Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling continues at Starkwhite this week through to 21 October. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling (2014), installation view detail, Starkwhite

China is experiencing a museum boom of epic proportions. With unlimited capital, rapid land acquisition and a taste for architectural statements, it has become a playground for global architects to design some bizarre and beautiful creations. But some say the rapid development of the sector is delivering museums that have advanced beyond current museum practice. Labelled the 'Louis Vuitton bags of architecture”, they are seen as flagship stores of culture by urban planners and city branders with the potential to introduce the Bilbao effect – the rejuvination of a city through museum building.

In a recent interview with Randian, the author of New Museums in China, Clare Jacobsen, talks about the new museums and whether they can become something more than LV bags of architecture. Read more…

Art as a Verb opens today at Monash University of Art. Curated by Charlotte Day, Francis E Parker and Patrice Sharkey, the exhibition takes as it's departure point the concept of art as action, presenting projects form the 1990s to the present challenge the traditional role of the artist and the site of the museum. What constitutes the work of an artists? How do the varying roles of artist (an instigator, facilitator, teacher, performer, consumer or visionary)for within broader society? And how does the museum support art forms that function beyond the art object?

Artists in the show include Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Billy Apple, John Baldessari, Martin Creed, Peter Fischili & David Weiss, Alicia Frankovich, Paul McCarthy, Rose Nolan, Claus Oldenburg, Ariel Orozco, Mike Parr and Rirkrit Tiravanija.
Image: Billy Apple, PAID: The Artists Has to Live Like Everybody Else, 1987, Herbert Fabrication and Engineering 2003, invoice mounted on PAID offset lithograph, 42 x 29.7cm

Last week Charles Esche awarded the 2014 Walters Prize to Luke Willis Thompson, the 7th artist to receive the $50,000 award. Along with the other finalists, he also received $5,000 from patron Dayle Mace when this year's lineup was announced.

The Walters Prize is the brainchild of Dame Jenny Gibbs and Erika and Robin Congreve, patrons who bring ideas as well as deep pockets to the arts. In 2010 Jenny Gibbs talked about the Prize and how it has been set up to keep the founders (and other patrons associated with it) at arms length, leaving it to the Auckland Art Gallery to appoint four New Zealand-based selectors to come up with a short list of four and the international judge to select the winner. You can view the video here.
Image: Dame Jenny Gibbs

Ai Weiwei has staged his latest exhibition at Blenheim Palace, the seat of the Dukes of Marlborough and the house where Winston Churchill was born. The Guardian's Jonathan Jones reflects on why Ai Weiwei would mount a survey of his work at a British stately home where visitors are more likely to come for the Capability Brown gardens or the tea shop, and perhaps not for conceptual art. Read more…
Image: Ai Weiwei's Han Dynasty vase with Coca Cola logo

Rebecca Baumann's Once more with feeling continues this week at Starkwhite through to 10 October.

La Biennale de Montreal opens next month. L'avenir (looking forward) examines how contemporary artists give form to the question, what is to come? “Shifting between assessment and anticipation, clearly grounded in the now and informed by echoes of the past, the exhibition looks forward to the future to unveil a range of possibilities and rekindle some that may have been prematurely foreclosed.”

L'avenir (looking forward) was conceptualised by Gregory Burke (former director of New Zealand's Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) and Peggy Gale, and developed in tandem with co-curators Lesley Johnstone and Mark Lanctot of the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal. All four curators worked in close collaboration with the biennale's executive and artistic director Sylvie Fortin to create an event that promises viewers “powerful experiences: moments for contemplation, invitations to wonderment, occasions for exchange and calls for action.”

The biennale runs from 10 October 2014 to 4 January 2015.

In a surprise move, Frieze art fair has announced the appointment of Victoria Siddall as director of Frieze London and Frieze New York. The fair's co-founders and current directors, Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, say it will give them more time to focus on the future and explore new projects for Frieze.

