The week in art news: Controversy in Germany, permanent home for ‘ugly’ Kane sculpture, ‘unconventional’ portrait of motherhood celebrated and more…

Hito Steyerl cancels keynote speech at German art talk: The multimedia artist was due to speak alongside Candice Breitz and Eyal Weizman at ‘Art and Activism in Times of Polarization’ at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin this Sunday. The three have now pulled out of the event, with Steyerl saying she dropped out because of the “current context of the Middle East conflict.” Those still taking part include artists Muhammad Toukhy, Ruth Patir, Leon Kahane, and journalist Andreas Fanizadeh.

James Bridle un-awarded German art prize over Israeli boycott activism. In June, the British artist was announced as the winner of the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s theory award. The foundation has now taken back the award and its €10K prize money because of Bridle’s support for the pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. Here’s the kicker: as The Guardian points out, the foundation is named after an honest-to-god, card carrying, uniform wearing Nazi: architect Erich Schelling was a member of the Nazi party between 1937 and 1945.

Harry Kane sculpture finds permanent home. We last reported on the infamous artwork in March, when it was revealed to the public after spending five years in storage. Apparently it was so ugly that Waltham Forest Council struggled to find a home for it. We’re now happy to report that the statue has found a permanent home at the Peter May Sports Centre in Waltham Forest, which Kane opened in 2016.

Five years since the Rijksmuseum started its restoration of Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the conservators are finally getting round to it. To be fair to them, it’s taken five years to fully inspect and investigate the four-by-four metre canvas. All the work has been done with the painting in situ, and the conservators working inside a kind of large protective glass box. It’ll now be cleaned, repaired and repainted where necessary. Experts warn that the painting will lose its lustre while the varnish is removed, but it should be in a much better condition once the work’s finished.

Art Basel Miami Beach opens soon, and Plaster will be on the ground, but we won’t be at the infamous White Cube Soho Beach House party. After 13 years, the gallery has permanently cancelled the event, which for many visitors marked a high point (and often a personal low point) of the entire fair. The shock news was reported by Annie Armstrong in Artnet’s Wet Paint column. According to White Cube, their events designed to celebrate artists in the US have “evolved significantly” over the past 14 months. Is that an admission that the wallet’s empty?

Missed out on an Oasis ticket? Don’t worry ar kid, just go down to the National Portrait Gallery which will be playing a special extended cut of the band’s ‘Champagne Supernova’. Stretched out to six hours, the seven-minute song becomes an ambient background track to accompany the gallery’s current exhibition of celeb photographs, ‘Zoë Law: Legends’, including pics of the Gallagher brothers.

Speaking of endurance art, Ken Burns, the documentary filmmaker known for his 10+ hour long films, has released a new two-part series on the life and work of Leonardo da Vinci, with a mercifully short four-hour runtime. According to Burns, who’s previously covered the life of Ernest Hemingway, the history of Country Music, and the Vietnam War, da Vinci painted “like nobody else had painted with this authenticity to three dimensions… Maybe another way to say this is that he invented film.”

Scam of the week: a London art investment firm has been accused of running an $11M fraud, according to Artnet. Smith and Partner specialised in selling “limited edition” prints to investors, which would be managed by the company and sold on for profit. One investor reportedly put £92,000 ($117,000) into the company, only to see a total profit of £178 ($226). “They kept making excuses when nothing was being sold,” Philip Remillard, told the Times.

The Bouvier Affair continues: billionaire art dealer Yves Bouvier should stand trial over stolen Picassos, says French court. The Art Newspaper reports that in 2015, Picasso’s stepdaughter Catherine Hutin discovered several works were missing from a Paris storage unit. They’d been handled by Yves Bouvier’s business partner Olivier Thomas. Hutin says she later found out that two of the missing works were sold by Bouvier to Dmitri Rybolovlev. Bouvier and Thomas deny the accusations.

Steph Wilson wins Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize 2024. The London-based photographer won the annual photography award hosted by the National Portrait Gallery with an unconventional image of motherhood. The photograph, ‘Sonam’ shows a woman Wilson connected with as part of a wider project on ‘Ideal Mothers’, nude, holding her baby, and wearing a fake moustache. Sonam is a professional wigmaker, and the moustache represents her profession and her late father.

Joan Jonas wins Nam June Paik Prize 2024. The video and performance artist was recognised for her “key role in shaping early video and performance art,” and her continued exploration of “ecology, landscape and kinship between humans and non-human species at a time of climate breakdown.” She will receive a $35,600 cash prize as well as an exhibition at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Yongin, South Korea.

Walter Dahn, pioneer of ‘Bad Painting’, dies, 70. Dahn was born in Tönisvorst, Germany in 1954. In the 1970s, he studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys. After his studies, he moved to Cologne, founded the Mülheimer Freiheit group and developed a raw, neo-expressionist style that rejected minimalism and drew on graffiti and cartoons. By the late ‘80s, he had abandoned painting and taken up photography, screen printing and music. Dahn was represented by Sprüth Magers, which confirmed his death on 11 November 2024.