– 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
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