John Kaldor, the art patron/collector renowned for bringing art superstars to Australia, says his latest exhibition, 13 Rooms, will be “the most exciting exhibition of the decade.” Described by Hans Ulrich Obrist as an exhibition like a sculpture gallery where all the sculptures go home at night, Kaldor Public Art Project #27 brings together 13 international artists in a group exhibition of living sculpture within 13 purpose-built rooms in Sydney's historic Pier 2/3.

However, the show won't offer the artists themselves. They are using over 100 local actors, artists and dancers, working in shifts around the clock, to stage their works. Obrist compares this approach to contemporary performance art to opera or ballet where work can live on into the future as repertoire, liberating the artist in the process. “In developing time-based art which is not necessarily dependent on [the artists] performing, it's not really a performance, it's more like time-based sculpture.”
Image: Simon Fujiwara's Future/Perfect 2012 in 13 Rooms

MOMA is planning its first big show devoted to sound art. Soundings: A Contemporary Score will feature the work of 16 artists including Turner Prize winner Susan Philipsz who has taken the score of a symphony composed by Pavel Haas in 1943, while he was in a Nazi concentration camp, and re-imagined it with just one cello and one viola playing their intermittent parts. Melbourne artist Marco Fusinato is also in the lineup with 5 abstract drawings based on an orchestral score by Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer and theorist who died in 2001. Read more…
Image: Richard Garet's sound installation Before Me (2012)

Three percussionists are tearing up LA's Gallery 303 in piece choreographed by artist Doug Aitken, who is known for his fascination with the interplay of sound and architecture. The tear-down coincides with the planned demolition of the gallery, but it is also intended to work as a sonic universe that passers by would stumble across, causing them to question the nature of an exhibition and the role of a gallery, an uncertainty embraced by Aitken. Read more…
Image: two men percussively deconstruct Gallery 303 in Doug Aitken's 100 YRS, PART 2

Eugene Tan has been named as the director of the National Gallery of Singapore, which opens in 2015. He is currently program director of special projects at Singapore's Economic Development Board where he is leading the conversion of the old Gillman Barracks into a new art hub. Tan has extensive curatorial experience, including as curator of Singapore's Venice pavilion in 2005 and co-curator of the inaugural Singapore Biennale in 2006.
Image: Eugene Tan

Thirty artists and architects including Tamar Guimaraes, Isaac Julien, Olafur Eliasson and Norman Foster have created new works for an exhibition in Sao Paulo's Glass House in a homage to Brazilian Modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. Staged in the architect's former home, The insides are on the outside is the latest “house-museum” project organised by Hans Ulrich Obrist. He has previously staged exhibitions in the homes of architect Luis Barragan in Mexico City, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria, Switzerland and poet Frederico Garcia Lorca in Granada, Spain. “I started my career as a curator in a kitchen,” he says. “Artists do different kinds of work than they would in a museum or bigger space. That sense of intimacy is important” Read more…
Image: Lino Bo Bardi's former home the Casa de Vitro (Glass House), Sao Paulo

Udo Kittelmann, director of the Nationalgalerie State Museums of Berlin, says the other artists chosen to represent Germany at this year's Venice Biennale will be overshadowed by Ai Weiwei, one of four artists selected by curator of the German pavilion Susanne Gaenshimer.

Kittelmann says: If one invites Ai Weiwei, the international media is a given, Ai is increasingly used by some art world figures to put their own politics in a populist way. The other artists could be overshadowed by his presence. It is my belief that one must make the playing field level.”

Gaensheimer has responded saying: “The German pavilion is precisely about moving away from simple truisms and rankings and about questioning the assumption  that there are unambiguous levels and identities.” Read more…
Image: Udo Kittelmann

Blair French is stepping down from his current position as director of Sydney's Artspace to become the Assistant Director, Curatorial and Digital at the MCA Australia.
Image: Blair French

The Prada Foundation will re-stage Harald Szeemann's Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form at this year's Venice Biennale. The legendary exhibition of conceptual art, arte povera, and land art was originally curated by Szeemann for the Bern Kunstjhalle in 1969. The recreated version will be curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with architect Rem Koolhaas and artist Thomas Demand.
Image: catalogue cover for Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form

Beijing's Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art has opened up its entire space for its current show On / Off: China's Young Artists in Theory and Practice. Curated by Bao Dong and Sun Dongdong, the exhibition brings together commissioned works from 50 artists born after 1975. This generation  of artists emerged while Chinese contemporary art practice was shifting from the underground scene of the 1990s to the more commercial and institutionalised art world seen today. Read more…
Image:  Yang Jian, Sooner or Later, Lightning Will Strike us all, 2011-2012, video installation

