dance performance in the galleries of L.A. MOCA inspired by the exhibition "The Painting Factory: Abstraction after Warhol." Millepied will dance on top of Rudolf Stingel's "Untitled," a white wall-to-wall carpet. [LAT]

– Martin Creed "Hurt" by Critics: The conceptual artist, who is inviting everyone in Britain to sound a bell on the opening morning of the London Olympics, is "hurt" that a U.K. bell-ringers' group that opposes the initiative. "If they said it was silly, I might not get so upset because silliness is not necessarily a bad thing," Creed says. "But if someone just said it was rubbish...I do get very hurt." [Bloomberg]

– Shareholders Plot Artnet Takeover: After the art services Web site abruptly announced that it would cease publication of its venerated online magazine yesterday — following the departure of CEO and founder Hans Neuendorf, to be replaced by his son Jacob Pabst — two shareholders said they were considering taking over the company next month. Sergey Skaterschikov, a boardmember of Luxembourg's Redline Capital Management SA who also helms Skate's art market research (which has had it in for Artnet Magazine for a while), said Redline was considering acquiring Artnet. Neuendorf said he had no plans to part with the 26 percent share of the company he owns. [Bloomberg]

– Kunsthalle Wien Gets a New Director: Curator Nicolaus Schafhausen has been appointed artistic director of Kunsthalle Wien in Vienna. Schafhausen previously served as the director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, and curated the German pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2009. [AiA]

– Art Dealer "Too Depressed" to Go to Court: Anita Archer, the Melbourne art dealer accused of hoodwinking a millionaire investment banker into buying a fake Brett Whiteley painting for $2.5 million, claimed she is "too depressed" to defend herself in court against claims of negligence. The hearing has now been delayed until August. Lawyers, we hope you're taking notes. [Daily Telegraph]

– Fought-Over Pollock "Mural" Begins Conservation: The massive Jackson Pollock painting "Mural" (1943), which state Republicans have tried to convince the University of Iowa to sell, is headed to the coast next month for a major year-and-a-half conservation project at the Getty Center. The project, which Getty president James Cuno says had nothing to do with the political dispute, aims to address sagging at the center of the weighty 8-by-20-foot oil painting. [LAT]

– Boston Tea Party Museum Reopening: Though it closed following a fire 11 years ago, the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum, an institution steeped (so to speak) in history, will reopen this week. The museum — in no way affiliated with the reactionary political movement known as the Tea Party — recently received a $28-million loan from the State of Massachusetts that has allowed it to expand and modernize its offerings, which include one of the only two remaining tea chests thrown overboard by colonists in 1773. [LAT]

– U.K. Museum Goes Online-Only: It's a popular strategy for extending the life of a print publication, but can a museum survive by going online? Since shutting down its galleries last summer, Middlesex University's Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture has been building its new home — in the form of an extensively catalogued and tagged new Web site. [Guardian]

– Top-Level Collectors Get Sad Sometimes: Some of the most powerful buyers in the art world are wracked with anxiety, regret, and fear while they browse the aisles of major art fairs, feeling worthless when major galleries opt for a different client. "You suspect it’s not true,” says a collector, “but the defeat is less humiliating if you think your opponent is a major institution like MoMA." [Economist]

– RIP Paula Hays Harper, Feminist Art Historian: Harper, who was one of the first art historians to bring a feminist perspective to the study of painting and sculpture, worked at the University of Miami and the California Institute of the Arts until her death at 81. An assignment she gave to a group of female artists including Judy Chicago and Mariam Schapiro in the early 1970s eventually became the celebrated exhibition "Womanhouse." [NYT]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Promotional video for Marin Creed's "Work No. 1197: All the bells in a country rung as quickly and as loudly as possible for three minutes," commissioned for the London Olympics

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

Can the Bronx's Radiant Via Verde Housing Complex Revive Socially Conscious Architecture?

L.A. Authorities Move to Treat Tagging Crews as Gangs, and Civil Liberties Advocates Cry Foul

Louis Vuitton to Open Seven Pop-Up Shops Devoted to Its Capsule Collection With Artist Yayoi Kusama

Italian Experts Begin Reconstruction of Pakistan's Jahanabad Buddha, Damaged by Taliban Explosives

Pop-Up Shipping Container Show Delivers a Cargo of Hard-Hitting Photography to the Brooklyn Waterfront

"It Is Ultimately About Freedom": Barry McGee on His Prism Gallery Show and Berkeley Museum Retrospective

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

The art world lost a valued voice yesterday when Artnet announced it was shutting down its magazine after 16 years on the Web. Among the first online-only art publications, Artnet became known for its wry tone, its crisp art-market commentary, and its opinionated writers.

