Category: visual

Egypt’s foreign minister says an employee was to blame. “The head of the culture ministry’s fine arts sector, Mohsen Shaalan, and other senior officials are standing trial over the theft on charges of negligence. The Dutch masterpiece, valued at more than 50 million dollars, was cut out of its frame.”

“Damien Hirst’s 1993 We’ve got Style, (The Vessel Collection, blue/green) failed to find a buyer at a pre-sale estimate circling $1 million. Ironically, Hirst had a record $198 million one-artist auction in London on the same day in 2008, Sept. 15, that Lehman filed for bankruptcy.”

Calling it “one of the most important discoveries for many years,” curators at the Prado Museum in Madrid have uncovered what they say is the largest surviving canvas painted by the 16th-century Flemish master Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

“Nearly two decades after the art world went through a difficult but cathartic debate on beauty, architects — or at least these architects — continue to find the subject remarkably nervous-making.”

“Christie’s is auctioning artwork (from Lucian Freud to Gary Hume) and ephemera (from metal signs to the collected works of Dickens) that once adorned the British and European offices of a bank that seemed as solid as they get for more than 100 years.”

“The world’s most lucrative art competition, which opened Wednesday and runs through Oct. 10, offers an explosion of contemporary art: 1,713 artists showing in 192 venues — museums, banks, restaurants, civic buildings, city parks — almost all of them in a 3-square mile patch of downtown Grand Rapids. Art is everywhere. Painting, prints, drawings, photography, sculpture, video, conceptual art.”

“Spain’s Prado Museum has discovered a previously unknown work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the 16th-century Flemish master, after cleaning a painting that had been attributed to his less illustrious son.”

A man accused of stealing van Gogh’s Night Café from a private home in Santa Fe and selling it for $250 has “turned up in Vermont, where he has been charged with burglarizing two condominiums in the ski resort town of Stowe, credit card fraud and occupying an abandoned camp in Underhill.”

Best known for such conceptual sculptures as an Aeron chair rotated at 200rpm to look like a chalice, Glenn Kaino began exploring the world of illusionists and magic tricks around 2000. By 2008, “he had had enough of art as a commodity,” telling a gallerist at Art Basel Miami Beach, “I’m going back to magic. I want to believe in something again.”

Jonathan Jones: “The rebuilding and renovations that have taken place in the last decade have rescued our museums. But they have also done more than that. A city or town or rural area with a fine museum is a place with pride. … The recent growth and expansion of our galleries is part of a reborn pride in modern Britain.”