Katherine Crawford Luber to direct Minneapolis Institute of Art | Katherine Crawford Luber has been named the new director and president of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Luber has directed the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas for the past eight years, and takes up her new position in January, replacing Kaywin Feldman who left earlier this year to direct the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Uffizi director Eike Schmidt cancels move to Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum | German art historian and director of the Uffizi, Eike Schmidt, has cancelled plans to direct the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna just one month before he was due to move. Schmidt was appointed to succeed the outgoing Kunsthistorisches director Sabine Haag in 2017, and his last-minute decision has been criticised as ‘highly unprofessional and unprecedented’ by the Austrian minister of foreign affairs, Alexander Schallenberg.
Websites ordered to remove allegations against artist Subodh Gupta | A high-court judge in Delhi has ordered Facebook and Google to remove from the internet any material relating to allegations of sexual harassment made against the artist Subodh Gupta. The order was made at a hearing in Gupta’s defamation suit against an anonymous Instagram account (Instagram is owned by Facebook). The judge labelled the allegations made in posts by the account ‘defamatory’ and has also ordered Instagram to reveal information about the account’s administrator by 19 November, the date of the next hearing.
German city of Aachen withdraws art prize over recipient’s alleged support of BDS | The German city of Aachen has withdrawn a €10,000 art prize after it found reason to believe that the recipient artist Walid Raad was a supporter of the controversial Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which aims to put pressure on the Israeli government to give Palestinian citizens equal status. Mayor Marcel Philipp reached the conclusion after finding that Raad was ‘evasive’ in response to questions about BDS, although the artist has never publicly stated he supports the movement. BDS was officially declared anti-Semitic by Germany in a 2017 resolution.