– Welcome to Hirstville: Two spot paintings for formerly Young British Artist Damien Hirst were stolen from Notting Hill's Exhibitionist Gallery on Monday morning. The artworks — "Pyronin Y" (2005) and "Oleoylsarcosine" (2008) — are worth a combined £33,000 ($54,000). Meanwhile, the mega-rich artist has a scheme of his own in the works: He is planning to build a new town in North Devon near Ilfracombe that will eventually be home to a population of 3,000. The bucolic development, which will be erected on Winsham Farm — a wildlife reserve Hirst bought a decade ago for £900,000 ($1,474,000) — has been nicknamed "Hirst-on-Sea." [Guardian, London Evening Standard]
– NYPL Mounts Mandela Pop-Up Shows: The New York Public Library has mounted two pop-up exhibitions to honor Nelson Mandela’s life at the Schomburg Center for Research and Black Culture in Harlem as well as the library's main Fifth Avenue location. Antiapartheid ephemera, voting ballots from South Africa's first democratic elections, and a video from Mandela’s New York City visit in 1990 will all be on view. "He was incredibly sweet and humble," said Anthony Marx, New York Public Library's president. "He always paid more attention to the children in the room than to the grown-ups." [WSJ]
– Spiegelman on Reinhardt: “It was a revelation to find out that he was a great manipulator of words and pictures before he went over to the, um, dark side.” — Art Spiegelman, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Jewish Museum, reviews Ad Reinhardt’s show of cartoons at David Zwirner. [NYT]
– French Minister Snubs Google Cultural Project: The Google Cultural Institute inaugurated its brick-and-mortar offices — housed at Google's Paris headquarters — on Tuesday evening, but French culture minister Aurélie Filippetti canceled her plans to attend the event at the last minute, calling the initiative to make museum collections digitally accessible to a global audience "an operation that still raises a certain number of questions." [Guardian]
– Women's History Museum Considered: On Wednesday the House Administration Committee will hear arguments for building a museum devoted to women's history on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., namely from Joan Bradley Wages, CEO and president of the non-profit that has been pushing for the project for two decades. [WP]
– Southampton has approved the plan for a museum devoted to the African American Coast Guard. [AP]
– Google Open Gallery, the company’s latest art venture, allows users to create “online exhibitions.” [Google, The Next Web]
– Sotheby’s is bringing in Alfredo Gangotena, current CMO of MasterCard, to be the auction house’s new marketing chief. [Press release]
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