ART+OBJECT has launched the second issue of CONTENT, a magazine published “to celebrate the vital contribution New Zealand's visual artists make to our cultural identity and increasingly to the global discourse.” The current issue traces the journey of whare Hinemihi from the desolation of the Mt Tarawera eruption to the grounds of a Palladian manor house in an English country. It also includes interviews with Justin Paton, head of international art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and Simon Denny who will represent New Zealand at the 56th Venice Biennale. Tobias Berger discusses the Asia Pacific focus of Hong Kong's M+, Brian Butler and Isha Welsh comment on the US West Coast art scene and Richard Maloy and Roberta Thornley talk about a seminal photograph that has influenced their practices.  

CONTENT is a must-read magazine, avaialble free of charge from ART+OBJECT.

frieze has posted a piece by freelance writer Joe Turnball (one of the cluster of reviewers axed by the Independent) on critics as an endangered species, adrift in sea of self-promoting press releases. Read more…
Image:Bernard Berenson in teh Borghese Gallery, Rome 1955

Creative New Zealand has provided further information on the selection process for New Zealand's presentation at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

Twenty expressions of interest were received from artists/curators of which nineteen have been asked to submit full proposals. The proposals will be assessed by a selection panel chaired by Arts Council Chairman Dick Grant and including: Heather Galbraith (2015 Commissioner), Alistair Carruthers (Patron), Anne Rush (Arts Council), Blair French (Assistant Director, Curatorial & Digital, MCA, Sydney), Brett Graham, Artist), Caterina Riva (Director, Artspace), Dayle Mace (Patron), Helen Kedgely (Arts Council), and Judy Millar (Artist).

The panel will meet in late September with the aim of announcing the successful artist(s)/curator team in early October.

The 2014 Wallace Art Trust Awards were announced in Auckland last night by the Governor General, Sir Jerry Mateparae. The Paramount Award – a six month residency at the International Studio and Curatorial Programme in New York – went to Korean-born, New Zealand-based artist Jae Hoon Lee.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee's winning entry, Dry Valley (2012), duratrans on lightbox

Alexi Glass-Kantor is the new director of Sydney's Artspace. Since 2006 she has been the director and senior curator of Gertrude Contemporary, one of Australia's longest-running independent art spaces. In 2012 she co-curated Parallel Collisions the 12th Adelaide Biennale of Australian Art with Natasha Bullock and she has worked at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image as well as other independent spaces and festivals.

John Reynolds exhibition Vagabondage runs at Starkwhite to 21 September. Beginning with a mini survey of maxi works, the show presents a changing parade of moments in a practice that ranges across painting, drawing, performance and installation.

Clinton Watkins' Frequency Colour closes on Saturday at 3pm. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Frequency Colour (2013), installations view, Starkwhite

Tim Etchells, founder of ART HK (now Art Basel Hong Kong), will launch Sydney Contemporary in September. Unlike the Melbourne Art Fair, which has struggled to realise its international aspirations, Sydney Contemporary opens with a mix of 40% international and 60% Australian-based galleries. The new fair also includes two sections developed in partnership with Artspace and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art – Contemporary Video curated by  Mark Feary and Installation Contemporary curated by Aaron Seeto. The fair runs at Sydney's historic Carriageworks from 19 – 22 September.
Image: Carriageworks, venue for the inaugural edition of Sydney Contemporary

We are at the Auckland Art Fair this week (Booth 32), which runs at The Cloud on Auckland's waterfront to Sunday 11th. Clinton Watkins' Frequency Colour continues at the gallery from 11am  – 6pm during the week and 11am – 3pm on Saturday. You can read an exhibition review here.

Clinton Watkins' Frequency Colour runs at Starkwhite to 17 August. You can read an exhibition review here.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Frequency Colour (2013), installations view, Starkwhite

Charles Saatchi is planning an auction of 50 of his largest sculptures and installations with Christie's – works so large they will be exhibited in a disused London postal depot instead of Christie's HQ. And it will be an auction with a difference from any conducted by Christie's since the 1970s: no lot will have a reserve price or estimate, an idea reported to have come from Saatchi. Read more…
Image: Charles Saatchi

Australia has launched a new award recognising artists and arts organisations engaging with Aisa and strengthening the cultural links between Australia and Asia. 4A Centre for Contemporary Art was in the lineup of award winners for The Floating Eye, the Sydney Pavilion project curated by Aaron Seeto, for the 2013 Shanghai Biennale.

Hou Hanru, curator of the current Auckland Triennial, is the new artistic director of Rome's Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI, Italy's first national museum of contemporary art. He will be responsible for the museum's programming, ranging from architecture and design to contemporary and performance art. Hou takes up his new position in September.

