Gwangju Biennale Names 2024 Curator, Met Plans Provenance-Research Team, and More: Morning Links for May 10, 2023

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The Headlines

MASTER OF CEREMONIES. The Gwangju Biennale in South Korea has named the veteran French curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud to be the artistic director for its 2024 edition. Bourriaud is best known for coining the term “relational aesthetics” in the 1990s for then-emerging art that involved or highlighted social interactions. (Rirkrit Tiravanija’s tasty communal meals, for instance.) The biennale will open in September of next year, an auspicious month on the South Korean art calendar since the Busan Biennale is set to be up and Frieze Seoul is scheduled to run. (The current Gwangju Biennale opened just last month, but the show had been running in even-numbered years since 2000, until the pandemic.) “The exhibition will address a universal and apparently simple theme, our relation to space,” Bourriaud said in a statement.

INTERNAL AFFAIRS. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is establishing a four-member provenance research team in an effort to identify looted work in its collection, Robin Pogrebin and Graham Bowley report in the New York Times. The move comes after recent seizures of artifacts from the Met by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. In one action last summer, authorities hauled off items from Greece, Italy, and Egypt. In March of this year, officials took a $25 million statue of a Roman emperor, on loan to the museum, that they determined was removed illegally from a Turkish archaeological site. In a letter to staff, the Met’s director, Max Hollein, said that “the emergence of new and additional information, along with the changing climate on cultural property, demands that we dedicate additional resources to this work.”

The Digest

Italy has been conducting a “census” of its state museums to catalog material that it holds as a result of its colonialism. “Even though we had a more ephemeral colonial history than Britain, Germany, France, or Belgium, the problem obviously cannot be underestimated by us,” a Culture Ministry official said. [The Associated Press/ABC News]

The Venice Architecture Biennale opens May 20, and its curator, Lesley Lokko, was profiled by Patricia Leigh Brown. Lokko, the first person of African descent in the role, founded the African Futures Institute in Accra, and has penned 12 novels. More than half of her show’s participants are from Africa or its diaspora. [The New York Times]

After less than two years on the job, Ngaire Blankenberg stepped down in late March as the director of the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., Helen Stoilas reports. The institution declined to comment. Blankenberg said that she “learned so much,” while also mentioning “a lot of frustration.” [The Art Newspaper]

The BBC said that it will restore a 1930s Eric Gill sculpture on its London headquarters that was attacked last year by a man with a hammer as another man denounced the artist’s pedophilia. In his diaries, Gill admitted to sexually abusing two of his daughters. [The Guardian]

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis in Missouri has hired Dean Daderko as its chief curator. They served as curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston from 2010 to 2020, and organized the just-closed “Ecstatic Land” exhibition and screening series at Ballroom Maria with Daisy Nam. [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]

Do you enjoy the energetic street art of Kenny Scharf? Are you a fan of fine vintage cars? If you answered yes both of those questions, your dream auction lot may have arrived: Heritage will soon offer a 1960 Cadillac Coupe De Ville that Scharf customized and debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach 2006. The top estimate: $600,000. [Robb Report]

The Kicker

A BRAVE NEW WORLD. With rising interest rates and the looming threat of a recession, the state of play for art collectors is changing fast. In Bloomberg, journalist James Tarmy quoted Alex Rotter, the chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art at Christie’s, as he offered up a concise summary of where things stand right now. “I grew up in an America where money was basically free, and the more you had, the freer it got,” Rotter said. “Now is the first time in I think 20 years that people have to pay to get money.” Be careful out there, folks. [Bloomberg]