Martin Basher and Richard Maloy were commissioned to produce new works for Natasha Conland's Freedom Farmers exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. The Gallery has posted video interviews of the artists talking about their works on YouTube, which can be viewed via the following links: Martin Basher on Untitled (Spiritual-Marketplace) and Richard Maloy on Tree Hut #5.
Image: Martin Basher talks about his work in Freedom Farmers

You can read a review of Jill Trevelyan's biography of art dealer Peter McLeavey here.
Image: Peter McLeavey

Located on Auckland's New North Road, Jar is a small, not-for-profit space dedicated to the promotion of strong, singular work for public consumption, where where projects have been staged by artists Stephen Bambury, Peter Robinson and poet/Jar founder Leigh Davis. After a short hiatus, Jar  reopens next week with a project by Auckland-based artist Simon Ingram.
Image: Leigh Davis' Macoute, Temptation of the World from a sequence of thirty exhibitions entitled Time, Text & Echoes, each devoted to a single Leigh Davis flag poem. Jar is located at 589 New North Road, Kingsland, Auckland

Matt Henry's exhibition High Fidelity opens at Starkwhite this afternoon  at 4pm (upstairs).
Image: Matt Henry, Untitled (Vanadium Green) from the series 19:9, 2013, Acrylic on linen, frame, acrylic glazing, 510 x 820 x 76 mm

Exhibition curator Natasha Conland talks about Freedom Farmers: New Zealand Artists Growing Ideas at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. View video.

Vera Mey is leaving AUT's ST PAUL St Gallery to take up a curatorial position at Singapore's Centre for Contemporary Art where she will work with founding director Uta Meta Bauer.

Christie's New York has staged the highest grossing auction ever with a postwar and contemporary art sale that brought in $691.6 million and set a new record for a publicly traded artwork with Three Studies of Lucian Freud by Francis Bacon, which sold for $142 million – 20 million more than Edvard Munch's The Scream. And Jeff Koons' sculpture Balloon Dog (Orange) fetched 58.4 million, an auction record for a living artist.
Image: Francis Bacon's Three Studies of Lucian Freud goes under the hammer at Christie's

Emma Crimmings has been appointed director at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne replacing Alexi Glass-Kantor who has moved on to Artspace in Sydney. Crimmings has worked as a filmmaker, a producer for ABC TV Arts, a curator for the Moving Image Centre and Australian Centre for Photography, and most recently as Acting Director and Programme Manager of Cultural Affairs at the Australian Embassy in Washington.

Today the New Zealand Herald celebrates 150 years of publishing with a souvenir edition honouring 150 of the greatest New Zealanders since 1863. Colin McCahon is in the lineup of inspirational figures with a half-page spread of images and text on his selection as New Zealander of the year for 1954. The piece introduces him as one of the country's most influential artists, whose work is highly prized by collectors, fetching big prices, and goes on to say: “But the true value of art is not calibrated in dollars and cents, but in cultural influence and by this standard there has been no greater painter in New Zealand than Colin McCahon. Sitting under the piece is a half-page advertisement by an auction house promoting its share of the McCahon market and a total McCahon turnover of $13.5 million. A curious editorial decision by the Herald.
Image: Colin McCahon in his studio 

Matt Henry's High Fidelity opens in our upstairs galleries on Saturday 16 November at 4pm and to runs to 14 December. Richard Maloy's All the things I did continues downstairs to 30 November.
Image: Matt Henry, Untitled (Raw) 2013, loom-state linen, tray frame, raw oak, 332 x 236 x 48 mm

This link takes you to the NYT's backstory on the Nazi-looted art discovered recently in Germany.
Image: Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels (far left) viewing German art purged of degenerate influences, Berlin 1939

Over the past 15 years, Venice has become one of the word's most important cruise destinations, with up to nine cruise turnarounds a day in high season. But there are growing fears about the impact of the giant vessels on the fragile city and the risk they pose to its infrastructure and inhabitants. (They pass within 300 meters of St Mark's Square.) These concerns have been heightened by the disaster of the Costa Concordia which sank off the Tuscan Island of Giglio in 2012.

The Italian Prime Minister, Enrico Letta, has approved plans to begin limiting large cruise ship traffic in the lagoon, with the biggest vessels of more than 96,000 tonnes to be banned from November 2014. However the announcement glosses over the fact that about 475 relatively large ships (for comparison, the Titanic was only 46,000 tonnes) will enter Venice next year.

In 2003 Ralph Hotere painted White Drip II as a protest against broadcaster Paul Holmes for referring to United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan as a “cheeky darkie” on his radio show. Holmes purchased the painting and now (following his death earlier this year) it is going to auction with an estimate of $140,000 – $170,000.

Clinton Watkins is one of four artists featured in Crosstalk at the University of Connecticut's Contemporary Art Galleries, with a video titled Landscape Distortions. The exhibition focuses on single channel video work exploring various aspects of music performance, not to be confused with music videos.

New York-based conceptual artist Rainer Ganahal presented his own designs this week in two runway shows at White Columns. Staged as part of Performa 13, Comme de Marxists featured items based on recent styles by Comme des Garcon, but adorned with class warfare-style slogans. Read more…

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa has released Jill Trevelyan's much-anticipated biography of legendary art dealer Peter McLeavey, “the charismatic, pioneering art dealer who since the 1960s has shaped – even transformed – New Zealand art.” Read more…

Richard Maloy’s All the things I did opens at Starkwhite tonight.
Image: from Richard Maloy's student archive, re-presented at Starkwhite in All the things I did. Maloy's project was developed with support from Creative New Zealand.