News of the magazine's demise comes at a moment of turbulent uncertainty for the company. Yesterday, Artnet also announced that CEO Hans Neuendorf would step down from his post at the Web site he founded — which includes an art market database, gallery listings, and online auctions — and transfer control to his son, Jacob Pabst. But two Russian shareholders are jockeying to wrest control of the company. Meanwhile, in a further effort to downsize, Artnet reported it would shut down its Paris office.

While the future of Artnet remains uncertain for now, the impact of the loss of its well-known publication from the already small circle of art publications has reverberated throughout the art world. ARTINFO has gathered the reactions of a variety of art writers and professionals — some who have written for the magazine, others who were simply devoted readers. Their words about what Artnet Magazine meant to them are digested below. (Stay tuned for more reactions to come.)

Rachel Corbett, news editor at Artnet (in an email to ARTINFO):

There's much to miss about Artnet Magazine, where Walter Robinson hired me just over a year ago with an email that read, "let's do it -- I mean, do you want to come work here?" It was my first taste of Walter's famously succinct, brass-tacks style, and it's among the things I'll miss the most -- particularly the daily emails filled with single-sentence nuggets of wit or wisdom (or just gossip). Except those few times when, after turning in a story, he'd click back with his favorite one-word reply: "ugh."

David Ebony, managing editor of Art in America and former Artnet columnist (in an email to ARTINFO):

Predating Artnet, and years before Art in America’s website was launched, I was invited to write a column for an early online art magazine, now defunct, called Art Icons.  I mentioned the idea to Walter Robinson, my Art in America colleague at the time, who suggested I pick 10 New York art shows a week to comment on briefly, with each entry accompanied by a representative image. Thus, “David Ebony’s Top 10” was born. Robinson was supportive of the site and my work,  so after Art Icons went under and he had launched Artnet magazine, he invited me to bring the column there. The project got more and more exciting as the technology evolved to make it faster to download complex, illustrated pages. 

Some might remember how in the early days the Internet wasn’t conducive to art coverage since it took forever to download any article with images. Robinson quickly boosted the profile of Artnet, and it was soon the source of considerable art-world buzz. He also nurtured a kind of online writers’ colony. From 1996-2001, I published on Artnet hundreds of “Top 10” exhibition reviews, plus a number of features and other stories. Robinson had a light touch as an editor, at least with my writing, and a lighthearted approach to the material, which was inspiring to me and made the effort a whole lot of fun. It was consistently rewarding, too — sometimes in unexpected ways. I still get responses to those Top 10 pieces since they appear in the Artnet archives. I often asked Robinson why Artnet didn’t periodically issue a hardcopy version of the magazine. Now someone needs to do this as a way to the mark the magazine’s unique contribution to the scene.

Frederick Janka, associate director of SculptureCenter (in an email to ARTINFO):

My first reaction was just utter shock, like are you for real!? Artnet was an institution with an unmatched depth and breadth of artworld coverage. I had come to value not only the editorial hand, but also their awesome twitter feed. The art world greatly needs more critical platforms and voices not less.

Laura K. Jones, Artnet's U.K. correspondent (in an email to ARTINFO):

The very encouraging and unique editor Walter Robinson was always accommodating of my style, prone as it is to tangenital rants, for example. He once verbally patted me on the back by describing me as gnomic, but then in the same breath called me "a bit emo." Swings and roundabouts.

Reverend Jen Miller, former Artnet columnist (in an email to ARTINFO):

I had no idea they were folding! That is a tragedy. Well, all I can say about them is that Walter was willing to take a chance and give me a column when no one else was. I think because they had a sense of humor, something that is often lacking in both the literary and the art scene. I'd been working at nerve as a sex columnist for 2 years beforehand and when I lost that job, I looked for writing work that didn't involve taking my clothes off. I'd met Walter Robinson while working at various art galleries throughout the years and remembered that he'd bought a drawing of mine once. (I also spent a lot of time working in galleries trolling Artnet.) I asked him if he'd be interested in a column that came from the perspective of an artist, not a critic and he went for it. Really sad about this because they gave me a great opportunity to write, which is the one thing I wanna do when I wake up in the morning. I'm currently working on a book based around some of the crazier columns I wrote for them. They will be missed.

