The Royal family of the tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar has purchased Cezanne's The Card Players for a record $250 million, more than doubling the current auction record for a work of art. The Emir of Qatar's daughter, Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamid bin Khalifa Al-Thani, is the mastermind behind the global art buying spree by the nation crowned the single biggest contemporary art buyer in the world. Read more…
Image: Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, one of the museums working under the umbrella of the Qatar Museums Authority, headed by Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamid bin Khalifa Al-Thani.

Matt Henry's exhibition From the series 16:9 opens today at Sydney Non Objective. The works in the show were produced during a three-month residency at SNO in 2011.
Image: Matt Henry, Achromatic Grey (16:9) From the series 4:3, acrylic on linen board, frame, perspex, 277 x 353 x 57 mm

After stepping down as the chief executive and artistic director of the Liverpool Biennale, Lewis Biggs has been named as the curator of two triennials – the 2013 Aichi Triennial in Nagoya and 2014 Folkestone Triennial in Kent.

Archeologists are racing to save Afghanistan's cultural heritage at Mes Aynak, a mountainous, 9800-acre site studded with artifacts that archeologists believe are as significant as the Bamiyan Buddhas that were destroyed 11 years ago, as well as the remains of civilizations that stretch back to the time of Alexander the Great.

It's also the site of the second-largest copper deposit in the world, a resource the Afghanistan government is cashing in on through an estimated $3billion deal with a Chinese company to mine the the copper deposit over the next thirty years, starting in 2014. This leaves little time for the archeologists leading the excavations to extract as many treasures as possible before the drilling begins, raising fears that a financial jackpot for the poverty-stricken country could come at the price of Afghanistan's cultural heritage. Read more…
Image: remains of an ancient Buddhist monastery at Mes Aynek, Afghanistan

Twenty ancestral heads of Maori held in French museums as a cultural curiosity have finally returned to the National Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Collected by European explorers, they were traditionally kept as trophies after tribal wars and later traded for modern weapons and European goods.

None of the toi moko will go on display to the public. The repatriation team at Te Papa will begin to trace the origin of each moko and then return them to their whanau, a process they say could take up to ten years. “We have to investigate Maori history and link the battles with the time the tupuna left to go overseas,” repatriation manager Te Herekiekie Herewini said.

Three hundred and twenty toi moko have been returned to New Zealand from various countries since the 1980s but around five hundred remain in public and privates collections overseas.
Image: Portrait of a Maori man by Sydney Parkinson, published in 1784 by the Alexander Turnball Library, from the UNESCO site on Illicit Traffic of Cultural Property

The New Museum's Massimiliano Gioni has been appointed artistic director of the 2013 Venice Biennale. Gioni is a seasoned biennale curator. He curated 10,000 Lives for the 2010 Gwangju Biennale in 2010 and co-curated the 2006 Berlin Biennale and Manifesta 5 in 2004.

This link takes you to MoMA Design Store's spring/summer collection, which includes Wilkinson and Hulger's Plumen 001. Touted as the first designer energy-saving light bulb, it consumes 80% less energy and lives eight times longer than a normal incandescent bulb.

With their spectacular presentations, interactive exhibits, and children's activities, today's contemporary art museums imply a new visual economy for art. Similarly, within the academy there is an increased insistence on seeing art as part of a wider spectrum of 'visual culture' or 'creative industries'. The latest issue of Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art looks at the relationship between art and entertainment today. You can order the Journal from The Institute of Modern Art (IMA) Brisbane.

ARTINFO reports on the VIP Art Fair's new programming and enhanced interaction opportunities.

Since 1994 Clinton Watkins and Richard Francis have worked collaboratively under the moniker 1000. They regularly perform and produce recordings that focus on creating stark and intense minimal/maximal compositions of electronically generated noise. One Step Further From Birth, which is part of our upstairs group show of works by represented artists, is a limited edition lathe-cut LP including a link to free mp3 downloads.
Image: 1000, One Step Further From Birth, Lathe-cut LP, 33rpm, edition of 30

Mariana Vassileva's exhibition The gentle brutality of simultaneity closes on Tuesday 31 January at 6pm. You can read a review of the exhibition here.
Image: Mariana Vassileva, Will they be friends one day?, 2011, two nails and pencil on wall

Ukraine has announced that it will launch a biennale in Kiev in May 2013 with David Elliot as the artistic director of the event. Elliot is a seasoned biennale director having directed the first Istanbul Biennale and last year's Biennale of Sydney. He also served as the founding director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo and director of the Moderna Muset in Stockholm. Elliot has picked an epic title for his biennale: The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary Art.
Image: David Elliot, director of the first international Biennale of Contemporary Art in the Ukraine

This year's edition of the India Art Fair is likely to be remembered as the one where it moved from an Indian event to an international one. Now in its fourth year, the fair has attracted international artists and dealers keen to get a slice of the booming Indian art market. “We've bought Damien, Tracey, Mark and Antony,” said Graham Steele, director of London gallery White Cube. Also in the line up are a raft of high-profile galleries such as Hauser and Wirth from Britain and the United States, Galleria Continua from Italy, Arndt from Germany and Kalfayan Galleries from Greece.

The fair has also internationalised its investor base. Last June Neha Kirpal, the founder and director of India Art Fair, sold a 49% stake in the fair and brought on board the co-founders of ART HK, Sandy Angus and Will Ramsay. This followed news that MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd, the organiser of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, would take a majority ownership in ART HK.

