Pace Gallery is downsizing. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the mega gallery is dropping 50 artists and estates and cutting 50 staff. CEO Marc Glimcher has overseen a series of expansions since he took over from his father, the gallery’s founder Arne Glimcher, in 2011: Pace now has eight locations across New York (where it has two spaces), Los Angeles, London, Geneva, Seoul, Tokyo and Berlin. Glimcher described the $100m renovation of its global headquarters in Chelsea as something that would ‘by no means’ happen today. ‘The art world has changed dramatically over the past decade, and the current gallery model isn’t only broken, it’s unfixable,’ Glimcher said in a statement shared with Apollo. Arne Glimcher, who opened his own project space in Tribeca called 125 Newbury in 2022, told the New York Times that retrenchment was ‘like getting our gallery back’. ‘I think this whole mega gallery is ridiculous and also unsupportable. I always thought that.’
Dawn Airey has been appointed the next chair of Arts Council England (ACE). The experienced UK media executive takes over from Nicholas Serota, who has held the post since 2017, on 1 August. Airey has held some of the most senior roles in broadcasting, including being chief executive of Channel 5 and managing director of global content at ITV; she was chief executive of Getty Images in 2015–18. Her current non-executive roles include being chair of the National Youth Theatre and deputy chair of the board of Channel 4. She joins the Arts Council after the launch of its new policy framework, ‘Excellence. For Everybody. The UK’s secretary of state for culture, media and sport, Lisa Nandy, said: ‘I have no doubt that [Dawn Airey] will insist on pressing ahead with long overdue action to put people back at the centre of their own national story.’ Airey said she was humbled to follow Serota, describing him as an ‘arts titan’.
More than 100 artists have threatened the Venice Biennale with legal action for ignoring their wish to withdraw from this year’s awards. After the biennale’s prize jury resigned on 30 April, the organisers of the event said that the awards would be decided by the votes of visitors. On 9 May, 68 artists and national pavilions pulled out of the running for these awards in solidarity with the jury. In an open letter published on eflux on 3 June, the artists – now at 106 – said that many of their names are still on the ballot. After taking legal advice, they repeated their request to be removed from ‘any and all contexts’ surrounding the new Visitors’ Lions.
Marjane Satrapi, the Iranian-French artist, author and film director, has died at the age of 56. Born in Rasht in north-west Iran, Satrapi moved to France in 1994 and was internationally acclaimed for her series of Persepolis graphic novels, first published in French in four volumes in 2000–03, which describe her childhood and adolescence in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. The first of these was adapted into an award-winning film that she directed herself in 2007. Her death was announced on 4 June by the office of President Emmanuel Macron of France, which praised Satrapi as a ‘leading figure in French culture and an artist in love with freedom’.
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has appointed Makeda Best as its new chief curator of photography. The role has been vacant for four years, since Clément Chéroux resigned to become head of the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris in 2022. Best joins from the Oakland Museum of California, where she was deputy director of curatorial affairs; before that she was the photography curator of Harvard Art Museums. She begins her new role in September. In other appointments, Philippe Vergne has been named artist director and chief curator of the Bass Museum of Art in Miami. The French curator joins from the Serralves Museum of Contemporary art in Porto, where he has been director since 2014. Vergne was previously director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