“Maybe because I'm Italian, I kept thinking about of the High Line as a big boulevard or like a street of the Roman forum, and the public sculptures that dot that landscape,” says Cecilia Alemani, curator of Busted, which opens at the High Line next month. The project, which plays with the conventions of official public art works, includes Goshka Macuga's bust of Colin Powell delivering his infamous 2003 speech at the United nations holding that vial of anthrax. Read more…
Image: Goshka Macuga's bust of Colin Powell

Qatar's royal family is set on making Doha into an international art hub, hitting the headlines with news of the  world's biggest art buying spree that includes a world record $250m paid for Cezanne's The Card Players, and exhibitions by renowned artists like Louise Bourgeois, Takashi Murakami and Cai Guo Qiang. However, The Art Newspaper says a leading human rights organisation has warned British Museums collaborating with the Qatar Museums Authority on a cultural exchange programme to exercise “extreme caution” in their dealings with Qatar. The remarks come in response to the plight of Muhammad al-Ajami, a Qatari poet currently serving a 15-year sentence for reciting a poem in support of the Arab uprisings. He has also called for Arabs to rid themselves of “imposed regimes” comments which Qatari prosecutors claimed amounted to an incitement to overthrow the Emir. Read more…
Image: Anti-government protesters in Sanabis, Bahrain

A new documenntary on legenday collectors Herb and Dorothy Vogel premiered at the Whitney Museum last week. Herb & Dorothy 50×50 picks up where Herb & Dorothy left off. Previously the couple had donated thier collection to American Museums and planned to travel to the country to see the newly donated collections. However Herb Vogel died in 2102 and Dorothy has since stopped collecting, echoing her husband's earlier comment that “what we did then is now art history”.

You can read an ARTINFO interview with Dorothy here and a review of the film here.
Image: Herb and Dorthy Vogel

The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu has launched a new offsite space at 209 Tuam Street with Seung Yul Oh's Huggong, two large red and yellow balloons that squeeze up against the ceiling, bulge around columns and force viewers back to the walls. Huggong runs to 24 April.
Image: Installation view of Seung Yul Oh's Huggong at 209 Tuam Street, Christchurch. Photo: Jonathan Collie, Christchurch Art Gallery

An upbeat Tim Etchells hosted a function last week to promote the launch of Sydney Contemporary. Directed by well-known Australian gallerist Barry Kedoulis, the first edition of the fair will take place September in a refurbished train shed at Sydney's historic Carriageworks. Etchells says the fair will feature 65 galleries and that it has already secured the participation of 48 galleries, including 20 from overseas. He is also confident the fair will attract art buyers despite tougher market conditions that saw last year's Melbourne Art Fair report sales of $8 million, down from $11 million in 2010.
Image: Tim Etchells at ART HK

The trustees of LA MOCA say they will not hand over their institution to others – notably the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – and will instead raise the funds required for the museum to remain independent. The announcement has fueled speculation on billionaire collector Eli Broad's part in the saga. Broad is reported to have a special interest in the success of MOCA because he is building his own museum right across the street. Roberta Smith picks up the story in the New York Times. Read more…

This year's Dance Massive Biennial includes Action/Response, a project exploring the crossover between dance and visual arts. Staged over two evenings at North Melbourne's Errol Street precinct, it brings together a selection of works curated by Hannah Mathews and inspired by writers Ramon Koval and Chris Johnston. Read more… 

You can see the programme here, which includes a screening of Alicia Frankovich's Sempre Meno, Sempre Peggio, Sempre Piu (2008) at 6:50pm tonight at the Arts House Foyer
Image from the DANCEMASSIVE website: Laresa Kosloff, New Diagonal, Production Still: Alex Martinis Roe, Digital Video (3 mins), 2007

Twenty-five years ago a young artist started an independent art space in a modest house in a village in Yogyakarta. The arrival of the Cemeti Modern Art Gallery is one of the most important moments in the history of contemporary art in Indonesia but, as Alia Swastika notes, starting an independent art initiative was not easy during the authoritarian political regime of the late 1980s. Read more…
Image: Cemeti Art House, Indonesia

Ten years ago, on 19 March 2003, the US-led coalition force launched its second invasion of Iraq – an event that has had a profound effect on the country's archeology and museums as well as on its 34 million people. Museums have been ransacked, archeological sites plundered and the remains of the ancient city of Babylon have been damaged and contaminated by military action. Read more…
Image: US gunship over the Great Ziggurat of Ur

