Hans Ulrich Obrist's Institute of the 21st Century (i21c) will be launched on 29 July. i21c is a non-profit initiative to consolidate and digitally archive Obrist's Interview Project archive so that his interviews with major figures of the 20th and 21st centuries can be shared as a searchable database. Over the launch weekend Obrist will conduct public interviews with artists John Baldessari and computer engineer Danny Hillis.

You can receive i21c news and be notified when an interview has been posted here.

The Museum of Old and New Art is back in the news with reports that mathematician turned gambler David Walsh is in the sights of the Australian Tax office. The ATO says Walsh and others in a secret punter's club have been running a A$2.4 billion global banking business and wants taxes due. At last count Walsh faces a tax bill of just under A$40 million, which he disputes.

As the details became public, he was being asked whether this spelled the end of MONA. But Walsh remains upbeat, saying he is confident an agreement can be reached with the ATO and that he is determined to keep MONA running.
Image: David Walsh, founder of Hobart's Museum of Old And New Art

Damien Hirst, the artist who became a brand, has entered the fast-food brand game, lending an artwork to Burger King as it attempts to counter rival McDonalds marketing messages as part of its sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The title of the work is Beautiful Psychedelic Gherkin Exploding Tomato Sauce All Over Your Face Flame Grilled Painting, 2003. Burger King says the last part of the title is apt, given the fact that it flame grills its beef burgers. And Leicester Square franchisee, Django Fung, says: “Art should be accessible to everyone, especially in such a busy summer and putting this painting in our new-look Burger King restaurant in such a high-profile location does just that.”
Image: Damien Hirst's Beautiful Psychedelic Gherkin Exploding Tomato Sauce All Over Your Face, Flame Grilled Painting, 2003

Greetings from Los Angeles opens tonight at 6:00pm and runs to 6 August 2012. Exhibition curator Brian Butler will be at the opening reception.

The Palais de Tokyo sees participating in the renewal of the ecosystem of art as part of its remit. With this in mind, the institution will entrust its entire 2013 exhibition programme to young curators. Selected on the basis of the proposals they submit, “the winners will bear witness to the perpetual reinvention of the issues involved in curating an exhibition, their scouting talent and ability to dream up new ways of relating to art.” Read more…

Marina Abramovic's head-to-heads with her audience have been captured in a new film, while The Tanks, the world's first gallery dedicated to performance artists, is opening at London's Tate Modern. The Guardian's Adrian Searle reports on the boom in live art. Read more…
Image: Marina Abramovic, The Artist is Present exhibition, MoMA, 2010

ARTINFO reports on why Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev's Documenta may be the most important exhibition of the 21st Century. Read more…

Five European museums, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Gemeentemuseum at the Hague, have launched an online video channel for films about art and design. ARTtube will include interviews with artists and profiles of upcoming exhibitions, and aims to attract a half a million visitors a year by 2014.

The Guardian is offering a preview of Douglas Gordon's new video The End of Civilisation. It's his first ever film in England, albeit within sight of his native Scotland, and centres on shots of a grand piano burning in a dip in the fellside. “A piano started to represent for me the ultimate symbol of western civilisation. Not only is it an instrument, it's a beautiful object that works as a sculpture but it has another function entirely”, he says. “I wanted to do something with a piano in a landscape of some significance and I suppose as a Scotsman, there's nothing more significant than the border.” Read more…
Image: Douglas Gordon's burning piano at Talkin Head

Built by Australian gambling wizard David Walsh to house his private art collection, the Museum of Old and New Art has been in the headlines since it was launched in Hobart 18 months ago – partly because of the money Walsh has spent on acquisitions, extravagant openings and publicity, but mostly because the museum has captured the imagination of a wider public as well as the attention of the art world.

MONA has a reputation for challenging museum conventions and the latest exhibition takes it to a new level. Curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, Theatre of the World spans 4000 years of fine and decorative arts and includes 180 works from the collection of David Walsh and 300 items selected from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery ranging from historical items of furniture to cutting-edge works of contemporary art. Convinced that it is no longer enough to see art in an art historical context, Martin set out to create an experience that is purely about “seeing”, enacting a curatorial practice that favours what he calls “visual efficiency”. Viewers are invited to use their imagination to find relationships between seemingly disparate objects.

