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

The 10th edition of Europe's nomadic biennial, Manifesta, will be hosted by the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The biennial, which changes its location every edition, was launched shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall to encourage artistic dialogue between countries formerly divided by the Iron Curtain. Manifesta in 2014 will be the first edition to take place in an eastern European country.
Image: Hermitage

The Getty says the second Pacific Standard Time will explore the artistic connections between Los Angeles and Latin America. “Our city has had deep roots in Latin America, making it a nexus  of cultural creativity between North and South.” says Getty President and CEO Jim Cunro. Los Angeles and Latin America follows the first edition of Pacific Standard Time, which brought together dozens of museums to celebrate the historically under-recognised art of Southern California from 1945 to 1980.
Image: The first edition of Pacific Standard Time included an exhibition of Chicano performance and conceptual art group Asco at LACMA

Billy Apple is represented in Howard Wise Gallery: Exploring the New at Moeller Fine Art, New York. The exhibition is a homage to pioneering galleist Howard Wise and features work by Apple, Christo, Nam June Paik, George Rickey and others.
Image: Billy Apple, Unidentified Fluorescent Object (UFO), 1967

The Museum of Modern Art is calling on its network of artists, architects and designers to help rebuild Rockaway Beach, which is struggling to recover after being hit by Hurricane Sandy. “We are asking artists, architects, designers and urban planners to present ideas for creating social spaces, new housing models, urban interventions and other ideas related to rebuilding and protecting the shoreline,” says MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach.

Twenty five selected proposals will be presented publicly in the press, social media and on site in a series of presentations organised by MoMA in its temporary relief and cultural VW Dome 2 in Rockaway Beach during April.
Image: Post-Hurricane Sandy Rockaway Beach

Image: installation view of Martin Basher's current exhibition at Starkwhite

Architect Andrew Burns says his prize-winning entry in the inaugural Fugitive Structures architecture competition has an ambiguous presence between architecture and art object and transforms an ordinary rose apple hedge into a thing of beauty. He hopes his black box will become a sanctuary of quiet contemplation for visitors to Gene Sherman's Contemporary Art Foundation over the next six months.

Launched in Sydney by Sherman in partnership with BCN Architecture, the brief for the $10,000 prize was to create an inspiring architectural space on a 20 square meter courtyard site, with a three-metre height restriction – dimensions that allowed the temporary structure to slip under the radar of the local council. She came up with the idea for the award after visiting the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London's  Kensington Gardens. Each year the Serpentine commissions an architect to create a temporary pavilion in the grounds near the Gallery.
Image: Crescent House, Andrew Burns' prize-winning Fugitive Structures pavilion 

Image: Ralph Hotere, Black Painting (1964)

A new book out next week offers unedited transcripts from Calvin Tompkins' interviews with Marcel Duchamp ahead of a major profile in The New Yorker that ran the following year. Marcel Duchamp: The Afternoon Interviews (Badlands limited/DAP) comes out on the centenary of the first readymade Bicycle Wheel, and the debut of Nude Descending a Staircase at the inaugural Armory Show in New York. Read more…

Recently The Village Voice published a piece on the influence of big money on art today – how it affects the way art is made, understood and ultimately experienced. Read more…
Image: artwork by William Powhida from The Village Voice

Martin Basher's exhibition continues at Starkwhite this week through to 2 March. This link takes you to our press release and installation views.

The Getty Research Institute has released a video on legendary curator Harald Szeemann. You can view the video here.
Image: Harald Szeemann

Construction is underway on Bosco Verticale, the twin tree-clad apartment buildings in Milan that will the be world's first ever vertical forest. In addition to adding an eye-catching feature, the buildings' 900 trees along with a variety of shrubs and plants, are meant to absorb CO2 and particles from Milan's notoriously dirty air, shield radiation, produce both humidity and oxygen, filter noise pollution and provide energy saving shade to each of the towers' apartment units. The buildings will also have wind and solar systems, along with greywater recycling systems to help irrigate the greenery on the buildings' cantilevered balconies, and a team of in-house horticulturalists to tend to the trees, the tallest of which will grow to a maximum height of 30 feet.
Image: architectural renderings of  Stefano Boeri's Bosco Verticale, Milan

Grant Stevens' Supermassive is showing L.A. Louver to 23 February. You can read an Los Angeles Times review of his exhibition here.

