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The Headlines
ARTIST HARVEY DINNERSTEIN, whose closely observed paintings portrayed members of the civil rights movement and provided glimpses of everyday life in his native New York, has died at 94, the New York Times reports. As an artist in his 20s, Dinnerstein went with his friend Burt Silverman to memorialize the Montgomery bus boycott in 1956, “capturing church rallies and services and the lives of people surviving without city buses,” Richard Sandomir writes in the Times. He also documented the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., in 1968, for Esquire. Dinnerstein taught at the Art Students League for four decades, until the pandemic in 2020. He “was still working up until the day before he died,” Harrison Smith reports in the Washington Post; the artist’s niece told the Post that he was sketching “on the backs of envelopes, anything he could get his hands.”
RESORT COLLECTION. For many years now, casinos have been collecting and exhibiting art. The MGM in Las Vegas unloaded some of its Picasso paintings last year to diversify its collection, and the Associated Press notes that the Hard Rock in Atlantic City just opened an immersive van Gogh show. An art historian involved with the project told the wire service: “The whole point of an experience like this is to bring people in.” Here’s hoping that some venturesome gambling den considers doing a display of work by Duchamp, who claimed to have devised a system for profiting at roulette at the Monte Carlo Casino, a method he termed “delicious monotony without the least emotion.” In other hospitality news, Frieze cofounder Matthew Slotover is a partner in the forthcoming Fort Road Hotel in Margate, England, the Art Newspaper reports.
The Digest
Tan Boon Hui, a veteran museum leader on opposite sides of the world, died last week from complications of a stroke, at 53. Tan served as director of the Asia Society Museum in New York and the Singapore Art Museum, and organized two Singapore Biennales. Most recently, he had been leading Arts House Limited, an arts nonprofit in Singapore. [CNA, South China Morning Post, The Straits Times]
Canadian artist Lucinda Turner, who was a vocal advocate for preventing the sale of fake Indigenous art, has died at 63. Turner’s activities included lobbying for legislation to protect Indigenous artists and establishing a Facebook group, Fraudulent Native Art Exposed, to draw attention to the issue. [Vancouver Sun]
A French court rejected a suit brought by the wax sculptor who fabricated many of Maurizio Cattelan’s sculptures. It argued that the wax expert should be named the “sole author” of the works, and receive some €6 million (about $6.08 million) in compensation. Lawyers for Cattelan and his gallery named in the suit, Perrotin, had maintained that the artist had provided the intellectual property—and detailed instructions—for creating the pieces. [The Art Newspaper]
Writer Franz Lidz has a deep dive on a renegade plan to make 3-D–machined copies of the so-called Elgin Marbles. Not everyone is happy about the effort. [The New York Times]
A bounty of artist profiles today: Paul Mpagi Sepuya is in Cultured, Marco Fusinato is in the Financial Times, and Christine Sun Kim is in the New York Times.
Kris Jenner took a private tour of the Louvre. [Page Six]
The Kicker
IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT. The ultra-limited, 99-car run of the BMW that Jeff Koons designed sold out instantly, but in Top Gear magazine, Jason Barlow was lucky enough to take a ride in one—with Koons himself. Naturally, the highly quotable artist had quite a few things to say about the project. “I see no difference between creating the car and creating a new piece of work,” Koons said. “It’s an opportunity to have a conversation about feelings, sensations, about the permanency of certain things and the fragility of others. I’m looking forward to driving mine, but if one person out of the 99 preserves it, that would be nice. If that’s what excites them.” [Top Gear]