Regardless of whether or not the exhibition points to the future of museum practice and exhibition making, Jean-Hubert Martin's Theatre of the World is beginning to generate the kind of discussion that circulated around his ground-breaking exhibition Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Pompidu in 1989.

The theme of the 2013 Sharjah Biennial is the courtyard and its metaphorical conditions in a globalised world.

Recently curator Yuko Hasegawa, announced plans to build a new city structure to house works by artists in next year's edition of the biennial. She says: “I will invite a selection of Indian, Lebanese, Belgian, Japanese and Spanish architects to help envision a new urban structure that connects the historic area of Sharjah and its courtyard typology with the larger city. Within these new and traditional structures a broad range of artists will be invited to create works that will offer new experiences to be shared. Here the courtyard becomes more than a 'place' – it becomes a 'condition' where culture is nourished and true knowledge is formed.”
Image: the Sharjah Heritage Area

A new Tate-sponsored website called the Gallery of Lost Art has been set up to showcase modern and contemporary pieces that have been destroyed or lost, stolen or erased. The Gallery is currently showing 21 works of art in the form of dossiers with interviews, archival photographs and essays. Among them are Daniel Buren's 1971 installation for the Guggenheim's rotunda, Paul Thek's Tomb which a storage company is said to have discarded in the 80s, and Rachel Whiteread's monumental public work House (1993), which was destroyed as the artist intended. You can visit the Lost Art site here.
Image: Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1967-1995 (1995), which was lost in a fire at a London art storage company in 2004, along with pieces by over 100 artists

Sewing, basket-weaving, music-making, story-telling and other communal activities are at the heart of the 18th Biennale of Sydney. The exhibition, spread over five venues in the city, is entitled “All Our Relations” and presents a vision of art as a cathartic experience capable of healing wounds and building bridges. Read more…
Image: Lee Mingwei's The Mending Project, 2009

This week we are installing Greetings from Los Angeles, which opens on Tuesday 10 July at 6pm.

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's exhibition Pointing at Trees, closes today at 3pm.
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Pointing at Trees, installation view

Clinton Watkins' video Feedback is available as a free downloadable artwork at the Chartwell website.
Image: Clinton Watkins, Feedback (2009), video still, Chartwell Collection, New Zealand. This work was first presented by Chartwell and Starkwhite as a free download project at the 2011 Auckland Art Fair.

An $800 version of Damien Hirst's skull is on the market – a high-definition rotating image of it, certified by the artist, and available in a limited edition from the digital art venture S[edition]. Hirst, Tracey Emin, Bill Viola and Isaac Julien are amongst the S[edition] artists producing works for iPads, smartphones, PC and TV screens. Julian sees the venture as vehicle for the democratisation of contemporary art, but he'd like to see it market art originally made for the medium rather than images of pre-existing work, a view shared by others who say S[edition] should represent artists whose medium is the digital screen.
Image: Damien Hirst's $100 million skull

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's exhibition Pointing at Trees closes tomorrow. [Starkwhite hours are 11am to 3pm on Saturday.]
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Black vase and white flowers (2011), C-type print, 380 x 380mm

One of New Zealand's finest private art collections goes under the hammer in a two-part auction at Art and Object in September. Formed by Les and Milly Paris over four and a half decades, the collection covered just about every square inch of their walls, prompting a later decision to build another floor on their otherwise modestly-scaled home. Collecting was an all-consuming passion for Les and Milly, but it wasn't ever just about the art. They built longstanding, personal relationships with artists fortunate enough to be in their collecting sights, becoming much-loved figures in the New Zealand art world.
Image: Les and Milly Paris talking to Dowse Art Gallery director Jim Barr in the 70s

