The inaugural installation of a biennial art exhibition, performances by Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence dance company, and a screening of Gia Coppola’s film “Palo Alto,” with a live performance of its score by Devonté Hynes are among the highlights of the fall season at BRIC House, the multimedia arts center in Brooklyn.

The art exhibition, BRIC Biennial: Volume 1, Downtown Edition, will include works by more than two dozen artists, including pieces built of found objects (particularly copies of The Village Voice) by Scherezade Garcia, paintings by Vince Contarino and large-scale works on paper by Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The exhibition opens on Sept. 20 and is to run through Dec. 14.

Damien Hirst the Turner Prize winning British artist has purchased one of London’s blingiest homes for a reported £34 million ($57 million). The mansion, a five story, 14 bedroom, white stuccoed building was designed by John Nash, in the Regency style of architecture. It was Commissioned in 1811 by the Prince Regent and located in the park of the same name. The Grade I listed building is set in a half-acre garden plot.

The former YBA has added this jewel to his property portfolio to complement his North Devon, 24 acre holdings where he plans to build a new town with 750 homes. The artist also owns the 19th century Toddington Manor which sports 300 rooms. Hirst, who has a reported £215 million in personal weath is  the most successful living artist of his generation.

Maxwell Anderson, the Eugene McDermott Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, announced today the launch of an exciting redesigned digital database for the Museum’s collection of encyclopedic art through its website, DMA.org. This marks the first phase of an initiative to dramatically improve online access and representation of the Museum’s global collection of more than 22,000 works of art.

By digitizing its entire collection, the DMA is creating one of the world’s most sophisticated online art collections, providing open access to its entire collection, and leading the field in the quality and depth of content available to visitors, students, teachers, and scholars. In addition, whenever permitted by existing agreements, the DMA will release all images, data, and software it creates to the public under Open Access licenses for free personal and educational use.

Photographer Louise Lawler will be the next artist to fill the billboard located at the base of the High Line -- New York’s elevated, linear park. The image, which depicts a room at Sotheby’s that contains works by Minimalist and Conceptual art icons Frank Stella, Sol Lewitt, and Donald Judd, is the 15th installation in the High Line’s billboard series. Other artists who have participated in the public art project include the Conceptual artist John Baldessari, photographer Robert Adams, and the British artist David Shrigley.

In the early 1970s, Lawler began looking critically at the ways in which art was displayed outside of the artist’s studio. She began photographing other artists’ works on view in collectors’ homes, in storage spaces, and on view at auction houses, challenging the viewer to think about the context in which works of art are displayed and documented.

Sue Roe's chronicle of artistic high jinks in modernist Paris comes wrapped in a cover of blushing red, inky black and bilious green. These are the colours in which Picasso painted the Moulin de la Galette, a hilltop windmill in Montmartre that no longer ground flour but instead served as a raffish dance hall. Female mouths are like bleeding wounds, male top hats have a silky black sheen, and an unnatural green glare alluding to that most toxic of local tipples, absinthe.

Inside, Roe's writing is almost equally vivid. Reading her account of the way modern painters saw the world anew in raw, garish tones, you might feel the need to reach for your sunglasses. Picasso, the protagonist of this group biography, follows a relatively monochrome course from the frostbitten poverty of his "blue period" to a "rose period" when his images are warmed by a new sensuality.

The Whitney Museum of American Art has been having trouble keeping up with the demand to see “Jeff Koons: A Retrospective,” an exhibition that fills most of the museum’s space and was described by Roberta Smith in The New York Times as “the most cogent account of Mr. Koons’s career in over two decades.” And it may be that museumgoers want a last chance to walk through the Whitney as it is currently constituted, before the museum leaves its Marcel Breuer building for its new home, designed by Renzo Piano, in the meatpacking district.

The Getty’s “Rococo to Revolution: 18th-Century French Drawings from Los Angeles Collections” displays high points of the museum’s drawing collection alongside loans from private collectors. The surprise is how well the loans stand up. There are  privately owned drawings by Watteau (a counterproof of one of the first drawings the Getty bought, in 1982), Boucher, Fragonard, Greuze, and David. There are also sheets by artists lately rediscovered by scholars and collectors. On loan are an impressive Gabriel de Saint-Aubin and a famous François-André Vincent. His trois crayons Bust-Length Study of a Young Woman (1780) was one of the first drawings to be reproduced as a color engraving. In case you missed the memo, Vincent was David’s archrival, husband to Adélaïde Labille-Guiard. The Getty also has an important Vincent drawing, The Secret.

Private equity titan Leon Black and his wife Debra, a Broadway producer, melanoma survivor and leading force behind the Melanoma Research Alliance, are buying 19 E. 70th St., the former Knoedler & Company art gallery, which shuttered following a major art fraud scandal in 2009 that is still under investigation.

London developer Christian Candy bought the 30-foot-wide, 17,000-square-foot, 104-year-old Italian Renaissance-style townhouse for $35 million in 2013.

The controversial merger between the Corcoran Gallery of Art, George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art, all in Washington, DC, has received the green light from the district’s Superior Court. In a ruling on Monday 18 August, Judge Robert Okun called the decision “painful,” but concluded that it would be “even more painful to deny the relief requested and allow the Corcoran to face its likely demise.”

Under the terms of the agreement, first announced in February 2014, the beleaguered Corcoran will transfer its historic Beaux-Arts building and its College of Art + Design to George Washington University. The National Gallery of Art will take over a substantial portion of the Corcoran’s 17,000-work collection, which includes paintings by John Singer Sargent and Frederic Edwin Church as well as celebrated photography holdings.

