An elevated black cube designed by Melbourne architects Denton Corker Marshall has been selected for Australia's Venice Biennale pavilion, replacing the much-criticised temporary structure by Philip Cox which remained in place for 25 years. The new building has a $6m budget and all funds must be privately raised before building starts at the end of 2013.
Image: artist's impression from DCM website

Starkwhite will be closed over Easter (Friday – Monday), reopening Tuesday 10 April.

If you are wondering why the Tate banned Con Art author Julian Spalding from the Hirst exhibition, you may find the answer in his opinion piece for the Independent on conceptual art (he says it's art that cons people) and Damien Hirst as a sub-prime artist. Read more…

The Independent reports days after it published his condemnation of Hirst as a “con artist” whose art is “worthless” financially and artistically, Julian Spalding (author of the book Con Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can) was denied entry to the Tate's Hirst exhibition. Spalding had turned up at the request of the BBC and two German TV stations only to be informed that the Tate would not allow the interviews. “The Tate's job is to encourage debate about art,” he said. The fact that I'm not allowed to talk about the work in front of it is extraordinary.”
Image: Damien Hirst at the opening of his Tate show

Sotheby's is launching a gallery in Hong Kong to expand its sales at a time when China's appetite for art is booming. The new $7.2 million, 15,000 square-foot space in the Admiralty business district will enable the company to hold more auctions and events, including exhibitions.

Sotheby's is also maneuvering to keep up with rival Christies International PLC, which opened its own 15,000 square-foot gallery and salesroom space in May 2010. Both houses have also recently created Asian advisory boards to nurture ties to major collectors in Asia. Hong Kong supply-chain magnate William Fung and Hong Kong private-equity chief Mary Ma both serve on Christies advisory board and Pansy Ho, the daughter of Macau gambling tycoon Stanley Ho, serves on Sotheby's international advisory board.
Image: architectural rendering of Sotheby's Hong Kong gallery

The Brooklyn Museum is showing Keith Haring: 1978-1982, an exhibition exploring the early career of one of the best known American artists of the 20th century. The exhibition is accompanied by a tumblr hosting online pages from Haring's journals which go back to 1971 when he was 12 years old. The site will post one new entry per day ranging across the artist's diary entries, doodles and hand-coloured memorabilia stuck on pages. You can follow the daily posts here.
Image: an untitled journal drawing (1977) by Keith Haring

MTV has announced it will be reviving Art Breaks, its 80s series of short video interludes created by emerging art stars of the day. The art breaks will run between commercials and programmes, but this time they will be curated by MoMA PS1 and Creative Time.

You can check out what's in store at Art Break's Tumblir site.
Image: from Jean Michel Basquiat's 1985 Art Break

Our Starkwhite Group Show continues this week and through to 14 April.
Image: Billy Apple, FROM THE LAI SOO COLLECTION, 2011

The Whitney has commissioned the New York-based architecture firm LOT-EK to design a pop-up studio for the museum's education programme. Made entirely of shipping containers, the material of choice for LOT-EK (a play on low technology), the designers stacked two layers of containers and partially cut the interior to create a 472-square-foot minimalist cube with a mezzanine floor and diagonals of neon yellow glass.

Dedicated to sustainable architecture, LOT-EK principals Giuseppe Lignano and Ada Tolla have been using these overproduced containers for over 20 years, making use of what they refer to as a “marginal aspect of our civilisation”.
Image: the Whitney Studio under construction

In her first major interview, Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani talks to the Economist about the Qatar Museum Authority's mission to be a cultural instigator and catalyst of projects world wide, which is turning Qatar into a cultural destination. Read more…
Image: Head of the Qatar Museums Authority Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani

Tonight Auckland's Artspace launches Volume 2, a collection of essays and page art relating to the programme during Emma Bugden's directorship (2009-2011). Alicia Frankovich's A Plane for Behavers (2009) is documented in the publication and the writing includes Ellen Blumenstein interviewing Frankovich.

