Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.
Happy Thursday! Here’s who’s moving and shaking in the art world this week:
- Art Critic Zachary Fine Joins the New Yorker as Contributing Writer: Fine, a postdoctoral fellow at Wesleyan University and the interim director of the school’s Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism, is a longtime contributor to Art in America.
- The Breeder Announces Representation of Iva Lulashi: The Athens-based gallery has signed the Albanian-born, Milan-based painter, whose practice explores desire, memory, and the visual language of communist Albania. She represented Albania at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
- Cloe Piccoli Named Artistic Director of miart: The contemporary art critic and curator has been appointed to a three-year term leading Milan’s international modern and contemporary art fair, succeeding Nicola Ricciardi. Her vision is for “an inclusive platform that brings together culture and the market,” she said in a statement.
- Stephanie Wiles to Retire from Yale University Art Gallery: Wiles, the Henry J. Heinz II Director, will step down in spring 2027 after nearly a decade leading the New Haven institution, during which she raised over $100 million in gifts and artwork and hired the gallery’s first provenance curator.
- Essais Announces Representation of Andrea Eooi: The Paris gallery has signed the Brussels-trained painter as its first long-term artist collaboration, one year after its founding. Eooi (b. 1997), a recipient of the 2021 City of Brussels Prize of Excellence, will present her first New York solo exhibition this fall.
- Nasher Sculpture Center Announces Jury for 10th Nasher Prize: The five-person panel, which includes MoMA director Christophe Cherix, Centre Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon, Rauschenberg Foundation executive director Courtney J. Martin, incoming Tate director Jessica Morgan, and Raqs Media Collective co-founder Monica Narula, will select the laureate in spring 2027.
- Melissa Melero-Moose Wins Walker Youngbird Foundation Emerging Native Arts Grant: The Fallon Paiute-Shoshone painter, known for embedding gathered Great Basin materials like willow and pine nuts into mixed-media surfaces, will use the $15,000 award to develop a new series of paintings drawn from traditional Numu (Northern Paiute) stories.
Big Number: $35 M.
That’s the total estimate for a cache of works from the family collection of Paul Durand-Ruel, the dealer considered most responsible for establishing Impressionism as a commercial and critical success. It’s the latest coup for Christie’s, which is set to offer the works in Paris on October 22. The sale will feature 62 works that have remained in the family’s collection for generations, including paintings by Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Gustave Loiseau, Henry Moret, and Pablo Picasso. The top lot is Monet’s Bord des falaises à Pourville (ca. 1882), which carries an estimate of €11 million–€15 million ($12.5 million–$17.1 million). The sale will take place during Art Basel Paris week, no doubt to raise the profile of Christie’s Paris house, as the London sales do during Frieze London.
Read This.
Did you forget that Dimes Square is a thing? Don’t worry, that niche micro-scene of strivers, artists, and well-dressed charlatans is alive and kicking, at least according to Sammy Loren, the founder of social media tabloid On the Rag. For Cultured, the Angeleno documented a six-week run of partying in New York, skipping from Manhattan gallery openings and readings to Brooklyn magazine launches. For readers of On the Rag, it should come as no surprise that Loren proves an irreverent guide to the downtown scene, chronicling everything from a “performance” involving the smearing of birthday cake on one’s face to scammer-author Caroline Calloway’s reading of Latin poems that she may or may not have translated. Your eyes are liable to roll back into your skull, yes, but Loren does have an ear for the soundbite. The kicker quote is especially good: “The strivers in New York are pseudo-intellectuals,” writer Zoey Greenwald tells him. “Whereas the strivers in LA at least have the decency to be dumb.”