Committed to promoting European culture and history, whether it is horology or the decorative arts, Swiss watch manufacture Breguet has made it possible for the new display of 18^th-century French decorative arts in the Louvre Museum in Paris to see the light of day, with the reopening last June of 33 dedicated galleries, previously closed for almost a decade.

It was the golden age of the French decorative arts, a time when everybody who was anybody had one wish: to make their way to the City of Light to make their fortune. The French capital was the epicenter of creativity and savoir-faire in every sphere of art in the 18th century (what has been called “a moment of grace in French art”), when all of the best artists and designers from around France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands flocked to Paris to work.

Rosewood parlor furniture that has scarcely been moved for more than 150 years is about to be shipped across Louisiana.

The New Orleans Museum of Art has bought the parlor contents (for an unspecified price) from the owners of Butler Greenwood Plantation, a 1790s property along the Mississippi River in St. Francisville. It will go on view at the museum in a year or so, after minor repairs.

Descendants of the original owners live at Butler Greenwood, which also has a bed-and-breakfast on the grounds. (Rentable quarters include a dovecote and an original kitchen.)

This fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, celebrates the 20th anniversary of Malcolm Rogers, Ann and Graham Gund Director, with a range of special programs and events, including an array of “20 Reasons to Visit.” The longest-tenured Director in the Museum’s 144-year history, Rogers marks two decades at the MFA on September 1. A free MFA Community Day: Celebrating 20 Years of Director Malcolm Rogers will be held on Sunday September 7, which follows a weekend of exclusive events, including a gala (sold out) and a lively MFA by Moonlight party on Saturday, September 6 (tickets on sale now). Special member events, exhibitions and public lectures will encourage visitors to come back for exciting activities all month long. Social media channels will use the hashtag #MR20 to highlight the festivities surrounding Rogers’ anniversary, with fans and followers invited to participate on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

On September 9 and 10, Christie’s London will offer the first portion of the collection of antique dealer and interior designer Christopher Hodsoll as part of its “Interiors” auction. The second part of the collection will be featured on September 16 at the auction house’s “Interiors -- Style & Spirit” sale. Hodsoll, who is based in London, is well-known for his idiosyncratic taste in antique furniture as well as his ability to create striking interiors that blend classical pieces with the rare and unusual.

Hodsoll began dealing antiques with his mentor, the late design legend Geoffrey Bennison. Bennison’s predilection for the decadent as well as the eccentric rubbed off on Hodsoll and has had a profound influence on his style.

Following Sotheby’s two previous selling exhibitions of Western fine and decorative arts held in 2012 and 2013, the renowned international auction house will mount its third annual “Age of Elegance: European Paintings, Furniture and Sculpture” sale in Beijing on September 7 and 8.

Hosted in the Grand Ballroom of the Kerry Hotel, “Age of Elegance” contains an exquisitely curated selection of 65 items that embody the stellar craftsmanship and extravagantly ornamental tastes of European decorative arts from the rococo period up until the 20th century.

At the very highest end of the scale is Francois Linke’s extraordinary Grand Bureau (US$6 million), a gilt bronze writing desk and chair first shown at the Paris World Expo in 1900 that represents the summit of belle époque splendor.

Sometimes it's not the "what" that makes architecture such a challenge, it's the "where." And for Jeff Sheppard, location added monumental pressure to the task of designing the new Denver Art Museum Administration Building.

The Bannock Street lot was humble and squeezed right between the two highest-profile pieces of modern architecture in the city: DAM's $110 million Hamilton Building addition, designed by Daniel Libeskind in 2006, and the $29 million Clyfford Still Museum, a concrete wonder dreamed up by Brad Cloepfil in 2011.

How does a local guy — even, arguably, Denver's most creative, budget-conscious, building designer — compete with that? With an $11 million budget?

Colonial Williamsburg got a big contribution toward an even bigger goal Thursday.

Susan and David Goode of Norfolk contributed $1 million for the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg to support efforts that include tours, teacher workshops and regular classes offered at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum's newly renamed Susan Goode Education Gallery.

According to Colonial Williamsburg spokesman Joe Straw, that's a contribution to the big plans the foundation has for the museums.

One of the Taft Museum of Art's best-known paintings – "Europa and the Bull" by Joseph Mallord William Turner, circa 1845 – goes on display next month at the Tate Britain, one of London's foremost museums.

It will be there through Jan. 25, before traveling to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco as part of the exhibition "Late Turner: Painting Set Free."

Maybe you have faded memories from many years or decades ago, of visiting an old house preserved as a museum — a stuffy, drab kind of place both physically and mentally. It felt like a place somewhat lost to time, stuck in a kind of historical coffin of its own design.

Fortunately, most historical house museums today, at least those of any renown, don’t fit that characterization. Even relic-filled places like Colonial Williamsburg have evolved with the times and especially the great strides made in historical preservation over the past couple decades, says Karen Daly, executive director of the Dumbarton House.

I bought some art the other day — nothing too crazy, nothing too expensive, nothing made by an ex-graffiti artist going legit and now giddily bilking rappers out of their piles of new money. Just something beautiful, something I had an emotional response to, something that I perceived as having value independent of its function or cost of production.

That’s how it begins, right? Not my personal collection, but the idea that value is subjective, open to interpretation and influence. If you look closely, the art I chose will reveal something about me, yes, but not that I’ve been hoodwinked.

A rare collection of African art assembled over nearly 30 years by a leading Genentech biochemist will go on display at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park in late January, marking the first time the public has seen many of the carved forms and shapes.

The collection, "Embodiments: Masterworks of African Figurative Sculpture," was assembled by scientist Richard Scheller, who was taken by African art's "amazing forms," but fascinated when he began to learn what the sculptures represent.