The Los Angeles Times reports LACMA's plans to build a massive Jeff Koons sculpture of a train outside the museum seem to be running out of steam. However, the Friends of the High Line have announced their desire to build the sculpture in the celebrated park on the elevated railway line built to carry carcasses into New York's meatpacking district. Read more…
Image: design rendering of Jeff Koons' Train for the High Line, NY

The Wall Street Journal talks to Rachel Kent about her exhibition Marking Time at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art, which includes 24 hour marathon viewings of Christian Marclay's The Clock and Stuart Ringholt's after hours nude gallery tours. Read more…

Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art reopens this week with a Sam Marshall-designed extension that adds more than 48,000 square feet of space, including three new galleries – one dedicated to Australian art collected since the museum's inception – and a rooftop sculpture terrace overlooking Circular Quay and the Sydney Opera House.

This link takes you to ARTINFO's selection of 20 artists with must-click web sites from Tauba Auerbach to Andrea Zittel.
Image: Wim Delvoye's web site

While Thomas Demand was in Sydney looking at spaces for a project initiated by John Kaldor, he spotted a spaceship-like structure that is part of the MCL Centre. Designed by the late Australian architect Harry Seidler, the building is a hotel occupied by the Commercial Travellers Association Club. “I snuck inside and saw a beautiful circular staircase and small rooms,” he said. It felt like a time capsule from the 70s. They haven't changed anything.”

Kaldor has rented a floor of the building to stage Demand's project. Visitors can walk around a circular corridor along which 15 rooms can be found, each subtly altered by Demand and featuring a photograph from his Dailies series. Read more…
Image: Commercial Travellers Association Club building designed by Harry Seidler and venue for a Thomas Demand exhibition presented by Kaldor Projects

Billy Apple's 2 Minutes 33 Seconds (gold), 1962 is showing in an exhibition devoted to the precious metal gold and its use in art. Curated by Thomas Zaunschirn, Gold runs at the Belvedere Palace in Vienna from 15 March – 17 June 2012.
Image: Billy Apple, 2 Minutes 33 Seconds (gold), 1962, gold plated bronze, painted bronze base, 120 x 356 x 152mm, image courtesy of the artist and the Jennifer Gibbs Trust

Designed by Tokyo-based architects Atelier Bow-Wow, the BMW Guggenheim Lab is a mobile lab traveling around the world to inspire innovative, forward-thinking ideas for urban life. It had its inaugural run in New York in 2011 where it hosted 56,000 visitors over 10 weeks and is currently in transit to Berlin. However plans to set up the lab in the famously alternative Kreuzberg district have been scrapped in response to strong opposition to the project and after the police and local authorities concluded there was a high risk of property damage. Read more…

The Getty Museum is launching a new international program, the Conserving Modern Architecture Program, in the hopes of giving preservation architects new and more sophisticated strategies to preserve 20th century buildings. Its first project will be funding research at the Charles and Ray Eames house in Los Angeles.

Tim Whalen, the director of the Getty Conservation Institute, said the program was not designed as an advocacy organisation, like the Los Angeles Conservancy's Modern Committee to keep landmarks from the wrecking ball. The point is to forge partnerships with architects and organisations already doing research on how to preserve modern masterpieces. Read more…
Image: the living room of the Eames house in Los Angeles

Members of the radical Russian art collective Voina have broken away from the group to form an all-female, anti-Putin punk group known as Pussy Riot. Recently they performed an unsanctioned punk prayer service at Christ the Saviour Cathedral, entreating the Virgin Mary to liberate Russia from Vladimir Putin, stirring up a storm about the role of the church, art and women in Russian society. Read more…
Image: Pussy Riot performing at Red Square in Moscow

Seung Yul Oh is looking for volunteers to participate in a performance for Made Active: The Chartwell Show at the Auckland Art Gallery. The performance takes place at the Gallery on Saturday 14 April at 3pm.

Titled The Ability to Blow Themselves Up (performance version), it requires 50 people to stand at a location around the gallery and blow up balloons over a 30-minute period.

