The sale of Myron Kunin’s collection brought a total of $41,617,500 on Nov. 11, setting a new record for an African Art auction in the U.S.

Minneapolis collector’s African art collection fetches record $41.6M

Minneapolis collector Myron Kunin’s African art collection sold for a record $41.6 million at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 11. An extremely rare Senufo Female Statue shattered the previous world record when it went for $12,037,000. Carved by an artist known as the Master of Sikasso, the Ivory Coast sculpture is one of only five Senufo figures of its kind. Calling it the Kunin Senufo Female Statue, Sotheby’s described it as a “quintessential masterpiece of African abstraction.”

It’s pleasing to think the crowds at Primark helped fund the restoration of the V&A Cast Courts

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification.

The Spectator

IKEA recreated Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and other famous paintings using flat-pack furniture

IKEA has been getting pretty creative with its PR stunts lately, first it remade a scene from The Shining in store, and now it’s recreated paintings by Van Gogh, Renoir and Hopper in real life. I think they must be pushing the food hall because all three of the paintings chosen centre around food and drink: Edward Hopper’s bar-based Nighthawks, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party and Van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.

Dexter Dalwood’s Muse Music

Dexter Dalwood is that rare beast – an artist able to examine how history is constructed and interpreted through the making of paintings which are both intellectually challenging yet visually seductive. Not only does Dexter Dalwood possess a profound cultural and historical knowledge, he also perceives the connections between art history, politics, music, literature and personal experience, which he intimates with a remarkable lightness of touch. The artist’s juxtaposition of quotations and references from a broad and eclectic range of subjects is reflected in his transposition of the cut-and-paste of the collage technique to canvas. A technique he values in music but doesn’t see so much of in the art of others.

Institute of Contemporary Arts show on gender, sexuality and celebrity culture

Mass digital culture and an examination of the post-human world will be at the core of next year’s programme at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The London gallery will showcase a variety of young artists from around the world in its spring 2015 show, titled Looks. It will examine how they use their art to respond to the urgent social issues that have arisen out of technology and our online identities – focusing on gender, sexuality and the obsession with celebrity culture.

A decade of great photos from one of the world’s most respected photography awards

Canada’s Magenta Foundation has recently launched Flash Forward 2015, its competition for emerging photographers. Now in its eleventh year, Flash Forward has proved a launch pad for many young photographers – it’s definitely a great way of getting your work under the photo-world’s nose. I am happy to be included in this year’s list of international judges. With so much amazing work from previous years’ submissions to choose from, the selection I have chosen here is focused around photographs that suggest balance via their subject or composition. Cheryl Newman.

Auction start-up Auctionata pulls in £675000 at contemporary and modern sale

Art Market Monitor crunches the numbers on the Berlin-based auction start-up Auctionata’s first sale in New York which totaled about $675,000, which, they write, “is not a bad result for a first sale, especially when the company was able to sell a Warhol print of John Wayne for $80,000.”

A White Flower by O’Keeffe Blooms Green: $44.4 Million

One of Georgia O’Keeffe’s classic flower paintings — “Jimson Weed (White Flower No. 1)” from 1932 – sold at Sotheby’s on Thursday morning for $44.4 million, nearly three times its $15 million high estimate. The painting, which was being sold by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., to benefit its acquisitions fund, had belonged to the artist’s sister, Anita O’Keeffe Young, and for six years had hung in the private dining room in the White House during the George W. Bush administration.

The Gurlitt collection should be sold to benefit Jewish organisations’

On 24 November, the Kunstmuseum Bern will reveal whether it has decided to accept the bequest of the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, the son of the art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. In 2012 German police seized around 1,300 works from Gurlitt’s Munich flat; hundreds of them are thought to have been looted or confiscated from their former owners by the Nazis. On the eve of the Swiss museum’s announcement, we spoke to Alfred Weidinger, the deputy director of the Belvedere in Vienna, which in 2006 returned five major works by Klimt to the heirs of Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer.

Baz Luhrmann’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth

The award-winning Australian director Baz Luhrmann has excelled in other media, from pop music to window dressing. So should we really be that surprised by the news that he is planning to oversee a booth at next month’s Art Basel Miami Beach fair? Luhrmann will commandeer the Swiss gallery Galerie Gmurzynska’s space, with the help of his wife, the costume designer Catherine Martin and the British music producer and long-term collaborator, Nellee Hooper.