— Swimming at Berlin’s Museum Island: Under a longstanding proposal titled “The Flussbad,” a section of the water surrounding Berlin’s Museum Island would become a public swimming area — and now, thanks to environmentalists and Green Party members interested in cleaning the polluted canal, that proposal is seeing some serious support. (This summer, certain brave souls even swam through the toxic water as a show of solidarity.) “Urban development and politics here should be like music in the city, where you have both the Philharmonic and nightclubs like Berghain,” said Gottfried Ludewig, a Berlin City Parliament member from the center-right Christian Democratic Union. “We should have Museum Island and also the Flussbad to show we’re still a city where crazy ideas can become reality.” [NYT]
— DNA-Based Art Authentication Developed: A new authentication system has been developed that allows artists to infuse their work with bits of lab-created DNA. The Global Center for Innovation at the State University of New York at Albany initiated the project after receiving $2 million in funding from ARIS Title Corporation, an insurance company specializing in art. “We wanted a marker that was very hard to locate and not prone to environmental issues or tampering,” Robert J. Jones, president of SUNY Albany, said, referring to the synthetic DNA. Some artists are embracing the technology that would thwart plagiarists. Eric Fischl, for one, whose work was copied and auctioned in a London sale 20 years ago for six-figures, calls the method “a no-brainer.” With three-dozen artists, foundations, and archives already signed on, the DNA tags could be implemented as soon as next year. [NYT]
— Study of Black and Latino Arts Orgs Offers “Wake-Up Call”: A new study from the University of Maryland’s DeVos Institute of Arts Management reports that black and Latino arts organizations are drastically underfunded — and moreover, proposes a harsh solution which suggests that funders back “a limited number of organizations,” giving “larger grants to a smaller cohort that can manage themselves effectively, make the best art, and have the biggest impact on their communities.” As supporting evidence, the report highlights a statistic that 5 percent of funding for the black and Latino groups profiled came from individual donors, while mainstream arts organizations report around 60 percent. “It’s a wake-up call,” said Michael Kaiser, former Kennedy Center president and current DeVos head. “It’s not politically easy or palatable, but it’s a potential solution that does need to be considered. I am concerned that so many organizations are just holding on, with so little resources that they can’t create the size and quality of work that draws more donors and audiences. They get sicker and sicker. If there can’t be more funding, some funders will have to make choices.” [LAT]
— Three European Galleries Merge for Manhattan Pop-Up: Through the end of October, Paris’s Galerie Brimo de Laroussilhe and Galerie Kugel, and Rome’s Galleria Alessandra Di Castro have joined forces in the Academy Mansion on the Upper East Side. “The whole idea is that we’re three dealer friends and we all have different visions and different specialties and we decided to merge them,” said Alexis Kugel. [WSJ]
— MoMA’s Monthly Wikipedia Edit-a-thons: MoMA is now hosting monthly Wikipedia edit-a-thons, seven-hour events in which volunteers gather, eat a free lunch, and improve the quality of pages on underrepresented art topics. [WSJ]
— Mexico’s Missing 43 Remembered: People across Mexico commemorated the one-year anniversary of the day that saw 43 students from the teachers college in Ayotzinapa go missing. Many responded to the disappearances with installations, murals, banners, and costumes. [LAT]
— Robin Pogrebin is the new art and auction reporter for the New York Times, following Carol Vogel’s resignation last December. [Artnet]
— The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has been gifted $2 million from a trustee, the largest donation from an individual it has ever received. [WP]
— Paul Reed, a painter of the Washington Color School, has died at 96; John Berg, art director for Columbia Records who designed iconic album covers for Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, has died at 83. [NYT, WP]