He is looking for people of different ages and nationalities to make up this group. If you are interested please contact him by 23 March at seungyul@gmail.com
Image: press image supplied by Seung Yul Oh

The founders of Art HK, Tim Etchells and Sandy Angus, have launched a new contemporary art fair in London. Scheduled for March 2013, Art 13 will be headed by former Frieze fair manager Stephanie Dieckvoss who also assisted with the launch of ART HK in 2007. She has most recently spent two years curating exhibitions at the Serpentine Gallery.
Image: Olympia Grand Hall, venue for Art 13

The American chapter of the the International Association of Art Critics has announced the winners of its annual AICA Awards honoring artists, curators and critics for excellence in art exhibitions in 2011. They include an installation by Sarah Sze on the High Line (Best Project in Public Space); the exhibition Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art at the Japan Society (Best show in a Non-Profit Gallery or Space); the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (Best Architecture or Design Show); and Paula Cooper Gallery's presentation of Christian Marclay's The Clock (Best Show in a Commercial Gallery in New York).
Image: Sarah Sze, Still Life With Landscape (Model for a Habitat) at the High Line, NY. Image from the the High Line web site

Sydney -based artists Ken and Juliana Yonetani will show a glowing green set of chandeliers made from uranium at the NKV in Weisbaden, Germany in the group exhibition Keeping Up Appearances.The work is timed to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant disaster in Japan. Read more…

The Shanghai Biennale has announced the curators for the 2012 edition. The chief curator, Qiu Zhijie, is a professor at the School of Intermedia Art at the China Art Academy as well as director of Total Art Studio and a member of the supervising team in the Arts and Social Thought Institute. As an artist he as represented China at the 53rd Venice Biennale and 25th Sao Paulo Biennial.

Qiu Zhijie is working with two co-curators: art critic, media theorist and philosopher Boris Groys and Jens Hoffman, currently director at the Watts Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of Arts, San Francisco.
Image Qiu Zhijie, chief curator of the 2012 Shanghai Biennale

Billy Apple and Mary Morrison spent the weekend working with GNS scientist Dr Cornel de Rondo and his team as he continued his search for the lost eighth wonder of the world on New Zealand's Lake Rotomahana. The fate of the fabled Pink and White Terraces will be revealed this weekend in Sunday, 7.30pm, TV One, 18 March.

We have run several posts on New York's celebrated High Line Park, the old railway lines on stilts to New York's meatpacking district that was converted to a park and opened to the public in June 2009, followed by a second extension in June 2011 that doubled its length to a mile.

New York City's Department of Parks has unveiled plans for the last phase of the Park. Like the previous phases, the final extension will be designed by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Refro. Current proposed concepts include an amphitheatre-like seating, or an open gathering space bordered by beds of wild flowers, a new irregularly spiraling staircase and a children's play area where support beams will be stripped and coated with bright yellow safety rubber, perfect to climb around on.
Images: The Hight Line Park and concept for an amphitheatre at High Line's 10th Avenue spur

From Wednesday 21 March we are presenting a group show of new works by represented artists.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Space Tree #4 (2012)

Damien Hirst has gone from YBA to a global brand over the past 25 years – and become the richest living artist on the planet. He talks to the Guardian about money, mortality and his first retrospective in Britain. Read more…

The Nordic section of this year's Armory Show is making a big impact. Jacob Fabricus, director of Malmo Kunsthalle, has organised the section combining artist-run spaces with commercial galleries. “It's a fair, but I don't work in the commercial world and wanted to do something different, therefore I brought smaller non-commercial spaces,” he told The Art Newspaper. Read more…
Image: items from the range of posters, souvenirs and other stuff curated by Jacob Fabricus promoted under the banner FREE STUFF at the Nordic section

ARTINFO reports The Armory Show has kicked off with good vibes and brisk business.
Read more…
Image: The Armory Show vernissage

The Guardian reports Gilbert and George have pilfered 3,712 newspaper bills from outside London news agents to create new works for shows at White Cube. While one of the immaculately dressed pair distracted the agent by buying chewing gum, the other removed the newspaper bill from is stand. Read more…

