Ann Shelton's in a forest features in the Australian Centre of Photography's Summer Season exhibition which opens in Sydney tonight and runs to 17 February 2013.

Christo is creating for Abu Dhabi a colossal 150-metre-high, flat-topped pyramid that would overshadow the Great Pyramid of Giza. The work will be made out 410,000 multi-coloured oil barrels inspired by the yellow and red sands of Al Gharbia, which he views as a “spectacularly beautiful desert location” for the work. Read more…

Seung Yul Oh will take up a Nanji Studio residency in the New Year. Administered by the Seoul Museum of Art, the residency was set up to act as an incubator for young Korean artists. While in Seoul, Oh will also present his first solo show at ONE AND J gallery.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, The ability to blow themselves up (Still #1), 2012

Ross Manning's exhibition Field Emissions runs to Saturday 22 December.

You can catch Ross Manning's sonic performance at Starkwhite today at 4pm, followed by drinks with the artist to celebrate the opening of his exhibition Field Emissions.

Images: Billy Apple's installation at Starkwhite for his 50th birthday held on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 22 November

On Thursday 22 November 1962, Billy Apple came into being. It is exactly 50 years since that art historic moment.

In London in 1962, I began an extended work, which was part of an effort to break down the separation between “art activity” and “life activity”. I decided to use my own identity as the vehicle with which to explore the concept of the artist as “art object”. Billy Apple 1974

On the eve of his show at Lisson Gallery, which includes past and new work, Lawrence Weiner talks to The Art Newspaper about using text as material, why he doesn't like to be called a conceptualist and his ambivalence about the power of the art market. Read more…

MoMA has acquired the score for one of the most controversial gestures in the history of modern music. John Cage's 4' 33″ meditation on the act of listening, which was inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's revolutionary white paintings, will go on view at MoMA next year. Read more…

As New York is drying out from the flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy, Venice has been hit by torrential rain and unusually high tides putting 70% of the city under water.

The low-lying city of lagoons experiences problems from high waters every winter, especially around St Mark's square where many of its building are regularly flooded, but this is the fourth time the city has faced extreme flooding since 2000, which Italy's environment minister, Corrado Clini, insists is caused by global warming.

Venice is is in the process of building an elaborate system of sea walls to cope with the worsening annual flooding, but the work is not scheduled for completion until 2015.

Captured by contact microphones placed throughout the city centre, the sound of traffic, air vents and building vibrations infuse broadcast test tone colour fields to visualise real time noise in Clinton Watkins' City Noise project commissioned by the Auckland City Council's public art team for the Bledisloe Walkway light boxes. City Noise opens at 5.00pm tonight at the walkway between the Aotea Centre and Wellesley Street.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Magenta (High Rise Sub Sonics) 2012

Performa's RoseLee Golderg, asks what took so long for curators to catch on to live art? Read more…

Alicia Frankovich will present her new piece, The opportune spectator, in an evening of performances at Arratia Beer, Berlin on Friday 16 November at 7.15pm.

Our next show is Field Emissionsby Brisbane-based artist Ross Manning. The artist will launch the exhibition with a sonic performance on Sunday 25 November (time to be announced later) and the show will run from 26 November to 22 December 2012.
Image: Ross Manning, Dichroic Filter Piece (extended projection), 2012. Dichroic filters, cut glass, dvd player, projector

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Huggong continues this week, closing on Saturday 17 November.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, Huggong (2012) installation view

Art restorers working on frescoes in a forgotten chapel in Assisi believe they have stumbled across proof that images found under layers of grime are the work of medieval artist Giotto. Read more…
Image: Restorer Sergio Fusetti working on frescos that may be the work of Giotto

Martin Basher is showing in the group exhibition Strangers in a Strange Land at LMAKprojects in New York. The exhibition opens tonight (NY time) in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy.

The ICI's Independent Vision Award for emerging curators has gone to Jay Sanders, curator of performance at the Whitney Museum in New York, and Nav Haq, a curator at MuHKA in Antwerp. The biennial award goes to emerging curators from around the world who have demonstrated “exceptional creativity and prescience” in organising exhibitions, coordinating research and for related writing.

Sanders and Haq were chosen by Hans Ulrich Obrist from a shortlist nominated by 15 internationally recognised curators. “Nav Haq fredquently takes us into the polyphony of art centers, creating shows and projects that broaden the scope of our thinking,” he said. “Jay Sanders stays close to artists, gaining a strong understanding of an artist's body of work – both emerging and overlooked – so that ultimately audiences can know an artist deeper.”
Image: Haq and Sanders

As the China Art Palace and the Power Station of Art roll out their opening programmes, Jing Daily reports the city will open another 15 museums by 2015 as part of a plan to make Shanghai a new global cultural hub. And while the expansion of the sector will clearly benefit Shanghai's burgeoning cultural tourism industry, social returns are also being factored into the plans to position Shanghai as a creative city. The museums will be located throughout the city rather than clustered in tourism zones. “In future Shanghai residents will be able to find a museum or cultural venue within a 15 minute walk of their homes,” said a spokesperson for the Shanghai Municipal Committee.
Image: Shanghai's new Power Station of Art, formerly the Pavilion of the Future at the 2010 World Expo

Private art institutions, like the Minsheng Art Museum and the Rockbund Art Museum, have been leading the way in Shanghai, building their institutional profiles at home and abroad on the back of first-rate, curatorially-driven programming. With the arrival of two new state institutions – the China Art Palace and the Power Station of Art – things may be about to change as they provide even greater scope for contemporary art in the city, depending on their larger institutional projects and how they play out in their programming.