Set up to celebrate the diverse methods of sound making and sound theory, Liquid Architecture is Australia's premier sound festival. This year's edition, Liquid Architecture 13: Antarctic Convergence, explores the philosophical, social and environmental ramifications of the growing human presence in Antarctica through the activities of artists who have produced work from first-hand encounters with the frozen continent. The lineup of artists includes Phil Dadson who visited Antarctica in 2003 under the Antarctica New Zealand Art Fellowship Programme.
Image: video still from Phil Dadson's Echo Logo [Polar Projects]

The PinchukArtCentre in Kiev has announced the 21 artists making the shortlist for the 2012 Future Generation Prize of $100,000. This link takes you to the shortlist.
Image: Victor Pinchuk, founder of the Future Generation Art Prize

ARTINFO has published a list of 30 influential art professionals who are aged 30 years or younger. It includes patrons, critics, dealers and curators (but not artists this time). You can see the list here.

The 18th Sydney Biennale opens today. This year's theme is “all our relations”, which Toronto-based co-curator Gerald McMaster hopes visitors will interpret with an open mind. “Most people think that relations are human relations, how we react together,” he says. “But it extends to the environment, weather patterns, animal migrations, populations. We were interested in the idea of how things begin from something simple as an interaction and can grow into something more complex.” Read more…

The Biennale takes place at multiple venues including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Museum of Contemporary Art and heritage sites such as Carriageworks (a former railway workshop turned into an arts centre) and Cockatoo Island (a former shipyard and convict prison).
Image: Cockatoo Island

Nicolaus Schafhausen has been named as the director of the Kunsthalle Wein and will take up his position in October. He has curated many exhibitions including the German Pavilion for the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2009, the 2008 Brussels Biennale, and the 2010 Media City Seoul Festival. He has served as the director of several art institutions, most recently the Witt de With Centre for Contemporary Art, where his shows included the two-part Billy Apple exhibition A History of the Brand and Revealed/Concealed. He is currently the director of Fogo Island Arts, a residency program in Newfoundland that brings together art and science.

Curated by Brian Butler, Greetings from Los Angeles opens at Starkwhite on 10 July and runs to 6 August 2012.

For 40 years James Turrell has been creating skyspaces that harness and enhance the experience of perceiving light. He has just completed his 73rd skyspace at Houston's Rice University. Titled Twilight Epiphany, the pyramid-like experiential work of art provides two light shows each day – one at sunrise and one at sunset – in conjunction with the arc of the sun. Visitors gaze up at the 72-by-72-foot white roof which offers a view of the sky through a 14 x 14 foot square opening. LED lights on the ceiling change colours as the sun rises and sets providing a wash of oranges, greens, pinks and blues, impacting on the colour of the sky as seen by visitors.
Image: James Turrell's Twilight Epiphany, Rice University, Houston

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's exhibition Pointing at Trees closes on Saturday 30 June at 3.00pm
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Black vase and white flowers (2011), C-type print, 380 x 380 mm

Michael Heizer's monumental Levitated Mass has finally opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The work is composed of a 456-foot-long slot over which the artist has placed a 340-ton granite megalith. Read more…
Image: Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Phil Dadson's Bodytok Quartet is showing at Pataka to 29 July. You can read a review of his video installation here.
Image: video still from Phil Dadson's Bodytok Quartet

This afternoon Layla Rudneva-Mackay talks about the work in her exhibition Pointing at Trees. [Starkwhite 3:00 – 4:00pm]
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Blue on grey (2011), C-type print, 380 x 380mm

The Shukhov radio tower in Moscow may be lost if it is not properly restored soon according to architect Vladimir Shukhov's great-grandson. Commissioned by Lenin and constructed between 1920 and 1922 using an innovative lattice shell technique, the 90 year old tower is regarded as an architectural masterpiece of the Russian avant-garde. In 2010 Norman Foster described it as “a structure of dazzling brilliance and great historic importance”, warning that it required urgent attention to save it.