Rafael Lozano-Hemer is turning the Park Avenue tunnel in New York into a reverberating sound and light installation celebrating free speech. Visitors will find a silver intercom to speak into and their comments will pulse through the tunnel in waves of sound and light. However, the NYPD has voiced concerns about content and has asked the artist to install a time delay so comments can be regulated. Lozano-Hemmer has refused to play ball saying “This is the place for people to express their views…I've never in my life censored a work, and I won't do it.”
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's voice tunnel, Park Avenue tunnel NYC, 3-18 August 2013

The director of Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, has put a new management team in place to support a move toward digital technology and e-publications. The old management structure had not changed since she took up the reins 13 years ago and she now feels that rapid developments in digital technology require a rethink of how things are done. She cites the recent MCA e-publication, Anish Kapoor's living catalogue as a strong application of digital technology. As well as containing essays and photographs, the publication also included videos, curator and artist interviews, and allowed for audience interaction which was incorporated into a final edition. Read more…
Image: MCA director Elizabeth Ann Macgregor 

Clinton Watkins' Frequency Colour runs at Starkwhite to 17 August.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Frequency Colour (2013), installations view, Starkwhite

Katharina Fritsch talks to the Guardian about her Fourth Plinth cockerel sculpture located near Nelson's column in Trafalgar square. Like previous pieces in the series, Hahn/Cock is ruffling feathers, but controversy is an anticipated outcome of the project: the plinth programme is keen to inspire a healthy debate about what constitutes public art. Read more…
Image: Katharina Fritsch's Hahn/Cock, Fourth Plinth project, Trafalgar Square, London

Jeffrey Deitch has finally announced he will be stepping down after three years as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. The official news release says he will be stay on for an unspecified time to ensure a smooth transition and the successful completion of MOCA's $100 million dollar endowment campaign, expected to close this fall. Now attention turns to the search for his successor.
Image: Jeffrey Deitch, outgoing director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art 

Clinton Watkins' Frequency Colour opens tonight at 6pm. You can read the exhibition release here.

Creative New Zealand has announced a new selection process for New Zealand's representation at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015.

The approach adopted for the current biennale, which bypassed proposals in favour of informal sector consultation and a hands-on, behind-the-scenes selection process, has been replaced with a two-stage process beginning with preliminary expressions of interest from artists and curators. Eligible applicants will then be invited to submit proposals to be assessed by a panel including a CNZ representative, the 2015 Commissioner (Heather Galbraith), visual arts sector experts and representatives of the Venice Biennale patrons' group.

As the city of Detroit enters bankruptcy, the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts may be under threat. Unlike most art museums in the US, which are owned by non-profit entities holding art collections in trust for citizens, the Institute is owned by Detroit, as is much of its collection and many of the city's creditors have said that the artworks must be considered a saleable asset.

A spokesperson for the state-appointed emergency managers appointed to deal with Detroit's debts, which could amount to more than $18 billion, says”we haven't proposed selling any asset, but we haven't taken any asset off the table. We can't.”

Michigan's Attorney-General responded with an opinion saying the artworks – under the state's trust law – “were held in trust for the public” and could be sold only for the purpose of acquiring additional art, not for paying municipal debt. However, under federal bankruptcy proceedings it is unclear what force his opinion would have, all of which appears to point to a lengthy dispute between the city and its army of creditors.
Image: Detroit Institute Arts 

Following a trip to New Zealand Carol Yinghua Lu has written piece for Frieze on the making and presentation of art in the quake-devastated city of Christchurch. Read more…
Image: Chill Spree, installation view, Dog Park Art Project Space, Christchurch

Our next exhibition is Frequency Colour, a multi-channel video and sound installation by Clinton Watkins consisting of a twenty-minute piece generated using custom-made analog video manipulation hardware. Read more…

Doryun Chong, the associate curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, is to be the chief curator of M+, which is scheduled to open in Hong Kong's West Kowloon District in 2017. M+ is being designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron.

Richard Dale reports on the first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong for the New Zealand Herald. Read more…

Trenton Garratt's exhibition Absorption and Reflection《专注、沉思》closes today at 3pm. You can read a review of the show here.

Auckland's Audio Foundation presents ANTARCTIC CONVERGENCE  Part 2 this weekend. Curated by Australian sound and intermedia artist Philip Samartzis, it is the second and final evening of presentations of work responding to the uniquely evocative and geophysical attributes of Antarctica. The programme features presentations by Phil Dadson, Jae Hoon Lee, Rosy Parlane and Philip Samartzis. You can catch it at the Audio Foundation on Saturday 13 July, starting at 7.30pm.

