Arts news

• The Antarctic Biennale: a crazy idea becomes reality

  26-02-2017 22:00
  I have to declare an interest here. I am the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Antarctic Biennale and I consider this the proudest title of my career, although it has had some rocky moments since I got involved last May. The art world is a hyper-sensitive, PC and suspicious place, very far from the artistic myth of bohemian lackadaisicalness. The Russians go in for inspired improvisationlets call it the Italian style of doing thingswhich crashes into the cautious Nordic way of planning e
  
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• Asian buyers helped bolster Sotheby’s revenue in 2016, auction house reveals

  26-02-2017 22:00
  
  Despite an overall contraction in art sales last year, Sothebys CEO Tad Smith expressed confidence in the art market, the Sothebys team, and the companys expanding digital presence during an earnings call this morning covering the fourth quarter of 2016. Sothebys sold a total of $4.9b in property in 2016, down 27% from the previous year and behind Christies total of $5.4b. However, the publicly traded company reported net income of $74.1 million for 2016, compared to $43.7 million in 2015,
  
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• Ashley Bickerton gets retrospective break from Damien Hirst

  26-02-2017 22:00
  Ashley Bickerton is to get his first major retrospective in the UK thanks to his friend and long-time collector Damien Hirst. The show of work by the Bali-based US artist, which is due to open in April at Hirsts Newport Street Gallery in south London, follows numerous disappointments with other institutions. Bickerton tells us that five planned museum retrospectives have fallen through. I am too eccentric; I didnt pass muster with the boards, he says. The beautiful thing about Newport Street Ga
  
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• The facts on fruit and Worcestershire sauce | Letters

  26-02-2017 20:58
  
  George Bernard Shaw | Art of left and right | Bendy banana myth | Sales of Seville oranges | Delia Smith’s welsh rarebitIn response to your article (14 February) on May Morris’s love letter of 14 February 1886 to George Bernard Shaw, Michael Holroyd writes (Letters, 18 February) that there is no need to add “George” to the playwright, who never used that name on his plays. That might have been true of his plays, but at that time of the love letter, when he was writing the
  
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• Fabulous dancing Warhols on Oz museum’s Mardi Gras float

  26-02-2017 18:38
  
  The art world is going gay this month, with the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney at the forefront of LGBTQI celebrations. The gallery will get a fabulous makeover, partnering with Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras over the next week. On 1 March, the gallery hits the homosexual heights with Queer Art After Hours, a celebration of gay art and performance. (music comes courtesy of DJ Seymour Butz with star turns by The Huxleys and Cocoloco). But the highlight is the gallerys Warhol-inspired
  
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• Son of Nazi governor returns art stolen from Poland during second world war

  26-02-2017 11:00
  
  His family looted exquisite paintings from a Polish museum. This week will see a key moment in the country’s long effort to regain its lost treasureIn December 1939 a Viennese woman with chestnut brown hair walked triumphantly into the National Museum in Kraków.Lora Waechter’s husband was the recently-appointed Nazi governor of Kraków: SS Gruppenführer Otto Waechter; she was decorating the new headquarters that he had established at the city’s Potocki Palace
  
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• On my radar: Agnès B’s cultural highlights

  26-02-2017 10:00
  
  The French fashion designer on being linked to David Bowie’s Blackstar, her love of David Lynch and her favourite Paris eateryAgnès B (née Agnès Troublé) was born and raised in Versailles. At 17 she married Christian Bourgois, had twins two years later and divorced soon afterwards (but retained the B of his surname). After a couple of years at Elle magazine, she moved into fashion design and opened her first boutique in a former butcher’s shop in Paris in
  
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• America after the Fall: Painting in the 1930s review – beauty born of adversity

  26-02-2017 09:00
  
  Royal Academy, London
  This unmissable show is a time capsule of 1930s America, from the Dust Bowl to Jean Harlow at the moviesA gigantic pack of Wrigley’s gum hovers like a Zeppelin before the Manhattan skyline. The sky is cloudless cobalt, the East river lies tranquil below. Here is the perfect gum (or so the slogan boasts) in an ideal vision where everything is reduced to pristine rectangles, from the rising skyscrapers to the gum to the abstract reflections. Pop fused with minimalism th
  
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• French artist living inside a rock surrounded by excrement: 'I feel completely at ease'

  26-02-2017 02:26
  
  Abraham Poincheval is attempting to survive inside a 12-tonne boulder inside a Paris art museum for a week An artist entombed inside a 12-tonne rock for nearly three days has described the experience as like “tripping”, insisting he would stick it out for a week.
  Speaking through a crack in the limestone boulder late on Friday, Abraham Poincheval said he had been buoyed by how his performance has “got into people’s heads”. Related: Cracking story: French artist to e
  
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• Overshadowed by Rodin, but his lover wins acclaim at last

  26-02-2017 01:05
  
  Camille Claudel, tragic model and muse, gets the recognition she sought as a great sculptorFrance is finally recognising the talent of the 19th-century sculptor Camille Claudel with the first national museum dedicated to her. It opens next month in Nogent-sur-Seine, 100km south-east of Paris, partly funded with profits generated by the town’s nuclear energy plant.Displays of her sculptures will reflect her significance as an artist, but they also tell a tragic story. Claudel was a studio a
  
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