In an interview with The Financial Times, Slotover said the new projects he and Sharp have in mind do not include opening another fair. “It's not clear there are obvious opportunties elsewhere,” he said. But he added, “Never say never.”
Image: Victoria Siddall

While art fairs are on the rise in Hong Kong where Art Basel Hong Kong will be joined by Art Central in 2015, Shanghai's main fair is in troubled waters. The recent edition of SHContemporary was a disaster, opening with the grand Shanghai Exhibition Centre conspicuously devoid of art. Consignments were held up in customs with many crates arriving after the last visitors had left the vernissage. And to cap it off, participating galleries were told no sales could take place within the fair as the permit obtained was one only to exhibit art.

Art fair director Guido Mologni says it is too soon to say whether SHContemporary will continue in the future, but it's hard to see the fair recovering from such a set back.
Image: SHContemporary booths in the grand hall of the Shanghai Exhibition Centre

The founder of ART HK, Tim Etchells, will launch a new art fair in Hong Kong in 2015. Co-directed by Eve Share Banghart (Art Basel, ART HK and Gagosian Gallery) and Maree Di Pasquale  (Melbourne Art Fair, Sydney Contemporary and Abu Dhabi Art Fair), Art Central debuts 14 to 16 March to coincide with Art Basel Hong Kong.

News of the fair comes as no surprise – Etchells has been planning it ever since he sold ART HK to MCH Swiss Exhibition Limited, the parent company of Art Basel. However, rather than rolling out an 'affordable' art fair (as expected), Etchells has opted for a high-end fair that will sit alongside Art Basel Hong Kong. Art Central will be staged in a purpose-built tent on the new Central Harbour Front, less than two kilometers from the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre where Art Basel takes place.

Word on the street is Art Central will offer an attractive alternative to galleries that are unable to get into Art Basel Hong Kong, but it will also appeal to gallerists who liked the the focus and format of ART HK before it was made over by Art Basel.

On Friday 19 September we open a new exhibition by Australian artist Rebecca Baumann. It is her first solo show at Starkwhite and follows her participation in Art Basel Hong Kong in May, where we presented a commissioned work in the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa.

New Zealand has featured in previous editions of the Sao Paulo Bienal – Joe Sheehan in the 28th, Andrew McLeod and Brendan Wilkinson in the 27th, Remember New Zealand curated by Tobias Berger for the 26th, Gavin Hipkins in the 25th and Peter Robinson in the 23rd. But New Zealand artists were not included in the 29th edition and they haven't made the cut again this year with the 30th edition. Nor are there any New Zealand artists in the Gwangju Biennale or in the upcoming Shanghai Biennale.

Over the past two decades a handful of New Zealand curators were instrumental in brokering our artists into these events before moving overseas to take up curatorial positions. Two of them have returned to New Zealand – Robert Leonard (now chief curator at the City Gallery Wellington) and Simon Rees (the new director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery) – and look set to ramp up biennale representation for our artists again.
Image: Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, venue for the Sao Paulo Bienal

Jeff Koons will create the first in a series of new works that will be used to raise money for the United Nations Foundation. He will create a large sculpture (and several smaller pieces) made of materials from luxury handbags donated for the project by Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs, Diane von Furstanberg, Almine Ruiz-Picasson and others. The finished piece will be auctioned at a dinner at Four Seasons restaurant in New York on on 9 November with the proceeds going to the United Nations Foundation's shot@life campaign, which is raising money to fight  measles, pneumonia, polio and rotavirus in children.

Okwui Enwezor is the first curator of his generation to direct Documenta and the Venice Biennale and the first African curator to direct either one. In an article titled How Okwui Enwezor Changed the Art World, the Wall Street Journal tracks Enwezor's global curatorial project, beginning with his 1996 breakthrough show Insight: African Photographers 1940 to Present at the Guggenhein Museum. Since then he has produced international exhibitions that seek to define their moment – biennials in Johannesburg, Gwangju and the Paris Triennial – and historically-driven, encyclopedic museum shows. Read more…
Image: Okwui Enwezor

Like the recent Biennale of Sydney, this year's edition of the Sao Paulo Bienal has opened with artists calling for the organising foundation to sever links with a sponsor – this time from the state of Israel. Fifty-five of the 68 participating artists have signed a letter protesting Israel's Gaza offensive and calling on the bienal to return funds received from Israel.

