In Brief: John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien awarded CBEs, lottery arts funding plummets

Queen’s birthday honours: Artists John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien awarded CBEs Other recipients include a knighthood for Leonard Blavatnik, the Ukrainian-born businessman who has given substantial donations to Tate and V&A, and artist Idris Khan made an OBE.

Lottery arts funding plummets by £55m Lottery operator Camelot has warned it expects a decline in sales to continue, which means arts funding is likely to fall further. Out of a total £1.6bn in returns for National Lottery Good Causes in 2016/17, around £326m was generated for the arts – down from around £380m the previous year. Arts Council England receives around 14% of this funding and suffered around a £38m drop last year. Its vulnerability to ongoing fluctuations in lottery income remains unclear.

Richard Mosse arrested at anti-refugee rally on Greek island Irish photographer and 2017 Prix Pictet winner says he was arrested by undercover Greek police while peacefully observing an anti-refugee rally by residents on the island of Chios, near Turkey. He was on the island to film an episode of Bloomberg’s Brilliant Ideas series — an interview programme that profiles major international artists.

Screening of BBC 2 Venice documentary featuring Grenfell Tower victim postponed The documentary, The Venice Biennale: Sink of Swim, follows the artists featured in the Diaspora Pavilion, including Khadija Saye who died in the fire. Originally due to be screened on 17 June it is now scheduled for Saturday 1 July.

Winners of the John Ruskin Prize 2017 announced Ceramic artist Rosa Nguyen has been announced as First Prize winner of the national art prize. Now in its fourth iteration, the prize received a record number of entries this year from UK-based artists, craftspeople and makers aged 18 or over. Second prize goes to artist and AIR Council member Bethan Lloyd Worthington, with the student and recent graduate prize going to Fi Smart.

Italy’s five suspended museum directors return to work On 15 June, Italy’s highest administrative court, the Council of State, suspended the decision by the Lazio regional administrative tribunal (TAR) that voided the appointments of the five directors, who had been ousted as part of an ongoing reform of the country’s bureaucratic museums sector. The Council of State is due to hold a definitive public hearing on the case on 26 October.

Art forger jailed in 2007 claims his work is still slipping through the net of police and auction houses Working from a garden shed at his parents’ home in Bolton, amateur artist Shaun Greenhalgh fooled some of the world’s leading museums by creating fake paintings and sculptures using tools bought from B&Q. In a newly published autobiography, he claims that some of his work continues to fool prestigious auction houses.

Northern Ireland arts organisations hit by funding cuts Despite hopes Arts Council Northern Ireland (ACNI) would maintain standstill funding, MAC Belfast has been forced to apply £28k in cuts following orders from the Department of Communities. Even though its lottery income has fallen by 15%, ACNI said it was able to mitigate the cuts through National Lottery Funds, which MAC will use to focus on arts programming costs.

Three men charged over Damien Hirst counterfeits that sold for $400,000 Fake ‘limited-edition’ Hirst prints were sold online to dozens of buyers by a New York group that included a man previously imprisoned for a similar scheme. It is not clear which works were forged, but at least one of the counterfeit prints was the work Esculetin from Hirst’s series of spot paintings.

Images
1. John Akomfrah, Auto Da Fé. © Polly Thomas.
2. Rosa Nguyen, Tableau – Gardening with Morris, mixed media, 2015. Installation view at The John Ruskin Prize 2017: Master of all Trades, Millennium Gallery, 2017. Photo: © Andy Brown.
3. The MAC Belfast. Photo: Ardfern (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.

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