Category: visual

“Let’s stipulate that public statuary derived from movie scenes is at best dubious… But worse is the endless recycling of images, whether from film, photos or art, that have become–and here’s that dreaded word again–iconic. What is an icon these days but a cliché on stilts?”

Art crime, you see, is a dumb crime. With masterpieces in particular, it’s virtually impossible to find a buyer for a stolen work. As the authors write: “A Rembrandt, real or imagined, is far harder to sell than it is to steal.”

“It seems the alleged copy, which has been given the title Human Natures: Many Faces, 2005, may be one of several made by an anonymous Chinese stone carver in Beijing.”

“The charges filed in United States District Court in Brooklyn accuse three antiquities dealers and a collector of conspiring to smuggle an Egyptian sarcophagus and other items, and of laundering money. All of the suspects have been arrested except for a Jordanian dealer who operates out of Dubai.”

Reinhold Wuerth, a German billionaire who turned a family-owned screw wholesaler into a global company, paid more than $70 million to buy a Holbein painting, beating a bid from the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt.

The fast-forward momentum of digital technology “changes our sense of what it means to make” and “results in work that feels like play, work that turns old into new, elevates the banal. Work that has a past but feels absolutely present.”

“The Merseyside branch of the Tate has had a run of high-impact successes including its current René Magritte exhibition. Or were they successes at all? The apparently thriving gallery announced this week that it is to shed staff in a comprehensive review of the way it is run. Meanwhile, director Christoph Grunenberg is leaving for a new job in Bremen.”

“The gorilla in a pink mask on the wall of the ex-North Bristol Social Club, in Eastville, had been a familiar landmark in the area for more than 10 years. But the building has recently been turned into a Muslim cultural centre. New owner Saeed Ahmed assumed it was a regular piece of graffiti and had it painted over.”

“As a medium that ruthlessly commodifies places, rendering exotic sites (or peoples) safe for consumption (the postcard rack itself being a twirling memorial to a place’s loss of authenticity), it’s not surprising that even the deadly blasts coming out of, say, Yucca Flats, Nev., could be aesthetically framed on a postcard.”