The week in art news: culture world mourns Pippa Garner, Texas museum under fire, Grand Egyptian Museum finally opens, and more…

Pippa Garner, conceptual artist, writer and designer, dies aged 82. Garner was best known for satirising systems of consumerism, marketing and waste in American society. An Instagram post on Garner’s account announcing the news reads: “She wanted a trans president, universal healthcare, the end of testosterone toxicity overload and pet-troll-eum, hormones for all, lusty living to the very end.” Garner reentered the spotlight in recent years, with shows at Jeffrey Stark and White Columns in New York, the Verge Center for the Arts in Sacramento, Kunsthalle Zürich and the 2024 Whitney Biennial. Garner died on 30th December, 2024 in Los Angeles.

Texas museum slammed by state officials over controversial Sally Mann photographs. Local government officials and some museum visitors have filed complaints over Mann’s work on view in a group show at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The photographs have been described as featuring “inappropriate depictions of children” according to Artnews. The exhibition, titled ‘Diaries of Home’, features the work of 13 women and non-binary artists who, according to the museum’s website, “explore the multilayered concepts of family, community, and home.” Mann’s work has been the subject of controversy over the years, notably for her family portraits, which often include images of her children in the nude. The Fort Worth museum describes the series as “intimate and compelling”, but clearly, not everyone agrees. A county judge told the Dallas Express that the images “are grossly inappropriate at best” and “they should be taken down immediately and investigated by law enforcement for any and all potential criminal violations. Children must be protected, and decency must prevail.”

UC Berkeley gets $2.6M for project aimed at artistic and academic censorship. The multi-year project titled ‘A Counter-Imaginary in Authoritarian Times’ is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and will consist of workshops, publications and classes that will span art institutions across the US. The project is headed by UC Berkeley professor Shannon Jackson, and supported by fellow UC Berkeley professors Judith Butler, Debarati Sanyal, and New York University professor Denise Ferreira da Silva. Jackson told Hyperallergic that the project leaders “will attempt to trace the histories of free speech and censorship and to provide legal training to academics, artists, writers, and others facing censorship nationwide.”

Speaking of censorship: crypto bro Justin Sun has allegedly killed an article criticising his banana-eating stunt, according to Fortune. The blockchain billionaire and art collector made headlines in November after he bought Maurizio Cattelan’s infamous banana sculpture, Comedian (2019) for $6.2M at Sotheby’s. Sun later ate the banana at a press conference in Hong Kong. CoinDesk published a piece in early December criticising Sun’s actions. According to Fortune, Sun’s team complained about the tone of the article and CoinDesk’s owners and demanded that editorial staff remove it from the website. Callan Quinn, the author of the article, described the media hype around Sun’s banana-eating stunt as “ridiculous” and that the conference was a “marketing gimmick”.

Grand Egyptian Museum finally opens. Over two decades since it was announced, the museum, based in Giza, Cairo, has opened 12 of its galleries which feature a collection of 15,000 artefacts over 500,000 sq m – twice the size of the Louvre. First announced in 2002, the GEM has been seen as a key symbol of Egypt’s future and a key part of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s ‘Egypt Vision 2030’, which includes a major overhaul of the Giza plateau also home to the Pyramids of Giza. In 2010, the museum began its own conservation efforts, soon becoming the largest in the region, in an effort to ensure that Egypt actively protects its legacy and “intent to share Egyptian history on its terms, with respect, responsibility, and innovation,” Artnews reports.

What does the world need? Another art fair! Santa Monica Post Office launches in Los Angeles. The new boutique art fair will run alongside Frieze LA and Felix art fair in February. The new LA fair was developed from Place des Vosges, a smaller project in Paris whereby a limited number of international galleries stage a show together. Santa Monica Post Office promises to be “much more collegial” than other art fairs, with “less pressure to sell”, according to organiser Chris Sharp. An art fair de-centring sales? We don’t buy it.

Hate crime investigation kicks off following vandalism at German museum. An artwork at the Kunstverein Hamburg was attacked in November last year when a visitor stomped out the word ‘Palestine’ that was etched in a layer of clay covering the gallery floor. The installation, red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth [kick dirt] (2024) by London-based artist Phoebe Collings-James invites visitors to walk across a floor covered in dried clay, on which the artist has made drawings and written short pieces of text, with one section inscribed with Palestine, Haiti, Sudan and Congo, all countries that have experienced conflicts in 2024. The museum has confirmed that the artwork has been restored to its original state and that the incident is being investigated by local authorities.

New Year, new crystal-ball predictions from art market experts. Gabriela Palmieri, founder of Palmieri Fine Art and former Sotheby’s chairman of Contemporary art, Americas told Artnews that we could be in store for a  Christopher Wool comeback “in a meaningful way, because there is a major delta between auction results and private sales.” Arushi Kapoor, Los Angeles and Miami-based art adviser and founder of the Agency Art House also told the publication that she predicts the prints market “returning to pre-2019, pre-Covid levels”. Amy Cappellazzo, a founding partner of Art Intelligence Global told The Art Newspaper that the market will “tear away from the long, deep groove of our own selves and start looking again at what is unpopular, off market, passé, ugly, difficult and challenging,” while gallerist Niru Ratnam told the publication that he believes “one of the auction houses will fold, as will more fairs. In short: we’re in for an interesting ride!”