Berlin's Deutsche Guggenheim To Close "Over the years the Guggenheim has held 57 exhibitions and attracted 1.8 million visitors. It also commissioned 17 artists -- among them John Baldessari, Anish Kapoor, Gerhard Richter and James Rosenquist -- to create new works that were first shown at Deutsche Guggenheim." The New York Times 02/06/12

The '60s 'Happenings', Remembered By Their Instigators "But what actually happened at the Happenings? Because they were so ephemeral, and documentation is so patchy, art historians have spent decades trying to figure that out. So have their creators." Claes Oldenburg, Patty Mucha, Lucas Samaras, Red Grooms and others look back. The New York Times 02/05/12 (includes slideshow)

When Picasso Turned Anglophile "[A] major new exhibition on the artist will reveal how Picasso developed a taste for all things English during his first trip to Britain. Picasso spent 10 weeks in London during the summer of 1919, designing scenery and costumes for [Diaghilev's Ballets Russes staging of] The Three-Cornered Hat." The Telegraph (UK) 02/05/12

Enemies Of Christo's Colorado Project Make Last Stand The battle against the artist's plan to temporarily erect canopies of silver fabric over 42 miles of the Arkansas River in central Colorado is in its final skirmish, with the anti-Christo forces led by a group calling itself Rags Over the Arkansas River (ROAR). Denver Post 02/03/12

Architecture, A Profession In Meltdown "When the Great Recession dawned, architecture was the glamour profession of the creative class. ... A once-thriving profession, one that requires considerable education and work ethic, and which has traditionally served a wide range of functions - designing mansions for the 1 percent as well as public libraries - is [now] in trouble." Salon 02/04/12

Qatar Pays Record $250 Million For A Painting "The tiny, oil-rich nation of Qatar has purchased a Paul Cézanne painting, The Card Players, for more than $250 million. The deal, in a single stroke, sets the highest price ever paid for a work of art and upends the modern art market." Vanity Fair 02/02/12

Cairo's Overlooked Museum "A diamond in the rough, the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art houses works by more than 1,500 Egyptian artists, mostly from the middle and late 20th century ... Overshadowed by Egypt's pharaonic and medieval Islamic heritage, and the more recent upsurge in interest in contemporary Arab art, the country's modernist artists elicit scant respect." International Herald Tribune 02/02/12

Damien Hirst With Your Spot Paintings, Eat Your Heart Out "The Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama transformed a completely white room, including furniture, into a spectacle featuring her signature dots, helped by children who visited the exhibition over two weeks and placed brightly coloured stickers throughout the installation." (Much more fun than Hirst's rigid grids.) The Guardian (UK) 02/01/12 (slideshow)

The Artist Who Throws Herself At Men (Literally) "There is [Lily] McElroy, all five feet and three inches of her, leaping through the air, her skirt in a state of disarray, turning an idiom into reality. Other bar dwellers look stunned, annoyed, or amused as one of McElroy's friends takes a picture." Slate 02/01/12

Cleveland Museum Of Art Ousts Board Chair (And So...) Michael "Horvitz's departure was a rare sign of discord at an institution with a reputation for solid management. The loss of a generous donor - Horvitz and his family have contributed more than $5 million to the museum's expansion and renovation - also raises questions about how the museum could have alienated someone with the potential to do more for it in the future." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 01/29/12

2011 Was An Excellent Year For Art Auction Houses "Art prices swelled last year, lifting sales at Christie's International PLC to $5.7 billion last year, up 14% from the year before. Christie's auction sales matched those of its chief rival, Sotheby's, which said it auctioned off $4.9 billion of art last year, up 14.5% from the year before." The Wall Street Journal 02/01/12

Leonardo Replica Of Mona Lisa Discovered In The Prado "What is most exciting about the Prado replica is what it reveals about Leonardo's original. In the Madrid copy there are areas that are better preserved than in the Louvre painting." Compare the two in an interactive screen here. The Art Newspaper 01/31/12

