Creative Scotland closes its key fund for artists amid government budget freeze

Creative Scotland has closed its key fund for artists as the Scottish government freezes its budget, reports the Scotsman. The arts agency announced on Monday that its £6m ‘Open Fund for Individuals’, which is funded jointly by the government and the National Lottery, will close at the end of August due to the Scottish government’s funding freeze, and that Creative Scotland is facing ‘severe budget pressures’. The Scottish government had pledged to ‘more than double’ its arts expenditure in the next few years. Creative Scotland expected to have £13.2m restored to its budget for this financial year, and told the Scottish Parliament last week that almost £11m of funding it had already allocated had been cancelled or threatened by the government. The agency also said that the fund for individuals would be reinstated ‘as soon as possible’ once its future funding became clearer.

Staff at the Noguchi Museum in New York have staged a walk-out in protest against the museum’s recent ban on keffiyehs. Last week, Hyperallergic reports, more than two-thirds of the museum’s 72-person workforce signed an internal petition calling for the reversal of a dress code instituted on 14 August that prohibits staff from wearing the Palestinian headscarf known as the keffiyeh. The petition asserted that the staff were ‘dedicated to protecting and fostering the work and legacy of Isamu Noguchi – a man who understood intimately the injustice of targeted discrimination and displacement’, and that the dress code ‘does not serve the overall mission of the Museum’. (Noguchi had faced discrimination as a Japanese American and spent time in an internment camp in Arizona for Japanese immigrants.) On Wednesday, to protest against the new dress code still being in place, at least 14 workers, including all nine public-facing staff, walked out.

The Hotung bequest to the British Museum, made by the late Hong Kong businessman Joseph Hotung in 2022, has been valued at £123m, reports the Art Newspaper. The bequest encompasses 246 jades from across all China’s major dynasties, 15 blue and white porcelain objects from the 14th to the 16th century, 24 bronzes and other metalworks, a Neolithic ceramic jar and the head of a bodhisattva. Hotung served on the museum’s board from 1994 to 2004; he also sat on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and was the first chair of the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. His bequest to the British Museum, which was announced in 2022, was recognised in the museum’s latest financial accounts after probate for his estate was granted. It brought the museum’s total of donations and legacies for the financial year to £138.5m, compared to £27.6m for the previous financial year.

The French actor and art collector Alain Delon has died at the age of 88. Best known for his handsome looks and his performances in a number of influential French and Italian films in the 1960s and ’70s, Delon was also a lover of art, and began collecting it in 1969, when he acquired a drawing by Albrecht Dürer for 700,000 francs (approximately €922,400 today). Though his early collection largely encompassed drawings, Delon soon began acquiring works by 19th-century French artists such as Millet and Géricault, and developed a taste for Fauvist paintings and the animal sculptures of Rembrandt Bugatti, the Art Newspaper reports. Last summer, Delon auctioned off his collection at Bonhams in Paris; the sale fetched €8m. He said in a statement, ‘There are two things I regard as my legacy: my acting career and my art collection. I am so proud of them both.’