Lindsay Pollock, editor-in-chief of Art in America (in an email to ARTINFO):

Artnet magazine was a pioneer of on-line arts coverage and I am sorry to see it go. Beyond all that website contributed to the art world conversation, Walter Robinson played a key role supporting and cultivating many new writers. He gave me one of my earliest assignments and for that I’m personally grateful.

William Powhida, artist and former Artnet contributor (in an email to ARTINFO):

While I've had a colorful relationship with Artnet over the years hearing the news of the sudden, unceremonious closure of the online magazine (never call it a blog) was a little like hearing that a difficult uncle had passed away without warning. In this case, two cranky uncles who were not afraid to offer an opinion on anything. Despite receiving a death threat from Walter and a resoundingly negative review from Charlie (you got "Finched!") I enjoyed being able to disagree with their distinctive voices. Walter also gave me one of my first opportunities to publish criticism and provided a platform for many other critics including Ben Davis.

It's a bitter irony that a magazine so concerned with the price of art would be shuttered by failing to meet a bottom line. Without the human voices of critics, Artnet will finally realize its namesake, a website to figure out how much you can net on art. Fuck that. I'm sure Walter and Charlie will land somewhere, but, well, watch out below. I'm sure I'll see them on the low roads.

Magda Sawon, co-founder and co-director of Postmasters (in an email to ARTINFO):

Damn. It is terribly hard to remove this well worn bookmark from my browser. I must have read 99 percent of all content of the magazine over the 16 years. (I'm old, you see) Sadly, we have arrived at a moment when almost every shred of so called cultural production is monetized,  hijacked by investors and business models. Hats off  to Artnet Magazine — you will be missed AND you will be remembered. Walter has brought in the the substance and the idiosyncrasy,  a mix of brilliant, informative, and downright crazy stuff.  Personally, I am grateful that he had the nerve to give Steve Mumford "press accreditation" to enter Iraq and subsequently Afghanistan to document the wars. He published  "Baghdad Journal" entries — the illustrated dispatches from the front; raw, powerful narrative that was roundly, and — shall I say — rather simplistically  rejected by the artworld's  anti-war party line. Here is to hope that all good people that delivered this magazine — Walter, Emily, Rachel — will resurface soon. I am waiting for my new bookmark.

Phyllis Tuchman, Artnet contributor (in an email to ARTINFO):

I loved writing for Walter Robinson’s artnet. There were no restrictions. No word count, no content issues, no deadlines. There was minimal editing, too. Sometimes I felt like a tightrope walker without a net. It was glorious. I don’t know any other art magazine that would have given me so much free rein to delve into a variety of Impressionist topics. I will always be grateful for that opportunity. Walter was also great about images. He’d post any painting or sculpture you wanted to use in the name of public domain access. And, several on-site photographs I took — Hans Christian Andersen by Thorvaldsen, a sundial by Stirling Calder, a few others — have popped up on other websites because you could treat subjects ignored by mainstream outlets. I’m delighted at least one of my features became a classic: the guide to Sol LeWitt murals in NYC. Thank you, Walter, it was swell.

Linda Yablonsky, journalist (in an email to ARTINFO):

When Artnet first came online, I went to the site first thing every morning. It delivered hard information in a breezy, slightly cynical yet impassioned way and up-to-the-minute reviews. It had the ever-valuable database of auction sales, an invaluable research tool. What's more it had a horoscope. Most of all it had Walter Robinson, who has been on the scene since the 70s as both writer and artist. His weekly roundup reviews told it like it was in local galleries, admiring the admirable and hooting at the rest without mincing words.  Walter has been a supportive friend for a long time, but we never worked together till just last year. It was as great a pleasure to write reviews for him as it was to read him. He gave me great freedom — and a great title for my column, Close Encounters — and pushed me to take a harder look at art, and its institutions and fairs. Altogether, he gave Artnet an inimitable personality — his — that no other online art magazine could touch. It's been such a constant in my life that I can't quite believe it's gone. That it's a real kick in the gut, and it hurts — all of us.

