“The FBI was on the trail of recovering the principal masterpieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from a criminal gang in Corsica two years ago only to have its efforts dashed, in part because of bureaucratic infighting among federal agents and supervisors.”
Category: visual
Chinese Collectors Dominating Current Art Market
“Roughly two thirds of the 611 lots that came on the block in a mammoth two-day sale went to Chinese dealers and collectors. They bought across the board, in every category, at every financial level.”
Latin American Art – On The Cutting Edge Of History
“The promise, mystery, and challenge of colonial Latin American art are luring not only a growing number of graduate students but also veteran art historians who built their careers in European art.”
Hot Museum: London’s National Portrait Gallery
The museum had its best year ever, with two million visitors. “It was an 8% increase on 2008/09 and 20% on 2006/07, the gallery reported.”
PaceWildenstein Gallery Is Breaking In Two
“Seventeen years after a merger made it a powerhouse gallery, PaceWildenstein is splitting and returning to the original brands. ‘There was no logic in keeping it going,’ said Arne Glimcher, chairman of Pace, … ‘We are not exchanging clients in the way we once were’.”
At Museums, Maquettes Aren’t Only For Display Purposes
Exhibition designers at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art “make models of the museum’s gallery spaces and all the objects that might appear in a given show, using foam core, balsa wood and cardboard. Paintings and photographs get miniaturized to scale using Photoshop.”
Seeing Through The Eyes Of Mark Rothko
“While most people who looked at his art saw blues and greens, tangerine orange and saffron yellow, crimson and jet black, he felt he’d encapsulated ‘the artist’s eternal interest in the human figure, character and emotions.’ … When he found observers weeping in front of them, he would deem his works successful.”
Banksy Blockbuster Prevents Saatchi Choke Hold
Two Saatchi Gallery exhibitions were “the first and third most visited shows in the UK” last year. “Only the ‘Banksy effect’ stopped Saatchi securing a top one and two in the UK. The street artist/local boy made good drew almost 4,000 people a day to see his interventions, or ‘remix’, of Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery.”
Globally, Japanese Exhibitions Draw The Most Visitors
“Japan’s museums remain in a league of their own when it comes to organising blockbuster exhibitions. In The Art Newspaper‘s 15th annual survey of attendance figures three Tokyo museums and one in Nara … fill the top four places,” and “average visitor-per-day statistics … are staggering.”
2000-Year-Old Ceiling Collapses At Nero’s Golden Palace
“A ceiling portion of Nero’s Golden Palace in Rome collapsed Tuesday, raising concerns once again that one of the city’s most popular tourist attractions faces dangerous erosion and other structural problems.”