Consumer confidence in New Zealand is at its highest level in two years according to the latest global Neilson survey carried out between 14 August and 6 September. Consumer confidence indexed at 93 in the second quarter of 2013, increasing three points. (Confidence levels above or below a baseline of 100 indicate degrees of optimism and pessimism.)

“Confidence levels of New Zealanders are the highest we've seen in two years and nearly half of Kiwis (47%) now believe we are out of recession, an improvement of 12 percentage points in the last year,” says Neilson NZ managing director Rob Clark.

Consumer confidence improvements were reported in Asia-Pacific (+2 to 105), North America (+2 to 96) and Middle East/Africa (+6 to 91). Europe's index held steady at 71.

In the past, the Folly project has been staged as part of the Gwangju Design Biennale, but this year it is being presented for the first time as a stand-alone event. Curated by Nikolaus Hirsch (director), Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chan (curators), Gwangju Folly II uses the ambiguities of the folly as a tool of enquiry to address the condition of public space. Eight follies (some moving targets on the metro or a moving hotel) have been commissioned from artists/architects including Ai Weiwei, Raqs Media Collective, Rem Koolhaas, Do Ho Suh and Superflex
Image: Do Ho Suh and Suh Architects, In Between Hotel, Gwangju Folly II

Richard Maloy’s All the things I did, a project developed with the support of Creative New Zealand, opens at Starkwhite on Tuesday.
Image: from Richard Maloy's student archive, re-presented at Starkwhite in All the things I did

The Biennale of Sydney has announced the list of artists selected by Julianna Engberg for You imagine what you desire.You can see the full list of artists here, which includes Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning. The Biennale runs from 21 March to 9 June 2014.
Image: installation view of Ross Manning's Field Emissions at Starkwhite, 2012

The Guardian reports on a backroom drama pitting Sotheby's against one of New York's most aggressive investment managers – a drama, it says, that sheds light on the increasingly competitive battle to sell art that threatens to upset the traditional balance between galleries that discover and develop the careers of artists and auction houses that sell works by artists with a proven value.

In a report on Charles Saatchi's Thinking Big auction staged by Christie's, the Financial Times says the collector “took a sledgehammer to prevailing notions of how to sell work by emerging artists.” The no-estimates, no-reserve approach to the auction of 50 large works from his collection delivered poor results for many artists and dealers were appalled by the everything-must-go strategy. It was a “strong-arm tactic” says Simon Lee whose gallery represents one of the artists in the sale, a tactic designed to force dealers into bidding to support their artists' prices. Read more…

You can read a Sydney Morning Herald Q & A with Justin Paton here.
Image: Kaldor Family Room at the AGNSW

Li Xiaofei's exhibition Assembly Line – Entrance closes today at 3pm. You can read a review of the show here.
Image: Li Xaiofei, Assembly Line – Entrance, installation view, Starkwhite

Director Michael Brand has announced the appointment of Justin Paton as Head of International Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Read more…
Image: Justin Paton

Art forger, Karl Sim, died earlier this week. He shot to notoriety in 1985 when he was arrested and convicted for art forgery after he copied and sold painitngs and drawings of notable New Zealand artists such Charles F Goldie and Petrus van der Velden. After the court case Sim changed his name to Carl Feoder Goldie so he could legally sign his Goldie fakes as C F Goldie. The forger left behind a list of 62 artists he'd copied over the years, fueling speculation about where they are and whether any have found their way into public collections.
Image: the Foxton Forger 'C F Goldie' in his studio

After five years in the doldrums the New Zealand economy may be on the rebound. Economists are predicting GDP growth of 3% or more and even the IMF expects growth to pick up to 2.9% – ahead of our Western trading partners (including Australia) and not far behind Asian nations like South Korea and Singapore. The rebuild of the quake-devastated city of Christchurch (home to the current SCAPE Biennale) is one of the major economic drivers, along with a booming dairy industry and better than expected growth in the Chinese economy (New Zealand's second largest trading partner, after Australia).

Artist Nigel Milsom, who is currently serving a six-year sentence for armed robbery, has won the $150,000 Doug Moran National Portrait Prize. Read more…
Image: Nigel Milsom's prize-winning portrait, Uncle Paddy

After being postponed twice following the earthquakes that hit Christchurch in 2010 and 2011, SCAPE 7 has finally opened. Despite widespread interest in the event and how curator Blair French and participating artists would respond to the post-quake setting, there has been surprisingly little coverage of SCAPE. Fortunately Melbourne's CCAS was there to cover the launch. Read more…
Image: I was using six watts when you received me, by Maddie Leach and Jem Nobles, SCAPE 7

Commissioned by the Christchurch City Council, Cologne-based artist Misha Kuball's Solidarity Grid is based in the act of giving and symbolism of light. Over a period of three years, beginning with the current edition of the SCAPE Biennale, a single street lamp from each of twenty-one cities around the globe is being gifted to Christchurch as a gesture of solidarity with the city during its post-earthquake recovery and rebuild process. The lamps will be installed along a section of Park Terrace, providing light for pedestrians and cyclists.
Image: Mischa Kubell's Solidarity Grid 

On this date in 1959, thousands of New Yorkers turned up for the opening of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Solomon R Guggenheim Museum. This link takes you to Buildings & Crowd, a short film of footage from the grand opening.
Image: opening of the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum in 1959

Alicia Frankovich's exhibition Today this technique is the other way round is showing at the Kunstverein Hildesheim from 19 October – 1 December.
Image: press photograph for Today this technique is the other way round