Charlie Finch, Artnet columnist (from his final column):

Nothing lasts forever, but it is a shame that, at the point at which Artnet Magazine's content is more comprehensive and lucid than ever, that it will disappear. I've worked with Walter Robinson for 15 years. Everything you read about him is true, he's a gentleman, the art world loves him, he's a brilliant painter, he's the best editor of his generation, and he will land on his feet.

Joy Garnett, artist and Artnet contributor (from her blog):

It was Walter who showed me how to write with seeming ease about art, how to be accessible without dumbing-down, how to be lively without being trashy (no, really), and how to be serious without being deadly dull.

Glenn O’Brien, journalist (on Twitter):

Artnet’s dismissal of their magazine kind of makes it official. It’s all about the money now. What if the WSJ was only numbers?

Paddy Johnson, critic (from her blog post on Art Fag City):

According to a press release sent out earlier today, Artnet’s archives will be preserved. That’s important, because the magazine published a lot of clear, direct writing over the years. They were an early model for online journalism and blogging and managed large personalities with mixed success. Charlie Finch, Thomas Hoving, and Tony Fitzpatrick continually made waves in the blogosphere, for better and for worse.

Walter Robinson, Artnet editor (from an email to the Observer):

One thing I could add is that Hans Neuendorf gave me a great opportunity 16 years ago when he hired me to help launch the magazine. He pretty much gave me a free hand to develop our special vision of art writing — smart, funny and informative texts on art that had a grounding in social reality, i.e. including pictures of people, and reports on prices, this last something Hans was especially keen on. I always liked to say that you could read an art review in the NYTimes or Art in America — where I worked for 20 years before Artnet — and not even know the damn things were for sale. We liked to mix all that up in Artnet Magazine — art criticism without too much blah blah blah.

Jerry Saltz, critic (from his Vulture post):

My heart skipped a beat when I heard the news. Everything I've written since 1998 has been republished on Artnet — often with pithier titles (supplied by Robinson), always with much better and way more pictures (many taken by Robinson). For years, I wasn't paid at all by Artnet. Even though I was as almost-broke then as I almost am now, it felt fine. Once I got paid, it topped out in the low three figures. I loved every second of it.

Ed Winkleman, founder of Winkleman Gallery (from his blog):

Artnet has been, among the online art publications, the best at reflecting what the New York scene feels like from the inside looking out....My morning surfing of the arts publications won't be quite the same now.

Although it was brought to Germany to be part of an art project on the theme of global peace, a 35-ton sandstone boulder is now at the center of a growing international controversy. The Venezuelan government and the Pemon Indian tribe are claiming that the rock, which was taken to Berlin by a German artist in 1997, should be returned to its native land.

Raúl Grioni, president of the Institute of Cultural Inheritance of Venezuela in Caracas, believes that the rock is sacred and that it was stolen by the artist, Wolfgang von Schwarzenfeld, for his "Global Stone" project in Berlin's Tiergarten park, the Guardian reports. "We ask that the German government start repatriating the sacred stone, [and] our foreign affairs minister will submit an official demand in the coming weeks," Grioni said in a statement. "I don't suspect the artist of having had bad intentions, but we find the lack of response very arrogant."

With Pemon Indians protesting outside its embassy in Caracas, the German government may now be ready to begin negotiations. According to AFP, Andreas Peschke, a spokesperson for the German foreign affairs ministry, said at a news briefing that "in order to facilitate a possible handing back of the stone and at the same time protect the interests of the artist, the foreign ministry has made relevant proposals for an amicable agreement."

Some Pemon Indians maintain that according to legend, a woman considered the tribe's grandmother was turned into this boulder by an angry god after having forbidden relations with a man, the grandfather, who was also turned into a rock. They claim that the two sacred stones are inseparable and that their separation is the cause of various natural catastrophes during the last decade, including deadly mudslides and floods in 1999, according to Der Spiegel. "Our grandfather has spoken to our elders in dreams and asks that his wife be returned," Melchor Flores, an activist for Indian property rights, told the Guardian. "He can't live without her."

According to Reuters, the 79-year-old artist maintains that he removed the rock from Canaima National Park with the authorization of former Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera and that he has documents that prove it. The artist also rejects the idea that the rock has any sacred value. "This project is self-funded and is not driven by commercial interests," Von Schwarzenfeld told the Guardian. "But it has suited some people to say that an imperialistic white German artist stole it and won't give it back." According to the AP, the artist believes that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez has created the controversy in order to win support from the Pemon Indians before elections in October, and Bruno Illius, an ethnologist who studies the tribe, expressed the same opinion to the Guardian.