India Art Fair Struggles To Join World Circuit "Nothing is simple in India. Although the government had agreed to waive a customs levy on imports, there was still duty and 12.5% sales tax to be paid on anything bought at the fair, with the result that dealers were reserving rather than selling and concluding transactions out of the country. The organisers also had to contend with India's notoriously obstructive and lackadaisical bureaucracy--for example, the road to the fair was only paved the day before it opened." The Art Newspaper 01/31/12

Frank Gehry Designing, For Free, New L.A. Jazz Venue "Having designed L.A.'s signature space for classical music, Frank Gehry is on board to do the same for jazz - although his pro bono work on a new Culver City home for the Jazz Bakery would be on a much smaller scale than his downtown Walt Disney Concert Hall." Los Angeles Times 01/31/12

Renaissance Bankers Of Florence, Hanging On Walls "The recent 'Money and Beauty' exhibit, held in the majestic 15th-century Palazzo Strozzi, illustrated how Florentine merchants got around the Catholic Church's ban on money-lending and bankrolled the Renaissance." NPR 01/31/12 (includes audio and slide show)

The Banksy Of Moscow "A Russian street artist who created a giant pair of spectacles from a streetlamp has been dubbed 'the Russian Banksy'. The mysterious figure, known only as P183, ... reveals little about himself except that his name is Pavel, he is 28 and that he studied 'communicative design'." The Guardian (UK) 01/31/12 (slide show)

Painting By Young Hitler Sold At Auction A painting created by the 24-year-old Hitler has recently sold at an online auction, according to reports. The painting, titled "Maritime Nocturno," sold for approximately $12,000 in a closed sale by the Darte auction house in Slovakia. Los Angeles Times 01/30/12

Unseen Portraits By Lucian Freud To Be Shown For First Time "[A] major new exhibition of his drawings and watercolours [in London] will feature rare, previously unseen works, including intimate portraits of his parents, children, self-portraits and childhood etchings." The Telegraph (UK) 01/29/12

Sydney's Top Museum Takes Its Time Finding New Director "Six months after Edmund Capon announced his retirement as director, the Art Gallery of New South Wales is no closer to naming a successor." The Australian 01/31/12

Animal Rights Group To Indian Artist: Let The Pigeons Fly Free "Live and 'hand-raised' pigeons are confined in a room filled with copper wires and transistor radios emitting white noise from unused frequencies." It's all part of an exhibition - and animal rights activists are not amused. Hindustan Times 01/28/12

Inventing The Modern Blockbuster - Picasso At The Tate In 1960 The 1960 Picasso show at the Tate not only sold record numbers of catalogues and saw record numbers of patrons through the turnstiles; it reinvented what Britain thought of its place on the world stage - and changed the lives of artists like David Hockney, who's now got a blockbuster of his own. Thank god the "ladies' committee" pulled off the sangria. The Observer (UK) 01/28/12

Feelgood Art Floods Economically Depressed Great Britain "'There is a second world war kind of thing going on about "keeping the home fires burning" at the moment; a bit of "keep calm and carry on" art, if you like,' said the Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller." The Guardian (UK) 01/28/12

A Century Of Jackson Pollock, And The (Annoying) Debate Still Rages "Pollock still provokes heated debate about the very definition of art. Was a man who placed a canvas on the floor and dripped paint straight from the can actually creating a work of art?" NPR 01/28/12

London's National Gallery Assistants Stage Work Actions "Used to standing quietly in the shadows while the spotlight shines on a Leonardo or Caravaggio or Velázquez, the National Gallery's warders - or assistants, as they are known these days - do not tend to draw attention to themselves. But, at the moment, that is exactly what they are doing. Last week's two-hour stoppage, which saw between 30 and 40 assistants walk off the job, forced the temporary closure of around 35 rooms, though not the blockbuster Leonardo exhibition." The Guardian (UK) 01/27/12

Of Art And Imaging Analysis "There are manifest deficiencies of understanding on the crucial relationship between the discoveries that are being made through advances of technical analysis, and the original painterly/artistic means by which the art-objects-under-investigation were produced by artists in the first place." ArtWatchUK 01/26/12