Frick Collection looks set to move into the Breuer building

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Frick Collection looks set to move into the Breuer building | The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Frick Collection have announced that they are discussing a collaboration that would allow the Frick to move in to the Breuer building (currently the Met Breuer) on Madison Avenue during the planned renovation of the museum. Under the proposed plans, the Met, which has leased the Breuer from the Whitney Museum of American Art since 2015, would vacate the building in 2020, enabling the Frick to remain open to the public when construction begins on its historic premises on 70th Street.

Director of Serralves Museum resigns over censorship row | The director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, João Ribas, has resigned just eight months after his appointment, following a dispute with the Serralves Foundation over the museum’s presentation of an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. The Art Newspaper reports that 20 works have been removed from the show, which was commissioned and curated by Ribas, while access to two rooms has been restricted to over-18s. Prior to the opening of the exhibition, Ribas had told a Portuguese newspaper that there would be no restricted access to Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit images.

Marina Abramović attacked in Florence | The Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović was attacked yesterday (23 September) by an amateur artist who hit her over the head with a framed painting. The incident occurred as Abramović was leaving the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, after a book-signing organised to coincide with her retrospective at the institution. The man was released after Abramović, who was unharmed, decided not to press charges.

Police remove sculptures in the Maldives | A series of sculptures by the British-Guyanese artist James deCaires Taylor was removed by police from the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi resort last Friday (21 September), according to Al Jazeera. The police said that the civil court had issued an order for the resort to take down the works, which had been deemed un-Islamic because of their depiction of the human figure. In July, the country’s then president, Abdulla Yameen (who suffered an unexpected election loss on 23 September), had previously ordered the removal of the sculptures. 

Recommended Reading | In Hyperallergic, Zachary Small reports on new research, published by The Lancet, that suggests Caravaggio’s death in 1610 was not the result of syphilis, aspreviously believed, but of sepsis resulting from a sword wound. And in Frieze, McKenzie Wark assesses the legacy of the late cultural theorist Paul Virilio.