Japanese architect Toyo Ito has been awarded this year's prestigious Pritzker Prize. Along with Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker laureate, Ito is a superstar of Japanese architecture. He is best known for his 2001 Sendai Mediatheque, a seven-story glass box that distills a series of complex technical break thoughs in its spare, even-keeled finish. His largest and most ambitious project, the 620,000 square-foot Taichung Metropolitan Opera House, is under construction in Taiwan and scheduled to open next year.
Images: Toyo Ito, 2013 Pritzker Prize laureate and his Sendai Mediatheque

Billy Apple, Phil Dadson and Jae Hoon Lee are represented in 21st-Century Collecting at Wellington's Adam Art Gallery. Curated by Christina Barton, the exhibition raises questions about contemporary art practice and the challenges facing those who are its custodians.

Thomas McEvilley died on March 3 at Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York from complications from cancer. As one of the most influential and prolific commentators on the art of the late twentieth century he will be widely missed. Few art critics have arrived on the scene more spectacularly than McEvilley did with ‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief’, his relentless and withering attack on MoMa’s major exhibition, ‘Primitivism in Twentieth Century Art” in the November 1985 issue of Artforum. If postmodernism’s brief was the dismantling of Eurocentric formalism, McEvilley became its leading spokesperson more or less overnight. Though an academic—he taught art history at Rice University in Houston for over 30 years and subsequently established the MFA program in Art Criticism and Writing at the School of Visual Arts, New York—his intellectual allegiance was less to the Academy than to the City, New York where he lived.

That said, it was McEvilley’s training in Classical Philology that initially distinguished him from his fellow art critics and again recently, with the publication of his book on and translations of the poetry of Sappho (2008) and his magnum opus The Shape of Ancient Thought, A Comparative Study of Greek and Indian Philosophy (2002). This lifelong command of such disparate fields of knowledge, is a mark of extraordinary capaciousness of his mind. The independence and originality of his insights into the larger issues of modern and contemporary art are matched by those to be found in his numerous studies of individual artists, as various as Marcel Broodthaers, Denis Oppenheim, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Leon Golub,  and Kara Walker.

McEvilley had friends and readers in New Zealand. A contributor to the first issue of Midwest, he was keynote speaker at the 1994 Wellington International Arts Festival Under Capricorn conference, Is Art a European Idea?, and more recently he wrote an  essay for The Brush of All Things, the catalogue of Max Gimblett’s 2004 retrospective at the Auckland Art Gallery. He was a close contemporary and a good friend of mine; I will miss the warmth and depth of his intelligence. 

Wystan Curnow.
Image: Thomas McEvilley reading from Sappho

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature continues this week at Starkwhite.

Lehmann Maupin is the latest international arrival on Hong Kong's burgeoning gallery scene joining Gagosian, White Cube and Galerie Perrotin. The Arts Newspaper reports on how things are panning out for galleries chasing the Chinese Dragon. Read more…

The artist list has been announced for Massimiliano Gioni's Venice Biennale exhibition The Encyclopedic Palace. You can see the full list of artists here for which for the first time includes a New Zealand artist.
Image: Massimiliano Gioni curator of The Encyclopedic Palace, which includes Simon Denny who is represented in New Zealand by Michael Lett

Love it or hate it, the Archibald Prize is a permanent fixture on Sydney's exhibition calendar. Hosted by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the $75,000 portrait prize attracts hundreds of entries from artists and, according to former AGNSW director Edmund Capon, attracts at least 150,000 fee-paying visitors a year, provides a financial windfall for the gallery and generates a huge amount of priceless press. But as the annual Archibald Prize-bashing begins with calls for it to be killed off, or at least changed, the famously unpredictable artbagger is singing off a new song sheet. “If it was judged by critics or curators it would have been deceased a long time ago,” says Capon. “It would have died up its own backside.”
Image: 2012 Archibald Prize winner Tim Storier with his dog Smudge

Last week the LA art world was debating the pros and cons of a possible merger between LA MOCA and LACMA. Now the NYT reports the financially-troubled museum may be close to working out a five year agreement with the National Gallery of Art in Washington to collaborate on programming, research and exhibitions. Any agreement would not include financial or fundraising assistance, leaving MOCA's fiscal problems unsolved, but an agreement could help lift its fundraising efforts and ward off a merger with LACMA.

