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- The Louvre has closed due to about 50 protesting arts and culture students blocking its glass pyramid entrance, in the latest sign of what appears to be abating civil unrest that peaked on Saturday and devolved into rioting.
- Amid a “cyclical downturn” for Art Basel fairs, the company will hold onto its spot in Miami through 2031, thanks to a new deal that reduces annual rent from nearly $1 million to $500,000.
- A man was struck by dislodged roofing material and died during a walking tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home in Scottsdale, Arizona, which has temporarily closed as a result.
The Headlines
LOUVRE BLOCKED. The Louvre was closed Monday due to about 50 protesting arts and culture students, who blocked its glass pyramid entrance, reported Le Figaro. Their action comes on the one-year anniversary of the brazen jewelry heist at the same museum. It follows a massive, nationwide protest on Saturday against social inequality, particularly visible in public schools, which spiraled into looting and riots and continued to a lesser degree Sunday evening. No damage was reportedly done to the Louvre, and protesters were not able to enter the glass pyramid, according to the AFP. The protesters at the Louvre, including students at art schools such as the associated École du Louvre, said they were angry at the violent response of police to protesters in recent weeks, and wanted to show support for students demanding better conditions in public schools and the rising cost of living. The unrest comes on the eve of Art Basel Paris this week, sparking concerns about the impact this may have on the fair and a packed week of art events throughout the city. Art Basel issued a statement Sunday reassuring visitors that “the fair is proceeding as planned,” while “additional security personnel have been deployed to patrol the perimeter of the fair 24 hours a day.” The opening of Stan Douglas’s show Parallax at the Jeu de Paume on Sunday was also canceled “out of precaution,” and the surrounding Tuileries gardens were closed for the same reason, a museum spokesperson told ARTnews. Other galleries, such as Hauser & Wirth, closed their space in the 8th arrondissement on Saturday “as a precaution to protect the team, visitors and staff,” said a representative in an e-mail.
ART BASEL’S ‘CYCLICAL DOWNTURN.’ Following months of heated negotiations, Art Basel will hold onto its spot in Miami through 2031, thanks to a new deal with city officials that reduces the annual rent paid by the fair to the city from nearly $1 million to $500,000, plus additional city credits for police, fire, and EMT services, reports the New York Times. To convince officials that the art fair deserved a rent reduction, Art Basel chief executive Noah Horowitz reportedly gave a far less flattering picture of the company’s finances and the art market as a whole. He also threatened to abandon Miami Beach for Las Vegas, or another city. Horowitz said that recently reported profits for the fair’s parent company, MCH, followed years of “extraordinary losses in which MCH almost faced insolvency,” which led them to take “in a large investment from James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems family office to stabilize the business.” All Art Basel fairs were “currently facing a cyclical downturn, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the launch of Art Basel Miami Beach in the early 2000s,” he said. Meanwhile, galleries are limiting fair participation or shuttering in response to a slower market, he added, which is why Art Basel Miami Beach will host 250 galleries this December, instead of 283 last year.
The Digest
A man was struck by dislodged roofing material and died during a walking tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home in Scottsdale, Arizona, which has temporarily closed as a result. [ARTnews]
A new study examining 79 fingerprints on China’s Terracotta Army suggests that women and children helped make the ceramic sculptures alongside adult men. [Heritage Daily]
Landlords of The Park Mansion building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan are demanding that socialite Libbie Mugrabi sell her Jean-Michel Basquiat painting to pay the $2.3 million they say she owes them in rent. [New York Post]
A fine arts student strike at London’s Goldsmiths University has become the longest at a UK higher education institution in history, lasting 130 days. [The Art Newspaper]
You Hong-june, the director of the National Museum of Korea, made a formal apology on Monday for exhibiting a calligraphy work that was wrongly attributed to Korean activist Park Won-geun, when it was, in fact, by a pro-Japanese collaborator during Japan’s rule over Korea. [The Korea Times]
The Kicker
LIVING GHOSTS. Ibrahim Mahama’s major show, “The Harvest Season,” opens at the Fondation Cartier in Paris on Thursday, marking “the most ambitious exhibition I’ve done,” he tells ARTnews. The Ghanaian artist who works collectively within a community insists that “the artist is just a vessel, and I see myself as that vessel in order to put all these different things together to do the work that we do.” The show includes Parliament of Ghosts, an ongoing, 2019-begun installation made of discarded train seats, railway sleepers, school furniture, and government archives. To this he has added about 200 royal stools from the Asante Empire. Mahama explained that the stools were often looted before being exhibited in Western museums, where they are placed behind glass. Another new project for the show, Things Fall Apart, reconstructs an abandoned glass bottle manufacturing factory in Ghana, which will eventually go on permanent display in Kumasi, where the artists are planning to build a new institution.