— Picasso Museum President Fired: Anne Baldessari, the president of Paris’s Picasso Museum, has been fired by culture minister Aurélie Filippetti after five long years of delayed renovations at the museum. The ministry attributed Baldessari’s dismissal to a “gravely deteriorating work environment” at the museum that has led to the resignation of many high-ranking employees. Civil servant Jérôme Bouët will serve as a temporary president. [NYT]
— Amtrak Sponsors Massive Murals: In a new public art project sponsored by Amtrak and the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, artist Katharina Grosse is painting seven sites along the train’s corridor north of Philly with giant neon patterns. The painted sites, which include warehouses, bridges, and trees, are meant to be experienced from inside a moving train. “It’s a very different understanding of where a painting sits,” Grosse said. “You just get a glimpse of something rather large, it’s just touching the warehouse there on that little edge. The painting itself is far bigger, it’s maybe in the sky but there is no surface where it can land.” [WSJ]
— Collector Plans to Open Ai Weiwei Museum: Fund manager Christopher Tsai wants to open an Ai Weiwei museum in New York to house his ongoing collection, which currently includes 40 works by the artist from the 1970s to the present. The collection he shares with his husband includes Ai’s “Map of China” (2006) and an edition of the “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Head: Gold” (2010), among others. [TAN]
— Holland Cotter Reviews 9/11 Museum: “The first thing to say about it, and maybe the last, is that it’s emotionally overwhelming, particularly, I expect, for New Yorkers who were in the city on that apocalyptic September day and the paranoia-fraught weeks that followed, but almost as certainly for the estimated two billion people around the globe who followed the horror unfolding on television, radio and the Internet,” writes Holland Cotter in his review of the soon-to-open September 11 Memorial Museum. [NYT]
— Cleveland Claims Cambodian Statue Wasn’t Looted: The Cleveland Museum of Art claims to have research to prove that its Cambodian statue of Hanuman was not looted from Prasat Chen. [Cleveland]
— China Boasts More Top-Grossing Houses: Last year, 11 of the top 20 grossing auction houses were in China and accounted for 28.8 percent of the dollar amount of art sold in 2013. [Bloomberg]
— Katy Kline has been named interim director of the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. [Art Daily]
— Turns out recently deceased art hoarder Cornelius Gurlitt wrote a second will, but it doesn’t change much. [WSJ]
— Art Basel in Hong Kong is selling $10,000 passports to an imaginary country called Jing Bang. [Bloomberg]
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