Scottish government to boost arts funding

Our daily round-up of news from the art world

Scottish government boosts arts funding | Creative Scotland’s budget is set to increase according to proposals made in Scotland’s Draft Budget for 2018–19. Funding to the body will increase annually for the next three years. Creative Scotland’s Grant in Aid budget for 2018–19 will increase by 21.2 per cent, including an extra 6.6m for regularly funded organisations that will partially offset a drop in revenue from the National Lottery. According to Arts Professional, the Scottish culture sector had been bracing itself for significant cuts.

Artist arrested in China reportedly released on bail | The New York Times reports that Hua Yong, a painter from Beijing, has been released on bail after being detained by the police last week. Hua was arrested after allegedly posting materials critical of mass evictions being carried out in the city. In videos uploaded to the internet, he had demanded that the rights of migrant workers displaced in the sweep of Beijing’s huge urban renewal plans be respected.

German museums report drop in visitor numbers | Figures released by the German Museums Association show that visits to the country’s museums fell by 2.2 per cent in 2016. According to the Art Newspaper, institutions devoted to art and culture were hit particularly badly: visits to art museums declined by 7.4 per cent, a drop partially attributed to a decrease in tourism and a number of popular exhibitions held in 2015.

Steve McQueen is making a film about Grenfell Tower tragedy | Turner Prize winning artist and film maker Steve McQueen is to begin working on a project intended as a tribute to the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster, reports the Sunday Times (£). McQueen, who grew up close to the site of the tower, has hired a helicopter to film the remains of the structure from the air. When complete, the film will be handed over to a London museum.

Recommended reading | On ArtNet, Brian Boucher looks at the ways in which artist collectives are helping to revive some of the most neglected areas of Detroit. In the Observer, the novelist Alan Hollinghurst remembers his friend Howard Hodgkin, who died this spring. In New York magazine, Jerry Saltz considers petition to have Balthus’s painting Thérèse Dreaming removed from display at the Met. Although he concedes that the work is problematic, he approves of the museum’s decision to keep it on view.