“At a time when the people of Gaza return to the rubble of their homes, destroyed by the Israeli military, we do not feel it is acceptable to receive Israeli cultural sponsorship,” the letter reads. “In accepting this funding our artistic work displayed in the exhibition is undermined and implicitly used for whitewashing Israel's ongoing aggression and violation of international law and human rights. We reject Israel's attempt to normalise itself within the context of a major international cultural event in  Brazil.” Read more…
Image: Pro-Palestine protesters in Sao Paulo (2009)

SIGNALS continues at Starkwhite closing on Saturday 13 September.
Image: Jin Jiangbo, Silent (2011), pigment ink on photo rag, 110cm diameter

Every September Jerry Saltz conducts a “semi-sick ritual”, returning to the September issue of Artforum to see what the new season of shows and openings holds “for the faithful, the frightened, and the shy.” This link takes you to an article on what he found this time.

ARTINFO caught  up with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev in Sydney and talked about her plans for the next Istanbul Biennale.

Having seen every edition of the biennale since its inception in 1987, she finds the history of the event particularly meaningful. “I think it was the beginning of a decentralisation of the art world from the canonical, traditional venues like the Venice Biennale to another system that we now have where there are 150 biennales around the world,” she says. “The geopolitics of art really changed with Istanbul, and that's why I decided it was important.”  Read more…
Image: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Our current exhibition SIGNALS has been extended by a week and will now close on Saturday 13 September. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: SIGNALS, installation view (Billy Apple's THE ARTIST WILL LIVE FOREVER (Chinese) and FROM THE LAI SOO COLLECTION. and Jin Jiangbo's Hidden

Stephanie Rosenthal has been named as the artistic director of the 2016 Biennale of Sydney. Currently based in London, Rosenthal has been Chief Curator at the Hayward Gallery since 2007, having previously worked at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art. She was also one of three curators who realised a national section of the first biennial in Cartenga, Columbia earlier this year.
Image: Stephanie Rosenthal

SIGNALS responds to the changing face of Auckland, a multi-cultural city with a rapidly changing demographic, where the mix of European, Maori and Pacific Island cultures is being enriched by new New Zealanders, notably from Asia.

Artists in the exhibition include: Billy Apple (NZ/US), Stella Brennan (NZ) Trenton Garratt (NZ), Jin Jiangbo (CN), Seung Yul Oh (NZ/KR), John Reynolds (NZ), Layla Rudneva-Mackay (NZ) and Yuk King Tan (HK) and Wang Dawei (CN).

SIGNALS runs from 9 August to 6 September.
Image: Billy Apple, THE ARTIST WILL LIVE FOREVER (Chinese) 2013, uv impregnated ink on canvas, 618 x 1000mm

A swedish glass gallery, Kosta Boda, has come up with a novel way to auction an artwork. Instead of the usual monetary bids, bidders could only win an artwork with the intensity of their emotional and physical reactions to the piece. Coined the “auction based on emotions”, no money changed hands for three pieces valued at over €25,000 in total.

On the night of the auction, each bidder was brought into a closed off room and sensors were hooked onto their hand and ear. At this point, the artwork was unveiled and the sensors began monitoring the bidders heart rate and galvanic skin response. Each bidder had 60 seconds to experience the work and after going through the process for the 303 participants, the three with the highest physical response were awarded the artworks.
Image: a bidder at the Kosta Boda auction

Hong Kong's ParaSite Art Space curator Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya sees Asia as being like “a curatorial Wild West” where the continent's multi-role curatorial practices deconstruct all his European preconceptions. Influenced by the lack of publications that focus on curatorial practices in Asia, Fominaya and artist Michael Lee compiled a selelction of 16 essays that address this issue, inviting contribitions from curators and critics, including Hans Ulricht Obrist, Russsell Storer, Cao Weijun, Hector Rodriguez and others. Read more…

Grant Stevens' exhibition Hold Together, Fall Apart enters its final week at Starkwhite, closing on Saturday 2 August. You can read a review of the exhibition here.  You can also catch Stevens' work at the City Gallery Wellington. What We Had Was Real runs to 7 September.
Image: Grant Stevens, Haven (2104), video still

In his first feature-length film, photographer Gavin Hipkins presents a richly pictorial essay of images of the natural world – and the often forlorn evidence of humanity's passage through it. Hipkins draws his themes for Erewhon from Samuel Butler's Erewhon: Or, Over the Range, published in 1872. Butler had worked on a South Island high country sheep station and it's easy to suppose that his objectification of a wholly invented 'native people' is an ironic posture owing something to his experience in colonial New Zealand. Likewise his concerns with the coming dominance of industry chime eerily with contemporary concerns: vegetarianism is the law of the land in Erewhon and machines have been banished to museums for fear of their becoming conscious.