Last year, Victor Putin ordered the allocation of $4.3 million to reconstruct the tower, but Shuhkov's great-grandson (also named Vladimir) believes this could result in an unsatisfactory replica. He says Russian officials have not sought the advice of foreign experts who are ready to work on a plan for the tower for a nominal fee, and that the European Union has allocated a comparable sum just to study his great-grandfather's design heritage.
Image: the Shukhov Radio Tower, Moscow

frieze magazine is inviting entries for the Frieze Writer's Prize 2012, which aims to discover, promote and encourage new critics from across the world. The winner will be awarded £2000 and commissioned to write a review for an upcoming issue of frieze. Read more…

Dane Mitchell has been selected for the 2012 Gwangju Biennale, which runs from 7 September to 11 November. This year's edition is being directed by six curators – Nancy Adajania (India), Mami Kataoka (Japan), Wassan al-Kudhairi (Qatar), Sun Jung Kim (Korea), Alia Swasticka (Indonesia) and Carol Yinghua Lu (China). Mitchell is also in the lineup of artists selected for the 2012 Liverpool Biennale.
Image: Dane Mitchell, detail Celestial Fields, 2012

In an article published by the Huffington Post, Charles Birnbaum reports on the success of New York's High Line, the stretch of abandoned, elevated railroad on New York's West Side that has undergone a Phoenix-like resurrection to become one of the city's most popular destinations. He says the much-loved park has generated discussion about the so-called High Line effect and that several cities are looking at their own long-disused sections of track hoping they can literally replicate New York's success. Read more…
Images: The old High Line and the new High Line, New York

Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari have created a billboard for New York's High Line, the fourth in the series that began last December with John Baldessari's The First $100,000 I Ever Made. The pair made the image as part of Toilet Paper, an art magazine founded by them two years ago.
Image: Billboard by Maurizio Cattelan and Pierpaolo at the High Line

Layla Rudneva-Mackay will talk about her exhibition Pointing at Trees at Starkwhite on Saturday 23 June at 3.00pm.
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Pointing at Trees, installation view, Starkwhite

Brazilian-born, New York-based artist Vik Muniz is turning Rio's garbage into a portrait of his city in his New Landscape project, a meditation on the ever-quickening pace of consumer culture that he is creating on the margins of the United Nations Rio+20 conference on sustainable development.

His idea is to create a giant collage out of trash and then take an overhead photograph of it, creating a work so realistic it looks like a photograph of Rio's Guanabara Bay and its surrounds, not a photo of garbage. Visitors carrying trash place their contributions on a projected image of the Bay taken by Muniz and his assistants shift around their contributions and add other bits of trash according to his instructions.

“We have a chance to meditate on our place in nature by making the representation a symbol of that place from within,” Muniz said. “It may not solve all the problems but it puts you in a state to meditate on our own decisions.”

Muniz has worked with trash before and is best known for his portraits of garbage pickers at a Rio de Janeiro landfill, a project that was chronicled in the 2010 documentary Wasteland.
Images: Muniz's projected image of Guanabara Bay (top) and people adding trash to his landscape (bottom)

Nikolaus Hirsch, curator and director of Stadelschule and Portikus, has been selected as the General Director of the 2012 Gwangju Folly Project. When asked about the curatorial direction for this year's Project, Hirsch said he will focus on “creating a discussion that is architectural, aesthetic, and artistic while at the same time communicating with the Gwangju citizens and reflecting the unique characteristics of Gwangju.

Established in 2011 for the urban rejuvenation of Gwangju, the Folly Project has been recognised as a new type of public design that can communicate with pedestrians as well as with the surrounding environment. As the original eleven works created for the first edition of the event have met with popular and critical acclaim, they have created a platform for Gwangju as a new city of design. Read more…
Image: Francisco Sanin's Folly built for Gwangju Design Biennale's 2011 Folly Project

The Algerian-born, Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno is known for his collaborative works with artists like Douglas Gordon and Pierre Huyghe that use film to examine notions of portraiture and the representation of individuals. Recently he talked to The Art Newspaper about his solo show at the Fondation Beyeler and why he chose to make a film about Marilyn Monroe, which he describes as a portrait of a phantom incarnated in an image. Read more…
Image: Marilyn Monroe's hotel room at the Waldorf Astoria recreated by Philippe Parreno for his film For Marilyn, 2012

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's exhibition Pointing at trees continues at Starkwhite this week.
Image: Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Pointing at Trees, installation view