Gladys Nilsson, c. 1966–67.Photo: Courtesy of the artist and the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento.

The Perfectly Peculiar Art of Gladys Nilsson

It’s not more than a few seconds after we meet that the artist Gladys Nilsson, 86, insists on helping me carry my suitcase over the threshold and into her home. Nilsson has lived in a handsome brick house with Craftsman-style interiors in the town of Wilmette, just north of Chicago, since 1976 with her husband, the artist Jim Nutt, 87. The two met in 1960 when they were both students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

There is art everywhere—paintings and sculptures and masks, piles of papers and books, work made by the two of them or their friends, plus plenty of souvenirs from their decades of travel. “Stuff gets put down and it stays there and we ignore it,” Nilsson deadpans. Eclecticism suits them.

Via Vogue

At the Art + Tech Summit, Christie’s Pins Its Future on AI Billionaires Who Aren’t Buying Art… Yet

“We are in a historic moment in wealth creation,” said CNBC wealth reporter Robert Frank at the keynote presentation of the 2026 edition of the Christie’s Art + Tech Summit last week, alongside Christie’s CEO Bonnie Brennan and Michael Anders, founder of the investment firm ICONIQ Capital. Frank was referring to the riches being created as big AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and SpaceX go public. These initial public offerings are projected to create 20 new billionaires, while SpaceX’s IPO alone is projected to have made 4,400 employees into millionaires. The question at the summit was: will all this new wealth create new art collectors? Anders, Brennan, and Frank struggled to define the future desires of a new generation of mega-rich.

Via ARTnews

Jeff Koons Beats Copyright Infringement Claims in ‘Made in Heaven’ Lawsuit

A U.S. appeals court upheld a ruling in favor of Jeff Koons in a copyright dispute over his iconic “Made in Heaven” series, rejecting the claims of a sculptor who had accused Koons of using one of his works without permission.

Prop designer Michael Hayden first sought compensation in 2021 for the appearance of his 1988 sculpture in three works from Koons’s series, made between 1989 and 1990. As Hayden himself acknowledged in his filing, the series caused “a media sensation” and has been credited with “launching Mr. Koons into the art world’s stratosphere.” Despite this, Hayden claimed to have only discovered the alleged infringement in 2019.

Via Artnet

He’s the Last Great Land Artist You’ve Never Heard Of

This spring, Charles Ross sat in his studio in SoHo, but his mind was elsewhere: a mesa in eastern New Mexico, where his life’s work, a monumental naked-eye earthwork called “Star Axis,” — part observatory and part pyramid — juts at the cosmos. “If you’re there in the winter when there’s a snowstorm, it’s like the sky is painting the earth white,” he said. “And the thunderstorms. And rainbows several times a week.”

Ross has a degree in math and a yen for physics. He says he can sense celestial alignments, and feel the difference between colors of light in a spectrum. When he needed a well dug for his desert home, he called a dowser.

The artist, 88, belongs to a generation of land artists who shed galleries and cities to work at a scale more common in ancient Egypt and Mesoamerica. In 1975, he had been crisscrossing the Southwest for four years, hunting for the perfect location for “Star Axis,” when a cowboy appeared and handed him a business card.

Via NYT