Marina Abramovic staged a high-concept event at Sundance in honour of the documentary Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. All guests wore white lab coats, noise cancelling headphones and (echoing the artist's silence during her MoMA retrospective performance) were forbidden to talk for an hour. Robert Redford, who spent an entire day at the MoMA show, called the event “fabulous”.
Image: Robert Redford, documentary director Matthew Akers and Marina Abramovic

Since starting his fair in 2010, Tim Fleming has wanted to host an event that's decidedly cultural, where commerce is key, but downplayed. “We have this enormous audience of almost 11,000,” he said “and we can do pretty much anything with them, within reason.” This year at the opening of Art Los Angeles Contemporary, audiences encountered a re-staging of Judy Chicago's Disappearing Environments. Read more…
Image: Judy Chicago's installation outside the Art Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair, January 2012

The first solo survey of the work of Louise Bourgeois in the Middle East has opened at the Qatar Museums Authority Gallery. Featuring 32 works spanning the artist's career, the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Conscious and Unconscious is part of a series of cultural initiatives that are being rolled out under the watch of QMA chairperson Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani,who was positioned in a recent Power 100 list as the most influential person in the art world.

The Louise Bourgeois survey follows Cai Guo-Qiang's first solo exhibition in the Middle East at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art as the museum looked eastwards to consider the dynamics of the longstanding, but little-known relationship between China and the Arab world. Mathaf also works under the umbrella of the Qatar Museums Authority.
Image: Louise Bourgeois' Maman in Qatar

France is returning 20 ancestral heads of Maori held in French museums as a cultural curiosity. For many years France resisted handing over the cultural artifacts, but a law passed in 2010 paved the way for their return to New Zealand where they will be returned to their home tribes or sit in storage at the National Museum, Te Papa Tongarewa “They are after all human remains, and in Maori culture they should not be publicly displayed,” said Pou Temara, a university professor who chairs New Zealand's repatriation advisory panel.
Image: Repatriation ceremony at Quai Bramly, Paris

As Frieze and NADA prepare to launch their debut editions in New York, The Armory Show is positioning itself as a new and improved fair. The 2012 gallery list has been pared back by 25% and most booths will focus on presentations by a smaller number of artists. New director Noah Horowitz says: “art fairs have a tendency to go bigger, but our mission is to make it more boutique and give the galleries a larger footprint. The re-vamped Armory also includes a new solo projects section for young dealers and a new media lounge presented in partnership with the Moving Image video fair. You can see the Armory's exhibitor list here.

Scheduled to open next month, the Asia Society Hong Kong is the first American museum satellite to be launched in China. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects have transformed a campus of four heritage buildings built by the British army in the mid-nineteenth century and added a new wing connected to the heritage buildings by a double-decker walkway.

Following the vision of Asia Society founder John D Rockefeller to promote the understanding of Asian culture, the museum will open with Transforming Minds: Buddhism in Art showcasing 6th-century relics from Rockefeller's collection together with work by contemporary Asian American artists.
Images: The $49.5m Asia Society Hong Kong by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

This year the Chinese New Year falls on January 23, marking the beginning of the Year of the Dragon. The only mythical creature among the 12 animals of the Chinese Zodiac and associated with the emperor in ancient times, the dragon is regarded as a symbol of might and intelligence.

We are showing works by represented artists in our first floor galleries.
Image: Trenton Garratt, Morning Sun, oil on linen, 1000 x 830mm

As Greece races against the clock to avoid being the first nation to default on its debts and potentially plunge the eurozone into a further financial crisis, the Independent reports hedge fund financiers who bought distressed Greek debt are holding up the rescue attempt to ensure they profit from the crisis. Read more…

Seung Yul Oh is in the lineup of artists presented at Art Los Angeles Contemporary this week by ONE AND J Gallery, Seoul. Oh is currently based in New York under the Harriet Friedlander Residency
Image: Seung Yul Oh, RaMyun, 2011

Jae Hoon Lee's installation Tree Roots is part of El Barroco de Aotearoa at MUCA Roma, Mexico City. Co-curated by Richard Reddaway and MUCA Roma director Gonzalo Ortega, the exhibition runs to February 2012 (closing date yet to be announced).
Image: Installation view of Jae Hoon Lee's Tree Roots at MUCA Roma, Mexico City

Jae Hoon Lee is at Scott Base under the Antarctica New Zealand Arts Fellowship Programme. Each year Antarctica New Zealand invites artists to become honorary Arts Fellows and travel to the frozen continent to undertake specific projects that will help raise awareness of the scientific, aesthetic and wilderness values of Antarctica. Lee follows in the footsteps of Phil Dadson who was there in 2003, a visit that culminated in Polar Projects.
Image: Scott Base Antarctica

Chinese artist Zhang Daqian has ousted Picasso to take the No.1 position on the world auction market. Artprice reports Zhang generated $506m in auction revenue in 2011 followed by compatriot Qi Baishi on $445.1m. Warhol took third place with auction sales of $324.8m followed by Picasso on $311.6m. Fifth slot was occupied by another Chinese artist, Xu Beihong who tallied $212.9m.

This year's edition of Art Stage Singapore (12 – 15 January) includes a local platform curated by Eugene Tan. In a recent interview he talked about why Singapore art needs this push. Read more…

Launched in January 2011 by gambling millionaire and maverick David Walsh, Hobart's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is on Australia's art map and is credited with having spared Hobart from the worst of the tourism declined triggered by the global financial crisis. During its first year MONA attracted about 400,000 visitors and is the state's number one visitor attraction. It was named Tasmania's best new tourism development of 2011 and is in the running for the national tourism awards in March.