This article appears on ARTINFO France.

In 2002 Kathy Grayson entered Jeffrey Deitch’s now-shuttered Deitch Projects armed with a Dartmouth degree in art history and studio art to ask the gallerist for a job. According to Deitch, he knew immediately that Grayson had that “it” factor. “She had the instinct, the ability to live the art,” he told Theme Magazine in 2010.

Grayson was manning the gallery’s reception desk when she curated a group show called “Dirt Wizards” at Bushwick’s Brooklyn Fire Proof. People noticed, namely Deitch and New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, who called the show “ambitious.” Deitch eventually took Grayson off the reception desk and made her co-director, where she continued to immerse herself in the art world through a network that included the late artist Dash Snow and man-about-downtown Aaron Bondaroff. She produced memorable shows like 2007’s “Nest,” where Snow, Dan Colen, and 30 volunteers shredded telephone books over three debaucherous days to recreate their infamous “Hamster’s Nests” — a byproduct of drug-filled nights of partying in hotel rooms, where they decimated any paper they could find — in the Deitch Projects space.

Deitch eventually signed on to head MOCA in Los Angeles and shuttered his New York gallery spaces, handing off his emerging artist roster to Grayson, who had decided it was time to open her own operation. Now located on the Bowery, Grayson’s the Hole is finding its footing in the current gallery landscape. If it’s any indication of the gallery’s progress, the June 7 opening of its latest exhibitions, “Portrait of a Generation” and “Andrépolis,” managed to stir up a crowd that flowed out the door.

But it’s not just Grayson’s eye for burgeoning talent and her anything-goes attitude that caught our attention. Her flowing hair that’s often dyed in My Little Pony shades of turquoise and pink, and personal style that combines downtown hip with gallery avant-gardism, make her ideal Tastemaker material. She told ARTINFO about her current nightspot of choice, the designers who clothe her when she has “to look fancy,” and more.

Click on the slide show to see Kathy Grayson’s Tastemaker picks.

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — This weekend, the art-world descended upon Bard’s sylvan campus in the Hudson Valley to celebrate the Center for Curatorial Studies’s 20-year anniversary. For the occasion, CCS pulled out all the stops, plying attendees with two rigorous museum shows, a series of panel discussions, a book launch, in situ performances, and generous libations of food and drink.

Arriving in medias res Saturday morning, I caught a heated panel discussion on alternative spaces. Stephan Kalmar of New York’s Artists Space and Lukasz Gorczyca of Warsaw’s Raster treated the audience to a bonafide art-administrator showdown over cultural institutions’ collusion with the market. Alex Sainsbury, director of London’s Ravens Row, fatalistically opined, “Art will die because it’s too expensive to live in the city these days…Culture is the market now.”

The conversation may have been sobering, but the crowd — which over the weekend included Liam Gillick, Sarah Morris, Gavin Brown, Adam Lindemann, and a mafia of A-list curators including Elisabeth Sussman, Paul Schimmel, and Lauren Cornell — didn’t let that harsh their elite-summer-camp mellow. Outside Bard’s Hessel Museum, performers in white tights blitzed the chatty, wine-sipping coterie with a guerilla recitation of Sophocles’ “Antigone.” Directed by Chelsea Knight and Elise Rasmussen, the piece was part of the performance-heavy exhibition “Anti-Establishment,” curator Joanna Burton’s millennial answer to Institutional Critique.

Inside, Swedish anarcha-feminist collective Yes Association, consecrated the “Hannah Arendt Smoking Area” by reading texts, pouring dirt on the floor, and devouring raw onions. A highlight was H.E.N.S’s perversely funny “Alternative Pedagogy and New Left Daycare” installation, complete with adult-sized baby bouncers, sock puppets spouting Marxist theory, and a Felix Gonzales-Torres-style pyramid of juice boxes. Next-door were Jacqueline Humphries’s neon black light paintings, which the catalogue aptly touted as “the Rothko Chapel transformed into a nightclub.”

