The MOCA in Los Angeles is in some serious financial trouble according to a report in the LA Times. Read more...

Floyd Norris, the chief financial correspondent of The New York Times, does a blog for paper’s business section. Today he’s offering a minute by minute account of the turmoil on international markets, titled “United Panic.” Tellingly, he has just done a post about Sotheby’s SEC filing of yesterday, detailing that the house has “incurred a principal loss of approximately $15 million (pre-tax)” as a result of guarantees, after the lackluster sales in Hong Kong and London. “Guaranteeing prices will not fall appears to be a poor decision in almost every market these days,” was Norris’s comment. (scroll down for the post)

Shanghai-based artist Zhang Huan, one of the top Chinese artists working today, has changed his London gallery from Haunch of Venison to White Cube, The Appraisal understands. (In New York, the artist is represented by PaceWildenstein.) Asked about the new arrangement, Haunch of Venison’s Harry Blain confirmed it, but said Haunch of Venison, which is owned by Christie’s, would still do an exhibition with the artist in Zurich in January. When asked why the artist made the switch, Blain said “these situations can be very fluid.” Zhang Huan has shown with several galleries in the past, including New Yorkers Jeffrey Deitch and, before him, Max Protetch. Haunch of Venison will show Zhang’s work in Zurich and “see where it goes from there” says Blain. A reprentative of White Cube was not available when we called for comment.

In yesterday’s Observer, Laura Cumming tallied up all the folks who have recently crossed over from the museum world to the dark side the market. “The entire industry is forming and reforming by the day like some monstrously engorged digestive tract, in which public and commercial are mulched.” Check it out.

The annual Frieze Art Fair opens in London next week, and the Wall Street Journal’s Kelly Crow reports today on some pre-fair jitters. I’ll be reporting daily on the fair, one of the first major gauges of what the contemporary art market’s reaction will be to the global financial crisis.

The marriage of art and luxury goods got quite a bit cozier yesterday, when auctioneer Phillips de Pury & Co. announced that it had been purchased by Mercury, Russia’s largest luxury fashion retailer. Read more...

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London Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak went to see the Tate’s show of late painter Mark Rothko’s late paintings. He wasn’t excited. “The late work is so notoriously sombre and depressing that a show consisting of nothing else would surely make a perfect venue for a suicide convention.” Read more...

From Colin Gleadell’s report on the Hirst sale in the Wall Street Journal – Read more...

An interesting tidbit was buried in Carol Vogel’s New York Times report on Sotheby’s Damien Hirst sale: Read more...