On the eve of their exhibition at Melbourne's Anna Schwartz Gallery, AES+F spoke to the Sydney Morning Herald about art-making in post-Pussy Riot Russia. Read more…
Image: figure from AES+F's Angels-Demons series

Martin Basher's exhibition continues at Starkwhite this week through to 2 March. This link takes you to our press release and installation views.
Image: installation view of Martin Basher's current exhibition

This year the Chinese New Year falls on February 10 and Starkwhite celebrates the start of year of the snake with Shangahi-based artist Jin Jiangbo who is in Auckland to oversee the installation of an exhibition of interactive works, which opens on 7 March as part of the visual arts programme of the Auckland Festival of Arts.

Alicia Frankovich presents a new performance tonight at Berlin's Galerie Michael Janssen. The missing action takes place between 18:00 and 20:00 at the opening of Assaf Gruber's exhibition Every Corner of the Soul.

The Mendel Art Gallery and future Remai Art Gallery of Saskatchewan has announced the appointment of former Power Plant director Gregory Burke as director and chief executive. Read more…

Despite earlier reports that South Korea would present a group show at this year's Venice Biennale, Kim Sooja will be the country's sole representative. Best known for her installation, video and performance work, the artist is a seasoned biennale performer – this is the fifth time she has participated in the Venice Biennale. Read more…
Image: from Kimsooja's Bottari Truck Migrateurs

We opened our 2013 programme on Tuesday evening with an exhibition by New-York based artist Martin Basher, which runs to 2 March. This link takes you to our press release and installation views.
Image: Installation view of Martin Basher's current exhibition at Starkwhite

The auction house Christie's, which has owned Haunch of Venison since 200,7 has decided to close the gallery and stop resresenting artists. The gallery's headquarters in London will operate as a space for the auction house's private sales and the gallery in Fitzrovia, along with the New York branch in Chelsea, will close down at the end of their current exhibitions.”Private sales at Christies' have been growing exponentially and that's where the focus should be,” the gallery's international director told Bloomberg.

The news comes as no surpise to those in the art world who felt the marriage of an auction house and dealer gallery was an unholy alliance. Read more…

John Kaldor, the art patron/collector renowned for bringing art superstars to Australia, believes 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 and over 70 performers to present a group exhibition of living sculpture within 13 purpose-built room in Sydney's historic Pier 2/3. The exhibition builds on two prior iterations and continues the project of curators Hans Ulrich Obrist (co-director of London's Serpentine Gallery) and Klaus Biesenbach (director of MoMA PS1 in New York). You can see some of the works in the show in a Guardian review of 11 Rooms in Manchester. View video
Image: performance/installation by Xu Zhen, one of the artists in 13 Rooms which runs from 11-13 April 2013

Participating galleries from Australia rate the 2013 edition of Art Stage Singapore as a great success. Ursula Sullivan of Sydney's Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art says: Art Stage Singapore was brilliant this year. After 2012, we almost did not come back as it was a bit of a tragedy, but thankfully we did.” Read more…
Image: Sullivan + Strumpf Fine Art at Art Stage Singapore

The Sovereign Art Foundation has announced the thirty finalists for this year's Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Jae Hoon Lee is in the lineup of contenders for the US$30,000 prize to be judged by David Elliott, director of the 17 Biennale of Sydney; Emi Eu, director of Singapore Tyler Print Institute; Lars Nittve, director of M+, Hong Kong; Tim Marlow, director of White Cube and Philip Tinari, Director, Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art, Beijing.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Becoming, (2002)

The world's first online biennale, an exclusively internet-sited art exhibition, will be launched in April under the directorship of Jan Hoet. He is working with a team of international curators including: Daniel Birnbaum, director of Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Fulya Erdmci, curator Istanbul Biennale; Yuko Hasegawa, chief curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo and curator of the Sharjah Biennial; Adriano Pedrosa, independent curator, Sao Paulo; and Nancy Spector, Guggenheim Museum NY. Read more…
Image: Jan Hoet