This year we are presenting a solo show by New York-based artist Martin Basher at The Armory Show, and Gavin Hipkins' film This Fine Island will be screened in the inaugrual edition of Armory Film. You can read our press releases here.
Images: Martin Basher press image and still from Gavin Hipkins' This Fine Island, 2011

The Tate has acquired 10 tonnes of Ai Weiwei's sunflower seeds – around one tenth of the 100 million seeds individually crafted by Chinese craft workers for his 2010 Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation. The artist has suggested that the seeds can be arranged either laid out as a square or a cone 5m in diameter and 1.5m high.
Image: Ai Weiwei in Sunflower Seeds (2010) at the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall,

New York's art fair season kicks off tomorrow with The Armory Show vernissage. This year the stakes are higher with Frieze waiting in the wings ready to launch in New York in May. But The Armory Show is rising to the challenge, upping its game with a suite of new moves: a less-is-more approach (the number of participating galleries has been reduced by 25%); encouraging galleries to focus on solo or selective group shows; collaborating with Moving Image, NY to stage the inaugural edition of Armory Film; and partnering up with Paddle8, adding web-based exhibitor presentations and transactions to the mix, along with early access for plugged in collectors. The Armory Show is also also aiming to be a user-friendlier fair with wider isles, improved public and VIP spaces and architecturally-enhanced access between Pier 92 (The Armory Show – Modern) and Pier 94 (The Armory Show – Contemporary).

The latest Artprice report updates China's growing strength in the global art market. China's share of art auction sales is 41.4% of sales ahead of the US (26%) and the UK (19.4%). Of the ten top-selling artists at auction, six are Chinese, says the report. In 2011 Chinese artist Zhang Daqian ousted Picasso to take the No.1 position on the world auction market, generating $506m in auction sales, followed by compatriot Qi Baishi on $445.1m.
Image: Lotus and Mandarin ducks by Zhang Daqian which fetched HK191m ($24.5m) at Sotheby's in Hong Kong in May 2011

Qatar's royal family is 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 New York Times reports critics of the royal family say it is behaving as a facilitator of the international art scene while at the same time using it for self-promotion, leaving the local art scene out in the cold. Read more…
Image: Head of the Qatar Museums Authority Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani at the opening of Takashi Murakami's exhibition at Versailles in 2010

Commissioned by the New Plymouth District Art in Public Places Trust, John Reynolds' Big Wave Territory was installed recently at the Port gateway to New Plymouth's Coastal Walkway. The work celebrates Taranaki's rich cultural landscape, directing passing pedestrians and port car park traffic to various local and regional destinations – the Mountain, Paritutu Rock and Sugar Loaf Island, SPOT X and The Forgotten World Highway. Using Transit New Zealand's road design format and materials, the high reflection sign also provides cultural points of departure, including artistic legacies, such as the writing of celebrated author Ronald Hugh Morrieson and Len Lye's kinetic sculpture.
Image: John Reynolds, Big Wave Territory (detail), Coastal Walkway, New Plymouth

Robert Smith says the 2012 Whitney Biennial is one of the best in recent memory. Read more…
Image: Whitney Biennial, a dancer in Sarah Michelson's Devotion Study #1 – The American Dancer

Last Friday, Trenton Garratt and Clinton Watkins staged their performance Transcode across two sites connected by a live video feed as part of the exhibition The Obstinate Object at the City Gallery Wellington. At Massey University's Engine Room gallery, Garratt pulled apart a porcelain version of his sculpture, Our House, from which the resulting sound was directed live via telephone to the City Gallery where Watkins captured the sound onto magnetic tape.

The remnants of the porcelain sculpture will remain at the Engine Room for three more weeks after which the sculpture's only presence art the City Gallery will be the charged magnetic tape hanging from the foyer gallery wall. A video recording of the performance will start playing today on monitors located at the entrance to the City Gallery.

You can view the performance online here.
Image: Trenton Garratt & Clinton Watkins, Transcode, (video Still), City Gallery Wellington (2012). image Shaun Waugh