The headliner, “From 199A to 199B: Liam Gillick,” curated by CCS director Tom Eccles, highlighted the British artist’s work during the ‘90s. “There’s this notion about how Liam Gillick is a conceptual artist,” Eccles said. “But let’s examine that. He’s not easy, but why would you want it easy?” Visitors were confronted by a gigantic German text, translated as, “So were people this dumb before television?” Under the sign of degraded intelligence, guests helped themselves to glasses of Jameson. By dint of an ingenious act of curation, the variably playful and inscrutable artworks included a tent in a paneled room inset with halogen lights set to a looped recording Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” Gillick bookended the exhibition with a dejected text piece from 1993, reading, “The significance of the structure is still dependent upon structures outside art which I am too lazy to challenge.” (“1993 was the worst year,” Gillick admitted.)

I asked the artist whether he minded being grouped under the umbrella of “relational aesthetics.” Gillick wryly replied, “The only thing worse than being associated with a group that can be shutdown, is not having ever been related to something. I also emerged in Britain in the ‘80’s, so I get two crappy groups.” After dinner and an avant-garde dance show, the crowd congregated at Olafur Eliasson’s island installation “Parliament of Reality” where the festivities carried on into the night.  Say what you will, relational aesthetics knows how to party. 

Anyone annoyed at the uptick in melodrama during the second series of “Downton Abbey” better get ready for a lot more of the same, at least if the first footage from the upcoming season is anything to go by. The addition of a new character, Martha Levinson — Lady Cora’s mother, played by Shirely MacLaine — doesn’t look like it’s going to calm things down around the Grantham estate one bit. The clip, which premiered during the 40th AFI Life Achievement Award: A Tribute to Shirley MacLaine, is delight for any fan of the Julian Fellowes’s period piece drama. It shows MacLaine and Maggie Smith’s first interaction, in what’s most likely years, and things get a little testy. (Fast forward to the 0:45 second mark to get to the good stuff.)

As enjoyable as it has been to watch Smith’s Dowager Countess verbally eviscerate anyone who annoys her over the last couple seasons, the idea of her finally meeting her match, and hopefully pushing her insult game to a new level, is exciting. Note to Mr. Fellowes: As much as we’d like to see what happens with the rest of the Crawley clan, we’d totally be okay with an entire season of MacLaine and Smith throwing sassy barbs at one another. The only problem: This makes waiting for the next season to start airing in 2013 that much harder.

It’s been just a year and a half since Carine Roitfeld left her position as the editor-in-chief of French Vogue, but with her freelance life as busy as it is, it seems like a lot longer.

First there was a rumored collaboration with Tom Ford. Then a campaign for Chanel, a gig designing the windows for Barneys (shot by Mario Sorrenti), her Elizabeth Taylor-themed issue of V (shot by Mario Testino), her stint modeling couture for W, and a raucous Fashion Week party at Westway, a former strip club on the west side of Manhattan, where she performed a rendition of “You’re So Vain.”

All of this is a preamble to her next editorship — this time, of a magazine that bears her name on the top of the cover, not just the top of the masthead. CR Fashion Book is set to launch in September, but the Cut revealed today that a preview insert will appear in the July issue of V magazine. It’s being called “Issue 0.”

We already have a decent idea of what Roitfeld’s Fashion Book will feature, as she's been spilling careful teases of the magazine’s content over the last year. The big scoop came when WWD obtained what were called "mock-ups" of the magazine, along with an interview with the editor. But those pages were marked with the “Issue 0” stamp — could this be the same content that will be stuffed into next month's V? (Fashion Media Group LLC, the New York-based company that owns Visionaire, V, and V Man, is the publisher behind CR.)

The Cut also has a behind-the-scenes video of the “Issue 0” shoot. It’s a '60s-tinged black-and-white preview that features dueling mirrors, split-screens, platinum blond wigs, and a soundtrack that plays over Roitfeld’s conversation.

And it’s certainly not the last footage we’ll see from a Carine Roitfeld photo shoot. Fabien Constant is filming a documentary about the fashion icon called “Mademoiselle C.” It will chronicle her move to styling high-profile campaigns after leaving Vogue, and will continue during her return to magazines.

That documentary will also show the world Roitfeld’s first real transition to a full-time job in New York City — the offices for CR are located in the Standard East Village, an apparently more “mellow” outpost of the boom-booming hotel line. It’s located in Astor Place, so if we could recommend a nice place for a drink after you close, Mlle. C., try McSorley’s.

