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The Headlines
STARMAN. The Victoria & Albert Museum in London has received the archive of musician and actor David Bowie—with a whopping 80,000 items—as a gift from his estate, the Associated Press reports. The trove includes costumes, letters, instruments, and a great deal more. Some of the material was included in the 2013 V&A exhibition “David Bowie Is,” which traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, and other venues. The public will be able to view the holdings in 2025 in a Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts at the V&A East Storehouse, a satellite branch of the institution that is now under construction in east London. The Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group provided £10 million (about $12.1 million) for the center, which the V&A’s director, Tristram Hunt, told BBC News will serve as a “sourcebook for the Bowies of tomorrow.”
SPARGEL SEASON. Today, Art Basel released the exhibitor list for the 2023 edition of its flagship Swiss fair, Maximilíano Durón reports in ARTnews. When the festivities begin on June 13, there will be 285 exhibitors on hand (about the same number as last year), 21 newcomers among them, including Empty Gallery of Hong Kong and Offer Waterman of London. Its Statements section—a proving ground for emerging artists—will feature solo presentations by 18 individuals, including Sky Hopinka (via New York’s Broadway gallery) and Gordon Hall (via Hua International of Berlin and Beijing.) For the full rundown of the action, head to ARTnews.
The Digest
The water in some Venice canals has fallen so low that gondolas cannot navigate them. The low tides in the city come amid a lingering high-pressure weather system in the region and at the end of a winter that has seen the nearby Alps receive an unusually small amount of snowfall. [CBS News]
The 2023 edition of Portland, Oregon’s Converge 45 biennial will feature more than 50 artists and collectives, including Richard Mosse and Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Writer and curator Christian Viveros-Fauné is organizing the exhibition, “Social Forms: Art as Global Citizenship,” which opens August 24. [Williamette Week]
Time is running out for London’s National Portrait Gallery to raise the £50 million (about $60.3 million) required to keep Joshua Reynolds‘s Portrait of Omai (ca. 1776) in the United Kingdom; an export ban on the piece will expire March 10. Meanwhile, there is talk of the Getty stepping in to fund to a joint acquisition. (The Getty is not commenting.) [Financial Times and The Art Newspaper]
The 12th Momentum biennial, which will open at Galleri F 15 on the island of Jeløya in Moss, Norway, on June 10 (maybe a stop before Basel?) will feature a “long and growing” list of participants. Its curator is the art collective Tenthaus, which is “moving toward a model of polyphonic co-authorship,” it said in a statement. [e-flux]
Speaking of collectives, Frieze spoke to members of disbanded groups like Bank, Art Club 2000, and K-Hole about how they came together, and what brought them to an end. K-Holer Dena Yago said, “We weren’t that close when we started: we really cemented and gelled through partying together in our early 20s.” [Frieze]
Artist Tim Whiten has won the 2022 Gershon Iskowitz Prize, which annually honors an artist who has made an “outstanding contribution” to art in Canada. It comes with a cash prize of CA$75,000 (about US$55,500) and a solo show at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. [ArtDaily]
The Kicker
LIVING LEGEND. Artist David Hockney, always eager to experiment with new technology, has developed an immersive digital installation about his life’s work that is running at a London venue called Lightroom. Such crowd-pleasing (and critic-maddening) spectacles have tended to focus on dead artists, like Klimt and van Gogh, journalist Alex Marshall notes in a New York Timesstory on the project . “They’re dead,” Hockney said. “I’m a living artist, so I’ve come in and actually done things.” [NYT]
Source: artnews.com