Fulya Erdemci, who is currently director of the SKOR Foundation for Art and Public Domain, will curate the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013. Erdemci was amongst the first directors of the Istanbul Biennial (1994 – 2000) and she is a seasoned biennale curator. She curated the Istanbul section of the 25th Sao Paulo Biennial (2002), joined the curatorial team of the 2nd Moscow Contemporary Art Biennale (2007), co-curated the 5th Public Biennale of Art in Public Space in Christchurch (2008) with Danae Mossman, and curated the 2011 pavilion of Turkey at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011).

Phil Dadson's video Between Worlds (2011) is amongst the collection of stories and visual and sound artworks by international artists in the Streaming Museum's online tribute to John Cage. You can view his video contribution to A John Cage Centennial Tribute here.

Produced and broadcast in NYC, Streaming Museum is a hybrid museum that presents multi-media exhibitions in cyberspace.
Image: John Cage, 1991, photo by Hemming Lohner, courtesy of the John Cage Trust; and video still from Phil Dadson's Between Worlds, 2011

After two-year hunt, the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has named Timothy Potts as director. Like his predecessor, Michael Brand, he hails from Australia. He was also rumoured to be on the headhunters list for directorship of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which has gone to Brand.

When an old vase found in her late sister's house went under the hammer for $92 million Gene Johnson and her son Anthony watched in amazement as they realised they were going to share a fortune. However, 15 months later the family is not a penny richer as the Quianglong dynasty imperial vase has not yet been paid for.

A Chinese property billionaire was named as the buyer after one of his agents was reportedly banned from registering for a Quianglong dynasty scroll in Toulouse after the alleged non-payment. This has fueled speculation that the Chinese government sabotages sales by having agents buy pieces and then refuse to pay because it believes the antiquities were looted from China and should not be sold.
Image: The Quianglong dynasty imperial vase that went under the hammer for $92 million

Last year a group of artists from the South Pacific region, including Phil Dadson and John Reynolds, travelled on HMNZS Otago to a place rarely explored – the Kermadec Islands. The project was an initiative of the Pew Environment Group's Global Ocean Legacy programme, which promotes the designation of large, highly-protected marine reserves.

A cluster of international galleries, all with ties to Asia, will set up in the site of the former British military barracks in Singapore. They include Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki Gallery, Mizuma Gallery, Ota Fine Arts and Tomio Koyama Gallery from Japan, along with Shanghai's ShangArt and Pearl Lam Galleries, and the Drawing Room from Manila.

The Singapore Government came up with the idea of converting Gillman Barracks into an arts cluster in 2010 and has since invested $10 million into the project. An open tender was made last June for galleries to apply for a space in the barracks and 13 have been selected. “We thought hard about galleries that would have the effect we want and that could make Gillman Barracks a catalyst for the Singapore arts scene”, said Eugene Tan, a director at the Economic Development Board.

There is only one Singaporean gallery in the lineup which has raised questions about local galleries being frozen out, but putting pressure on local galleries is “partly the plan”, says Eugene Tan. “We want them to raise their game.”

Also anchored within the barracks will be the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), which will be one of the key programming platforms at the new art destination. CCA will include an international artists residency programme and a centre for contemporary art research.
Image: Gillman Barracks, Singapore, circa 1970

Keith Haring's last surviving mural in Australia is at the centre of an ongoing conservation v. repainting debate. Conservators say the work, which is showing the effects of time and neglect, should be preserved and they should be given every opportunity to save or improve on the current quality of the original paint – or at least keep it intact until conservation technology catches up with the problems.

Others say the mural should be repainted because it is in line with the artist's wishes. “It is more important that the work conveys Keith's ideals and respect for communities in which he worked, rather than to preserve a brushstroke”, says Keith Haring Foundation director, Julia Gruen.

In a recent article published in The Art Newspaper, Will Shank makes the case for conservation, but he also suggests a compromise – to let conservators proceed with preserving the original and run with a faithful copy nearby. Read more…

Gavin Hipkins' experimental screen narrative, This Fine Island, has been selected for the inaugural edition of Armory Film. Curated by Moving Image, the screenings will take place during the course of the The Armory Show in a dedicated Media Lounge on Pier 94.

