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The British government is launching a campaign to try to prevent people from being taken in by scam investments. “The investment scam of the moment appears to be art. A few years ago it was ostriches, later followed by whisky, wine and champagne. Thousands of people have been targeted by companies promising big returns if they buy art prints which are then supposedly leased out to hang on the walls of large companies.”

A prominant Asian businessman has criticized Singapore’s public funding of what he called “elitist, intentionally avant-garde work which ‘may have no relevance at all’ outside of the West. He suggested that public funding of such ‘so-called art installations’ had become ‘disconnected from the community’ which they purport to engage with. Globalisation, he said, was a ‘double-edged sword’, tending to homogenise indigenous art movements while making them known to the world.”

A new generation of art sellers has emerged in New York. They “have been mounting shows in unusual spaces, featuring work that is fast, cheap, and exuberant—and produced more often by ‘collectives’ than by nineties-style art stars (not that any of these artists would pass up their own fifteen minutes). This fall, these players have become their own Establishment: Several of their artists were just tapped for the Whitney Biennial, and a number are members of the New Art Dealers Alliance, which declares that the ‘adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art’ is dead.”

“Over the past decade repatriation departments have been set up in museums across America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to return human remains to their places of origin. While research on human remains can reveal information about historic patterns of migration, lifestyle and disease – a substantial amount of energy, time and money has instead been committed to burying the evidence.”