An estimated £150 million-£2 billion worth of art treasures are looted from sites around the world every year, according to a new Institute for Archaeological Research report. “Buddhas in Cambodia have been decapitated with power saws and the illegal trade in fossil hunting stretches from Nebraska to the Gobi Desert.” The report urges Britain to sign the 1970 UNESCO Convention prohibiting illegal exports and imports of artifacts, claiming up to 90% of antiquities auctioned in London over the past 20 years were sold without any details of provenance. – Yahoo! News (Reuters)
Author: Douglas McLennan
AFFIRMATIVE EMBRACE
George Segal, who died at age 75 last Friday, is remembered not only as a preeminent pop artist, but also as a sculptor whose depiction of sexual freedom and tolerance of difference were way ahead of his time. “It’s significant that in 1983 (in his “Gay Liberation” sculpture commemorating New York’s Stonewall riots) he had already sought to include gays and lesbians as a part of his vision of America.” – Salon
PRIMARY SOURCES
The great Kirov Ballet has put on its detective hat to recreate the long-lost original “Sleeping Beauty.” “We will see almost every step as Tsar Alexander III saw it in 1890, almost every detail that the brilliant Marius Petipa choreographed to Tchaikovsky’s extraordinary music, and every design as the ballet’s ambitious originator, Ivan Vsevolozhsky, drew it.” – The Telegraph (London)
SHOW BIZ SLEEPING BEAUTY
The English National Ballet is underfunded, says its director. So he puts on a show, the critics be damned. “On our Australian tour of Swan Lake last year, our smallest audience a night was 7,800 and our largest was 11,000 – 11,000 Australians, sporty people, who stood on their feet and roared. When I’m looking at that, I don’t care what anybody says. If the productions were naff, the dancing substandard, the costumes tacky, I’d mind. But this is the highest quality you can find.” – The Sunday Times (London)
THE GREATEST DANCER OF OUR ERA?
For nearly the last 15 years of his ballet career, Rudolf Nureyev “did everything possible to destroy his reputation, dancing too often, too badly, eventually too unwatchably to be anything more than classical ballet’s grimmest joke. And yet, surprisingly, almost impossibly, his artistic rehabilitation is now in full swing, fed by new evidence that, if not the greatest dancer of our era, he may well have been the most original and influential.” – Los Angeles Times
SEGAL DIES
SO THIS IS DISNEYLAND?
Malcolm Rogers has been in charge of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for five years. The museum’s debt is down, attendance is up and the institution is reaching into the community. But the MFA has also been charged with controversy. No question the museum is being reinvented. Is it for the better? – Boston Globe
RESPONDING TO THE PAST
London is besotted by contemporary art. But the National Gallery, by definition a collector of things past, has not participated. But now an “inspired” plan to ask today’s art stars to produce works based on the National’s collection. – The Sunday Times (UK)
“NAKED SOY SAUCE AND KETCHUP FIGHT AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE”
They romped all over Tracy Emin’s bed at the Tate and peed in Marcel Duchamps’s urinal. But two London performance artists say their actions are serious art – not pranks. So what is the point? – The Observer (UK)
ART THEFT AND INTRIGUE
A former Azerbaijani prosecutor has been convicted and sentenced for his role in the bizarre theft of some 200 prints and drawings, including a dozen rare works by Old Masters Albrecht Dürer , Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael worth as much as $10 million dollars. – MSNBC