– Two-Year Jail Sentence for Tate Rothko Vandal: Vladimir Umanets (a.k.a. Wlodzimierz Umaniec), the outspoken Yellowist who defaced Mark Rothko's "Black on Maroon" (1961) at the Tate Modern on October 7, has been sentenced to two years in prison for the act of vandalism, which will require conservation work costing up to £200,000 ($322,500) to the prized painting, recently estimated by Sotheby's to be worth between £5-£9 million ($8-$14.5 million). Judge Robert Chapple said it was "wholly and utterly unacceptable" to promote Yellowism's philosophy that all creative production is equal by damaging a work of art. [Telegraph]
– No More Visas for Young Artists in England: A new U.K. immigration law excludes young artists from obtaining visas to work in the country. A successful applicant must be "an established, world-class artist." (By contrast, "promising" young scientists are welcome to apply.) "[I] couldn’t think of anything dafter," says Jude Kelly, artistic director of London's Southbank Center. France and Germany, she notes, "are much more welcoming to young artists from emerging countries like Brazil, India, and South Korea." [TAN]
– DMA May Soon Own "Salvator Mundi": The Dallas Museum of Art has made an offer to buy Leonardo da Vinci's rediscovered painting "Christ as Salvator Mundi" (c. 1499). The museum must now wait to see if its offer — known only to be in the "tens of millions" — is acceptable to its unidentified dealers. If the DMA is successful, it will become one of only two institutions in the United States (along with the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.) to have a work by the Renaissance master on public view. [D Magazine]
– Aspen Art Museum Gets $2.5 Million: Collectors Bob and Nancy Magoon are donating $2.5 million to the Colorado contemporary art institution to endow its CEO and director position in perpetuity. Their gift follows an earlier $500,000 donation made toward the capital campaign to construct the new, Shigeru Ban-designed Aspen Art Museum facility currently underway in downtown Aspen. [Press Release]
– Pro-Labor Mural Removed for Good: Maine's Republican governor Paul LePage was within his rights to remove a large, pro-organized-labor mural from Maine's Department of Labor building, a federal appeals court ruled. Five Mainers, including three artists, filed a lawsuit claiming the removal violated the painter's First Amendment rights. The court concluded that the governor's actions qualified as "government speech." The mural featured a 1937 shoe strike in Maine. [AP]
– Hammer Acquires Suzanne Lacy's Rape Map: The Hammer Museum has bought artist and activist Suzanne Lacy's 1977 work "Three Weeks in May," on which she collaborated with Leslie Labowitz and which mapped Southern California rape cases. Last year it was included in L.A. MOCA's "Under the Big Black Sun." At the time, then-chief curator Paul Schimmel had hoped to acquire the piece for his institution, but did not have sufficient funds. [LAT]
– Tate Launches Youth Program in Response to Riots: Seeking to remedy the situation that helped spark last year's riots in the U.K., Tate has begun a four-year, £5-million ($8-million) drive to connect with 80,000 people between the ages of 15 and 25 through a series of festivals and artist workshops. "It’s a program that recognizes we still have a very long way to go in terms of the provision of arts in this country particularly to certain kinds of communities," said director Nicholas Serota, who hopes the project will “spark a long-term transformation in the way young people engage with art." [Independent]
– Artist's L.A. Light Rail Bridge Rolled Out: The new extension of Los Angeles's Metro Gold Line, a concrete bridge straddling the I-210 freeway and designed by Minnesota-based artist Andrew Leicester, will open to the public this week, though motorists have been passing under the completed infrastructure-as-public artwork project for weeks. The 600-foot-long structure, whose patterns and details alternately evoke a woven basket and the scales of a snake, took two years and $690 million to build. [LAT]
– A Tie for Russia's Top Art Prize: For the first time in its five-year history, the annual Kandinsky Prize, Russia's equivalent of the Turner Prize, has two winners: artist collective AES+F and the sculptor Grisha Bruskin. They split the €40,000 ($52,300) prize money, while Dimitri Venkov receives the €10,000 ($13,000) under-35 prize. [BBC]
– The Problem With Collecting Khmer Antiquities: Sotheby's ongoing legal fight with federal prosecutors over a Khmer statue that may have been looted from a temple in Cambodia has cast a shadow over a well-known collector in the field. Douglas A.J. Latchford, a bodybuilding impresario and expert in Khmer works of art, is depicted in court documents as a scheming collector who lied to import stolen objects into the country. "This is somebody's imagination working overtime," he countered. [NYT]
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