The opening programmes of both museums indicate the directions they are likely to take. The gigantic collection-based China Art Palace has opened with floors dedicated to Chinese Modern art and a “Masters Hall” dedicated to 20th-century artists like Wu Guanzhong, Qi Baishi and Lin Fengmian. The temporary shows in the opening lineup include Congratulations from the World, featuring contemporary works from the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; American masters from the Whitney Museum; Vermneer masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum; and works from the collections of Maison de Victor Hugo in Paris, the Museo National de San Carlos in Mexico city and the British Museum. And next month it will present an exhibition from the Musee d'Orsay focusing on Naturalism in France.

The Power Station of Art has opened with the Shanghai Biennale signaling its role as a contemporary art museum. In a statement on his theme, Reactivation, the chief curator, artist Qiu Zhijie, said he wanted to emphasise how artists interact with the public and their role in bringing about change. In addition to the presentations in the biennale, this year it also includes pavilions featuring contemporary artists from cities around the world, which the organisation hopes to make a permanent feature of the biennale. “We chose cities that are similar to Shanghai,” he said, adding that he was careful to choose cities that had their own history of reactivation, of creating a dynamic new society, while exploring how artists had contributed to these changes.

Perhaps with the masterpiece-driven approach of the China Art Palace in mind, Qiu Zhijie also said: “The result (at The Power Station) is a public that is free to form their own opinion about art. Without anyone telling them what is 'good' art, they come to their own conclusions.”
Image: Qiu Zhijie's Map of Utopia (detail), mapping the concepts underpinning the 9th Shanghai Biennale

Starkwhite will present Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature in the visual arts programme of the 2013 Auckland Arts Festival, which was announced at the Festival launch last week. Commissioned by Swiss art collector Uli Sigg for the exhibition Shanshui, Poetry without Sound? Chinese Contemporary Art at the Museum of Lucerne, which he co-curated with Ai Weiwei and Peter Fischer, Rules of Nature is an interactive installation blending imagery and sounds from traditional Chinese art forms with new-media technology. The exhibition, which runs at Starkwhite from 8 March to 6 April 2013, will also include a new work by Jin Jiangbo with imagery in the manner Shanshui ink-and-wash painting that forms and reforms in response to visitor interactions.
Image: Jin Jiangbo's Rules of Nature projected onto water in the Shanshui exhibition co-curated by Uli Sigg, the Swiss art collector who has donated $170 million worth of contemporary Chinese art to the M+ museum in Hong Kong. 

This year Billy Apple® turns 50. In the latest issue of frieze he talks to Anthony Byrt about a career of collaborations and controversies that have consistently redefined art's relationship with advertising, science and technology. Read more…
Image: Billy Apple®, Trademark 50th (2012) pigment ink on canvas, 1100 x 1100 mm 

The Getty Museum's, Pacific Standard Time brought together dozens of museums to celebrate the historically under-recognised art of Southern California from 1945 to 1980. The Getty invested $12 million directly into this initiative – about $10 million in grants to more than 60 participating museums and other non-profits to research and stage exhibitions, and the rest for events and marketing.

Hailed as a tremendous success, PST changed a cultural stereotype – that the city has no history – and now a study says the collaborative venture also had a significant economic impact on the region. According to a report released this week, the Getty's $12 million investment in Pacific Standard Time generated almost 10 times that amount in spending by tourists and local residents, which is good news for those in cultural tourism.

However, Getty Trust President Jim Cuno has been careful not to overplay the economic benefits. “It appears that the numbers are good, and it's worth sharing those numbers with the general public,” he said. But he called any revenue generated a byproduct of Pacific Standard Time's mission, described as “the preservation and documentation of the region's artistic legacy and sharing it through public exhibitions.”

GalleristNY talks to Chris Kraus about her most recent novel Summer of Hate and how it was born out of her early years in Los Angeles where she co-taught a class in Fictocriticism with science fiction author Mark von Schlegell at the Art Centre College of Design in Pasadena. Fictocriticism, she explained, has to do with writing about art and ideas with the same intensity and cadence as your own problems or the party you went to last night.” Read more…
Image: Chris Kraus

At Art Basel Miami, Lorenzo Rudolf championed Latin America's contemporary art scene and helped raise its profile. Now as director of Art Stage Singapore he aims to do the same for Indonesia. The 2013 edition of his fair will include dedicated space for Indonesian galleries and an exhibition of about 30 Indonesian artists. And in an unusual move for an art fair, Art Stage Singapore will represent about two thirds of them. “We only want to show the best, but many Indonesian artists don't work with galleries,” he said. “The infrastructure is not there.”

But how will participating galleries feel about Art Stage Singapore competing with them for sales?

On the final day of the fair in 2012 Rudolf took a small group of collectors to artists studios in Indonesia and some galleries complained they were cut out and said the move took collectors away from the fair. Rudolf acknowledged it caused some friction, but says the Indonesian pavilion will help them this time by atrracting collectors.”It is the best promotion for them,” he said. “If Indonesaia is here then there is no need to go to Indonesia.”
Image: Arahmaiani's Lobsangnima, A Young Tibetan Monk in Yishu (2011). He is one of the indonesian artist at Art Stage Singapore 2013

Previously conceived of and presented as an integral part of the Gwangju Design Biennale, the second edition of the Gwangju Folly Project will be held as an independent event this year. Nikolaus Hirsch (director), Philipp Misselwitz and Eui Young Chun (curators) have developed a curatorial approach for the event, which uses the folly as a tool of enquiry to address the potential of public space today – in contemporary Gwangju and globally.

The Art News Paper is reporting that Vatican City will have a pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, citing this from Italy's La Stampa paper: : “…the artists will include fewer than 10 men and women from various countries around the world, some of whom are established artists and others who are just emerging. Their subject matter will be the first 11 chapters of the Book of Genesis.”
Image: The Swiss Guard in Vatican City