Alexander McQueen. Jenny Packham. Erdem. The labels worn by the Duchess of Cambridge consists of a list of designers most women lust after — hefty price tags aside. Let’s not forget that Kate Middleton also favors mainstream brands like Zara, Reiss, and Topshop. One would assume that designers would send endless boxes of clothing to Kensington Palace (and they do!), thanks to the sales spikes she causes once photographed in an item. But the Duchess refuses to accept free garments.

So who foots the bill for Kate’s enviable wardrobe? Her father-in-law, Prince Charles, who will publicly reveal his accounts for the first time since Kate joined the British Royal Family. The Daily Mail estimates that the Duchess’s wardrobe so far this year could cost up to £35,000 ($54,593).  

Prince Charles has offered to pay for any work-related dresses the Duchess wears to her public appearances through his official household account, funded by the Duchy of Cornwall, a private estate of land and property holdings.

The royal family isn’t hurting for money, of course, but Kate’s wardrobe bill is only $14,000 less than the annual salary of £44,000 ($68,631) that her husband, Prince William, makes as an RAF helicopter pilot.

The Duchess’s fashion choices have made her a sartorial darling and she knows how to mix couture, high-end designers, and mass retail brands. She also makes an effort to wear items more than once, as she did with a pink $2,000 Emilia Wickstead dress she wore in May. $54,593 may sound like a lot, but she is a princess after all — and she does have to attend a lot of black-tie affairs.

But most mortals don’t have make appearances at black-tie events regularly and have to support themselves on a salary that equals Duchess Kate’s clothing allowance, if not less. 

Still, in order to keep things in perspective, ARTINFO looked at a May 2011 survey of national occupational employment and wage estimates by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and selected 10 professions where the average annual salary amounts to approximately $54,593. Here’s what we found:

Aircraft Cargo Handling Supervisor - $50,500

Real Estate Sales Agents - $51,170

Postal Service Mail Carriers - $51,390

Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters - $51,830

Kindergarten School Teachers, Excluding Special Education - $52,350

Food Service Managers - $52,620

Fine Artists, Including Painters, Illustrators, and Sculptors - $53,400

Court Reporters - $53,710

Social Workers - $54,220

Police and Sheriff’s Patrol Officers - $56,260

LONDON — The contemporary season kicked off solidly at Sotheby’s tonight, thanks in part to financial guarantees for the top lots. It total, the sale brought in £69,307,050 ($108,028,899), comfortably midway between pre-sale expectations of £57.5-82.5 ($89.9-128.5 million).

Only ten of the 79 lots failed to find buyers, making for a trim buy-in rate of 13 percent by lot and 7 percent by value. Twenty-one of the 69 lots that sold made over a million pounds, and of those, 26 hurdled the million dollar mark. Four sold for more than four million pounds and four exceeded five million dollars.

One artist record was set — and it was a doozy, with Glenn Brown’s large-scaled, Surrealist-inspired “The Tragic Conversion of Salvador Dali (After John Martin)” (1988) soaring to £5,193,250 ($8,094,719) (est. £2.2-2.8 million). The painting was a kind of giant carbon copy of the famed John Martin work, “The Great Day of his Wrath” (1851-53), which resides at Tate Britain.

At least four telephone bidders chased the widely exhibited painting, and it finally sold to a Russian-speaking Sotheby’s client services person for a hammer price, before fees were added, of £4.6 million. Remarkably bagging the second highest price of the evening, it crushed the previous mark set at New York's Phillips de Pury in May 2011, when “Filth” (2004) made $2,546,500.

The Brown painting was one of six lots backed by so-called irrevocable bids, slightly better known as third-party guarantees. Apart from the Brown action, that type of high-end insurance policy for sellers stripped the room of any drama. “When irrevocable bids come into play,” theorized Oliver Barker, Sotheby’s senior international specialist, “sometimes the estimates are rather aggressive and you’re managing the vendor’s [seller’s] heightened expectations. It takes out the auction magic in a way.”

That seemed the case, as other guarenteed paintings, especially Francis Bacon’s cover lot — the swirly and tough “Study for Self-Portrait” (1980) — sold on a single bid below the low estimate to a telephone bidder for £4,521,250 ($7,047,272) (est. £5-7 million). It last sold at auction at Sotheby’s New York in May 2001 from the collection of Stanley Seeger for $1,765,750. The dissapointing result “was a question of a slightly over-aggressive estimate,” Barker said after the sale.