The  approach to the National Gallery was made by Eli Broad, the billionaire collector who bailed out MOCA in 2008. He is reported to have a special interest in the success of MOCA because he is building his own museum right across the street. For the moment he appears to have derailed the possibility of a merger with LACMA. Read more…
Image: The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art

For the sixth consecutive year, the British Museum was the most visited attraction in the UK with 5.6 million visitors. The Tate Modern took second place with 5.3 million visitors, up by 9% on the previous year with a large share of the increase down to Damien Hirst. His exhibition became the best-attended solo show and second-most visited exhibition in the Tate Modern's history.

Following his Gangnam-style video, Ai Weiwei has written 9 metal-tinged tracks for his recording debut, with music by rock musician Zuoxiao Zuzhou, a friend who was questioned during the artist's 2011 detention. Two of the tracks are devoted to the blind activist Chen Guangcheng and another track is titled Climbing over the Wall, a reference to China's great firewall.

Ai told reuters that the idea for the album came when he was held in detention. “All I could sing was Chinese People's Liberation Army songs,” he said. “After that I thought when I'm out I'd like to do something related to music.” He also says Elton John has been an inspiration for making his own album and that he is already at work on a second album that is closer to John's oeuvre.
Image: Ai Weiwei

IMA Director Robert Leonard is curating an exhibition for Starkwhite to coincide with the opening of the Auckland Triennial in May. Titled Bazinga!—the notorious catchphrase of Dr Sheldon Cooper from the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory—the show will explore a nerd sensibility in recent Australian art. It will feature work that touches on science (especially astrophysics) and science fiction (particularly Star Trek); mathematics and statistics; technology, computers, computer games, and the internet; and obsessive fandom, autistic behaviour, and inane pranks. The artists are Rebecca Baumann, Botborg, Antoinette J. Citizen, Gabrielle de Vietri, Danielle Freakley, Daniel McKewen, Ross Manning, Grant Stevens, and Stuart Ringholt. Bazinga! opens Saturday 11 May at 6pm, with a video/sound-feedback performance by Botborg, and runs until 8 June.
Image: Grant Stevens, Matter (2007), digital video

Australian gallerist Barry Keldoulis has been appointed CEO and Group Fairs Director of Art Fairs Australia Pty, the company behind the new Sydney Contemporary art fair and the Melbourne Art fair. Keldoulis takes up the reins from Francesca Valmorbida who laid the foundations for Sydney Contemporary, which launches in September.
Image: Barry Keldoulis

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature continues this week at Starkwhite.
Image: Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection Rules of Nature is presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced a plan to take over the financially troubled LA MOCA, but it may require the approval of billionaire collector Eli Broad. His $30m bailout of MOCA in 2008 was on condition that it may not be acquired by another museum within 100 miles within the next 10 years. You can read the merger proposal here.

Massimiliano Gioni and Hans Ulrich Obrist teamed up recently at the New Museum to discuss do it, the ongoing curatorial project of instructions by artists for artworks exhibited as manuals that began in Paris in 1993 as a conversation between Obrist and artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier. “I think it's Richard Hamilton who once told me that we mainly remember exhibitions that invent new rules of the game,” Obrist said on the panel. “And that's what Boltanski and Lavier and I said at the cafe, that we wanted to invent new rules.” Read more…

As the Armory Show prepares to launch its centennial edition in New York this week, Jerry Saltz revisits the 1913 Armory Show and the birth of modern America. Read more…
Image: 2013 edition of The Armory Show

Mexican artist Hector Zamora has recently completed the installation of Muegano, a multi-faceted structure hovering above a lake in Christchurch's Botanical Gardens. Originally commissioned for the 6th SCAPE Public Art Biennial in 2010, the installation of the work was postponed in 2011 after Christchurch was rocked by a devastating series of earthquakes that left much of the city and its architectural heritage in ruins. Having survived the 1986 Mexico earthquake, Zamora was sensitive to how Christchurch people might feel about the sculpture's tumbled appearance, but with the passing of time the work can now function as he intended: as a comment on inner city living and urban density.
Image: Hector Zamora's Muegano, Christchurch Botanic Gardens

Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature opens at Starkwhite on Thursday at 6pm. Drawing on the ancient tradition of Chinese ink and wash paintings and employing interface software, his shanshui-inspired landscape is formed and re-formed in response to interactions by viewers. Presented in association with the Auckland Arts Festival 2013, Rules of Nature runs to 4 April.
Image: Jin Jiangbo's interactive projection at the 1012 Guangzhou Triennial