Hipkins' film revisits Charles Darwin's journey to the Bay of Islands in 1835, but in his adaption, Darwin's nineteenth-century travel writing in The Voyage of the Beagle becomes a vehicle for present day tourisms, travel romance, and racial othering, against the backdrop of New Zealand's lush landscape.
Image: Gavin Hipkins, This Fine Island , 2012 (production still), 12 mins, 16mm transferred to Digibeta

Michael Brand, former director of the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, will replace Edmund Capon as director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

ARTINFO says online art wars are heating up as Paddle8 secures $4 million from technology and luxury investors in its first significant round of venture capital fundraising. The seed money will keep Paddle8 competitive in an expanding field of e-commerce initiatives that includes VIP, the world's first online art fair, and Art.sy, the site backed by Dasha Zhukova and Larry Gagosian.

Paddle8's traffic has increased to up to 100,000 views per day and, according to the company, over 2000 carefully screened individuals join its private member community every month. Co-founder Alexander Gilkes told ARTINFO “Over the next few months we'll roll out an ambitious pipeline of new developments including a new app and increased editorial content.”

The new developments will build on Paddle8's core strategy of producing guest-curated exhibitions online with works for sale at major galleries and a recent move into the world of art fairs. Partnerships with NADA and Art Los Angeles Contemporary allow the fairs to utilize the web, adding web-based exhibitor presentations and transactions to the mix, along with a fair preview.
Image: Paddle8 founders Alexander Gilkes and Aditya Julka

Alicia Frankovich's exhibition Bodies and Situations opens tonight at Starkwhite, 6.30 – 9.00pm.
Image: Alicia Frankovich, Egg happening, Stuttgart, 2010/2012

Uruguay is the latest country to join the biennale club. Titled Big Sur, the debut edition of the Biennale de Montevideo will be curated by Alfons Hug in collaboration with two co-curators: the Chilean born Paz Guevara, who lives in Berlin; and the Uruguayan curator and artist Patricia Bentancur. Hug is the director of the Goethe Institut in Rio de Janiro and has curated numerous biennales including Sao Paulo and the Instituto Italo-Latino Americano pavilion in the 54th Venice Biennale.

Big Sur opens on 15 October, in the middle of the Sao Paulo Bienal,which scheduled for 8 September – 9 December 2012.
Image: Montevideo street scene

Fours years after collaborating on the 'Bird's Nest' Olympic stadium in Beijing, the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei will reunite to design the next Serpentine pavilion. They plan to create a floating platform barely five feet off the ground, supported by 11 columns representing previous pavilions. The platform will collect rainwater on the surface, reflecting the moody London sky. The trio also plans to dig a few feet into the soil so visitors can walk beneath the roof.

The Herzog & de Meuron/Ai Weiwei pavilion will be the 12th in the series which began with Zaha Hadid in 2000 and has included giants such as Oscar Niemeyer, Alvaro Siza, Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry.
Image: Peter Zumthor's 2011 Serpentine Gallery pavilion

ARTINFO reports on what what collectors, dealers and artists are saying about the VIP art fair. Read more…

Deutsche Bank and the Solomon R Guggenheim Foundation have announced plans to close the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin. Neither party gave a reason for the decision but the bank's chief executive officer Joseph Ackermann said Deutsche Bank intends to use the space as a forum for “intensified dialogue between the business and political worlds.”

Over the past 14 years the Deutsche Guggenheim has presented 57 exhibitions and attracted 1.8m visitors. The bank and foundation also commissioned major pieces from artists such as Jeff Koons, William Kentridge, Bill Viola, Rachel Whiteread and Anish Kapoor that were exhibited in Berlin, New York and Bilbao.
Image Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin

The Victor Pinchuk Foundation has launched the second edition of the Future Generation Art Prize of $100,000. The Prize is open to artists of up to 35 and applications can be made online with a closing date of 6 May 2012.

Cinthia Marcelle, a Brazilian artist who makes films, photographs and installations, won the inaugural prize in 2011. She was selected by a jury consisting of Daniel Birnbaum, Okwui Enwezor, Yuko Hasegawa, Ivo Mesquita, Eckhard Schneider, Robert Storr and Ai Weiwei.
Image: Victor Pinchuk, founder of the Future Generation Art Prize

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