Another example was Gerhard Richter’s guaranteed, mostly black and white “Untitled  (687-4)” abstraction from 1989, which sold to the telephone for £2,841,25 ($4,428,656) (est. £2.5-3.5 million). “Kind,” another version, close in scale and identical date wise, sold at Sotheby’s London in February for £3,065,250 ($4,817,960) (est £2-3 million). Perhaps the recent Richter frenzy is toning down a bit.

A photo-realist styled Richter, “Jerusalem” (1995), based on a photograph taken by the artist in 1994, sold to another telephone bidder for £4,241,250 ($6,610,836) (est. £3-5 million).

In one of the few contested shootouts for property coming in without guarantees, Jean Dubuffet’s lively “Cherubin Oisistiti,” a gouache on paper from 1962, attracted at least four bidders and ultimately sold to Alfred Taubman, the former chairman and major stockholder of Sotheby’s, for £993,250 ($1,548,179) (est. £300-400,000).

Most of the slow but steady action at this sale went to anonymous telephone bidders, though Michelangelo Pistoletto’s painted tissue on polished stainless steel, “Lei E Lui Con Gli Occhiali Neri” (1970) sold to London dealer Daniela Luxembourg of Luxembourg & Dayan for £481,250 ($750,124) (est. £350-450,000). The seller acquired the work in 1971, making this example a poster child for fresh-to-market offerings.

As evidenced during last week’s series of Impressionist and Modern sales, top-quality works performed well. That was the clear case with David Hockney’s stunning, small-scaled, 24-inch square “Swimming Pool” (1965), which sold to another anonymous telephone for £2,505,250 ($3,904,933) (est. £1.5-2 million). That work was last sold at Sotheby’s London back in October 2007, for £1,196,500.

It was difficult to tell whether the long, even seemingly endless Spring/Summer marathon of art fairs and auctions had an impact on the semi-comatose room, as occasional blasts of bids stirred the air. Martin Kippenberger’s clever play on words and image “Terrorist/Touristin,” an oil on canvas in two parts from 1997, sold to a telephone bidder for a sizzling £1,015,650 ($1,583,094) (est. £500-700,000), even though the bidding increments were painfully slow at £20,000 per bid. It last sold at Phillips de Pury in New York in November 2004 for $612,800.

In the first of many Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings to be offered at auction this week, “Saxaphone,” a late 66-by-60-inch acrylic on canvas from 1986, dense in text including equations, sold to the telephone for £2,729,250 ($4,254,082) (est. £2-3 million). It last sold at Sotheby’s New York in November 1997 for $244,500, a rather impressive return for a buy-and-hold consignor.

A pricier model, Basquiat’s ferocious and convincingly animated “Warrior” (1982), another of the third-party backed works, sold on what appeared to be just two bids from the telephone, for the top lot price of £5,585,250 ($8,705,729) (est. £5-7 million). This Basquiat also has a track record at auction, last selling for £2.8 million at Sotheby’s London in June 2007, exactly five years ago.

Excitement was at a premium as a group of six Frank Auerbach portraits and a lone Lucian Freud print from the charitable estate of Ruth and Joseph Bromberg, sold to benefit the Prints and Drawings Department of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, tallied £2.5 million ($4 million) against a low estimate of £1.8 million. “Ruth Bromberg Seated” (2007-08) sold to Gilbert Lloyd of London’s Marlborough Gallery — the artist’s long-time representative — for £193,250 ($301,219) (est. £150-200,000).

“It was a pretty patchy and boring evening,” said Paris dealer Thaddaeus Ropac , who underbid Andy Warhol’s gruesome “Ambulance Disaster” screen print on paper from 1963, which ultimately made £409,250 ($637,898) (est.£300-500,000). “But it was a good result overall. I’m very happy I got my Beuys so it was worth sitting through it.”

Ropac, who is opening a Beuys show at his new, second venue Paris gallery in October, nailed Joseph Beuys’s “Tisch mit Aggregat,” a sculpture ensemble comprised of a wood table, accumulator, wire cables, and bronze from 1958-1985, from an edition of four for £601,250 ($937,168) (est. £500-700,000).

The evening action resumes Wednesday at Christie’s.

To see images of the highlights from Sotheby's London's contemporary sale, click on the slide show.