A new exhibition at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery challenges 13 artists from New Zealand and Australia to document a 21st-century in which machines, humans and nature have come together. AMONG THE MACHINES provides a setting to rethink the stories we tell of the future and the kinds of images that will help get us there. Each artist presents two works: one selected by curators Su Ballard and Aaron Kreisler, and the other a new work that creates a response to or counter to the original work. The lineup of artists includes Stella Brennan, Jae Hoon Lee and Ann Shelton. Read more…

The Auckland Art Fair has revealed details of some of the projects that will be presented during the 2013 event, which runs at The Cloud on Auckland's waterfront from 7-11 August. They include Seung Yul Oh's oversize inflatable Huggong. Oh has just returned from Art Basel Hong Kong where he presented another interactive inflatable in the Encounters section curated by Yuko Hasegawa. Read more…
Image: Seung Yul Oh's Huggong installed at Starkwhite

In a new series of interviews for ABC Arts, Hannah Mathews invites leading curators in Australia to reflect on their influences, experience, the state of the profession and their relationship with art and artists. Here she talks to Robert Leonard, the outgoing director of Brisbane's Institute of Modern Art who returns to New Zealand in the New Year to take up the position of chief curator at the City Gallery Wellington. Read more…

Recently Hou Hanru talked to ARTINFO about the Auckland Triennial as a locally engaged project of global art and how it has validated the international significance of a city he he refers to as “one of the leading cities of the Pacific Rim.” Read more…

James Turrell's installation in the rotunda of the Guggenheim is the must-see show in New York this summer. Blake Gopnik arrived at the museum expecting to experience the light of timeless truth, but says what he could feel and see most clearly were “dollar signs and the troubling social structures that art such as this now reflects.” Read more…

Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art is back in the news with its inaugural winter festival Dark Mofo, which lit up the city over the weekend.

The visual arts component of the festival includes Kurt Hentschlager's installation Zee, which comes with a warning of its hallucinatory and potentially dangerous effects. People entering the piece must sign a waiver as the work can trigger what the artist decribes as an emergency shutdown of the brain as it struggles to process the aural and visual onslaught. But other works in the program offer more contemplative experiences, such as Ryoji Ikeda's tower of pure white light reaching 15 kilometers into Hobart's night sky.

MONA has transformed Hobart, putting what was once regarded as a sleepy hollow on the global arts and culture map. And the state government is happily piggybacking on the stunning success of the museum – on this occasion by contributing $1 million a year for three years to the winter festival.
Images: Kurt Hentschlager's Zee and Ryoji Ikeda's Spectra [Tasmania], featuring in MONA's winter festival Dark Mojo

A number of powerful works addressing war, conflict and terrorism made an impact at Art Basel this year – partly because they were timely presentations with a civil war raging in Syria and anti-Government protests in Turkey and partly because political work like this is not often seen at art fairs.

Visitors queued at Art Unlimited to see The Sound of Silence, Alfredo Jaar's work about the late photojournalist Kevin Carter, whose photograph of a starving child in the Sudanese desert won him a Pulitzer Prize. Other gritty, politically-engaged work presented at Art Basel included Huang Yong Ping's terracotta model of Osama bin Laden's compound where he was killed by US forces (Abbottabad), Johan Grimonprez's film exploring the global arms industry (The Shadow World) and Willie Doherty's harrowing account of the Troubles in Ireland (Remains). Read more…
Image: from Johan Grimonprez's The Shadow World 

Trenton Garratt's exhibition Absorption and Reflection《专注、沉思》runs at Starkwhite to 13 July.
Image: Trenton Garratt, Absorption and Reflection《专注、沉思》installation view, Starkwhite

The Art Gallery of New South Wales has launched a digital iPad publication to accompany the Anne Landa Award for video and new media arts 2013 exhibition The Space Between Us. The publication explores the relationship between video and performance art through videos, audio clips, still images, essays and curator interviews.

The Space Between Us features works by Lauren Brincat, Alicia Frankovich, Laresa Kosloff, Angelica Mesiti, Kate Mitchell, James Newitt and Christian Thompson.

“Each artist approaches the idea of performance from a different angle, ” says curator Charlotte Day. “A number of the artists are there performing directly, a few of the artists are creating situations in which performances occur whereas others are drawing on a rich history of performance and how they might create a kind of space in which we can come together.”

The winner of this year's $25,000 Anne Landa Award will be announced later this month.
Image: Alicia Frankovich's The Opportune Spectator, 2013

Nicholas Baume, the curator and director fo New York's Public Art Fund, will curate the public sector at Art Basel Miami. With Miami's Bass Museum of Art, he will transform Collins Park into an outdoor exhibition that will be a site for video, installation, performance and large-scale sculpture.
Image: Nicholas Baume

With the launch of his cloud-like gridded pavilion in Hyde Park, Sou Fujimoto became the youngest architect in the lineup of Serpentine Pavilion architects. Each year the Serpentine commissions an architect to design a temporary structure. Starting with Zaha Hadid in 2000, the commission has attracted a stellar list of architects including Frank Gehry, Herzog & de Meuron with Ai Wewei, Rem Koolhaas, Oscar Niemeyer, Jean Novel, Alvaro Siza and  Peter Zumthor. Read more…
Image: Sou Fujimoto's 2013 Serpentine Pavilion