Erewhon  was premiered on Sunday at the New Zealand International Film Festival and screens again today at 1.30pm at Auckland's Academy Theatre. You can view the film trailer here.
Image: Gavin Hipkins Erewhon (Production Still)

Barry Keldoulis, the CEO and Group Fairs Director of Art Fairs Australia, the presenters of Sydney Contemporary and the Melbourne Art Fair (on behalf of the Melbourne Art Foundation), will talk about the upcoming Melbourne Art Fair at Starkwhite at 5pm today. He will cover public and collector programmes, and the three new exhibition sections that have been introduced to this year’s edition of the Melbourne Art Fair – MAF Platform, MAF  Video, and MAF Edge. Curated by Simone Hine and Kyle Weise, the co-founding directors of Screen Space, MAF Video includes Grant Stevens’ Auric Variations.
Image: Barry Keldoulis

Changes to the rules governing collectibles held in self-managed super funds (SMSFs) in Australia may trigger a flood of artworks onto the market with investors facing the possibility of their portfolios being sold at fire sale prices. According to art accountant and valuer Michael Fox there has already been a significant level of divestment of collections that he says could be explained by “a desire to seek a higher price for the artworks and collectibles before the market becomes depressed by an oversupply of artworks”. Read more…
Image: Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Untitled (Awelye) 1995

The role of art in growing your wealth and viability of art as an investment were two of the session topics at the London Business School's recent art investment conference.

Keynote speaker Anna Dempster, an economist and senior lecturer at Soetheby's Institute of Art, said art as an asset class presented significant opportunities at a time when an estimated $2 trillion of artworks are currently held in private hands. But other panelists disagreed with the positioning of art as an asset class. “Art is an asset, not an asset class,” said Luke Dugdale, director of the Royal Bank of Canada's British-based wealth management division. “If it were an asset class, the Financial Conduct Authority would regulate it and that would kill the art world. It's a market in which everyone can be an advisor.”

The conference was wrapped up by self-confessed flipper Kenny Schachter. “An asset class generates a return on investment, whereas with art the dividend is visual,” he said. “But if you buy art low and sell high you can make extraordinary money.” Read more…

Michael Zavros' exhibition Bad Dad continues at Starkwhite this week through to 28 June.
Image: Bad Dad installation view 

New Zealand is one of 11 countries presenting inaugural exhibitions at this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, which opened on 7 June.

Artistic director Rem Koolhaas's theme invites participating nations to reflect on the development of modern architecture since 1914 and the resulting loss of distinctive national characteristics in architecture. But New Zealand commissioner David Mitchell argues that national differentiation in architecture is possible and has curated an exhibition about traditional Maori architecture, identified by Artinfo as one of the 5 rookie pavilions to watch out for. Read more…
Image: detail from the whatarangi (Maori storehouse) in the New Zealand pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art has revealed the names of the 13 artists selected for this year's edition of Primavera, the exhibition for young Australian artists under the age of 35 launched by Cynthia and Edward (Ted) Jackson to honour the memory of their daughter Belinda. The selection was made by artist Mikala Dwyer, one of the four artists exhibited in the inaugural edition of the exhibition at the MCA in 1992.

Dwyer's lineup includes the controversial Melbourne-based artist Paul Yore who is currently fighting charges of producing and possessing child pornography after being accused of creating images that sexualised children during an exhibition of his work at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Art.
Image: Hossein Ghaemi's Frank: Hole up – Hold up (2013). Ghaemi is one of the 13 artists in Primavera 2014

Okwui Enwezor, the artistic director of the 56th Venice Biennale, has been on a whirlwind trip to Sydney and Melbourne where he has been meeting artists and visiting galleries and exhibitions, which he described as a “fascinating investigation into Australian contemporary art”. Read more…
Image: Okwui Enwezor