Twenty-one years ago thieves broke into a San Francisco museum and made off with four paintings – including one thought to have been painted by Rembrandt. Now three of the works have mysteriously turned up. New York Times
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MIDLIST LIVES
The top of the art market auctions has bloomed. But it’s the middle range where the really interesting action is. Artnet.com
GOING ONCE …
Antique dealers and auction houses have always had a complicated relationship. Now, one of London’s grandest names in Oriental art decides to sell off its Japanese collection – at auction. Financial Times
NOT POP ART
But popular culture – the raw, vulgar, greasily commercialized stuff disdained by artistic traditionalists and modernists alike. LA curator puts pop into traditional art spaces. His specialty is not public art, not political or gender-driven art, not multicultural art — often, it’s not even contemporary art — but pop culture and its “artifacts” as art. New Times LA
ART SINCE THE WALL
A new New York show takes a look at visual art in Berlin in the decade since the wall fell. And there’s not a painting in sight. New York Times
NEW MUSEUM
To show Austrian and German fine and decorative art from first half of the 20th Century. Has prestigious 5th Ave. New York address and blue-chip founders. New York Times
SOMETHING ABOUT MARY
In the past few months in South Central Los Angeles someone has been defacing community murals depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe. Art critics? fanatics? vandals? LA Weekly
BEST COMPOSER OF THE CENTURY?
A few years ago it would have been unthinkable to even consider Benjamin Britten for such a list. Now people are talking… – Toronto Globe and Mail
THIRTEEN HOURS AND $32:
That’s what the average American spent on movies in theaters last year. Our appetite for entertainment rockets ahead – last year spending on all forms of entertainment increased to $55 billion, up 10 percent from 1998. Variety
ART OF THE GAME
When artists invade construction of sports stadiums, the “public” in public art is challenged. New stadia are working out complicated relationships with public artists. FoxSportsbiz.com
