– Klaus and Courtney to Judge PS1 Halloween Costume Competition: MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach and former Hole frontwoman Courtney Love will share MC duties at Sunday’s inaugural Artist’s Halloween Carnival and Parade at the Long Island City contemporary art center. The celebrations will begin with an artists’ costume workshop at 3pm in the Performance Dome — with aesthetic inspiration provided by creepy videos from Ryan McNamara, Anne Eastman, and others — followed by a parade around the museum and costume contest judged by Biesenbach and Love, and a party. [@KlausBiesenbach]
– Texas Gallery Exhibits Picasso Vandal’s Art: A Houston art space is hosting an exhibition of 12 paintings by Uriel Landeros, the young man who tagged a Picasso painting at the de Menil Collection earlier this year with a cartoon bull and the word “conquista.” (Though Landeros won’t be in attendance — he’s currently on the lam — James Perez, who runs Cueto James Art Gallery in Sawyer Heights, will be hosting a Landeros look-alike contest at the opening.) Perez says he mounted the show simply because he likes Landeros’s artwork — but his decision is rubbing some locals the wrong way. [Chronicle]
– After Delay, Roma Memorial Opens in Berlin: A Berlin memorial dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of Roma and Sinti people murdered and persecuted by the Nazis opened in Berlin today after a three-year delay. “This memorial acknowledges a group of victims who have gone unacknowledged for far too long,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the opening ceremony, which comes 67 years after the end of WWII. The memorial, by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, is a water basin containing a stone on which a fresh flower will be placed every day. [Bloomberg]
– While UAE Stalls, Qatar Surges: While the United Arab Emirates’s major cultural development projects are languishing, Qatar has quietly unveiled similarly ambitious and faster-moving initiatives, like the Jean Nouvel-designed national heritage museum. But experts say there is danger in creating an art scene entirely through public funding. “When an artist or curator is asked to put on an exhibition, they are not doing it at grassroots level,” says Art Dubai founder John Martin. “There is no organic growth.” [Independent]
– Are Honeybees Art Historians?: We’ve long known that honeybees can distinguish among types of flowers, but according to a new study, they can distinguish among artworks as well. Dr. Judith Reinhard of the University of Queensland’s Brain Institute found that bees could differentiate between Impressionist paintings by Monet and cubist paintings by Picasso. “Our study suggests that discrimination of artistic styles is not a higher cognitive function that is unique to humans, but simply due to the capacity of animals to extract and categorise the visual characteristics of complex images,” she said. [ANI]
– U.K. Receives Major Contemporary Art Donation: Britain’s Contemporary Art Society recently received a trove of about 300 works of contemporary and modern art worth a total of $6 million from the collection of Eric and Jean Cass. The Contemporary Art Society, which gifts art to the U.K.’s public art collections, will distribute the Casses’ donations among the Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow, Leeds Art Gallery, the National Museum of Wales, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. [Artforum]
– Basketball Street Art Show Scores Slam Dunk in Soho: Two years after making its debut during Art Basel Miami Beach, the Public Works Department’s “Art of Basketball” exhibition — in which basketball hoop backboards marked with paintings by leading street artists including Chris Stain, CERN, Cope2, and Mr. Brainwash depict NBA stars like Kevin Durant, Kobe Bryant, and Blake Griffin — is making its New York City debut at SoHo’s Pop International Galleries. “For the last two years, we’ve been focusing on ‘Art of Basketball’ because we feel there’s so much meat on that bone,” said street artist and PWD curator Billi Kid. “Hip-hop and basketball come together well, and the NBA really supports what we do.” (For a clip about “The Art of Basketball,” see our VIDEO OF THE DAY, below.) [ESPN Playbook]
– Scotland’s Leading Arts Group Ready for Revamp: After being criticized for fostering competition and “corporate” tactics among cultural organizations in an open letter signed by Scotland’s leading artists — including Karla Black, Martin Boyce, and Douglas Gordon — Creative Scotland, the top Scottish arts funding organization, agreed to undertake a major overhaul at its October 22 board meeting. “We will look again at our structure to ensure appropriate prominence is given to art form specialism and to ensure specialist knowledge is used effectively in our decision-making processes,” said Creative Scotland chair Sandy Crombie. [TAN]
– Major Museum Lands at Paris’s Biggest Airport: Among the amenities in the new S4 satellite of Paris-Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport’s terminal 2E will be a dedicated 2,700-square-foot museum space whose exhibitions will rotate every six months. The gallery will debut with a show of some 50 paintings and sculptures from the Musée Rodin, including Auguste Rodin’s iconic “The Kiss.” The Musée de Roissy, which will be curated by former Musée d’Orsay president Serge Lemoine, is expected to see between 600,000-800,000 visitors per year. [Le Figaro]
