MILAN — A record number of visitors attended the 57th edition of the Venice Biennale contemporary art show that put political engagement at the center of artistic dialogue. The Biennale closed its six-month run Sunday with more than 615,000 visitors, up by nearly a quarter from 500,000 two years ago. Biennale President Paolo Baratta credited…
A person got quite the impressive addition to his shoe collection on Sunday. An unnamed buyer bought a pair of customized, game-worn Nike Air Jordan I sneakers at an auction in Dallas, Texas for $55,000 — the highest price ever paid for this shoe’s particular style. Michael Jordan wore the shoes after returning from an…
Earlier this year, Art Basel sued the sportswear brand Adidas over a series of sneakers bearing the art fair’s name without permission. Now, the suit is no longer: the two enterprises have reached a settlement, a spokesperson for Art Basel told ARTnews today. The lawsuit was filed this past May, after white Adidas sneakers with…
Rome’s Galleria Borghese is launching a three-year partnership with the Italian luxury goods brand Fendi to create an international study centre dedicated to Caravaggio. The museum inside a 17th-century villa is one of 20 leading Italian institutions, including the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence and Museo di Capodimonte in Naples, that gained financial independence from…
Meet Charley Hill, the legendary bloodhound who has retrieved stolen masterpieces the world over. Most notably, Edvard Munch’s The Scream, taken from the National Gallery of Norway in 1994 and rescued by Charley from the basement of a summer house in Oslo Fjord. “The art world enables me to see the worst in everyone—myself and…
President Trump now appears to be among the nation’s “celebrity artists.” A small, stark sketch he once made of the Empire State Building in 1994 sold for $16,000 on Thursday night, part of an auction of art objects in Los Angeles that was not without drama. “A packed audience of collectors and bidders were live…
There are two versions of French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Two Sisters (On The Terrace).” One has hung in the Art Institute of Chicago since 1933. The other is in President Donald Trump’s New York apartment. But one of them is a fake — and the Art Institute says it isn’t the one in Chicago. Trump,…
Sotheby’s brought in £50.3 million (about $66.5 million) at its contemporary art evening sale at its New Bond Street salesroom in London tonight, notching a haul that fell squarely between the low estimate of £43.6 million ($57.2 million) and the high estimate of £60.4 million ($79.2 million). The sell-through rate by lot was a solid,…
An antique Chinese bowl fetched a whopping $38 million at auction on Tuesday. The purchase of the 900-year-old bowl, which was fashioned during the Song dynasty, sets a new auction record for Chinese porcelain, auction house Sotheby’s said. An anonymous buyer placed the winning bid of 294 million Hong Kong dollars ($38 million), clinching the…
Maurizio Cattelan came out of his self-imposed, five-year retirement from the art world just in time. His work has always been prescient, sometimes uncannily so. His life-like wax portrait of Pope Paul II in full papal regalia lying inert under a felled meteorite—La Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) (1999)—presaged the sexual abuse scandals of the…
