The Headlines
AUSTRALIA’S VENICE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES, with Khaled Sabsabi now telling the Guardian that Creative Australia’s controversial decision to suddenly drop him from as the country’s representative for the 2026 Biennale is “dismantling” his career. “Nobody should have to go through this torture,” he added. Creative Australia’s board nixed Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino’s pavilionearlier this year, just a few days after their selection was publicly announced. The decision came following criticism of the Lebanese Australian artist’s past artworks, and it already appears to have had a ripple effect for Sabsabi, whose show at Monash University was indefinitely postponed last week. Sabsabi this week told the Guardian that Creative Australia reacted with a “kneejerk” response based on a misrepresentation of his practice, and added that he does “not support or endorse any form of terrorism or racism or antisemitism or Islamophobia.”
ARTSY ANTICS. Two men from Germany smuggled portraits of American President Donald Trump and Friedrich Merz, the politician expected to become the next chancellor of Germany, into the Louvre and stuck them on the wall in the same room as the Mona Lisa, the German tabloid Bild reports. How did they pull it off? The men from Cologne identified as Ilgar Aliyev and a friend who called himself “Bobby” shared apparently plotted their stunt in advance and spoke of their plans in a film posted to YouTube two days ago. It all appears to have gone mostly as they imagined it would. In a film of their shenanigans, Louvre personnel appear not to notice as the duo place the frames on the wall with double-stick tape, then exit the museum. Following what is surely an embarrassing snafu for the Louvre, a spokesperson for the institution declined to comment to Der Spiegel.
The Digest
The Kennedy Center has fired at least five employees working on its social impact team, including artistic director Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The team’s mission was to attract young, new, and diverse audiences to the center, but its Trump-appointed president, Ric Grenell, described the team’s work as wasteful. [Los Angeles Times]
Forbes has released its ever-growing list of billionaires, and for the first time in five years, a new wealthy woman has risen to the top: Alice Walton. With an estimated $101 billion in fortune, Walton is an active philanthropist in the arts, having founded and chaired the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas. [Forbes]
The Louvre has started a marketing campaign called “Le Louvre au centre” (The Louvre in the Center), which involves displaying copies of masterpieces in commercial malls known as centre commerciaux. The campaign is being done in partnership with the multinational group Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield (URW), which runs the shopping centers hosting the program. [Libération]
A new book explores the life of Salvador Dalí’s wife, Gala Dalí, and her involvement in his career and life. Michèle Gerber Klein’s biography details Gala’s experiences of two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as her own art practice and her venturesome fashion sense. [WWD]
The Kicker
ART OR BUSINESS? That’s a question posed by Marisa Meltzer in a recent piece for Art in America about Marina Abramović’s longevity method. “Could Marina Abramović be the wellness guru we needed all along?” Meltzer asks, wondering if she may indeed offer a kind of “out-of-the-box” alternative to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. The artist’s pricey wellness courses combine exercises in concentration, stamina, and being “in the moment.”Elements of all this figure in her latest show, “Marina Abramović: Transforming Energy,” at the Modern Art Museum (MAM) Shanghai , which spans 150 works, including crystal “transitory objects” that the audience can interact with to “trigger” an experience with the minerals. Shai Baitel, the exhibition’s organizer, said he had “curated the metaphysical,” adding, “This is an entirely new concept.”
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